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Widely read in English department post-colonial courses, Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the life of “the madwoman in the attic” of Jane Eyre and suggests the background of her madness. The book is divided into three parts, narrated by Antoinette Cosway (who becomes Bertha Mason) and Rochester. But the book also brings to life other voices—their…
It’s that time again. My university’s semester has ended, and while this does not, alas, mean that I’ve logged any hammock time, nor that all my interns for August are placed, nor yet that a certain grisly assessment report is approved by all relevant parties…it does mean opening the composter. In our semi-rural one-acre lair,…
The shapely tesserae of a well-chopped onion. Butter and flour foaming into roux. The beauty of texture, the formal grace: the rough seed husk and the slippery seed. Precision in small things. The hours spent simmering and adjusting, simmering and stirring till the earth is in it. Knifecraft; the importance of technique. The colorful raw…
By the time I first read “Rock Springs” by Richard Ford, I had already crossed the country seven times by car, four of them through the eponymous town. One of these times my friend and I were on a road trip just for the sake of it. Or for the sake of her novel research….
I began this week by writing about compost…and that, if you’re just breathing a sigh of relief, is still to come, probably next week. Compost, however, has been preempted by word of a minor scuffle back in the northeast, of the type all too familiar in academic circles. It’s given me cause to reopen Ovid’s…
When does a poem become real? When does it cease to be a scribble, fragment, scheme, or intention, and assert its own particular vision of completeness? If it’s a poem when it’s printed in Ploughshares, it must have been a poem when it was still scrawled in a notebook. But there’s a difference between the…
Every Memorial Day my grandmother took flowers to the graves of people she had known, military or not. She was a southern transplant, with ancestors that fought on both sides of the Civil War, but she lived in my grandfather’s state, New Hampshire, so the graves she visited belonged to members of his family. Like…
Everyone has them—the books that we loved that got only cursory critical attention, if any. The friends who managed to get the books finally, finally into print, only to hear a few grains of sand shifting in the long silence as they drive to the liquor store to buy themselves the only champagne that will…
Mood: a predominant emotion; disposition; a conscious state of mind. Etymologically, “mood” at its root is anger, anger and its sometime sidekick, courage, though, the book cautions us, mood’s ultimate origin is unknown. Because who can really say where a mood comes from? Construction on the freeway wastes an hour of my time, now I’m…
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