Of Elsewhere
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 […]
I started reading George MacDonald in high school, at C.S. Lewis’s recommendation. My first George MacDonald was, if I remember correctly, “The Golden Key,” a lovely story about a boy and girl who enter fairy land to go on a quest and find as they near the end that they have lived their entire lives […]
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 […]
Today I bring tidings of two minor projects I’m working on as a result of the Grad School Bug: reading Elizabeth Ammons’ Brave New Words, a call for optimistic, inclusive, and activist teaching in the humanities, and writing an essay exploring the concepts of truth Diana Wynne Jones develops in four pivotal poems in her […]
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 mentioned that I took a free, local poetry class last year, and one of the really excellent things about it was that the teacher asked lots of insightful and provocative questions, and I found myself thinking much more about my assumptions about what poetry does and how to read it than I do on […]
In the last post, I observed that in a Williams-ian afterlife I might well find myself with “some large messy mess of myself to get through.” Descent into Hell centers around love and reality’s conflict with self-infatuation and illusion. If Sodom is a city of disordered love for others, Williams calls “Gomorrah” as the city […]
Of Elsewhere 