Of Elsewhere
So, I’ve already broken my promise a little—but perhaps only a little. I don’t have deep close reading in this entry. What I’m offering instead is some observations on my responses to Night the First of The Four Zoas (outlined in more detail here). Those who read my last blog posts on Blake will notice Blake’s […]
TL;DR A being who is part of William Blake and all people, Tharmas, takes in the wives/significant others and creations of other self-components. Tharmas’s own wife/SO Enion becomes jealous and kills them (at least, so we’re told later). Tharmas disintegrates and Enion tried to weave a covering for her sins, but a part of Tharmas […]
This is the first blog post in my poetry series. Here is how (in theory) I imagine this series working: each entry will deal with a longer work (chapbook or long poem) by a single poet. In it, I will engage in both general description of everything I’ve read and close reading of some part […]
I mentioned once that I found Northrop Frye more comprehensible than Angus Fletcher, the author of Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, a bizarre and much-lauded book that drove me up the wall. This was true for Frye’s books The Anatomy of Criticism and Fearful Symmetry. I am not sure it is true for The Double […]
Today I have been trying (and mostly but not entirely failing) to rewrite a bit of Evernost. I know the problem (my main character bores me and so does the storyline) and I think I know the solution (write it anyway, trying to make it as smart as I can, because neither is inherently boring […]
Last things first: I am revising Evernost-the-novel (as opposed to Evernost-the-compilation-of-poetry-and-pictures, which will take much longer to mature). This is very exciting and somewhat exhausting. Sometimes to encourage myself along the way writing I’ll pick up a random or near-random book on writing. Today’s was John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist. I read his The Art of […]
I finished George MacDonald’s The Wise Woman and Other Stories, in which I read only the Other Stories, because I already know The Wise Woman well and don’t have the bug to reread it right now. I found “Little Daylight” rather lovely and expressive but also a bit slight for my taste. “Cross Purposes” was fun but pretty silly […]
I’ve been too distracted by other projects to want to blog lately. Evernost continues to evolve, with excitement and sometimes drama. For a long time I’ve vaguely wanted to write myself into it as a lying narrator and alter-ego of a major character or two. So I’m trying to write a coherent or semi-coherent account […]
This past two weeks I’ve reread Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer—I read it the first time in a public library, I think in high school—and finished C.S. Lewis’s narrative poems (I’d read Dymer and the Launcelot before but stalled out before The Nameless Isle and The Queen of Drum). A few notes from Letters […]
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 […]
Of Elsewhere 