TRY POE

POETRY

I am.

During the pandemic my pc started dying piece by piece, HD first, then CPU fan, now it looks like our internet service is being downgraded such that during business hours things work rather normal but after 5pm, service is prohibitively laggy with packet loss and 10 second pauses and dropped connections.

So I've been catching up on my reading.

Finally got around to reading the original Foundation trilogy. Started it in HS, lost track somewhere in the first book, set it aside.

Also up: Rereading the Culture novels by Iain Banks. Basically, Scotsmen in space.

Already had a go at rereading the first 5 Dune books a couple years ago, so I'm good for a few more years, haven't seen the movie yet but I'll probably still remember enough to follow along.

As for actual poetry, started about 6 months ago with Paradise Lost, then three plays by Ben Jonson ("Volpone", "Epicoene", and "The Alchemist"). Nothing too deep there except that Jonson was an exceptionally cynical commentator on the head games people tormented their families with in Elizabethan London.

Then uh some stuff I was supposed to read in actual university, but wound up not reading, just vibing off the Cliffs notes or somehow absorbing the gestalt of the assignment from the exhaled hot air in the lecture hall.

The Epic of Kudrun
Dietrich and the Giant (one of many sagas about Theodoric the Goth that survived into the Middle Ages and became fodder for a cycle of popular courtly epics)
Alphart's Last Stand (another Theodoric hero saga)
Theodoric and the Death of the Three Princes (Diether, Theodoric's brother, manages to let the crown prince and the two princely sons of Attila ride out of his sight while near the front during the wars against Odovacar. They are stopped by Witege the Betrayer, think they can take him, but he kills them in combat. Rather than face the reaming he'll get from Theodoric when he's caught, he runs away and jumps into the sea.)
Helmbrecht (the medieval Austrian cautionary tale about city slickers and dissing your parents)

Currently wading through the last of those. Suitably grim ending, but unsurprising - medieval society was still founded on agriculture, and while courtly society was unashamedly exploitive of those who worked the land, the farmer's plight could and was presented as a sympathetic cause on occasion.

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POETRY

Not sure how I missed this post, nice one Schmockla :)

I just got a really nice haircut yesterday....won't show it...just letting u know....