Today is Baudelaire's Birthday.
For a little trivia and whatnot about him, you can glance at this "mini-profile" I compiled some years ago. (It had been part of my long-defunct Dead Authors' pages).
Saw what I thought was a great eponym in an article Doctor Who and the Fandom of Fear in Reason. The author refers to something as "a Phildickian tale."
I don't know whether this eponym is in common usage when referring to things reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's works or not. Could be. But it was the first time I'd ever seen it, and I just really liked it for some reason.
Any month that begins with April Fools' Day and ends with Walpurgisnacht is far more weird than cruel. Oh, and the fact that Tax Day is smack in the middle of it seems both weird and cruel.
April was pleasantly weird for me this year.
I spent a week and a half in mid-April in New Orleans. Visiting the co-editors -- Melusine and the Marquis.
Stayed with Melusine. She wrote a handful of entries in her LiveJournal mentioning what all we got up to, beginning with this entry.
Found out (by a quick googling) after I returned home a little more about that Spanish ship she mentions in her "Avast me hearties!" entry. Turns out it is the Spanish navy's training ship, so all those young sailors were apparently cadets. Google turned up this site that has photos of this magnificent ship, the Juan Sebastian de Elcano. There's a good photo of the beautiful carving on the bow.
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April being called the cruellest month, of course, comes from the opening of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
Eliot was originally going to title this poem He Do the Police in Different Voices.
But I guess since his opening line was about April's cruelty and not its weirdness, maybe "The Wasteland" sounded a bit more tough or something.
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire ....
The fragment "mixing memory with desire" has long been one of those lines that stays in my mind, cropping up at random moments. Apparently, that line does that to other people too. There's a certain episode of the Tick (I don't recall offhand exactly which one it was) where the Tick uses that very line in one of his rambling pontifications: "So once again, we find that evil of the past seeps into the present like salad dressing through cheap wax paper, mixing memory and desire."
So now I say -- once again April Fools' Day segues into Walpurgisnacht. With salad days and a salad dressing of memory & desire in an easy-to-squeeze bottle.
Yup. April is the weirdest month.
