between the rock and the cold, cold sea

Your humble correspondant has received preliminary confirmation that in the coming academic year she will be in receipt of a SCHOLARSHIP from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, said scholarship alleged to be valued at ENOUGH MONEY TO LIVE ON.

Until receipt of final confirmation, yr. correspondant takes leave to continue to FRET and WORRIT, although to a degree much reduced by this most welcome notice of relief.

That was a good birthday. Much better than it looked this morning.

Open mike poetry night was interesting, in ways both good and bad. The bad: the guy with the poem about cutting women, and the old bloke with This is a poem I wrote twenty years ago. The good: a couple of excellent poets, and some friends I see far too seldom.

And then there was the conversation about the work of Susan Cooper - her The Dark is Rising sequence - and landscape, liminality and myth. Which is the kind of conversation I stumble into all too seldom. And feels like the most unexpected-yet-welcome gift.

I love smart enthusiastic people. They make the world so much more interesting.

I haven't re-read TDIR sequence since I was ten. But I remember those books, and the immediacy of landscape, and the vital, almost brutal quality of the Greenwitch, the essential cliffness, forestness and hillness that stuck with me, that still sticks with me. In The Grey King and The Dark Is Rising, especially, the landscape that Will moves through is an incredible presence, and the myth that exists in that landscape, also.

They were books that took me from being a sometime reader of the fantastic to someone who actively sought it in books. And maybe I'll reread them, when I come back from Crete, and see if they hold up to the passage of time.

I've been afraid to, you see, because they were such incredible books when I was ten that I didn't want to spoil the memory.

So yeah, all around a good evening. Even if I did get C.S. Lewis and Lewis Carroll mixed up.

Thanks.