Pronounced "Ah'-Sha"

I'm reminded more than once lately of one of Nietzsche's more catchy aphorisms. "It takes more courage to make an end than a beginning. All poets know that." I'm probably quoting him badly since the last time I read Zarathustra was when I was 18 and that's, well, many years ago now. Anyway, I've been, indeed, in the wells and caverns of the revisionist blues. Granted, I've been pretty lucky so far. I can only hope that my next four (gasp) chapters go over so well. I'm currently in the process of finishing up revisions of my second chapter. The first is already heavily revised and currently circulating with my committee. The quote above is applicable because I'm discovering that writing conclusions to chapters is a bigger bitch than I ever realized. I think I'm really bad at conclusions to begin with, and usually I end up doing some sort of verbal equivalent of the spastic jumps that really annoying man-child does on MAD TV. I hope to christ one of you gets that reference. ("Look what I can do!") I'm currently trying to tack on an at best subjunctive and at worst half-assed conclusion that gestures toward the argument I'll make in the next chapter, which I haven't written yet. I had a feeling that you all would be really riveted by this account of my revision process, but it's mah blog, so whatevah.

When I'm not slogging through my own prose, the summer is lovely. I've been getting work done, spending 30-40 hours a week smiling at strangers at my other job, working out at the gym (13 miles today! AND it felt great), and watching Dark Angel. There is still much work to be done, as there always is, but I always appreciate the winning combination of warm weather and no teaching! I'm also, perhaps as a way of distracting myself from the more difficult library books patiently awaiting my attention and which are much more pertinent to my next chapter, reading a bit more into the oeuvre of the deeply problematic and endlessly fascinating H. Rider Haggard. My dearest niece doesn't know if yet, but she's definitely getting She and Ayesha: The Return of She for her birthday this year. What a fun writer he is! I'm currently reading Allan Quartermain and it's cracking me up. Haggard is deeply obsessed with imaginatively penetrating (pun intended) the wilds of various non-European spaces. He's mostly into Africa, though the second She book mostly takes place in Central Asia. His rugged, manly, great white hunter protagonists go on the most brutal, exhausting, and excruciating quests before discovering--as they must--white people lording power over non-white people and white women threatening to destroy civilization as we know it. Herein are contained the great remaining mysteries of the world. Like I said, he's a great story-teller, and he completely cracks me up.

As a reward for bearing with this perhaps tedious exposition, here's some artist's rendering of the endlessly fascinating Ayesha.

Here, I'm pretty sure she's bathing in the eternal flame that gives her her immortal youth, beauty, and mysterious ability to rule superstitious minds (read natives) through terror. Make no mistake about it, her love kills mere mortals. In the world of Haggard, many mountains contain such a flame. The novels are finally unclear, though, about whether Ayesha power comes from Isis, to whom she was a priestess in her regular lifetime, or Set--the Egyptian version of the Devil.

Oh, Manichean Delirium! Angel? or Angelheart?