A Bridge Too Far

I found myself stuck on a bridge for nearly half an hour this afternoon. Rear engine of the London to Paddington train died just after we left Saltash, leaving us on the I.K. Brunel. I carried on with my annotation of 'The Ladies' Paradise' (painfully slow - like the train - but I would rather do that than suffer James Joyce's 'Ulysses').

I put in about 8 hours all told; I also annotated 'The Waste Land' and can see how it's fragmentary style and numerous narrative voices (in French, German and Hindi, I ask you) are going to drive me up the wall. Alongside 'The Waste Land', I have considered writing about Eliot's 'Prufrock' and Ezra Pound's 'Metro'- am avoiding Pound's 'Mauberley' as like 'Ulysses, it is excruciating (Vogon poetry, anyone?).

Lecture today made me irritated - how a 'Dandy' is heralded as a true individual, but a 'Woman' is objectified as nothing more than a 'living frock'. Quote 'dazzling and stupid'. I know - product of it's time etc. Not for the first time do I find the theorists and the modernists as being a misogynistic bunch of twats. F.T. Marinetti et al. His 'scorn of women' matches my derision of pricks who drive too fast - the Futurist Manifesto can go suck itself. Or something close to that description.

The reason for my mood is that the train ran 40 minutes late coming back. Walled in with fellow commuters with their farts, crisps and bad perfume AND (critically) who won't shut the duck up. Or something like that (I don't habitually use bad language in public, but I have had a day of it).

Crabby Claws is now leaving the building - or, let's face it, sleeping. Only to do it all again tomorrow.

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Lunar Boreialis

Leda & the Swan by W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

                                 Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Answer for question 4537.

[Error: unknown template qotd]Physically, nothing much has changed, but personally I am very changeable - it is a work in progress. I think you have to be that way, too or you just stagnate.

My mindset is virtually unrecognisable in comparison to a few years ago. The slightest thing would knock me back, but with wisdom that comes with years on the clock, I have proved to myself that I have overcome.

I used to be such a people-pleaser - not anymore.