See the little blogwatch, see his little feet,

And his little nosey–isn’t the blogwatch sweet? –Yes!!!

ShoeBlogs: The Manolo has the advice for the womens and the mens. It is addictive and hilarious. Be sure to explore the sections on the horrors and the clothing for the mens. Via Cacciaguida, more or less randomly.

“If I was looking for a wine made with larvae, I’d choose this”: Army worm wine (“‘Army worms eat leaves,’ he told the Duluth News Tribune. ‘So essentially they’re a combination of fruit and flowers.'”) and many other noxious concoctions. Via the Old Oligarch, I think.

Stuff that isn’t worth a separate post: 1. Does anyone have a recipe for a) baked/roasted/otherwise-cooked pears?
b) ditto, but involving chocolate?
(These recipes should be very easy…. Dessert is the one area where my cook-fu is still dormant. All I can do is chocolate-chip cookies using the wonderful recipe on the back of the Nestle Tollhouse chips package.)

2. Finished my book of GM Hopkins’s selected poetry. Verdict: …Eh. He’s clearly brilliant. I think I learned a lot about rhythm: He’s captured this irregular rhythm that’s more like singing, or a frightened bird beating its wings against glass, or a hesitant child swinging on the monkey bars. It isn’t metronomic regularity, and it isn’t unrhythm.

Nonetheless, it often took so long to untangle his syntax that I was left at a far emotional distance from the subjects of his poems. All the hyphens fenced me off. I often felt like I was being forced to pay attention to form at the expense of content, when of course form should draw readers to content and vice versa; in fact, I think ideally there would be no form/content division at all. Form would comment on content and content would reflect the real human needs that had prompted the creation of certain poetic forms. Hopkins didn’t do that for me. (Spenser often does–that extra foot so often serving as a subtle “memento mori,” a gentle rebuke to the aspirations of the stanza, or else an extension and intriguing elaboration of the stanza’s theme–and Shakespeare’s sonnets pretty much always marry form and content perfectly.) So in the end… I don’t have Hopkins poems to promote, and I kind of expected to. Oh well. Go read some Dickinson–best non-epic poet in Western literature, I tell you what.