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Tag Archives: Pronouns
Praxis Parabasis
Alice Burdick Simple Master “Light Daily Shifts” I can’t work for you because I’m lost in your theory. It was a bad idea to start and made awful by practice. Dear reader, is one to identify with the speaking I … Continue reading
Incandescent Feline
Robert Graves in the introductory note to his On English Poetry Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective concludes with the observation “that when putting cat among pigeons it is always advisable to … Continue reading
The Body, Its Environment, Its Exercise
Northrop Frye captured something of the imprinting that happens when good models abound. And are taken up, bodily. Now if we write in a way that we never speak, the first thing that disappears is the rhythm. It is hardly … Continue reading
Turning “total” to “to all”
Huizinga “Play and War” in Homo Ludens We can only speak of war as a cultural function so long as it is waged within a sphere whose members regard each other as equals or antagonists with equal rights; in other … Continue reading
You Them Him
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson This Accident of Being Lost “Circles Upon Circles” A lyrical moment reined in by reality check… I see a couple approaching you, and I hang back and wait. I look out onto Ball Lake and disappear the … Continue reading
Love of a Bookish Sort
Edmund White The Burning Library “Nabokov: Beyond Parody” I may also seem to be saying that if Lolita, the supreme novel of love in the twentieth century, is a parody of earlier love novels, we should not be surprised, since … Continue reading
Embracing A Most Peculiar Aside
A Summary Account . . . (I should say somewhere about here that when I say “he” I also mean “she”: as the late President Smith used to say, man generally embraces woman.) Northrop Frye By Liberal Things (1959). This … Continue reading
Whither Eros
Howard Gardner (5 Minds for the Future) on the Respectful Mind… We homo sapiens must somehow learn how to inhabit neighboring places — and the same planet — without hating one another, without lusting to injure or kill one another, … Continue reading
Awe-filled and Awake
Michael Redhill in Light-crossing offers a suite of poems that reflect upon the reflective figure of the father. while that roil of stars and darkeness coalesced to you, who arrived, surprisingly. Grey, wet, sweating nutrient, quick to suck. Math-loving atoms, … Continue reading
The Ends of Being and Books
Paved paradise, put up a parking lot – Joni Mitchell Books had opened in childhood imaginations of other lives in which the idea of our own lives dwelling took on depths and heights, colors and figures, a new ground beyond … Continue reading