Top 10 Things More Pretentious...

...than blogging (to no one) about a long-dead poet's marginalia:

1-10: nothing.

oops. guess i miscalculated on that one. I've probably been called pretentious before though, so what the fuck. if you can't laugh at yourself....still, i'm doing a lot of research right now and i re-stumbled upon an old favorite of one of William Blake's odd poems. In Songs of Innocence and of Experience, there are a lot of companion poems (for those not familiar), meant to be read in reference to each other. One in the Innocence section is called "The Divine Image" and is (from what I've read today) very typically Swedenborgian. But basically it's not that interesting, generally saying that these four qualities, Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love are God manifest in humanity, which is pretty typical Blake, at least in Innocence.


Here's where we get to my bit for today. A deleted poem from experience, "A Divine Image" references that poem and tears it a new asshole, very succinctly (in 2 stanzas compared to five).


A Divine Image
Cruelty has a Human Heart
And Jealousy a Human Face;
Terror, the Human Form Dvine
And Secrecy, the Human Dress.

The Human Dress, is forged Iron
The Human Form, a fiery Forge.
The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd
The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.


It ended up getting deleted for something a little more subtle, but I think this is a really interesting poem, especially in the context of his Songs, where extremes are everywhere. Time to get back to writing, though. Hope you enjoyed the semi-insane Romantic sidetrack (if you made it this far).

Time to put the nerd-pants on

I just found out about the launch of the World Digital Library, a free online library that has crap-tons of books, photographs, drawings, manuscripts, &c. It's not any sort of scam. They haven't even asked for my email address yet. It's just that sort of utopian free-information-for-everyone-for-the-betterment-of-humanity gig. Which is great. I've been poking around it for a while this morning and found The Book of Urizen, one of William Blake's gorgeous engraved books. This isn't just a bunch of jpegs. You get really high quality images that you can zoom in/out with, which is a real treat with the hand-colored plates that make up Urizen. The quality is good enough to read. This might be crazy nerdy, but i am insanely excited about this library. I also found a book of 100 Japanese poems by 100 poets dating from the late 17th century. For anyone who can read it, i'm sure it's fascinating. Anyway, it just launched today, so keep an eye out for expanding holdings. I'm sure they'll be putting stuff up constantly.

Finally, the last things about the WDL i want to mention is the interface. There are a lot of different ways to browse the collection, which lets you stumble upon things in a much more interesting way than having to guess what might be interesting based on title or abstract. It looks like this is going to be a really kickass resource.

AND: reading tomorrow night! Longfellow Books! be there! Betsy Scholl! Should be great! 7PM!