Keeping It Under Your Hat

Last night I read one of the newly released Sirenia Digests, #174, a short story from Caitlin R. Kiernan called "The Man Who Loved What Was". Speaking as someone who loves What Was myself, the story is an absorbing contemplation of the value of collecting old things in one's brain. Seemingly treating the concept as an actual accumulation and transportation to a separate plane of existence, the story contextualises the act of studying and researching history to make the psychic impact have something like a physical. There's a sadness and eeriness to it.

To-day I've been reading John Milton again. I have the big collected Milton on my kindle but it just wasn't adequate for me--not to mention difficult to jump to specific points in--so I ordered one of the 1952 Encyclopedia Britannica editions from a thrift store on Amazon. All of those are pretty nifty hardbacks, by the way, and I wouldn't mind having the full collection one day. I brought two of them with me to Japan (Boswell and one volume with Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne).

The Milton volume has miscellaneous poems--including "Comus", "Lycidas", "L'Allegro", and "Il Penseroso"--as well as Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Areopagitica, all unabridged. These really are the essentials if you're going to put Milton into such a slender volume. It's strange what a feeling of peace and invigoration Milton can give me, just reading "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" on the train this morning. None of the millions of Miltonic analyses quite addresses it, probably because words can't. And after all, what's the point of any art if its essence could really be explained?

Twitter Sonnet #1451

The stooges changed atop a skinny hill.
With warnings dire, rocks began to roll.
We waited late but won't receive a bill.
The stain of mustard takes a ketchup toll.
As Stanley built a cue from trees we left.
There's something wrong about a herring bone.
Devised along a needle cut a cleft.
It's knitting, chums, that makes a yarn atone.
We're waiting 'long the wobbly yard for wind.
Let's toss the glass from deck to lofty spar.
I heard the garnet's lately on the mend.
Let's cook a boat of thick and heavy tar.
The sleeping singer sorts a sneeze to song.
Abaft the whales, the chopping keel was strong.