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 […]
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 […]
I think — I am not sure, but I think — Wallace Stevens is one of my favorite poets, up there with Blake and Dickinson (a various lot!). Perhaps it is silly to have a favorite poet I can often understand only with help (when I get the help, though, it’s so exciting). And this […]
I’m back, ish. I fell behind on my reading and even further behind on my writing about it during quarantine (I got absorbed in fiction projects again). Still, I’ve read some good books, both virtuous and fun, and I hope to write a bit about what I’ve read as well as my projects. I left […]
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 […]
Hello! With all apologies for my continued absence (I’ve been hard at work on my projects….), I am back, I hope, for real, though promises are dangerous. First, a brief update: last year, after my poetry class, I undertook an ambitious summer plan that worked tolerably well, and finally worked a lot on Evernost, which […]
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 […]
Of Elsewhere 