"Sand / Is grand / But oyster / Is moister"

From the larder, a newly unearthed poem by Housman, concerning oysters and cucumbers. (Previous local coverage of Housman here.) Naturally the juxtaposition of Housman and moisture brings up that Auden sonnet:

Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,
Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;
Food was his public love, his private lust
Something to do with violence and the poor. 

Also new to me: A.D. Hope's response to the Auden sonnet. And I am reminded that I recently stumbled upon this astoundingly bad translation of Aeschylus ("with nurture-milk it sucked the clotted blood"!). (Connection is via Housman parody that Calista pointed me to upon being sent the Aesch.)

Some unrelated linkage: Leigh Hunt's wonderful apostrophe to a fish (and the fish's response); Alice James's self-description of her body as a "mildewed toadstool".

After some grief, the defense has been scheduled! Key outstanding task now -- other than various admin. horrors -- is to write the introduction. Given how heavily my research depends on "reducing to previously solved problems," this is a delicate task; one cannot, as in papers, simply point to the appropriate references, but a detailed introduction to all the relevant ideas would entail unimaginable bloat...

Pearls-for-eyes redux

Francis Spufford, I may be some time:

The ice had preserved John Torrington, John Hartnell, and William Braine as yellowed revenants from 1846. Their lips had drawn back from their teeth, and their eyes, oysters of water-ice when the coffins were first opened, proved to have sunk back beneath the lids [...] the preserving ice does something curious to history. It does not distinguish between the recent dead and the remote dead; all are glazed over alike.

I am returning to this book after a week's travel, exigencies of packing for which have left me with a number of half-read books that I must now try to finish.

Grief-bacon, contentment-bacon

Dept. of stuff Germans have words for:

1. The German for living the good life is "to live like a maggot in bacon." (Hanging Noodles)

2. The German word "kummerspeck" means "excess weight gained by emotional over-eating" and translates literally as "grief bacon." (Nick Confessore, twitter)

3. From a W.G. Sebald poem that appeared in the New Yorker sometime this year:

A young woman
came up to me
& said that al-
though on vacation
she had spent
all day at
the office
which unlike

her apartment was
air-conditioned &
as cold as the
morgue. There,
she said, I am
happy like an
opened up oyster
on a bed of ice.