I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter

The wind has been howling these three days. Anna said it reminds her of change. To me it seems like madness.

The play finished last night and it has been a spectacular run. We sold all but three tickets in the week and were supported by professors, lecturers, college members, friends, strangers. I think, astoundingly, we made a profit.

I’ve been reading T.S. Eliot and I’ve concluded that April is not the cruelest month, February is. Nothing can be more dead than it is now. Where are the roots that clutch/What branches grow/ Out of this stony rubbish?...

And my favorite part:

There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Comments

Mr Cogito said…

Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen

February 6, 2011 at 10:06 AM

Ann said…

You see, I told you you would be resounding success. Congratulations.

The trees from my window are barely moving this morning and I can hardly believe that the wind has gone. It has such an effect on us. I used to say to student teachers, "You'll have problems with the children today; it's windy" and they would look at me as if I was mad - until they got into the classroom.

February 9, 2011 at 12:52 AM

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...

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 .

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...

A Shelf of One's Own

Search This Blog