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Living on 76th Street, just off Columbus Avenue, in a 2 room flat in a brownstone: shades of violet


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Dear friends and readers,

Doris Lessing and Stevie Smith say cats are shaped by their immediate environment, not only the treatment of their human friends, but the world around them. Cats mirror us. But there are all sorts of pictures and texts which testify ot the universality of cat behavior.  Both our cats regard the Admiral and my bed as their ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

We're going for a short holiday to Vermont - where it's supposed to be cool. I've still a sense of a new life in front of me. I've many feelings, some include regret that I won't be teaching any more as I enjoyed it, was a good teacher, and genuinely contributed to some students' lives, but all trouble and bitterness is ( Read more... )

"Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow, quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all" -- Doris Lessing, "Rufus the Survivor"

Dear friends and readers,

The admiral and I were away this past week -- in NYC and I've written a travel piece on our time ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

I first began this thinking about what do with my summer on May 13; that was the day before I proctored my second and last final; I sent in the grades on May 16; and I wrote again that my problem was partly solved on May 18 when I discovered that my essay on Trollope film adaptations had been published in close to its ( Read more... )

Dear friends,

A lasting effect -- what we read for & what our reading does to us. Do people realize the popularity of Hunger Games and this money-making hit movie (for the day) comes from teachers in the US (and elsewhere) using a "Dorothy Canfield Fisher" list of prizes and on it is this book. I found an old bad dream in a diary entry and thought ( Read more... )

Dear friends,

I've been worrying the question when actresses as a group first found a modicum of respectability, were not automatically seen as sluts, whores, unscrupulous vagrants. I've discovered the turn began in the middle of the 19th century with with the publication of memoirs, a culmination of women of the stage leading lives strongly ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

Jane and her mother are now in Bath (see letter 34) and living with Mr and Mrs Perrot at the Paragon.


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Dear friends and readers,

Another in my ongoing series of foremother poet blogs here and at Ellen and Jim have a blog, two: my choice for tonight is a woman poet whose voice in prose I am strongly drawn to. Mary Hays, appealing 18th century journalist, novelist, biographer, poet. I retell her life and summarize and comment on her writing. Her ( Read more... )