Monday, Birthday

Dear Void,

Let's not be too hard on me, okay? Yes, I did say on Friday that, having completed Taussig's small chapter 'Mimetic Excess' I would double back to work on Aphra Behn's Seneca Unmasqu'd (I'll tell you later why I'm doing that) and Lisa Robertson's Nilling. Although I did place Nilling next to my keyboard and I'm soooo looking forward to getting back into that ('with a skirty murmur, commodiousness arrives') and Robertson's discovery of something voluptuous and delicious in the 9th century codex, the Vossianus Oblongus (or rather a 1908 photo facsimile edition of it).

I was looking for a particular paper that is somewhere here on my desk and before long I was sorting the papers into alphabetical order which means, of course, every second thing gets a little read and I remember that it is ALL so interesting. Auden’s poem to Lord Byron in Letters From Iceland (1937) which reminds me very much of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writing back to Margaret of Navarre, the C16th Queen and writer. So of course I had to translate that:

I am so charmed by your coterie that if you give me your word to admit me there immediately; I will go and throw myself into the Rhone to find you, half out of desire to see you, and half out of boredom for all those I see (the original French can be found in Halsband’s Life of Lady Mary, 1956:232)

Then, I found again Cervantes’ preface to Don Quixote, wonderful and funny. It plays with the form of the preface, which include quotes from the Ancients, some sonnets, epigrams and imitation of the work of others (‘neither do I know what authors I have imitated’) and is written under the conceit of ‘I have this friend’.

Do you see how my day goes?

Anyway, now that is filed under C for Cervantes and put aside with all the others. I did get side-tracked by Leibniz, inventor of the modern binary number system in 1689. Though I’m interested in his Dissertation on the Art of Combinations (1666). And I started an iterative poem based off this reading (see image above). So, it wasn’t a totally unproductive day.

Also, Void, it’s my birthday. Yay

Jx