Melodies

Only 10 min today, the timer is ticking beside me, Peter and I have to attend to some business which will take all morning. I had tried to not be part of this, but in the end I was needed, so there you go.

Have been reading the required readings for the e-course, at the moment to do with rhyming, I must get a rhymed poem on the blackboard before we leave on Thursday. Read The Lady of Shallott, had heard about it so many times but never read it before, found I could predict some of the rhyming words, which was comforting, I can remember the time when we were playing some sort of game with friends and everyone had to write a small poem, some doggerel, and I was unable to do it, paralysed. This seems achievable.

What is harder is the mutilated poem, finding the lines because what is given does not make enough sense. Am giving it my focussed attention this morning before we go, a breakthrough is required so that I can carry on with other stuff. Can't hope for too high a standard, must just do it, when the e course is finished it'll be easier to hone and work on the poems I write for Year 2.

I have been absorbed by Vidia Naipaul and Paul Theroux. Someone from his publishers' sent Naipaul a letter with his name misspellt, and he responded in kind - it was an Anthony Mott, and he made it into A. Mutt. How to make friends.

Reading Larkin is such a pleasure, it feels simple and good, it was the same when we went to the cello concert the other day, we listened to what was for me far-fetched modern music, and then they played two older pieces and it was a relief of hearing something which I think of as melodic. Glass' music for Leonard Cohen's poems was also melodic and satisfying, and yet I think not rehashing old stuff.

Time to go.