Skip to main content

Before Bed

I find that the best, most luxurious time of the day to read is just before I go to sleep. The house is quiet, the dishwasher might be running, the candles are lit, and everything is solemn and flickering and drowsy. There's a brown chair that is tucked into the corner between my mammoth desk and my bed, and when you sit down there's no getting up. A pillow for your back, a blanket for the legs you can prop up on the foot of the bed.

Some nights I read Rebecca Fraser's Story of Britain, a chronological history. (So far I've just passed the Battle of Hastings, which I've always enjoyed because of the family legend that we're descended on my mother's side from a Norman knight, St. Clair, who came over with William in 1066, and from a Viking. I have a few more opinions about Vikings, those destroyers of architecture, churches, monasteries, schools, villages, literacy, farms, crops, flocks, herds, and households - but that can wait.)

And other nights I read from Lydia Davis, recently hailed as "master of the American short story". Some stories so short they are only a paragraph, or a sentence. Ms. Davis is coming to the Seattle Arts & Lectures this Wednesday night and I am hoping to see her - but we'll see...because I may have chicken pox.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tracing my steps

Has it really been eight years since I last wrote here? It was picking up Murdoch’s The Book and the Brotherhood that reminded me. My reading diary said I read the novel in 2011, but I don’t believe it. I have no memory of it. (And you would.) I came back to this blog to cross-reference. Yes, I can see I bought it in December 2010 – for a steal – but wrote nothing on it.  An old blog, like an old diary, is a shed skin, preserved by sentimentality, laziness, and neglect. For a while I was appalled at how openly I exposed my ignorance! I thought it was charming. (An Americanism?) Also for trying to speak in a register I couldn’t consistently command. But now that blogging is a dead art, that the energy that once lived there has been translated into Tiktok, or Youtube, or Substack, the blog becomes practically private. I can come back and paw over this old, shed skin.  When you come across old writing, there’s an inevitable measuring up between the self you were then and the sel...
Post a Comment
Read more

Natural Love

We sadly miss the beauty and silliness of medieval cosmology: “The sun, moon, and stars go still round…for love of perfection. This love is manifest, I say, in inanimate creatures. How comes a loadstone to drawn iron to it? jet chaff? The ground to covet showers, but for love? No creature, St. Hierome concludes, is to be found…[that does not love something], no stock, no stone, that hath not some feeling of love. ‘Tis more eminent in plants, herbs, and is especially observed in vegetals…the olive and the myrtle embrace each other in roots and branches if they grow near…” Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy .
6 comments
Read more

The School of Hard Knocks

It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...
8 comments
Read more