Of Elsewhere
My latest attempt to reassess priorities has led me to commit to sticking to two projects for the next month or so: create a pictures-only chapbook/zine (I’ve realized they’re short enough that I should call them zines) associated with the month of June in my Evernostian year and get through CS50x, Harvard’s free online introduction […]
So: I loved Inside Out, the Disney-Pixar film in which the five basic emotions have to help their person, a girl named Riley, navigate a move to a new city. It was great, but I confess I loved it especially because I wanted passionately to imitate it. I was a bit annoyed it had beaten […]
I have a lot of balls in the air right now. Grad School Bug is almost but not quite dead, but I’ve written this 20-some page paper on Diana Wynne Jones that I want to try to edit and publish. Unfortunately, I can’t motivate myself to work on it anymore now that it’s preliminarily done. […]
A bit of research on haiku reveals that the strict 5-7-5 syllable pattern we learn in school is frowned upon, or, at the very least, unnecessary, in English (apparently, 5-7-5 sounds too long and wordy in English because Japanese syllables sound shorter than English syllables). In addition, I gather that haiku are supposed avoid figurative […]
The grad school bug is waning. This because I remembered viscerally rather than intellectually that Evernost needs all the time I can give it and then some (it is a long, potentially extremely long, poem with bits of prose that are almost prose poetry, and I want to illustrate it copiously, so….), and I want […]
Today was a good day—beloved visitor in town, goal accomplished, meeting with friends in ten minutes—but I didn’t get a chance to write much of a blog post, so this will have to do. The accomplishment is the relevant part of all this: I finished my (theoretically eventually) publishable Diana Wynne Jones essay, minus some […]
Today I bring tidings of two minor projects I’m working on as a result of the Grad School Bug: reading Elizabeth Ammons’ Brave New Words, a call for optimistic, inclusive, and activist teaching in the humanities, and writing an essay exploring the concepts of truth Diana Wynne Jones develops in four pivotal poems in her […]
I seem to change my mind often about my reading plans. On Tuesday, after finishing Wordsworth, I decided to read Reader-Response Criticism from Formalism to Post-Structuralism, on the theory that I could contextualize C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, perhaps in ways I could write about productively. I wasn’t able to finish the book today, as I’d hoped […]
I just read a $1 Dover Thrift Edition of some of Shelley’s poetry (a lot of good writing for not very much!) and concluded that sometimes I’m in the mood for Shelley and sometimes I’m not. His language often, not always, feels diffuse by today’s standards—more redundancy or empty or lazy words like “sweet.” I […]
I just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. I’m exhausted, and not (overall) excited. This is not Lewis’s fault. He has to cover so much material, so much of which bores and annoys him, that—even though he expresses his boredom and annoyance with a great deal of wit—I too […]
Of Elsewhere 