Of Elsewhere
Very late update: the Diana Wynne Jones essay I wanted to share is long and abstruse and editing it to be even plausibly a blog post got very frustrating. Instead, I will give you a tldr: In the first three poems, Jones charts out something like Western history’s ways of thinking about truth (absolutist & […]
Farah Mendlesohn writes playfully in Diana Wynne Jones: Children’s Literature and the Fantastic Tradition that “it is just possible that for Jones’s complexity to be appreciated, first she had to grow her critics.” In these posts, I’ll jump off from the chapter of this book devoted to “The True State of Affairs.” My approach to […]
I miss this blog. I have, as you have seen, found it hard to keep up my momentum, because I’m usually working on so many projects at once: ever-shifting pieces of writing and art, of course, and also a newcomer pursuit: coding. Yes, I’ve taught myself to program using mostly free resources and I am […]
…there are souls so infirm and so accustomed to busying themselves with outside affairs that nothing can be done for them, and it seems as though they are incapable of entering within themselves at all. Teresa of Ávila, Interior Castle, translated and edited by E. Allison Peers What do the following four reads — Allie […]
The last time I blogged about outsider art, author and blogger Maranda Russell introduced herself as an outsider artist. Since then, I’ve come to enjoy her WordPress and Instagram, where she posts visual art, poetry, and stories from her life. Since I just brought out my own book of poetry and self-taught visual art, I […]
Two more books down, though they’re something of a detour from my plan…. I reread Charles Williams’ Descent Into Hell, which I’ve written about here and here, but before that I read Sera Beak’s Red, Hot & Holy, which was a strange and strangely rewarding experience. I’ll write a bit here about the juxtaposition of […]
I haven’t read John Gardner’s fiction, though I have a copy of Grendel now (a ratty, cheap used copy from the bookstore where I work, with this sublimely horrible blurb: “…warm, friendly, compassionate….a kind of Medieval King Kong!”), but I really enjoy his writing advice. This book is no exception. I won’t be able to […]
This 1961 edition of a selection of Dickinson’s poetry was lovely — rewarding — and a lot: 321 pages of plot or argument draw a reader through, while 321 pages of poetry are probably meant to be sampled, not read cover-to-cover over a few weeks. I may have mentioned this before, but, if not, let […]
You may recall I wrote at some length about William Blake’s Four Zoas, so I’ll keep this fairly brief: I just read the whole shebang from start to finish in a few days! I find completing two books in a week, even if one (the Blake) is only 100 pages long, an auspicious beginning to […]
As my first book of the year, I read Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. I am very glad I read it and I liked it a lot — though, as Scarry says about beauty itself, I find it thought-provoking rather than (simply) true; and the beauty Scarry works to embody and describe is […]
Of Elsewhere 