this doesn't mean i'm coming back to blogging

though part of me thinks I rather ought. No, I've just been on a huge e.e.cummings binge lately - what is it about the lower case that makes everything feel rushed out and desperate and sincere? - which was the kind of thing I'd have talked about here if I hadn't gotten out of the habit. Summer's the exact right time to pick old hobbies up again, though, isn't it? too much free time.

ANYWAY, in the midst of my big cummings rediscovery (and while I'm meant be reading All The Evelyn Waugh Novels Ever, so way to get distracted, self), he got quoted on the current highlight of my televisual week, BBC2's 'The Hour', which is beautifully shot, full of lovely performances and seems to get better every week, after a slightly unconvincing opening episode. The three leads are all fantastic but Julian Rhind-Tutt is sort of stealing the show a bit by being a perfect creeper - and to think that he was one of the great, charming loves of my mid-teens! That's the magic of acting. Apparently I'm supposed to find all the characters very annoying but I somehow don't? It's odd, and terribly subjective, but I do occasionally have the HUGEST love of characters who are slightly pompous/pretentious/dickish/unloveable/whatever, and sometimes absolutely no patience with them at all. Perhaps it's just because I really do think Ben Whishaw is one of the best actors of his generation, but I find Freddie more endearing with each episode - it's the father relationship and the small house and the fact that he's just a snapping working-class terrier underneath all that seeming self-confidence, I don't know, I like that kind of thing. And yet, on the flipside, I have vague memories of being totally unable to finish Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty' because all the characters were SO unsympathetic and insufferable, so it's not like I just bloody love bastards.

As a side-note, I just had a massive brain short-out and forgot both the title and author of that book (I haven't been sleeping well lately, give me a break), but managed to successfully locate it by googling, "novel 80s thatcher booker gay". Which gives you both an insight into my brain - couldn't remember the title or author, but DID recall that it won the Booker, what - and a very condensed insight into the plot, if you haven't read it. Also might suggest that I'm just dreadfully unsympathetic to Fictional Tories, as opposed to Fictional Bastards more generally, but then who knows.

None of this is what I came here to say. Here's the e.e. cummings that got quoted on 'The Hour', because why not:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands