By Morgan O’Neill

It has been almost a year since I first referred to a Robert Herrick poem in this blog.  It was just after seeing a beautiful Jane Woolrich baby doll design that swept me away.  Now, it seems I am drawn back to Herrick, one, because he is so easy to read, but, two, because the sudden wet, icy cold of a Northeast winter has me hunkered down continually searching for a glimmer of warmth wherever it can be found, real or imagined.

The real is an ugly thing to see.  We could skype but no video is permitted.  Ensconced in my office over my garage with no insulation underneath my body is wrapped for burial starting with my feet, mummy-like.  Heavy socks, a seemingly trite holiday gift once again prove their worth. Blue sweats, another gift adorn my shapeless form.  A woolen skullcap, blue as well, caps my hairless dome. Beneath the outerwear, my innerwear consists of aging long underwear somewhat stretched out from overuse and looks as if I am shedding snakelike.  They are blue too, matching my lips.  So there, I have finally coordinated my look, a blue lipped, blue dressed shapeless gnome inside and out.  The gray New England sky reflects unevenly the winter blues within.  This explains my need for Herrick.

Farewell Frost; Or,
Welcome the Spring

Fled are the frosts, and now the fields appear
Reclothed in fresh and verdant diaper.
Thawed are the snows, and now the lusty spring
Gives to each mead a neat enameling.
The palms put forth their gems, and every tree
Now swaggers in her leafy gallantry.
The while the Daulian minstrel sweetly sings,
With warbling notes, her Terean sufferings.
What gentle winds perspire, as if here
Never have been the northern plunderer
To strip the tree and fields, to their distress,
Leaving them to pitied nakedness,
And look how, when a frantic storm doth tear
A stubborn oak or holm (long growing there),
But lulled to calmness, then succeeds a breeze
That scarcely stirs the nodding leaves of trees:
So, when this war (which, tempest-like, doth spoil
Our salt, our corn, our honey, wine and oil)
Falls to a temper, and doth mildly cast
His inconsiderable frenzy off at last,
The gentle dove may, when these turmoils cease,
Bring in her bill once more the branch of peace.

Now, don’t you feel better, warmer, more positive, uplifted.  I do.  Sure, this poem from Herrick’s Hesperides published in 1648 evokes the spring, the coming rebirth of the land.  It has nothing to do with lingerie. But, who cares?  It makes me feel warm inside just like lingerie.

By Morgan O’Neill

So Ellen, Lingerie Briefs executive editor, has been on my case because I haven’t published much lately.  I have many great excuses I am prepared to defend myself with, notwithstanding the key one being my utter inability to intelligently connect what I am reading or reading about to lingerie.  Essentially, that is the theme behind the blog.   So, without that connectivity I remain speechless.  Or, blogless as it may be. That combined with the ever-present end-of-year array of things both important and trivial that must be attended to, writing has taken a back seat.  How is that for a rationalization?

Don’t get me wrong.  I am still reading though in a less conventional way.  I am listening to audiobooks!   And I must say that I have fallen in love with the genre. Yes, they have been around for decades.  Clumsy cassette players. Tapes (some unlabeled), batteries, dead and alive, evoke memories.  But today, with easy downloads, headphones and mobility and a vast library of choices, audiobooks have come of age.

Remember the hissing background of a dirty cassette player.  Or the narration slightly out of sync because a tape was too loose or too tight or worse, bent in some way.  Audiobooks (there weren’t even books) were tapes, not books; an interesting idea but in a nascent stage.  But today with the enhanced production values and stellar talent narrating the stories, audiobooks are a great way to pass time, particularly if you need both hands free.

When you are driving.  When you are doing the yard.  When you are housecleaning.  When you are cooking or feeding the dogs or grocery shopping or doing any one of the daily chores that take up your time, audiobooks are a terrific diversion from the menial, but necessary chores of the day.  I listened to Steig Larsson’s trilogy about Lisbeth Salander beginning with The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo and never stopped.  It is the perfect material for the trek by car through the Adirondack State Park in the dead of winter especially when cell service is suspect.  I have also become a serial character addict.  I never knew who Mitch Rapp was before I picked up a Vince Flynn spy story.  Now I have listened to all of his stories. I feel like I could easily be deluded into the righteous but apparently necessary covert operations of the CIA.   I never knew that I would like spy stories or detective stories.  Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallender character is frumpish and certainly more dour than most, but he fascinates me and I don’t know why.  I have now read all of the stories.  So I am a fan.

Now that I have written this excuse for not writing, it is odd how it makes me think about lingerie.  Lingerie styles that have been around forever just like the audiobook. They have been updated and improved many times over especially as technologies advance.  When I think of the evolution of the girdle and corset it is remarkable to see the changes and the innovations today that make what could have been a painful experience before a pleasure today.  Just look at Rago shapewear, then and now.  When I think about the weaving technology and the diversity of choices manufacturers have today versus years ago I know that wool can feel comfortable against the skin just like silk always has.  I know that some of the components of today’s well fitted bra just didn’t exist not too long ago. Check out the Flashback / Flashforward blogs by Layla L’Obatti and see just how beautifully lingerie has evolved.

Listening to a description of lingerie in an audiobook will never surpass looking at a beautiful women adorned in something enticing, but when there is no opportunity to look I can let my imagination go and listen instead.

By Morgan O’Neill

The thought just occurred to me that two things you cannot or should not do outdoors in a hurricane is one; try to read a book and two, wear lingerie.  You might argue that the incongruity of this argument is ridiculous.  Who would wear lingerie outdoors in a hurricane?  Who would try to read a book outdoors in a hurricane?  And, really, what does this have to do with literature?  Well, if a penguin can wear a tuxedo in an arctic storm, why not?  And if a female Weather Channel reporter standing outdoors in Battery Park can take the time to tell me what she is wearing underneath, then anything is possible.

The Perfect Storm chronicles the confluence of two weather systems … Read more

By Morgan O’Neill

As a fledgling schoolchild, one of the first things you learn is how to read for information.  It is an important part of how new readers enter the world of literature and a practical necessity for making it to high school graduation.  It’s a mandatory survival techique

First Grade: you head to your classroom to meet your gray haired, ancient schoolmarm, when the bell rings, and she says “Welcome students.  I am Mrs. Donotpissmeoff.  Ahem, you, the buck toothed kid in the back of the room, wipe that smirk off your face.  I know what you’re thinking… all of the time.  Now students, where was I.  Ah, yes, please read the information on the yellow paper on your desk about the supplies … Read more

By Morgan O’Neill

When I was young and highly impressionable I was seduced by the idea of heroism.  I fell in love with the notion of being a hero, with saving the day. Like every other child of the fifties I was there when Superman came to comic book life to save Metropolis and Lois Lane from evil doers. Yet, in spite of Superman’s heroic deeds, there was always something inaccessible about him.  Maybe he was just too perfect, too good to be true.  I could never be like him.   In the sixties, the flawed hero entered my comic book world dressed like a spider with the forewarning that with “great power comes great responsibility.” Even more beguiling was the idea that this flawed hero, … Read more

By Morgan O’Neill

Geoffrey Chaucer is widely considered the father of English literature and to the scholarly minded he is considered the greatest poet of the Middle Ages.  No, I do not mean that his poetry appeals to people ages 40 to 60, sort of like people aging out of the rock and roll era at about 30, to soft rock at 40 and elevator music just before they cart you away to the old age home.  I mean that period of time between the fifth and fifteenth centuries.  Chaucer, born in the mid-fourteenth century, lived near the tail end of this period. It was a time when language conventions were largely non-existent and words were spelled umpteen different ways.  The National Spelling Bee would … Read more

By Morgan O.Neill

Lately, I have had writers block.  It has been hard.  The words just have not flowed.  Not that they ever flowed with a fluency that made much sense to those who take time to read them, but at least I could get something reasonably coherent out.  But not right now.  I feel somewhat out-of-sorts.  And I wonder why sometimes it seems easy and sometimes it requires umpteen drafts and sometimes it is just impossible to begin at all.

 I have heard all sorts of stories about writing disciplines.  They run the gamut from no discipline at all to writing every day.   Write a thousand words no matter what, even if you are lying in bed with influenza. Take a break, put the … Read more