"'Tis only a duplicate, / A thing of no value! Take it, I supplicate!"

Robert Browning, "A Likeness" (1864)

Deserves more attention than I'm able to give it at this very moment, but resonates with "Youth and Art" at least to the extent that it expresses a similar situation of investing objects, images, people, with a significance or other meaning that they can't possibly have. Expressing also something the weirdness of a culture where images are commodified, where you could buy a portrait of a complete stranger and hang it on your wall, as in the first stanza:

Some people hang portraits up
In a room where they dine or sup:
And the wife clinks tea-things under,
And her cousin, he stirs his cup,
Asks, 'Who was the lady, I wonder?'
' 'Tis a daub John bought at a sale,'
Quoth the wife, -- looks black as thunder:
'What a shade beneath her nose!
Snuff-taking, I suppose, --'
Adds the cousin, while John's corns ail.

This would be a fun poem for thing theorists, since it contains one of those eminently Victorian lists of objects that make up a bachelor's home...and there's a certain sadness that surrounds the scene. I wonder if this is a sadness somehow particularly linked to the awareness of referential instability--even the poem's title has that built in.

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I'm having mouse drama in my apartment again. Basically, the odor that I thought was coming from the stinky cheese I'd saved from Christmas Eve lingered long after the cheese had been disposed of, and around 3:00 yesterday afternoon I had the sudden horrible thought of the glue trap in the kitchen. Fortunately, the building's handyman was coming up to look at something else, so I asked him to check that, too. Apparently, there were like four dead mice on the thing. Ew. Nevertheless, my apartment began to smell better immediately.

The drama didn't end, though. As I was relating the story on the phone to my father later, I saw--from the other end of my apartment--yet another mouse out for a stroll on my kitchen floor. This displeases me, and mice are one of the few things that I remain incredibly squeamish about--in any form.

Fortunately, the handyman should be coming back today to repair the hole in my shower and patch the one under my sink where I think the mice are coming in. And hopefully that will defer the drama a bit longer. At least I'm coping better this time than I did in May.

I'm also really going to try to do some actual work today. I probably didn't need to watch Private School on Hulu last night, did I?