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Sat Jan 5 11:20:03 EST 2019
Slept from one to ten.
Woke briefly around five.
Meant to go to sleep earlier last night, but lost track of time playing Golf Story.
High of forty-four and sunny today.
Is this even winter?
Goals:
- Work on PFAW (Pluggable Fantasy Adventure Writer)
A bit.
- Grocery
Done.
- Go to bed by midnight
No.
Vacuumed, washed dishes.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n01/seamus-perry/wielded-by-a-wizard
> Quite a few of Shelley’s contemporaries came to the view that he wasn’t all there – the inhabitants of Marlow, for example, who were treated to the recurrent spectacle of a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in life, still much struck. ‘His steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was rather fantastically arrayed … on his head would be a wreath of what in Marlow we call “old man’s beard” and wild flowers intermixed; at these times he seemed quite absorbed, and he dashed along regardless of all he met or passed.’ Not all the neighbours thought so admiringly of him, needless to say; and his poetry too would find detractors as well as admirers, dividing opinion over the next two hundred years with comical extremity. William Hazlitt, although notionally on the same side in the big political questions of the day, was pugnaciously uncharmed by the cast of mind that he discerned in Shelley’s dashing about, and anticipated a whole school of criticism: ‘There is no caput mortuum of worn-out thread-bare experience to serve as a ballast to his mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with any thing solid or any thing lasting.’
> Shelley was fully aware of his reputation for being away with the fairies and became brilliantly adept at playing along with it, often to seductive effect; but it wasn’t just an act. Some of the best stories come in Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron by the adventurer Edward John Trelawny, and so are a bit too good to be quite true, but they are evidence of the way Shelley came across. Trelawny’s account of Shelley’s attempt to learn how to swim in a deep pool in the Arno catches the thing very well:
> > He doffed his jacket and trousers, kicked off his shoes and socks, and plunged in, and there he lay stretched out on the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least effort or struggle to save himself. He would have drowned if I had not instantly fished him out. When he recovered his breath, he said:
> > ‘I always find the bottom of the well, and they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and you would have found an empty shell. It is an easy way of getting rid of the body.’
An amusing thought occurred to me: it might not be too far off the mark to think of at least some pre-modern historians as the fan fiction writers of their time.
Fifty-minute walk in the afternoon.
Warm and sunny — a perfect spring day.
Heard a morning dove.
Surprised to not see many people out enjoying Beverly Park.
After stumbling across that Shelly article, I ended up working on my survey of Victorian poets for the first time in a couple years.
https://www.audubon.org/news/birding-its-1899-inside-blockbuster-american-west-video-game
> The first time I see ravens, I flush them out of an alpine meadow carpeted with wildflowers. I pause to watch the flock fly off towards the distant, snow-capped peaks, trailed by their echoing croaks, when a man riding by on horseback bumps into me. Irritated, I shoot the man dead, and take his hat. So it goes in "Red Dead Redemption 2."
The article includes a checklist of birds found in the game.
Servings: grains 3/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 4/4, dairy 0/2, meat 2/3, nuts 0.5/0.5
Breakfast:
Lunch: potato salad, coleslaw, turkey burger, banana, carrots, apple, coffee
Dinner: cucumber, beer, tomato, pita, hummus
134/84
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