of all of the things i lack in life (power, riches, etc) the chiefest is a brain.

mostly squabbling this morning with su-lin about her new fitzie sonnet (yes, a new one!) which i declaimed as being neither elizabethan nor petrarchian, nor for that matter spenserian. she knows very well i think she can versify with ease i just object to the perversion of the form.

saw this in northrope frye this morning: "...the question of personal authority is relevant to the humanities in general, and literary criticism in particular. i think it advisable for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary scholarhsip to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. i am not speaking, of course, of any sort of moral model, but it seems to me that growing up insdie a mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies...keats remarks that the life of a man of genius is a continuous allegory, which i take to mean, among other things, that a creative life has something to dow ith choosing a life-style. i think the scholarly life has something to do with this too, and one chooses a preceptor among the poets who has something congenial to oneself in this respect."

my life story is one of getting ahead of myself early and then getting bored and frustrated quick. i'm sick of doing little things. treat it all as an academic exercise? just can't get myself to submit to that. but, not brave enough to be rebellious, therefore simply wander off waywardly, to much cost.