Down and Out in 19th Century London

            On Friday I got caught up on my journal. 

I weighed myself before lunch and I was 93.1, which is down a kilo from last Sunday.

I had potato salad for lunch.

I read and re-read the poems offered for critique by the partners in my group and then I made notes.

Vivian’s poem “Grandmother” had an unnecessary solitary rhyme that threw the flow off. She also tried to break up “a pipe broken” into “a pipe bro / ken”. “A pipe bro” didn’t mean anything that fit with the poem. Near the end was a strong image followed by four sentimental lines. I suggested that she just end with the strong image of “I had no strength for wings”. Her second two poems had much stronger imagery. “Trapped” had an eerie ending and “A Dream” felt like the prose part of a haiban and so I suggested she add a haiku at the end.

Matthew’s poems are full of rhymes that don’t feel like they were carefully chosen. He goes to the trouble for instance to say that his drink is not gin and tonic so he can find a rhyme with “comic” and it feels unnatural. He also has this tendency to put capital letters at the beginning of each line, which often interrupts the reading flow.

Margaryta’s poem “Olympia” had one stanza with an italicized other voice. It seemed to me that the voice should return throughout the poem a couple of times. I rewrote her final stanza to give her a sense of how she could fit together the words to make a natural rhyme. “Dewdrops” had a good line with “the sun’s many tongues”. “Kept” had a nice finish about birds choosing which scissors get to clip their wings.

Blythe has very short poems. One had a lot of staccato lines but she added “againagainagain” and I suggested she remove it because it goes against the percussive sound. For benches I suggested a rhyming ending that results from just changing the position of one word. “Bye Then” had a nice line “We’ll eat ourselves thin together”.

I read about a quarter of Thomas de Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater”. It hasn’t gotten to the opium part yet. Just that he supposedly had innocent friendships with a lot of London prostitutes and a ten-year-old girl that used to sleep in his arms for warmth. So far it’s sort of like a 19^th Century version of George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London".

I had a piece of pork tenderloin with a potato and a parsnip for dinner and watched two episodes of The Big Bang Theory.

Spoiler alert.

In the first story Sheldon is still dejected about his and Amy’s paper having been disproved. Leonard digs out of storage an emergency tape that young Sheldon made as a pep speech to himself for if they ever stop making Star Wars movies. Since that’s not going to happen this situation apples. But as Sheldon and Amy are watching it they discover that the recording of young Sheldon has been taped over by Sheldon’s late father for a training video for a high school team he was coaching. Later Sheldon actually listens to his father’s motivational speech to his team that was about to lose and he finds it inspiring. He suddenly realizes that his and Amy’s theory might not be wrong after all.

In the second story Amy and Sheldon are suddenly famous because of their paper and they are getting the VIP treatment from the university. The president though only wants Amy to do the interviews because Sheldon has no people skills. The subsequent headlines give Amy all the credit and that upsets Sheldon.

Denise asks Stuart to move in with her and that freaks him out.

Raj discovers that Anu is still friends with her ex-boyfriend. She asks him to trust her but he says he doesn’t even know her, since theirs will be an arranged marriage and they basically just met. He says he doesn’t know if he can trust her and so she is upset.