First: Masquerade

I'm trying to stop reading Terry Castle's Masquerade and Civilization, mainly because I realized that if I really read every word of everything on my lists I'm not going to finish. Unless I find my super-speed-boost-mario-cart version of my usual manner of reading (something like how fast I reread Harry Potter). But I can't *stop* because it's, well, a masquerade! Even from the Preface it's clearly kind of amazing:

"This book aims at two things: to re-create the historical phenomenon of the English masquerade and to outline its literary history, particularly in fiction, roughly between 1720 and 1790."

Re-create the masquerade? When I read this I was tired. I had finally just finished Imagining the Penitentiary. I laughed really hard. And I'm still waiting for the masquerade to pop out of the book with a lavish and chaotic parade of phantasmic identities led by Count Heidegger (yes! a real person!). About every other page my mind wanders into some other manifestation of Masquerade in my life, e.g., how to put together my yet-to-be-created Phedre costume if the person who said she'd make my dress never comes back from Venice (carnival!), or about my novel that I won't tell you about just like everyone else's novel they won't tell you about (you know), because I think there's a masquerade at the beginning and I just never fully realized what it was.

Also! I'm going to have to put together a syllabus for the NEXT English class I want to teach, before I've hardly started Poetry of Death, and I think it could be fun to do Drama of Carnivalesque as an antidote, so if anyone has any good ideas (I'm terrible with drama!) holler out or whatnot.

Along the lines of blog-reader-requests, I was thinking of including a creepy/hokey very Gothic poem around Halloween, but I can't think of any offhand (there MUST be some! will clear Gothic/Halloweeny imagery), so if one comes to mind, let me know.


Aaand now. . . update on the slow regurgitation of MTV nonsense. Taylor Swift is adorable, and even possibly became more adorable when I read the US Weekly "article" about what happened at the awards (the picture of her biting her lip was soooo endearing). So here is her video (can I say again how much I adore her?).

(n.b. the bitchy girlfriend CLEARLY is suffering from an excess of geometric cutouts).