Archives
Categories
Mastodon (hcommons.social)
Tag Archives: Enumeration
The Eternal Semiosis of the World
Pat Cadigan. Synners. Local colour from the novel. More than mere colour, a contributor to the versimilitude effect. She let the music wash over her, speed-thrash, cruise-metal, bang-rock, hard-core soul. It was almost like being back in one of those … Continue reading
Viscera
As I was reading The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje I was struck by how one particular passage of hallucinated anatomical rendering was like the viscerally-inflected passages that one finds in Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body. … Continue reading
Lists
“The Studio (Homage to Alice Neel)” by Alicia Ostriker appears in The Crack in Everything and has one stanza begin with a listing of colours: “Pallette knife jabs, carnation, ochre, viridian.” The next stanza also begins with a listing but … Continue reading
Names and Memorialization
Marilyn Hacker. “Tectonic Shifts Alicia Ostriker’s The Crack in Everything” collected in Unauthorized Voices. One section of “The Mastectomy Poems” has an epigraph — referring to “ordinary women” — from a poem by Lucille Clifton. Not at all parenthetically, Clifton … Continue reading
Coda Code
Aaron Shurin. Unbound: A Book of AIDS. References at one point Proust and a passage where one character muses upon the melancholy overtones of saying “you look as young as ever”. And this sensitivity is evident in Shurin’s own glosses: … Continue reading
Details
Taking this celebration of the interesting bits as an injunction to pay attention to details, I lifted it out of the specific context of not concentrating “either exclusively or primarily on those points that appear to be the most ‘important,’ … Continue reading
Long Time With Small
I was first alerted to the stamp artwork of Donald Evans by a note on miniature reproductions of work by Gertrude Stein (note found in Susan Stewart’s On Longing p. 180 n. 45). So, of course, I had to see … Continue reading
Violin Lust
Joseph Curtin. “Stradivari’s Varnish: A Memoir” in Brick 74 (Winter 2004) enumerates a number of reactions The sheer physical beauty of a great Italian violin excites all sorts of desires in all kinds of people. Violinists want to play them, … Continue reading
A Job Well Done
Edmund White’s The Burning Library contains “Nabokov: Beyond Parody”. It is a literary essay well worth an extensive visit (for the particular relation plot and language have with one another). The function of mythology in Nabokov is not (as it … Continue reading
Particular Settings in the Built Environment
I am carried away into a world cherishing the ways of the mind by the following list of neat places: UNIVERSEUM (European Academic Heritage Network) is concerned with academic heritage in its broadest sense, tangible and intangible, namely the preservation, … Continue reading