Seasons II

By AntichristSuperstar

Winter: My Secret

Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you're too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.
(...)
Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.
- Christina Rossetti

• Winter - Tori Amos
• Summer Breeze - Selas and Crofts

Seasons

by Betty

Summer is Ended (I)

Summer is Ended
To think that this meaningless thing was ever a rose,
Scentless, colourless, this!
Will it ever be thus (who knows ?)
Thus with our bliss, If we wait till the close?
Tho' we care not to wait for the end, there comes the end
Sooner, later, at last,
Which nothing can mar, nothing mend:
An end locked fast,
Bent we cannot re-bend.

(II)
Wreathe no more lillies in my hair,
For I am dying, Sister sweet:
Or, if you will for the last time
Indeed, why make me fair
Once for my winding sheet.
(...)

- Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

• Winter - Rolling Stones
• Landslide - Fleetwood Mac

Fade into you

I wonder how many people remember Mazzy Star with their hit Fade Into You. Or more like Fade Into Obscurity as more and more of the 90s bands are doing. I remembered it suddenly two nights ago. Not only is this song so very lovely and nostalgic but it has such a great video and the sort of poorly written Cranberries-ish lyrics that can make a lot of sense in its non-clarity.

• Fade Into You - Mazzy Star

Ageless Lolita

Wanted, wanted: Dolores Haze.
Her dream-gray gaze never flinches.
Ninety pounds is all she weighs
With a height of sixty inches.

My car is limping, Dolores Haze,
And the last long lap is the hardest,
And I shall be dumped where the weed decays,
And the rest is rust and stardust.

- Humbert's poem (from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov)

Nabokov's beautiful, disturbing work stands as one of the most impressive displays of language in American literature, as well as an awesome dissection of the complex anatomy of love. The sheer joy of its sentences, the nuance of its evocations, are certainly the main reasons it has endured and why it seems assured of a readership another 50 years from now. But it is worth exploring another aspect of that masterpiece, a moral examination that would have prompted Nabokov, who championed aesthetics above all, to incinerate with a laser glare any fool who poked round such a topic. (...)

(there is an article here that Blogger won't show, for whatever reason. Click on the line to see the article.)

- From: San Francisco Chronicle

I would really like to get my hands on Kubric's 1962 adaptation of Lolita. The best I could do for now is the 1997 re-make which I enjoy even though Lo is too old.