Sonnet 129

Pursuant to a conversation with brisingamen, I am moved to post my favorite of Shakespeare's sonnets, both because I love it and any excuse is a good excuse and because it offers a sharp corrective to the general perception that the Sonnets are "love poems."

129 is not about love.

129.
Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
  All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
  To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

disrepair

Have made a first, cursory pass over the entire dissertation and fixed--or at least patched--all the things that HL said were really wrong. Will have to go through it again, much less cursorily, but I think I'd better write the conclusion first.

Also need to finish Alas, Poor Ghost!, so I can look all smart and sociological in the pamphlet chapter. And have one source that no one on my committee will be familiar with.

Have left a message for a friend in the department that I'm going to exploit her by making her read my incredibly long and confusing introduction (it's going to hit 60 pages before I'm done, easy).

Have put the little cryptic notes of everything that needs to go in the conclusion in the conclusion. Writing the fucker may be a different matter.

The mail today brought word of another novella rejected, and menstrual cramps are hell.

Thirteen days.

doggedness

Two turnips (short stories) lobbed out.

Leaving me with my three Weird Sisters, three 10 k traditional horror novellas that nobody loves but me. *sniff*

On the upside, that's ten stories out and circulating, which is about five more than I could even imagine when I started submitting things back in 2000. (My three-year anniversary of submitting short fiction is October 5th.) And both those original submissions have sold. Huh. I guess that's a good sign.

Submitting short stories requires complete estrangement from the ego. That's the thing that's hard. You can't let it knock you on your ass when something gets rejected, even if it's the best thing you've ever written and the editors are all cretinous slobbering hyenas. (Which is how the more primitive levels of my psyche react to each and every rejection letter.) There's a rhythm to it, a kind of beat of not-thinking that's really really easy to lose. And once you start thinking, it's a very short and very slippery slope to that Eeyorish state of Why bother? No one will buy it. No one cares that it's your life's blood on the page. Probably they'll just make paper hats out of it and laugh. How Like Them, and you might as well be eating thistles.

It's also true that this particular tango gets easier with practice. But you have to keep dancing.