Update to the update

[greenstorm]

I categorically refuse to do an entire series of functional ware for The Wasteland by TS Eliot.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

it's a lovely idea, tho! :-D

i read "the love song of j alfred prufrock" to Leslie on our drive home on sunday and we ended up discussing it, and Eliot's life, in some depth for the next hour. really lovely experience. they hadn't previously encountered Eliot's work, not being a literature person until fairly recently and having no academic background in it. i, otoh, took a class on Eliot & Yeats in college, so.

[greenstorm]

I was given the Book of Practical Cats very young, but hoarded my mom's copy of The Waste Land by about age 10 or so. I don't have a lot of background on his life or any of that. Prufrock and much of his other pieces have felt too, I don't know, performative? for me. Whereas The Waste Land very satisfactorily navel-gazes itself into an internal spiral of the kind of patterned chaos I love, it seems less designed to be transparent to an external gaze.

[yarrowkat]

i encountered The Waste Land in high school and it sort of slid past me. then in the aforementioned college class, we spent a few weeks on it specifically. the day after we were all to have read it, we came into class and the professor said, "weren't you delighted when you discovered there were end notes? [with a falling intonation] and then you read them." HA. it is indeed less transparent to the external gaze. :-D

[greenstorm]

Gotta love a poem where the notes explicitly say "this is not an accident"

[greenstorm]

It would have to be 80-100 pieces. A year's work. If it haunts me long enough maybe I'll take a work sabbatical to do it. I think we get one. Cancel my phone plan for a year, lock the gates, and just... be in partnership with that poem and with the world of my hands and of objects.

[yarrowkat]

whew. a huge project. it sounds very soothing to just lock the world away and commune with clay & poems for a long time.