Goodies, Blogs, and Schrödinger's Persephone
It has been a wonderful past few days. I spent the weekend with Ryan, helping him get ready for his conference this week. The part about going to sleep this morning at 1 and waking up at 4 to drop him off at the airport wasn't so great (and he doesn't expect to get to sleep until about midnight PST), but today has been fantastic. I arrived back in Canton at 6, exhausted, to find a package on my bed. It was the copy of Yellow Rose Recipes I purchased to replace the copy I foolishly lost. Oh, how I've missed that Mustard-Crusted Seitan! After a nap and work, I found another package. My Glamourkin pendant! It's even more beautiful in person.1
My blogs, I show you them:
I mentioned the über geeky lit blog in a previous entry. EpicAdvisory: Reading the boring stuff so you don't have to! It's meant to be a reader's advisory blog that examines scholarly literature about three works in the Western canon, I've chosen to look at the Iliad. There's a lull in content at the moment due to other obligations in our curricula. Our goal wasn't to get people into the works themselves; to do that we'd be suggesting the originals or reader's guides. Sorry, kids, you won't find Brad Pitt in a skirt or Angelina Jolie wearing motion capture balls here.
My second themed blog also has a touch of literature geekery, if only in its title: Vaster Than Empires.2 I'm taking the plunge and participating in Vegan MoFo this year. Perhaps a poor choice, but nothing will spur me from this cooking rut better than this sense of community, this challenge. Just you wait and see what I do with self-imposed AmaranThursdays! I was even able to come up with a little something for today, in spite of the insanity:
1I chose this one because the words appealed to immediately, this impulse to savor that time of day that feels the more transitory. I didn't realize how appropriate it was until I read The Promise in the days between purchase and receipt. I found myself envious of Danny's solid-rootedness in his world-and discovered at that moment to my utter astonishment how angry I was at my father for his book and his method of study and the tiny, twilight, in-between life he had carved out for us (257).
That spoke so much to the frustration I have with our current situation. I was struck by the music and imagery in that phrase. Tiny, twilight. (It also appears in Graham Robb's biography of Rimbaud: 'Le Bateau ivre' is not the work of a young poet on the verge of a brilliant career, but the vision of a whole life, suspended between its final dissolution and the tiny, twilight world of the past. I'll give this book a try if I can find the time.)
I know that Potok wasn't trying to convey the nostalgia and sadness and hope I derive from it. The intention was probably toward isolation, silence, and dissatisfaction with narrow windows of intimacy. I can only plead that there was another lovely sentence on the preceding page: I left them there quietly together in the private world they were creating with their new dreams. The active wording links the pages and quotes; create and carve out. The characters build their lives with varying degrees of grace, either through stress or serenity.
"The fall of light" also reminds me metaphorically of the impending winter. Pomegranates have been on my mind lately and the bead reminds of their seeds, but does represent the ones eaten or the ones spared? Is Persephone above ground or beneath it? Both? That's another thing I appreciate about the pomegranate, its complexity. A wise man once called it the Rubik's cube of fruit, and I'm inclined to agree.
2 Marvell, of course. "My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow" is the obvious couplet, but I also chose it for the poem's sense of carpe diem.
My blogs, I show you them:
I mentioned the über geeky lit blog in a previous entry. EpicAdvisory: Reading the boring stuff so you don't have to! It's meant to be a reader's advisory blog that examines scholarly literature about three works in the Western canon, I've chosen to look at the Iliad. There's a lull in content at the moment due to other obligations in our curricula. Our goal wasn't to get people into the works themselves; to do that we'd be suggesting the originals or reader's guides. Sorry, kids, you won't find Brad Pitt in a skirt or Angelina Jolie wearing motion capture balls here.
My second themed blog also has a touch of literature geekery, if only in its title: Vaster Than Empires.2 I'm taking the plunge and participating in Vegan MoFo this year. Perhaps a poor choice, but nothing will spur me from this cooking rut better than this sense of community, this challenge. Just you wait and see what I do with self-imposed AmaranThursdays! I was even able to come up with a little something for today, in spite of the insanity:
1I chose this one because the words appealed to immediately, this impulse to savor that time of day that feels the more transitory. I didn't realize how appropriate it was until I read The Promise in the days between purchase and receipt. I found myself envious of Danny's solid-rootedness in his world-and discovered at that moment to my utter astonishment how angry I was at my father for his book and his method of study and the tiny, twilight, in-between life he had carved out for us (257).
That spoke so much to the frustration I have with our current situation. I was struck by the music and imagery in that phrase. Tiny, twilight. (It also appears in Graham Robb's biography of Rimbaud: 'Le Bateau ivre' is not the work of a young poet on the verge of a brilliant career, but the vision of a whole life, suspended between its final dissolution and the tiny, twilight world of the past. I'll give this book a try if I can find the time.)
I know that Potok wasn't trying to convey the nostalgia and sadness and hope I derive from it. The intention was probably toward isolation, silence, and dissatisfaction with narrow windows of intimacy. I can only plead that there was another lovely sentence on the preceding page: I left them there quietly together in the private world they were creating with their new dreams. The active wording links the pages and quotes; create and carve out. The characters build their lives with varying degrees of grace, either through stress or serenity.
"The fall of light" also reminds me metaphorically of the impending winter. Pomegranates have been on my mind lately and the bead reminds of their seeds, but does represent the ones eaten or the ones spared? Is Persephone above ground or beneath it? Both? That's another thing I appreciate about the pomegranate, its complexity. A wise man once called it the Rubik's cube of fruit, and I'm inclined to agree.
2 Marvell, of course. "My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires, and more slow" is the obvious couplet, but I also chose it for the poem's sense of carpe diem.