Of Elsewhere
Apologies for the delay in posting this–again, I’ve been sick, and then on vacation, and the discipline of writing weekly is proving to be at least as difficult in the longer term as I imagined it would be. Still, I want to keep making the good effort, and I thank you for your patience with […]
Literary quality is a concept I’m conflicted about. When I played the oboe in high school, I struggled to manipulate tempo, dynamics, and vibrato in a way that was expressive but convincing. I came to the conclusion that there were an infinity of right ways to play a phrase but a much larger infinity of wrong […]
As you may know, Brandon Sanderson (author of the Mistborn series, among other great work)writes about hard magic, the kind with rules, and soft magic, the kind that’s unpredictable and mysterious. He prefers to write the former and argues that problems should only be solved by magic when the magic makes sense, so that the author […]
When I first applied for a job at the bookstore where I work, I wrote on the section of my application that asks for reading preferences that I like fantasy and poetry. This was not terribly descriptive–at least, I didn’t get the job until submitting my next application, on which I listed many specific authors–but […]
I really like Nietzsche, and this essay–rich, dense, exciting, and considered seminal by major postmodern critics–is one of the reasons for that. I suspect I am butchering it, and I know I’m not addressing it in its totality. BUT. I chose to write about it because it articulates the aspect of the theory called postmodern […]
I have a bachelor’s in English literature, and I believe that I managed to acquire it without ever figuring out how to write a paper–mostly because I didn’t put in the time, but partly because I didn’t have even a basic grasp on what, in a broader sense, a critic was trying to do. When […]
I had a world-class college professor who gave up on her ambitions to write poetry because she didn’t think it was worth producing inferior material. She is so brilliant that I have no doubt her poetry was brilliant as well, and I also don’t think she’s Keats or Wallace Stevens. If she were she would know. […]
Of Elsewhere 