tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2276911630325008276.post3131986259581926628..comments2024-03-23T08:42:52.963-05:00Comments on Wait! I Have a Blog?!: Melancholy BabyKathleenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06559881249054540947noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2276911630325008276.post-57489422055462743702010-03-25T06:10:41.907-05:002010-03-25T06:10:41.907-05:00Paulette, I remember that section of the book and ...Paulette, I remember that section of the book and being amazed by the whole interior decoration, architecture, and travel hunk of her writings...and likewise Henry James...but then it made sense, in the fiction written by both, that setting is always so detailed and carefully set out! Another thing that amazed me was how these two writers did ghost stories!Kathleenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06559881249054540947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2276911630325008276.post-77739867224274826782010-03-24T21:41:52.704-05:002010-03-24T21:41:52.704-05:00I know that The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is...I know that The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is melancholy but the language is so delicious that that poem actually always makes me happy . . . there's also something I very much like about roaming around in the fog knowing that perhaps a warm fire waits at the end . . . p.s. I just got through the Decoration of Houses chapter of Ms. Wharton's bio. In her wake, she's leaving a long list of books I need to add to the already long list . . .including Ruskin and some of the travel memoirs Ms. Wharton loved . . .Paulettehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01828051134201512962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2276911630325008276.post-85848535012190158762010-03-24T13:37:08.918-05:002010-03-24T13:37:08.918-05:00Hmm, well the line breaks held, but not the spacin...Hmm, well the line breaks held, but not the spacing. Still something of the feel of it comes through.<br /><br />This was published in Ekphrasis, Vol. 4, No. 6, Fall/Winter 2008, which should be credited!Kathleenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06559881249054540947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2276911630325008276.post-83182193579809608932010-03-24T13:32:02.990-05:002010-03-24T13:32:02.990-05:00Thanks, you two. I don't mind melancholy, rea...Thanks, you two. I don't mind melancholy, really--I just note it. It comes and goes. I sort of live in nostalgia and ecstasy and melancholy, blended or alternating, and sometimes in routine.<br /><br />I have a poem called "Nostalgia" and was re-reading it this morning, as it is part of a chapbook manuscript I am getting ready to send out. I have no idea whether it will hold its line breaks and indentations here as a comment:<br /><br />Nostalgia <br /><br />--Winslow Homer, For to Be a Farmer’s Boy (1887)<br /><br /><br />People remember the past as sweeter<br /><br /> than it was, the way the sky<br /><br />had pink madder, chrome yellow,<br /><br /> and traces of vermilion<br /><br />over the pumpkin patch and its blue<br /><br /> blooming weed, and is now<br /><br />empty and white.<br /><br /> But it is now<br />empty and white <br /> and it used to be pinker, <br /><br />whether twilight or dawn.<br /><br /><br />This was based on the painting as shown in the Homer/Hopper show at the Art Institute in Chicago not too long ago, and the information that the colors had indeed faded.<br /><br />Are we programmed for nostalgia? Interesting question. And a fine one to come from a Noble Savage!Kathleenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06559881249054540947noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2276911630325008276.post-38516019823487899732010-03-24T10:20:46.615-05:002010-03-24T10:20:46.615-05:00So the question is: Are we programmed for nostalgi...So the question is: Are we programmed for nostalgia?<br /><br />In "Ode on Melancholy" Keats compresses much of our artistic ideal of art into the line "She dwells in Beauty - Beauty that must die," placing at the core of our aesthetic our own vanishing, and the vanishing of our object of contemplation and longing. Likewise, Whitman's longing comes at the end of the continent. Eliot's in the wake of the collapse of the Christian imperial system, the remade (and to him, cheapened) world they called "modernity."<br /><br />There is, of course, something banal here: Life and language only have meaning because we are finite creatures -- otherwise our experience is an undifferentiated whole, bereft of necessity (since everything will eventually happen.) But there is also the whole of our experience, which requires loss.<br /><br />Interesting that you should feel this with the loss of winter, the season of death, and the onset of spring, the season of renewal. Perhaps that signifies its goodness and power too -- the sense of loss, if you will a weight of incompleteness, inarguable finitude even while there is an intimation of the eternal, gives us depth. It is a great source of rhetorical power for Lincoln, and guides his decisions. <br /><br />The promise of "no depression" and constant springtime in our highly medicated age -- thanks to the Internet, a culture of the eternal now, in which everything seems connected and nothing seems lost -- may in this sense make us an adolescent culture. I miss nostalgia.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04098752270342510206noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2276911630325008276.post-68490154567748189982010-03-24T09:55:31.418-05:002010-03-24T09:55:31.418-05:00I am feeling melancholy too. I had not considered...I am feeling melancholy too. I had not considered the seasonal shift as a potential culprit... <br /><br />I have never been a great fan of biographies (although my son just loves them). I would like to read a biography of Emily Dickinson, even if it *is* a hefty tome. <br /><br />Every time I read your blog, I end up adding another half-dozen books to my mental "to read" list. I shall never live long enough to read them all!!Susanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08700838274754785164noreply@blogger.com