a press of one's own

The (first) two stories were Leonard's "Three Jews" and Virginia's "The Mark on the all." By publishing together, they signalled that the Press was a joint enterprise and a vehicle for their own writing. For Leonard, the story was a signpost pointing down a road he would not take -- as a fiction writer, as a Jewish writer. But for Virginia it "marked," as her title suggests, a completely new direction, the beginnings of a new form and a new kind of writing.

- Hermione Lee

Mark Gertler's former home (note blue plaque), 32 Elder Street, Spitalfields, London

the poet, the painter, the patrona

T.S. Eliot, Mark Gertler, and Ottoline Morrell

'after many a summer dies the swan'

Lee mentions Virginia, in 1899, testing her new pens in the back of her journal "with some fragments and quotations -- including the first verse of Tennyson's sad Tithonus...." I remember Woolf quoting that in other journal entries, too, and at least one book. It must have echoed frequently in her mind:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Which is Mopey High Victorian at its finest, and not as risible to a later irony-ridden age as, say, "Mariana," but there's something unsettling about Tennyson, a modern weariness, once all the smoke and cannons from "Crossing the Bar" or "Charge of the Light Brigade" die off* -- something of the same sad music in Morris. Remember me a little then, I pray, The idle singer of an empty day, which has haunted me ever since I first studied it in college. You hear the same echo in -- Housman? altho that's what he's fighting against, with his tough-minded strenuous irony. Hopkins maybe: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed....

"Tithonus" goes on too long, and is too fluent, fluidly beautiful, mellifluous (as Charlotte Bronte tartly said of "In Memoriam") and yet --

....the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground....


*Then again, I doubt anyone under the age of forty even remembers "Crossing the Bar" to dismiss it. Or perhaps fifty. I remember a teacher in grad school being amazed that nobody in the class knew "Light Brigade" when we were reading To the Lighthouse -- I did, but I kept quiet because that's what you do when nobody else in an American classroom knows the answer.

from 'Virginia Woolf,' Hermione Lee

Her writing in this biography is just so beautiful:

The first memory of this relationship, for both (Virginia and Vanessa), was of meeting in the dark secret space underneath the nursery table at Hyde Park Gate. "'Have black cats got tails?' she asked, and I said 'NO,' and was proud because she had asked me a question. Then we roamed off again into that vast space." In the earlier version of this, Virginia adds: "In future I suppose there was some consciousness between us that the other held possibilities." And this first memory is suggestive. The sisters confirmed each other's view of life in a secret space below and inside the life of the family. Virginia is characteristically proud of making an impression. There is freedom and space between them as they wander off again.

vintage dust jacket: "My Life," Isadora Duncan

'men work and play sports and make an impact on the world and women are there to get fucked'

The pictures from Steubenville don’t just show a girl being raped. They show that rape being condoned, encouraged, celebrated. What type of culture could possibly produce such pictures? Only one in which women's autonomy and right to safety counts for so little that these rapists, and those who held the cameras, felt themselves 'perfectly justified'. Only one in which rape and sexual humiliation of women and girls is so normalised that it does not register as a crime in the minds of the assailants. Only one in which victims are powerless, silenced, dismissed. It is impossible to imagine that in such a culture, assault and humiliation of this kind would not be routine - and indeed, the most conservative estimates suggest that ninety thousand women and ten thousand men are raped in the United States alone every year. That’s what makes the Steubenville case so very uncomfortable - and so important.

Here we have incontrovertible evidence of happy young people not only hurting and humiliating others, but taking pleasure in it, posing with their victims. The Abu Ghraib torture pictures were trophies. The Steubenville rape photos are trophies. They're mementoes of what must have felt, at the time, like everyone was having the sort of fun they'd want to remember, the sort of fun they'd want to prove to themselves and others later. The Steubenville rapists had fun, and they broadcast that fun to the world. They were confident that nothing could touch them, so baffled by the idea of punishment that they wept like children in court.

- Laurie Penny

I said please don't let me go

'The outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country"'

Virginia Woolf's curriculum vitae is, in public terms, full of gaps. She did not go to school. She did not work in an office. She did not belong to any institution. With rare exceptions, she did not give public lectures or join committees or give interviews. And in private terms her life-story is sensational only for her breakdowns and suicide attempts. She did not have children. Her sexual life, though unusual, was not dramatic or notorious. She was not the subject of any public scandals or law cases. She did not engage in hazardous sports or bizarre hobbies. She never flew in an aeroplane, or travelled outside Europe. Her exploits and adventures are in her mind and on the page.

- Hermione Lee

'Perhaps we're being dense.'

What I'm reading

Matthew Jaffe

From 'The Arthur Machen Project,' Matthew Jaffe

Steinbeck

Steinbeck was actually a tremendous formative influence. I began reading him in high school, and he was one of those eye-opening authors for me. He’s one of the writers who taught me invaluable lessons about characterization; that stories, novels, are not about events. They’re about people. When they stop being about people, you’re writing shit.

- Caitlin R. Kiernan

you're late! you're late!

Why am I still keeping this journal. No, yeah...I know you read it. You don't have to remind me that you do. But the blog is dead. Long live Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr! Long live the shortest imaginable attention span! You have a hundred friends! Less more is more! Who has time for blogs? How wasn't that true ten years ago? Fast! Speed! So little time! That toxin "quick and easy" wins over substance!

Where are you going in such a hurry?

- Caitlin R. Kiernan

Wye Oak - Civilian (Live on KEXP)

'but you will be'

that shitty Gatsby movie

We desert those who desert us; we cannot afford to suffer; we must live how we can.

- Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

'I mean it's dirty to keep yelling "Digression!" at him when he's all nice and excited'

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book for instance, you might as well take the book along with them; one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

- Tristram Shandy

best priest ever? I think so

Steve on GoodReads: "My priest is a big fan of the Southern writers like O'Connor and McCullers. Although we both love and discuss Flannery, he continually prompts me to read Carson, as if my failure to do so is at least a venial sin. Of course, I hound him to read Bellow and Roth, but he has little appreciation for what he classifies as 'the Northern ones.'"

"my dellarobbia Susan"

"Red is a very Plathian color and I should not have any need to cite examples from her work. Red also is a mythic color throughout Birthday Letters; the final poem was titled “Red.” In “Red” Hughes acknowledges Plath’s preference for that color, but he thinks “blue was better for your...was your kindly spirit” (BL 198). So in Hughes’ color-coded scheme for his women, Plath was blue, Alliston was red. (What of Assia Wevill? Brenda? Jill? Emma?) Can’t you just picture the official Ted Hughes limited edition Crayola box!"

INDEED.

'I wasn't some girl, I was as tough and as valuable as any boy'

I am so sick of the constant, blatant sexism. And any time any one points anything out as being sexist, they're accused of "whining" or "nagging" or "not taking a joke."

From the Steubenville rape trial to the obituary of Yvonne Brill to the fact that more women read books than men, more women write books then men, but only a small fraction of books that win literary awards are written by women. Women are the publishing industry's bread and butter, we are the backbone of the damn entertainment industry, but we are constantly demoted to "fluffy" to "light" to "meaningless."

From a very young age, I knew that "girly" meant inferior, so I avoided it like a plague.

- Amanda Hocking

fringe

I dislike blogging about TV but this is too good not to be shared: we are watching 2-3 eps of Fringe a night and just got up to about 4x14. T remarked, "This is like when that nerdy guy took over Buffy for one episode....only Peter Bishop has taken over the whole show."

Happy early Caturday!

photo used for the cover of Plath's "Unabridged Journals"

Draft of "Stings," Sylvia Plath

The Shirley McClintock series, by B.J. Oliphant (Sheri S. Tepper)

The Unexpected Corpse by B.J. Oliphant


I am now officially out of Shirley McClintock books. Fucking boo. The politics in the middle books are hair-raising and Shirley is too often absolutely right about absolutely everything, but I quite enjoyed having a quasi-cozy series with an older (mid-fifties, early sixties) twice-married heroine, her devoted companion, and foster daughter, set in semi-rural Colorado and New Mexico. Tepper's other Southwestern mystery series, written under the name A.J. Orde, is very good too -- much better than the McClintock books, in fact, largely due to the first-person narration -- but has a younger male (if sympathetic) amateur detective, and it's much more urban, set in Denver. I have some J.A. Jance, I've read nearly all of Tony Hillerman and keep meaning to try Sarah Andrews and Kathy Reichs (altho I CANNOT FUCKING STAND "BONES"), and people have recommended Walter Satterthwait, Judith Van Gieson, Louis Owens and Nevada Barr, but I don't think I'll find another heroine quite like Shirley. Bad knee and all.

View all my reviews

'manuscripts don't burn'

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

-- Amos Oz

this is me avoiding Tumblr (too nonverbal)

'Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.' - Virginia Woolf, quoted in Hermione Lee's biography

"I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books."

Personal digression about the C.S. Lewis God reveal: because I was raised an atheist, when I first started reading the Narnia chronicles the Jesus-analogies which would have been completely obvious to anyone else slipped right by me. Seriously, I didn't have a clue until the last goddamn page of The Last Battle, when Aslan-Jesus shows up and informs our beloved characters that they are all DEAD and that dying before you reach twenty is the BEST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU, and that this whole time Narnia was just Christian heaven. The frothing-furious, soul-searing betrayal I felt at this was beyond my ability to even process. Twenty-six years later I'm still mad, and also deeply disgusted at the idea of writing in a children's book that the character to be pitied is the one who WASN'T on the FATALLY CRASHING TRAIN. (Neil Gaiman wrote a short story about Susan, which could have been a really fascinating discussion of the dangers of a religion which focuses on the afterlife and innocence to the extent of condemning all real-life experiences, and what it's like to grow up after believing that, but what Gaiman actually wrote was bestiality porn. Sigh.)

- from the fabulous, fierce, and absolutely funny blog "Burning My Study," and why aren't you reading it NOW! Go!