This turned out to be about Henry James

Had extremely complicated WWII spy-thriller dreams last night. Also dreams about LiveJournal and being able to use a graphic interface to change the color of people's hair to match their text. Consequently feeling a little scattered and a lot lazy. Work is waiting for me, and I'm not ready for it yet.

I'm reading Leon Edel's one-volume biography of Henry James (thanks again to heres_luck who is letting me depredate her shelves). I don't much like James as a writer--except for The Turn of the Screw, which is brilliant--but I'm finding that I like him rather a lot as a person. We have things in common. Which is a fucking weird thing to say, but there you are.

In a lot of his early stories (Edel helpfully provides capsule summaries), the heroes and heroines fall into fevers and die after having some crushing disappointment. And I'm wondering, is that just a literary convention which the youthful James couldn't quite shake off, or is he transcribing some actual part of Victorian life? Because if people died of crushing disappointments today, there'd be a lot fewer people in the world. It's like "brain-fever," which is the most wonderfully convenient illness in the whole of literature, useful for everything. I know they thought of it as real--at one point William James writes to their parents from Italy saying Henry has a "sort of brain-fever"--but what was it?

the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to

I'm having trouble with my hands, wrists, and forearms again, so I'm going to be unnaturally quiet for the next few days.

Have made small progress on dissertation, and smaller on emperor.

You may imagine me seething like a teakettle about to come to the boil.

And, of course, I keep reading about Henry James's incredible productivity and thinking bitterly, But didn't the bastard ever get hand-cramp?