Archive for January, 2010
Speechless Again
My mother’s PET scan and new CT scan got read this morning, and her tumor is gone. Gone as in missing, not there, as in no one knows what happened. To recap, there was a baseball-sized mass behind her sternum in November that showed up as a shadow on an x-ray and then very clearly [...]
Research Oddments
It’s been a busy weekend at Blissbat Central. Over at the Hope Mirrlees site, there’s a mini-essay on connections between Mirrlees’ novel Madeleine and the 17th century French salon-goers and fairy tale writers called the précieuses. There’s also a list of great critical entry points for potential readers of Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees’ most famous novel. As [...]
Persian Poetry
Back in 2000, I made a mini-website to host and compare a handful of translations of poems by Rumi and Omar Khayyam. The purpose of the site was to make available samples of alternatives to the sappy, New Age Rumi “translations” by Coleman Barks (who doesn’t even read Farsi), to offer a comparison of Khayyam [...]
This Week in Reading and Making
My brain has finally started to return to its normal shape after the deeply unpleasant overwork of the six months leading up to the holiday break. As a result, things have been cooking in the books-and-projects category. Over on the Hope Mirrlees site, there’s now the full text of Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, as [...]
