Labor Day

[wackyweasel]

. . . is a day for homework! Especially when you've spent the whole weekend proper either working or celebrating your birthday.

I spent much of today trying to keep a good balance in my reading-Edgar-Allan-Poe-to-eating-birthday-cake ratio. (I like Poe, but are there really people in my class who are reading a dozen Poe stories and poems without

Comments

[blue_hat_guru]

Chocolate cake does seem a useful...balancer...to Poe.

[toastedcheese]

Somehow I did not question your reading Keats and Poe in that class. Interesting indeed! What's on the syllabus for the rest of the class?

A Keats sighting would be so much better than an Elvis sighting.

[wackyweasel]

Next up are Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then William Morris. Then, later, we have Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde.

The funny thing is that I knew Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a painter, but didn't realize he wrote poetry, so when I saw his name up next, I thought, "Great! We've subverted the 'British' and '1860 to 1910' parts of the course title, time to take that 'Literature' bit down a peg!" (We are, in fact, going to look at Rossetti's paintings, too.) I pictured us just looking at tons and tons of people who *influenced* authors of British Literature 1860 to 1910, then having one EXTREMELY ANALYTICAL reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

(Which, by the way, have you read Poe's "The Oval Portrait" and "William Wilson"? I feel like, between those two short stories, he basically wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray. Which, of course, doesn't preclude Oscar Wilde's total awesomeness.)

[toastedcheese]

Wow, it's sort of like a fantastic literature in Victorian England class!

I have read William Wilson but not The Oval Portrait. Now that you mention it, Wilde's prose is pretty Poetastic (favorite new adjective, btw.)