East Coker T.S. Eliot   V So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years — Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres — Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined…

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be John Keats When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, That I shall never look upon thee more, Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love — then on the shore Of the wide…

In the Drawing Room How they’re all around us, these gentlemen in chamberlain’s dress and jabots, like a night growing ever darker around its Order Star, implacably, and these ladies, slight and fragile, yet made large by their dresses, one hand in their laps, small, like a tiny dog with its collar: how they’re around us all: around the reader, around the peruser of these bibelots, of which several remain their property. Tactful, they let us live life undisturbed as we conceive it and as they fail to understand it. They wanted to blossom, and blossoming is being beautiful. But we want to ripen, and this means being dark and…

Renamed. Reworked. Same basic premise as the “Required Readings” I was doing before. I recently wrote a review of Sue Sinclair’s Heaven’s Thieves, and I still find myself thinking about it almost daily. Vacation The shoddy balconies, sliding glass panels, reflected swirl of leaves.   Why does everything that appears in glass look like a face?   The mirror-trees stand half in this world and half somewhere else, a place not necessarily better than this one   but faraway and therefore enviable.   — from Heaven’s Thieves (Brick Books, 2017)

Sometimes something bothers me but I can’t articulate exactly why. And then someone else comes along and articulates it for me and I want to give them the best high five that has ever happened (ignoring, for the moment, that I am truly terrible at high fives). This Man Repeller article was one of those times. All-female reboots bothered me for…some reason I couldn’t quite identify. I didn’t want to see Ghostbusters, despite everyone talking about it, partly because I didn’t watch it as a kid so I had no nostalgic connection to the story, but also partly because…something about the entire endeavour felt off to me. I just didn’t…

I’ve always found that I favour difficult female characters. Honestly, I kind of want to be a difficult female. So you can imagine how much of a “duh” moment it was when I read this BBC article on anti-heroines and realized “I love anti-heroines!” Anti-heroines are not a brand new concept, but they do seem to be popping up with increasing frequency. Carrie Bradshaw, Olivia Pope, Alicia Florrick, Gretchen Cutler, Julia George, Hayes Morrison…these are the kinds of women that fascinate me the most on TV. While this article is by no means exhausted, it does provide an interesting framework to consider them within. It also makes the academic part of…

It’s been a while since I posted one of these. Though I’m not sure all that many people are reading this blog anyway, so I figure if my screaming into the void is occasionally intermittent, it doesn’t really matter all that much. This essay by Curtis Sittenfeld is so very well-written. And it is about precisely the kind of friendship that I hold most dear. The kind of friendship that endures across distance. The kind of friendship that greets most things with humour but lapses into gravity when necessary. Take a moment and read “My Friend Sam“. As usual, the first part quoted here. Click the link to go to…

Required Reading. This is what it is like to be a woman in this world. And it makes me angry. It should make you angry too. Read it: Marry Karr’s “The Crotchgrabber“. I particularly appreciated these paragraphs, early in the essay: “In case you haven’t been on the receiving end of this sort of assault, you should know the primal physiological response it evokes—in this woman, anyway. The stomach drops, as if you’ve been shoved backward from a skyscraper and are flailing through space. Time dismantles. There are more frames per second, and people’s facial features become very specific. This guy had a squashed-down forehead, wide-set eyes, and heavy but…

I cannot begin to count the number of times someone has tried to sell me on meditation as a way to deal with anxiety. This concept is laughable to me. Like, I literally burst into laughter most times it is suggested to me. I know it works for many people. I know it is a practice, and therefore I might need to, you know, practice if I want it to be useful down the road. But, honestly, right now, at this point in my life, meditation does sort of the opposite of what it is supposed to. As I once told a dear friend, “Yes, because what I need is more time…

Required Reading. It is hot and life is hectic. Take thirty seconds to read this tiny poem by Sandi Pray, originally published in tinywords issue 16.1 in June, and breathe. I have a sister-friend for whom this is true. I have my own version of this. I think we all do. seed catalog the colours of a winter daydream