Midnight Blahggery in Georgia

I am en route through Georgia and punched toward a destination in the plainslands that is disconnected. While this preludes abundantly more journal musings and stray never-concluded poetry, it means there may be a hiccough here in my blogging routine both here and in my Jack’s Alley livejournal. At the moment I am shacked up in a surprisingly pretty, hilltop Super-Eight, where the water hangs in the air in snapshot and suspended by the heat. I have listened thrice now to the late Charlton Heston reading “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, then cycled through the BBC Radio Play of Jane Austen’s Emma.

I was inspired by Ellen Moody’s bloggering to re-read Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, which makes me a little lovesick for my boxed-up library. I learned about Jane Austen in Vermont from Ms. Place and wonder some about Florida’s Austenolatry. I got in touch with Amy Robinson from the Gainsville JASNA chapter that looks surprisingly more active and accessible than my old Michigan love – and best yet: the next get-together is on Sanditon: I maintain that DA Miller’s Berkeley smug got in the way of his reading of it in The Secret of Style, calling Sanditon the “death of the stylothete” and in need of a “brisk salt rub.” For soothe.

Neil Gaiman thought it’d be fun to start posting some Introductions he’d written in the past on his blog, and this one‘s for Joe Sanders’ collection of academic papers about The Sandman called The Sandman Papers.

Once you’ve written something it’s not yours any longer: it belongs to other people, and they all have opinions about it, and every single one of those opinions is as correct as that of the author – more so, perhaps. Because those people have read the work as something perfectly new, and, barring amnesia, an author is never going to be able to do that. There will be too many ghost-versions of the story in the way, and besides, the author cannot read it for the first time, wondering what happens next, comparing it to the other things that he or she has read.

I began Daybookery as a place for my readerly and writerly oriented thoughts because my growing-up pals from my Jack’s Alley were very much unenthused and bored (although I like to think they enjoyed my Harry Potter and the Phallic Symbols musing), and here I am just blogging about other blogs. Mine is more of a blahg!

At now midnight-thirty it’s time I pack-up my laptop and hit the road to Atlanta – although I could use another nap. It’s this heat, I swear; air conditioning seems never-cold-enough. What’s worse, the vending machine returned my twenty-five cents as a nickel and a dime – what kind of backwoods hole-in-the-wall is this?