I didn't know it was Monday, I swear

I’ve been rereading Prospero’s Children by Jan Siegel. It’s a book I’ve always had a fondness for. I haven’t read it in a long time, maybe a decade, despite recommending it to several people. I was looking for something to read the other day and noticed it on my shelf wearing one of the most cunning covers I’ve ever seen. I probably bought it because of that cover. I have no regrets on that count. The dust jacket has a picture with a door in it, a door opening onto the actual cover which is an elegant scene of an underwater city. So you flip off the dust jacket and you can see the entire scene. But when the dust jacket is on, it's this mysterious doorway going underwater.

Like I said, cunning. And beautiful.

Anyway, the prose felt a little clunky at first. But as I settled in and got used to the author’s style, I remembered what an absolute genius Siegel is. Some people do not care for it and I understand why. She loves similes and rambling descriptions. That kind of writing can be exhausting if you want something snappy. Jan Siegel is closer to Victor Hugo than Ernest Hemingway on the Descriptive Prose Spectrum.

Personally, I love to crack open a book and read about the moon for a page or two. Sometimes I want to ramble down country roads, knowing we’ll get to the plot eventually but in the meantime, just look at that scenery…

Oddly enough, the author Siegel reminds me of is H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is getting a lot of attention right now because of the Cthulhu Mythos. But what originally drew me to Lovecraft (hipster moment: before everyone else liked him!) was not his Mythos stories but the stunning beauty of his prose. I can read Lovecraft’s fantasy stories just for the prose and ignore the plots entirely. Look at this:

"When tales fly thick in the grottoes of titans, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery. "

[H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange High House in the Mist]

I get goose-bumps every time. That man was a poet. We’ve never had much use for poetry in America, though, so I suspect many of our country’s poets turn to fiction.

I have a metaphor to illustrate my obsession with prose. The plot of a story is the skeleton. Characters are the heart. But the prose is its flesh and blood.

Prose is very much on my mind because of my current project. I recently unearthed an MS I wrote after I returned from Hawai’i. Needless to say, it’s a joyful rambler. What else could I write after two years in paradise?

Hopefully, I can turn it into a published joyful rambler. But we’ll see.

We’ll see.

PS: Happy Veteran's Day. I'd love to say I posted this late because of that but I didn't. I won't say what did make me post late because that would be embarrassing. It's purely coincidence that there's a new show with Sarah Michelle Geller on Netflix...

PPS: Yeah, I still hate the word 'hipster,' even though I used it.