This one started as a writing prompt of the ‘describe an everyday process of making something’ sort. But then my mind got stuck on an idea I’d had right as I was starting to make dinner and it became…. something else. But with remnants of the process descriptions sticking to its ribs. Dinner: a Litany […]
“Odysseus was melting into tears; his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen fighting for his home and children. She is watching as he gasps and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing upon his corpse. The men are right behind. […]
Don’t count your chickens… the saying goes But I’m not counting, I’m imagining flocks of bids soaring, wheeling, roosting in the tops of the tallest pine trees. Who said anything about chickens, anyway? I’m dreaming murders of crows, murmurations of starlings, twitterings of sparrows, cooings of mourning doves, screechings of jays. I’m so enthused […]
Deirdre Mundy is musing about Penelope and the shroud of Laertes: ” I started wondering about the economic value of labor that was destroyed by Penelope’s nightly unweaving on her loom.” And she shared a couple of links, which I also found fascinating. 1. Women and textile manufacture in classical Athens by Sarah Muller “In […]
Reading Notes January 2019 I joined two online reading groups and started reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? Ambitious? Yes. Foolishly so? Perhaps. Only time will tell. I abandoned The Bear and the Nightingale. I didn’t like where the story was going. I had no assurance I’d like where it ended […]
Among my pile of library books on poetry is one called The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. Today I jumped in to the first exercise: Try to recall a very early experience you had of reading or hearing language that interested or excited or […]
Three things that caught my eye in today’s Morning Prayer. 1. “The Lord delights in his people” (antiphon, Morning Prayer, Sunday Week 1 of Lent) God is not angry, he is not sad, he is not fed up with us, or tolerating us. The Lord delights. The word delight makes me think of the way […]
“Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration— expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects of working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering’s only open path is […]
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines And keep him there; and let him thence escape If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape Flood, fire, and demon — his adroit designs Will strain to nothing in the strict confines Of this sweet order, where, in pious rape, I hold his essence and amorphous […]
“Oh that you may suck fully of the milk of her comfort That you may nurse with delight at her abundant breasts! . . . As nurslings you shall be carried in her arms, and fondled in her lap; as a mother comforts her son, so I will comfort you; in Jerusalem you shall find […]