entre chien et loup

Kirk has instructed me to update, so here I am. And! New town, new year (almost), new look, new name.

When I started this thing, "Elegant Disarray" was one of two titles I was considering. It comes from an old unfinished lyric of mine that went:

And she said, "O go away, leave me alone",
Her voice the sound of cracking bone.
Then through my eyes the new sun shone,
In the room where the books are thrown
Upon the floor in elegant disarray.
Still it rang through my head: "O go away".

Not my best, which is one reason I never finished the song, but I've always been rather pleased with the phrase "elegant disarray", and the phrasing of it in the song was cool too. Unfortunately, when I Googled it recently I saw that at least half a dozen others had turned the same phrase, and that's just since the advent of the internets. Ah, well. It's been at least a couple of millennia since the author of Ecclesiastes wrote that there was no new thing under the sun, and if it was true then it's certainly true now.

"Entre chien et loup", as I originally titled this blog, literally translates as "between dog and wolf", but figuratively it refers to dusk or twilight, which is my favorite time of day. The first post that I wrote, which I never published, began as a meditation on John William Waterhouse's painting of The Lady of Shalott, with its dusky mood, and moved into a discussion of why I love that hallowed interval between day and night. Maybe I'll try to recreate it sometime. Anyway, entre chien et loup remains my favorite French idiom (it's also the favorite of a French translator by the name of Céline Graciet--and can I just say how much it pleases me that, thanks to Richard Linklater, when I hear the name Céline I think not of a skeletal Québecoise chanteuse but of the ethereally lovely Julie Delpy, "the thinking man's femme fatale", as one writer described her, to which I must add, "and woman's" --and you can read her post about it here), but I think "Elegant Disarray" better sums up what goes on here.

Merry Christmas, everyone, and peace and happiness in the new year.