'Blog' Category
Go Ask Alice
So, I’m not writing this post for sympathy. It’s late winter. Just about everyone’s sick. I’m writing it because I just looked at the palmful of multicolored pills I was about to swallow and cracked up. That may be the drugs talking.
Anyway, I’ve had a chest cold/respiratory infection/bronchitis for nearly three weeks, and it’s still [...]Bewick’s Birds
In the first chapter of Jane Eyre, Jane reads a book called A History of British Birds. The book is important to the text in a few ways—it introduces a number of Gothic elements to the text in a tricksy way, slipping the arctic shipwrecks and bedeviled criminals in under cover of an apparently innocent [...]
Google Buzz Screws Up
There are plenty of valid reasons for not wanting your online activity and information to be packaged up for anyone who wishes to “follow” you. Many people who use one or more of Google’s services never intended for, say, their Google Reader information to be connected to their e-mail addresses. Some of them need to [...]
Reading for Research
The difference between reading for pleasure and garden-variety academic reading is the difference between visiting the paintings you love in a museum and spending time with paintings you don’t immediately respond to because you want to understand what kind of paintings they really are, and how they work.
The difference between reading for pleasure and reading [...]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 on [...]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 I [...]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 [...]
Three Vassar Girls Abroad
While I was doing research for a seminar paper a few weeks ago, I came across an 1880s girls’ fiction series that depicts the adventures of “three Vassar girls” as they explore the intellectual delights of Europe, South America, and beyond. I’ve only just begun the first book, Three Vassar Girls Abroad, and it’s just [...]
Zoot the Cat and His Miracle Kidneys of Power
I’ve been meaning to write this up for quite awhile as another data point for people whose cats are sick, and I’m sure that my desire to concentrate on our veterinary success story while we’re waiting (and waiting) to find out my mother’s cancer prognosis is a pretty obvious case of transference, but it’s good [...]
