So are the days of our lives

The disassembling is in early stages of earnestness now. My walls are bare - I thought that white walls would prompt my subconscious to disengage - and the battle-axe desk is gone. All its contents have been disgorged and are in piles on the floor: pens, papers, plastic folders, piles of sheet music to be put in boxes, photographs, electric cords. All my sins heaped on a pile in the middle of the floor - things I've held onto for necessity or want or laziness or for lack of a better place to put it.

And then the bookshelves are moving out next Wednesday so I must get rid of those dear friends in droves. It's hopeless. Just as I start to wean myself from the herd, I look down and pick up a book and think But I never READ this one. The fact is that once they're out of the house it'll be better. I look forward to this paring down of possessions as a simplification of the spirit.

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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...

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 .

I’ve a short story in the latest edition of The Stinging Fly , which is a brilliant Irish literary journal. If you’d like a copy (or if you like Claire-Louise Bennett or Kevin Barry or Danielle McLaughlin or Colin Barrett, who’ve all been published by SF ) you can get it here Or, you know, go to Dublin.

A Shelf of One's Own

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