"It is this hour of a day in mid June"

It’s Bloomsday again and it’s raining and dreary, like most of the rest of June. It seems we are granted no summer this year and it will rain from January through December.

I’ve been paging through Ulysses to find some gobbet to put up here, and instead of finding a sparkling paragraph, I’ve taken a dip. It’s been two years since I read it, but I don’t seem to remember anything but flashes: Leopold Bloom reading on his toilet, one of them (is it Dedalus?) at the beach gazing at the beautiful girl with the ruined leg, and the last few pages, the ecstasy of Molly Bloom. It was all a big wash of words for me, and instead of slowing down, as you should do when your brain is tired, I sped up. I saw the book as this wall, this gauntlet – a challenge and a test of will-power (much like how I see Infinite Jest.) But this does the book an injustice as a work of art. It may be challenging, but it can’t be seen as a measure of capability. It is first and foremost an experience.

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My Mad Girl

[A Question I am Not the First to Ask: What is it about women and madness? Are they more susceptible to delusion than men are? The subject of many books and hypotheses, we wonder if madness dogs the steps of creative women (eg. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman…) Is it a biological coincidence or a recurring phenomenon? Is it socially reinforced? Do men fear the hysterical women? Is it the uterus (Greek “hysteria”) which turns the brain?] The reclusive writer, the late Janet Frame, winner of all of New Zealand’s literary prizes, spent much time in institutions and in therapy and, as far as I can tell, her novels commonly include themes of estrangement, mental health and madness. Frame considered her 1963 novel Towards Another Summer too personal be published in her lifetime. As she’d already written an autobiography ( Angel at My Table , made into a film by Jane Campion) and been this subject of several biographies, this is telling. Towards Another Su...

Before I go

I'm at the airport with too many bags. A last minute weigh in required me to pull all my books out of my bags and redistribute the weight, while the service representative had to call Iceland (where I pass through en route to London), and the fifty pairs of eyes behind me glared and grew glassy. Though this morning the weather was pure, clear and copper-sunned, the fog has descended so low that the tips of the trees are nearly obliterated. This is Seattle. This is the city I know. Here's something I wrote a month or so ago, an ode to this city, its literary scene, and its inhabitants. When I graduated from a small Midwestern liberal arts college with the music degree I knew I might never use, I felt lost looking for What To Do Next. Despite the pressure I felt alongside my friends – future accountants, teachers, and doctors - to map out a life just so, a much respected professor suggested that each step in one’s life seems microscopic, a darkened footpath occasionally lit by a...

A Shelf of One's Own

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