Of Elsewhere
Of the three books I mentioned last week I was thinking of reading next (C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Greer Gilman’s Moonwise and Cloud and Ashes, and Stephanie Burt’s The Poem Is You), I’ve selected English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and I’m more than a third of the way through (I think I’ll try to be done by next week, […]
I am proud and delighted to report that I just finished reading the Oxford Book of English Verse cover to cover. I have discovered or been reminded of a number of poets I want to learn and read more of (Edward Taylor, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Edward Thomas, none of whom I’d known before this, for […]
As I mentioned last week, this is my current goal: to read the Oxford Book of English Verse from beginning to end in a month. To this I add that I want to blog moderately intelligently about it on Sundays. I am now 284 pages in. I have traversed Chaucer, achieved Shakespeare, gotten lost by […]
I kind of, deep down inside, want a lit PhD. I mostly don’t, and, as a result, I don’t, you know, have one. But the undead body of a desire for a lit PhD keeps clawing itself out of its grave, and this time my main reason for wanting one is: I want to write […]
I enjoyed the class on allegory (traditionally defined as extended metaphor) I took in college, and I’ve thought about allegory directly and indirectly for awhile (I also want to write an allegory–not just as in “a book that has definite themes that form a sustained second layer of meaning” but as in “a book in […]
During high school, I loved to talk with my mother about whether C.S. Lewis had successfully proven that morality is valid the way axioms of mathematics are. I think we both thought not (as I recall, we were looking primarily at Mere Christianity and possibly The Abolition of Man) I was open to the possibility and strongly wanted […]
A young girl with a four-letter L name is whisked off to a land of perpetual winter because she climbed into a wardrobe, all through the agency of a dominating male character whose name begins with the letters As. She must help defeat a deceptively charming, poisonously evil woman who kidnaps a boy the protagonist […]
So, one of the supposed Rules of Writing is that one should use “active” verbs instead of “passive” verbs, and usually this boils down to avoiding forms of the verb to be. In an effort to drill this into our tender high school brains, a teacher gave us a handout with the following sentence: It is the act […]
My mom was a volunteer docent at a contemporary art museum when I was growing up, which meant I was exposed early and often to a lot of interesting art, including at least one exhibit of outsider art that really, really grabbed me. Since then, I’ve been strongly attracted to outsider art, both the strange, […]
I enjoy reading the odd book about creativity, art, and writing—the more inspirational and romantic (as opposed to inclined to reduce everything to craft) the better. I’ve been curious about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for a long time, so I checked it out from a local library, and I’ve now read all but the appendix. […]
Of Elsewhere 