Going out for moon pieces

This is part of the English section of the lower Radcliffe Camera reading room (in the Bodleian) & where I spend the majority of my time midweek.  Yesterday & today's reading list:  Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, a biography on Hegel, Marx's The German Ideology & Theses on Feuerbach & ..., a biography on Marx, and Forgac's Marxist Literary Theories.  Not kidding.  The 8-9 page essay on all of this is due Thursday by 5p.  Then shift quickly to my other "tutorial" whose reading list must be consumed in its entirety Friday/Saturday so that I can deliver another 9 pager by Monday afternoon:  Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, biography on Joseph Conrad, Kundera's Art of the Novel, Butler's Early Modernism...too many to list, as I need to get off this blog & read.  Last week I read 800 pages, this week promises more & I feel I am conducting an experiment with my mind to see how many pages can be read in each 24 hour period, with as little sleep as possible to keep the lab-rat going.  I have to say it thrills me (vs. frightens/fatigues) to consume pages, authors, and entire periods so voraciously.  It's the only way if one has any hope of grasping what humans have thought and accomplished.

Then, in all the spare time between antibiotic doses, helping Naya sort through life, and thousands of pages of human scribblings, I have this idea for a story I'm working on.  It is about a woman who works in Christ Church Hall serving the students their extravagant meals three times a day.  How is it that her life has brought her to her knees there, so to speak?  If you have any art in similar vein as the pic above please pass on the name of the artist/painting to me.  This one is 'La Mere' by Elizabeth Nourse, 1888.  &

 then, of course, the other two pics are the Hall we extravagantly dine in while I peep and wonder at the servers each night, making character sketches & a view of Tom Gate from the inside.  The story'll be a tragedy.  How couldn't it be.

Then a bit of poetry to share that I read this morning at 4am whose last line's sentiments I adore:

One of the Butterflies

by W. S. Merwin

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn to pain.

And lest you think I'm getting too arrogant and serious, some amusement Naya and I laughed rather too loudly over for our housemates last night:

"Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaut on the moon and you fear your partner has been turned into Dracula. Next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham! You just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, 'Think again, batman."  --deep thoughts by jack handy

& These are one of those spiral stairs in the Bodleian I mentioned before, which at this point I have stopped climbing up and down for fun.  It takes me four weeks of climbing spiraling staircases and smiling childishly about it before I can notice that the stack of books I'm not attending to almost needs its own spiral staircase to reach its top.

And on that note, to Hegel!