Category Archives: Uncategorized

I have been thinking a lot recently about Occupy Wall Street. I like the time consecrated to deliberation. It takes time to disentangle want from need. I have also thought that part of the slogan is about occupying in the … Continue reading →

Julie Phillips. James Tiptree Jr.: the double life of Alice B. Sheldon. For a woman, a pseudonym can be a way of getting published at all, or of avoiding public disapproval. “George Eliot,” for example, put some distance between the … Continue reading →

May Sarton’s narrator reports on a character’s reaction to her father comparing her to an aunt known for her artistic talent but also locked up. The character reacts initially with disavowal and then with a kind of grudging recognition that … Continue reading →

In this collection of short stories it is the short anecdote that leaves an impression — a little jolt of satire. The narrator pretending to be an intern at Vogue wittily reports that Anna Wintour has had a skylight installed … Continue reading →

To round out Mortality by Christopher Hitchens, his editors added notebook material. It is material that is impressionistic and not fully worked up in its argumentation. Take for instance this bit which leaves me puzzled. Larkin good on fear in … Continue reading →

So I read “venerable” for “vulnerable” towards the end of “Perspectors/Melancholia” in Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: “Resistance is the vulnerable utopia of inwardness” and in so doing I enact or some part of me plays out what Robertson had noted earlier … Continue reading →

The “Tuesday” section from Lisa Robertson’s The Weather is punctuated with women’s first names and the question where they are. Some bring to mind the feminists Ti-Grace [Atkinson] Gloria [Steinem] Shulamith [Firestone] and others remind one of writers Violette [Leduc], … Continue reading →

I like to view this description of ritual and the effects of reenactment by Israel Scheffler in In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions as a syntagm, a progression. The marking out of ritually commemorated events helps to define a temporal … Continue reading →