For his birthday dinner James has requested Mount Vesuvius, a French ice-cream-and-meringue confection in the shape of an exploding volcano. I ought to be up to this, and I am trying to imagine that I am.
But for his real non-lava-related birthday present, Tom and I are taking James on a whirlwind trip to Montreal. It will be the first time that the 3 of us have gone anywhere alone since Paul was born, and this time we are going to a rock festival: Sonic Youth, Arcade Fire, Pavement, and (can you believe it?) Devo, among many other features. Moreover, I will get to spend a weekend talking bad French, and my family will respectfully believe everything I tell them since they don't speak French at all.
I wonder which poet would be most suitable as a companion for a whirlwind trip to a Montreal rock show. For some reason I am thinking about Shelley. But speaking of Shelley, earlier this week I drove past a mailbox with the name "Shelley" painted on it, quotation marks and all. Now I am wishing that I had a mailbox labeled "Shelley." It would be like having an official pseudonym: "please forward all mail marked 'Shelley' to this address." Imagine what great mail I would get! (Actually I suppose most of it would be bills, wouldn't it?)
4 comments:
Lord Byron? or perhaps Jane Kenyon?...though Shelley is always appropriate
you are very funny. Yes, it would all be bills. And when you come home from Montreal, the bailiffs will have taken all of your things to pay your debts.
I am mad at him at the moment. So let's stick with Potter. That will be a famous name, too. Did you know that the house where Byron made his ghost story proposition is the Villa Diodati, the place where Milton stayed on some trip to GEneva. Though what he was doing there, I don't know. Do you?
xo
Arcade Fire is the hottest group around. Their last appearances in NYC and the Washington area (where I live) were sold out.
Please take a picture of that volcano cake. Does it explode during or after the singing of Happy Birthday?
Our postal service is so poor here we are always getting someone else's mail and wondering where ours has gone. Maybe the USPS is playing a version of your poet on a mailbox.
Charles Diodati was fledgling Milton's best friend, and he died young. The Villa Diodati belonged to Charles's father, I believe. If I'm remembering correctly they were Anglicized Swiss Protestants. Milton stayed at the villa as he was en route to Rome, where, as a brilliant yet callow pinhead, he was shocked by Catholics and excited by intellectuals. I forget how he felt about art. Then he came home, embarked on women trouble, went blind, argued with ecclesiastics, and invented "Paradise Lost."
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