Online Happinesses

Things that made me happy yesterday:

• This (spoilery) scene from Primeval S03E01, in which Pristichampsus visits the Royal Festival Hall and has a ride in the glass lift.


• Receiving an email alert for Salt River


• thefulcrum, from which I grabbed a gorgeous free layout and spent Happy Time making my own header (in Paint Shop Pro 4, for the retro)


• The Wasteland as T. S. Eliot never envisaged it:

  1. IM IN UR WASTELAND BURYING UR DEAD
  april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has.



• Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes (a.k.a. Antigone) which brings the play vividly to life. (Bonus illicit MP3s of the production regaled my graphic-making time.) Review later.


• Post to LJ Bookmarklet (which I only just noticed) enabling linkspamming, yay!

2009/23: The Burial at Thebes -- Seamus Heaney

The Burial at Thebes -- Seamus Heaney
You can't just pluck your honour off a bush
you didn't plant. You forfeited that right. (562/3)
( my review )

Grantchester spring

Closeup
Originally uploaded by tamaranth

Today woolymonkey and I cycled to Grantchester, had lunch in the Red Lion and took tea in the Orchard Tea Garden "where more famous people have taken tea than anywhere else in the world". Turing conceived the idea of artificial intelligence in Grantchester; Wittgenstein and Virginia Woolf went skinny-dipping (probably not at the same time); Sylvia Plath recited Chaucer to a rapt audience of cows.

The brochure at the Tea Garden contains the entire text of Brooke's 1912 poem 'The Old Vicarage, Grantchester' (the one that ends Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?)

I don't think I'd ever read it all, and I certainly didn't know just how entertainingly rude (in doggerel) he was about Cambridge folk:

Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley, on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles

Ah, poetry: what crimes are committed in thy name.

"writing a novel is very close to falling in love"

Libba Bray - Writing a novel, a love story

THE FIRST DRAFT
I love this book. And it loves me. I never want to be without this book. Never, ever. What? Were you saying something? I'm sorry I can't hear you because my book just said the best thing ever.
...
THE REVISION, ON DEADLINE
F*@*#&ing book. I hate you. I wish I'd never met you. YOU MAKE MY LIFE HELL! HELL! I wish there were another word for hell but my thesaurus says there's not.

(via ellen_kushner)