“Melancholia is the more painful and elusive psychological experience [than grief] because the melancholic does not know what even if they know whom they have lost. Melancholy is characterised by a strangely absent sense of absence; the melancholic is absorbed by an enigma.”
Thank you!
October 13…preorders might come in a bit before that. I’ll make sure one gets to you!
yes my first…very exciting. Thank you for all the support over the years!!!
First I’ll have to tell you all why I became fascinated by these extraordinary, criminally under appreciated, groundbreaking women…more on that soon!
Hope you are all prepared for this to turn into an Anna Brownell Jameson and Jane Johnston Schoolcraft stan account until my book comes out.
This is the best photo we have of Anna, taken around 1844 as she approached the peak of her fame.
Thank you! David did an amazing job here. It is based on an 1837 sketch by Anna Jameson, and depicts a key episode in the narrative.
Excited beyond words to see this making its way into the world, thanks to the amazing team @beltpublishing.bsky.social.
‘I remember something Alan Moore told me: "It is so important to reenchant these places that we live in, to actually give back the energies that have been bled out of them. An empowered landscape creates empowered people, and the reverse is also true….”’
All cries and all complaints exhale a vapor, and from this
vapor a cloud is formed, and from these heaped-up clouds
come thunder, storms, the inclemencies that destroy every-
thing.
- Joseph Joubert, 1810
Blow, west-wind, by the lonely mound,
And murmur, summer-streams—
There is no need of other sound
To soothe my lady's dreams.
-Emily Brontë
"Song"
Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see.
-Emerson
She has reversed the roles of thou and Thou
not as a display of power
but to force out of herself some pity
for this soul trapped in glass,
which is her true creation.
-Anne Carson
The Glass Essay
This morning I read "The moon had been up since long before the sun went down, had been hanging pale in the sky most of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with silver." (Willa Cather, One of Ours)...
Lying awake at dawn, I heard the birds outside, and I suddenly remembered hearing them many years ago. I thought about the people who were no longer in my life. In the distance, the birds kept singing as if there were no yesterday.
Today's the festival of Terminalia! Why not celebrate by setting a boundary?
Tell someone you've never liked their nickname for you. Tear your arm away from the person who pats it. Insist on your lunchbreak, fridge space, pronouns.
(Then offer corn, honeycombs and wine on a crude altar.)
Happy belated Terminalia to all who celebrate.
Congrats Ruth!
Prince Hal in front of his friend abc sons beautiful maybe thin wispy birches Doth it now show very vilely in me to desire small beer? Chimes at midnight Welles 1965
Doth it now show very vilely in me to desire small beer?
Helium balloons in Paris--color photograph (autochrome) by the Lumiere brothers, 1914.
“Mostly it was an indulgent relief to shut the office door and phone him back; but I am ashamed to admit that at times I would avoid his calls […] unable to fathom how I could fit in a two-hour discussion of Lucie Brock-Broido’s newest poem in the New Yorker.”
I've created a new, ongoing, annotated bibliography of and about redacted poetry of all kinds. (And there are o-so-many ways to redact words!) It has links that let you see pages from most of the poetry titles. Even a few redacted novels snuck in. sebald.wordpress.com/redacted-the...
Will check these out — thank you!!!
Do you have a favorite Brontë family bio?
Perhaps better to say there may be elements of branwell in the Brontë antiheros, most discernibly Huntingdon. But it would be silly to reduce the complexity of their books to saying they are about branwell—I blame that on fatigue and not knowing what I’m talking about.
Ok maybe just wildfell.
my theory (no doubt wrong) is that all their best books are about branwell
All words containing every letter of the word "moor" in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847). All exact occurrences highlighted in green.
We should all post our favorite episodes. His interview with Sebald(!) was extraordinary on so many counts.
www.kcrw.com/shows/bookwo...
Haven't read enough Cather to know where ...Archbishop ranks, but I loved it. Quite different from her novels of Nebraska settler life (read years ago, need to revisit). If you like Summer Will Show, ...Archbishop is a natural choice since they both use the Revolutions of 1848 as a plot point.
