And, unknowingly, last month's theme was detail - things as they are, put down in prose or on screen, faithfully so or changed as if upon a blue guitar - whether I was looking at Olt, Flaubert's masterclasses with Maupassant, Ophuls visualising Maupassant's prose, Bertolucci's black and white in colour, Nabokov vs Trilling, Ps22 singing Coldplay, The Simpson's parodying Madmen, 0r my long meanderings on Joseph O'Neill and Mandelstam.
As a punctuation point, then - and because it is what I have been trying to do and what each of the above accomplish in their own way - this from Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights
I smelt the rich scent of the heating spices," Mrs. Dean reports, "and admired the shining kitchen utensils, the polished clock, decked in holly, the silver mugs ranged on a tray ready to be filled with mule ale for supper; and, above all, the speckless purity of my particular care—the scoured and well-swept floor. I gave due inward applause to every object....
And this is the Joyce Carol Oates essay that reminded me of it.
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