Yep, that's me, up in the middle of the night. Only thing to do is to pad barefoot to the baffroom and listen to one Rick Fisher from Tulsa OK.
Topic perfect for me. Pelvic Floor Dysfunction. Susan Wilcox, the phyiscal therapist.
Cmon, Susan, Get to the point.
Leaky bladder. She never discussed how to fix it, so I looked it up myself and sent myself an email.
Kegel exercises.
...
Below is a note from Rem, the Roslyn Postman.
BTW, I can barely see as I am not wearing my reading glasses.
Not required for employees, so long as
they're vaccinated. We never enforced the
mask requirement for customers.
It's safe to travel now, so long
as you're vaccinated. All the same, I
wouldn't travel internationally--that
would probably make me nervous too. I
will be travelling (domestically) by
plane in September.
Finished the Richard Himmel novel
and started a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy" novel, "Starship Titanic," by
Terry Jones.
Why would I want to read
that? Jones was a member of Monty
Python. So far it's not as ribald as I
expected, and with some decent situation
humor. Unbeknownst to the people on the
ship the construction amounted to an
insurance scam and the ship is slowly falling apart.--Rem
Ruth comments that she is surprised she has never read the book. They should have prescribed it at Goddard College.
...
Why did I look up Grace Slick? She is still alive - at 81 - but has had TERRIBLE problems with addictions.
She has all white hair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Slick
Hope the above link works.
...
Was looking up my famous poem PEOPLE LOVE ROCK BANDS. Wrote this when I went to see Jack Cassady of HOT TUNA at the Keswick.
Entered that poem into several contests. The winner is US, both you and I. Though locating the poem would take several days.
https://ruthzdeming.blogspot.com/search?q=people+love+rock+bands
Here's a terrific blog o mine.
...
Why did I get out of bed?
Bad dreams.
Watched on PBS something very moving about native Americans. The man suffered from substance abuse for many years. Was clean for about 18, since he's a role model for his son.
;;;;
Oh! Now I remember last night, she said, like a woman who drank 18 bottles of vodka last night.
Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed a Pulitzer Winner and did a very fine job. The girl's dad was incarcerated for years for two rapes. When she and dad finally met, he said, I treated them as if they were objects and not people. I had no empathy for them.
The morrow I will come back after 'naming names.'
Walter Straus - b. 1918 - dunno if he's dead or alive - did not like my poetry.
"Now here's a good poem," he said, and referred me to EVELYN.
Ah, now I remember. It's Evelyn Hope.
Summary
The speaker of the poem is an older man sitting with the corpse of Evelyn Hope, a 16-year-old girl who has recently died. He is "thrice her age" (line 21). Even though she "had scarcely heard [his] name" (line 9), he longed for her. She was too young to have yet loved, so he never made any direct proposal and wonders whether it is now too late.
He spends much of his address praising her purity and reflecting on how their relationship as "fellow mortals" (line 24) might have made them partners under other circumstances. He assures himself that their union is not forever prohibited and believes God has merely delayed it until they meet again and he can have her.
When they rejoin, he will tell her of the many phases of life he has passed since this moment, but will also assure her that she has always been missing from his happiness. He promises to her corpse that he will always love her. He then places a leaf into her "sweet cold hand" as a secret that she will see when she reawakens with God and which will communicate to her his promise.
Analysis
Despite the profuseness of the speaker's passion in this poem, he is easily categorized as disgustingly creepy. One gets the sense that Browning, in this poem published in 1855, wanted to explore the type of unfettered control fantasy that characterizes the Duke in "My Last Duchess," but without the sophistication in language, the charm, or the dramatic irony that pulls us into the earlier poem. Though a dramatic monologue, this poem lacks dramatic stakes - one gets the sense that the speaker is not worried about being interrupted during his long wail to the corpse, which could suggest he is a powerful man, and so he is able to expound on his feelings.
The most immediate grotesqueness of the situation is its physical circumstances. The speaker has obviously lusted after this girl from afar, without having ever made an effort to introduce himself. He acknowledges that she is too young to have yet loved, but this did not deter him from having developed an attraction deep enough that he believes they are fated to meet again in the afterlife. Again, the fact that she might have "scarcely heard his name," and yet he is given the opportunity to sit for an hour with her corpse suggests that he might be a man of renown who had picked out this young girl as a future conquest.
What is perhaps creepiest about the poem, however, is his insistence on expressing his feelings in such a pronounced pure form. He does not acknowledge the inappropriateness of such an attraction, but instead assumes that her nature of "spirit, fire and dew" (line 20) has made her an appropriate match for him. When he places the leaf in her hand at the poem's end, he means it to be a symbol of something pure and perfect, entirely unaware that he is crossing lines of propriety. The dramatic irony here does not draw us in as the duke's charismatic use of language does in "My Last Duchess", but instead horrifies us more, since this speaker is doubly unaware of how grossly inappropriate his actions and long-gestating affections are.
In the end, the poem is mostly concerned with the psychology of self-delusion. As noted above, the speaker is unaware of the extent of his delusion, so that the further he goes in assuming that he and the girl are fated to be reunited, the more we see his lack of connection with reality. His insistence on understanding their relationship (or lack thereof) in terms of godliness and purity only shields what we can assume is a much baser sexual lust. Of course, he'll never realize this but instead will spend the rest of his life considering himself a martyr for having lost this young girl, which makes the point that despite its title, this poem is not about Evelyn Hope at all but instead about a powerful man's level of delusions and grotesque perversions.
...
Night-night, Little Ruthie.
