'Twixt and 'Tween

Shop Window in Old Hong Kong

So far, no one has offered to buy me the M9. I am a little disappointed, but I'll wait. The holiday spirit may kick in yet.

Or will it? I wonder if there is so much of that as in years gone by. Things do change. It is not always maudlin nostalgia that makes us think so. Have students read "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" by Wallace Stevens and see if they get it. Nobody goes to bed at ten o'clock, they will tell you, except the old, so the poem makes very little sense to them. And e.e. cummings will baffle them, not because of the weirdness of his diction, but because of his adoration of whimsy and naturalness and his deprication of materialism. Their lives are already random. They are living 'twixt and 'tween. They want things.

I'm reading Pico Iyer's "The Global Soul." I'm thinking of becoming one, a citizen of the vast nowhere monocultural world without distinction. No time. No place. A value free space beyond ethics and aesthetics. A post-cultural heaven. You come, too.

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

BY WALLACE STEVENS

The houses are haunted

By white night-gowns.

None are green,

Or purple with green rings,

Or green with yellow rings,

Or yellow with blue rings.

None of them are strange,

With socks of lace

And beaded ceintures.

People are not going

To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

Only, here and there, an old sailor,

Drunk and asleep in his boots,

Catches tigers

In red weather.