Episode 1380: Finally Working...

Watched Primer this afternoon, which Phil recommended to me after we saw A Thousand Kisses Deep last night. It basically did my head in, but in a good way. At least the time travel in Primer doesn't immediately fall apart when I try to think about it. Anyway, today I set out to reread Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats and Monette's Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies For Rog, and I've just finished rereading, so it's time for some Ben & Jerry's Cookie Dough. I think I actually need the ice-cream right now, as having read the full sequence of the Monette for the first time, it's left me a little, well, upset. It's the first 10 elegies that are truly brutal, almost suffocating in their intensity of feeling. The remaining two sections of the collection are mellower and easier to cope with, I think. Am rather glad that I decided not to do the EN954 essay for last week's deadline, as having reread the collections one after the other, I have spotted connections between poems that I was completely blind to a couple of weeks ago. It's good because I've been wrestling with how to do a comparison of the two poets' elegies that goes beyond just commenting on the obvious differences in structure. John McCullough helpfully pointed out on my Facebook status something that I really should have made the connection for in my head, which is that while Monette's elegies are addressed to his dead lover, Gunn's tend to be addressed to friends and friendship is something that Gunn greatly cherished. Not sure yet if I can make anything of this, or rather if the point that needs to be made is that despite different targets, their elegies still produce similar effects, or maybe it has to be something more nuanced than that.