What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
I would like to creep back into the blogosphere once again - after a five-month period of utter silence - and announce that my silence was philosophical. I would like to say that words, that language - well, my words, my language - could not show […]

From the Quotes of the Day rss feed:
“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.” ~Paul Valéry
  

Interesting piece in The Age about Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.
Novelist Kate Grenville has upset historians by claiming her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River is a new form of history writing.
…begins the report by Jane Sullivan. While researching the story, Grenville came across “dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the First […]

Public schools in Sratford (Connecticut) have discarded their old “cutesy, feel good” motto of “Children First - Whatever It Takes” and adopted words straight out of the Stoic philosopher’s mouth, reports Fred Musante via the Stratford Star. The new motto Tantum eruditi sunt liberi or Only the educated are free is what public school children […]

The lovely Jai Clare has tagged me, so here goes:
One book that changed your life.
Obviously, there is no one book that changed my life. How can that be? My life is in constant change and many books have contributed to this. Overall though I can say that Thomas Hardy’s novels have been major catalysts. Especially, […]

Seems as if hardly any time has passed since I wrote that note about my summers, at the very beginning of this summer, on June 6. I remember that evening. It was a slow evening. I had time to think, and write. I had time to do all the things I like to do. For […]

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write on page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
John Steinbeck

Desire
I expect I’ll want a man like you, again.
There’s a point in the future, I’ll have you
roll up the sleeves of your tight cotton tee,
pinch the muscle there– as if to prove
there’s no dream. Your stomach, the skin
under your chin and your feet on the ground
will be firm and this will verify that I’m worn;
my […]

Blackwoman, Whitewoman
for Sonia Sanchez and Aristophanes
I love your skin–
when I lay beside you and my hands
work over you, we are art on a bed
propped up against a gallery wall.
I love the twist of our fingers,
the curious coalescence of our pigments
intertwined in genetic fascination,
our separate possibilities linking
the forgotten beneath.
When we stand in front of each other
and […]

On The Desire To Be Famous 
by Kathryn Koromilas 
Because I’ve not been written about in history,
I’ll do these things. Because no one knows my name,
no one knows all the things to be envied in me.
Because I want to be bloody filthy famous,
I’m off to cash in on my fifteen minutes-
and it’s rush hour at the Warhol.
I […]