Focus On Fracking -- Later This Evening -- August 29, 2021

Reminder (because no one else will remind you, LOL): the weekly edition of "Focus On Fracking" will be released later this evening. 

*******************************
Sophia and Cousin Caleb
Flathead Lake, Montana

Late July, 2021, Corky had to stay home. She doesn't do well in the water:

*************************
The Literature Page

Wow, wow, wow, this is really interesting.

I've been calling 2020, "the plague year." 

Others are calling it "The Great Pause."

Look at this, posted on March 23, 2020. I don't know anything about John Scalzi but talk about prescient. Back in March, 2020, we had barely entered the year of the plague, the lock down had just begun, but John Scalzi was not only writing about it, but he was calling it "The Great Pause."

That reminded me of a book I started reading a year ago or so, but quit for some reason, but recently started reading it again. It concerns a poet-author Letitia Elizabeth Landon who went by her initials, L.E.L.

From L.E.L: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated "Female Byron, Lucasta Miller, c. 2019, page four:

L.E.L. was, however, the voice of a lost literary generation. 

Her career which spanned the 1820s and 1830s, coincided exactly with the "strange pause," as the historian G. M. Young called it, between the Romantics and the Victorians. 

Modern scholars are stil unsure exactly what happened during this troublesome transition phase between the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Bryon (or as I refer to them, "keatsshellyandbryon") and the rise of Dickens. 

Referred to as "an embarrassment to the historian of English literature" and an "indeterminate borderland," it resists periodization, and has never been dignified with a name, However, it should probably be called the "post-Byronic" era, since the fallout from Byron's celebrity cult had such a profound impact on the writing of the day. Following his death in 1824, every hack wanted his -- or her -- own cult of personality. Yet the labile, often ironized voices writers created in response remain hard to interpret, their tone difficult for the modern reader to pin down. 

None is harder to read than that of the inscrutable L. E. L.

Literary eras:

• Regency era:  generally, 1811 - 1820 (the formal Regency decade); others, 1795 - 1837, which would include the Romanticism Period.
  

• Romanticism: 1749 - 1832, pretty much universally agreed, although "entire
  Romanticism period could be considered 1800 to 1850 (wiki).
• Rosseau's essay: 1749
• death of Goethe: 1832

• Victorian era: 1830 - 1901, as defined by The Norton Anthology, English Literature 
• Queen Victoria's reign: 1819 - 1901

Interestingly, there are those who feel there was a "literary gap" between the end of Romanticism and the beginning of the Victorian era, somewhere during the 1820s and 1830s.

The "strange pause" and L.E.L.