Trials

The most frustrating thing about learning to play an instrument is that sometimes you suck. Right now (right, right now - I'm procrastinating) I'm learning to play Massenet's 'Meditation' and I want to bloody throw my viola on the ground and stand on it. Because I was better last week.

Why? It's frustrating. If I was just awful and I stayed awful all the time that would be absolutely fine, but that glimmer of musical credibility that I hear once in a while just makes it so infuriating when I sink back into the doldrums.

Matthew is self-deprecating today. It's a good thing because ninety-nine times out of a hundred he is pompous.

Book update: finished one 'young adult' fantasy novel for the library club. It's called 'The Keeper's Daughter' by Gill Arbuthnot. Enjoyable. A solid 7.8. I have to read another young adult fantasy novel and then I'm going to back to my darling littérature. Currently debating between Matthew Lewis's 'The Monk' (Gothic Romanticism -- ah!) and Vladimir Nabkov's 'Lolita' (infamous twentieth century Russian sexcapade - ah!) The life of a teenager is a difficult one.

Poetry!

"If one really truly does indeed want to go to Cambridge then one really does have to begin studying poetry."

That is my inner scholar. He is very annoying but very correct. For that reason I bought the most beautiful little collection of poetry books a couple of days ago. It included:

• W.B. Yeats
• T.S. Eliot
• Sylvia Plath
• Ted Hughes
• W.H. Auden
• John Betjeman

I'll admit that before I bought the collection I had heard of four out of those six poets. But that's why I read! To learn! To that end I have started with Yeats. I have thus far read the very long introduction and about four poems, methinks. I'm not really feeling proper analysis, however.

In other news I have read the first book of Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy, and I am in LOVE. I am convinced that it is indeed 'proper' literature, even though it doesn't have 'social context' or anything of the sort. I mean, it has endured more than fifty years in print. And what it does have is themes, and character, and motive, and macabre description!

I need to up the ante with my reading schedule or else no one will ever believe I'm smart.