Wuthering Expectations resolutions for the new year

Since, on my vacation, I seem to have forgotten how to do whatever it is I normally do here, I will have to resort to something else.  It’s a new year, yes?  Happy 2011!

My resolutions:

1.  “I vow not to write bad prose this year.”  Thus swears Prof. Mayhew at ¡Bemsha Swing!  No one expects resolutions to actually be kept, right?  So I, too, vow etc.

2.  I’ll read Middlemarch.  It tops my mental Should-Have-Read list.  Eliot and Les Misérables alone would be a perfectly satisfying pair, come the end of 2011, to check off the list.  The whole idea of the list is absurd.  The actual, secret, point of this resolution is to murder the impulse to write an entire dull post about my Humiliation checklist.  Who cares?  Impulse: strangled.

3.  Finish fewer books.  Dr. Johnson, who read more than anyone, was pressed about a new book.  Had he read it through?  “No, Sir, do YOU read books through?”*  Johnson was correct.  You are perhaps thinking of all of the marvelous books that it would be a crying shame not to enjoy from beginning to end and then back to the beginning.  Yes, yes.  But what about all of the other books?  I’m currently reading a book I won’t finish.  Or that I will finish, without having read it through.  A start.

4.  Write about music more.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the trip recorded in the Italian Notebooks, makes use of a standard guidebook (“Murray”) that is packed with Byron’s poetry.  Every line of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage describing actual locations in Italy or elsewhere is, in the guidebook, evaluated against the real thing.  Poor Hawthorne, perfectly aware of the idiocy of the exercise, cannot help but do the same, except that he is comparing the view before his eyes not just to Byron, but also to Murray and to Byron-in-Murray.

More or less simultaneously, I was discovering all sorts of curious traces of Byron in Emily Dickinson’s poems.  All of this somehow led me to repeated spins of Hector Berlioz’s Harold in Italy (1834), and a projected post or posts about all of the fascinating connections between the music and the various texts.  I would love to read those posts, but I guess I did not want, or know how, to write them.

One three year old post about Robert Schumann; that’s Wuthering Expectations and music.  I suspect this is less a resolution to write more than a reverie about a road not traveled.  But who knows.  Maybe I’ll think of something.

5.  Write shorter posts.  I seem to have found a comfort level in the vicinity of 600 to 750 words, which is too long for a blog post.  No, sorry, not your blog posts.  Those are perfect as they are.  Can’t wait for the next one.  Mine are too long.  Time to put ‘em in the vise, give ‘em a good squeeze.  Time to end this one.

*  James Boswell, Life of Johnson, somewhere in April 1773.