Plans, Introductions, etc.
Okay. Firstly, something I’ve wanted to do for a while is post other people’s work on my site alongside my own, for the sake of variety and extra traffic. The first of these I’m going to put up after this post.
So this that I’m going to post by another writer is from a girl I added on Myspace, Molly, who writes some pretty superlative poetry. At least, I think so. It might just be the use of words like ‘skitter’ and ‘colloquial’, and some interesting images, but I think the voice is quite unlike a lot of poems that I’ve read. Anyway, I like them.
Next, at some point in the next few months I want to make this site ‘better’. Not sure exactly how it will improve much, but I want to vary the content some more, and write some more personal pieces, like I did at the start, so it’s more like a blog, than just a collection of short stories one after the other.
Not sure when when, or even if, these improvements will take place though, since I’ve been quite busy lately. I wasn’t particularly happy with my mark for my last term’s work, so I’m going to work harder this term. Today I’ve been working on a visual project entitled ‘Word & Image.’ You can guess what it’s supposed to be about from the title. I’m looking at Ascii art and the visual qualities of text.
My other project, for the prose component of my course is similar, though more focused on the written aspect. For that I ploughed my way through Ford Madox Ford’s ‘The Good Soldier’ yesterday so I could start reading Finnegans Wake which should be quite… interesting. I could really go off on a tangent about both those books, but I’ll restrain myself, except to say that, for all the nonsensicality of the first eight pages of the novel, the word that really stuck out for me was ‘celesculating’ used to describe a skyscraper (or ‘skyerscape’ as Joyce puts it). How beautiful is that word: ‘celesculating’? You’ve never seen it before, but you know exactly what it means. Most writers would have taken a whole line to get across that meaning, but Joyce does it in a single word. I suppose it’s language use like that that let him get away with writing Finnegans Wake.
And outside of that uni work, I’ve been working on something else, which is taken lots of time and I hope to get finished some time in the next couple of months.
Okay, onwards to the first not-written-by-me post on this site. And I would like to add that if anyone else wants work putting up here (though I’m sure you all have your own preferred outlets already, just email it to henry@hbenjaminpetrie.com).
Tags: Bloom, Finnegans Wake, Ford Madox Ford, Future, Guest Author, Improvements, James Joyce, Modernism, Molly, Plans, Poetry, The Good Soldier, Totemic, Uni, Work
