Stories
Advice to the Lovelorn, 1940s Style
Working through the boxes in our attic, doing a purge, I came across several letters written in the mid-1940s by my mother’s Aunt Peggie. I only have one side of the correspondence, but from the sounds of it, my mother often wrote letters to her aunt complaining about the lack of good men. Also about […]
From Soup to Nuts Cake: Recipes from the 1960s
I think the cookbook comes from the early Sixties, but there’s no date inside. The Moffat cookbook, given away when people bought new stoves. It belonged to my mother, who died Before, as I think of it now. Long Before, but I’m doing a household purge that starts with a couple of boxes of her stuff that […]
Review(s): Janet Malcolm’s Personal History and A Book I Won’t Read
I was cleaning behind a bookcase the other day and came across an old New Yorker dated October 29, 2018. Well, it’s a heavy bookcase and it doesn’t get moved that often, she said defensively. In it was an article by staff writer Janet Malcolm, a personal history called Six Glimpses of the Past in which she […]
Book Review: Normal People by Sally Rooney
In a series of posts, I’ve written about two modern novels, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and Normal People by Sally Rooney. The series starts here. After finishing The Nickel Boys, I turned back to Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Normal People. I’d put it aside after something about it bothered me; I didn’t know what. This […]
Book Review: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Let me say first of all that Colson Whitehead’s latest novel is brilliant: the story of boys locked up in a juvenile facility, mainly because they’re Black or inconvenient or both. Protagonist Elwood Curtis in The Nickel Boys is a finely-realized, decent and intelligent kid, nerdy when the word has just been invented, although the type is […]
Book(s) Review: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead & Normal People by Sally Rooney
As I wrote recently, I’ve been skittering among books with my COVID-era case of the concentration blues. Last time, I wrote about The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel and Bush Runner by Mark Bourrie. Now, two more: The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead and Normal People by Sally Rooney. The Nickel Boys was one […]
Book(s) Review: Bush Runner and The Mirror & The Light
Reading distractedly these days, jumping from one book to another, I’ve been hearing echoes. One pair of books that talked to one another as I read them at the same time: Bush Runner by Mark Bourrie and The Mirror and the Light, the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell. Both circle around […]
Plague Blog — 20
When I started a plague blog three months ago, I was aware that if nothing much happened, the blog might feel pointless. Writing online demands constant hits of drama, or at least brattiness, and I can’t be bothered being a brat. Too much work. Yet over the past three months, I’ve seen more than enough […]
Plague Blog — 19
“Graphite found in England was originally used to mark sheep. Called ‘wadd’ in Cumberland, it was found in exceptionally pure form in Borrowdale near Keswick, where the mine was tightly guarded and where miners tried to sneak out with a ‘wadd’ in their mouths.” “Early Greek mosaic by Sosus of Pergamon, The Unswept Floor, shows […]
Plague Blog — 18
“The Mayan deity Ixchel is the goddess of weaving, medicine and childbirth.” “In Santiago Atitlán (Guatemala), the weaving of the backstrap loom is ‘born’ while it’s ‘made’ on a treadle loom.” “The praying mantis is one of the insects mostly frequently kept as pets.” I’ve been cleaning out old files lately, and found a small […]
Plague Blog – 17
I’ve spent the past week and a half watching and listening to marchers around the world protest the murder of George Floyd, the black man who was killed by a cop kneeling on his neck in Minneapolis. More than that. They’re protesting 400 years of racism. “Get your knee off our necks,” Al Sharpton said […]
Plague Blog — 16
I got an email yesterday from the academic in England I wrote about earlier, the one who thought he might have COVID 19. We’d been going back and forth about a monograph he’d written when he told me pretty casually that both he and his wife were showing symptoms of the virus. His daughter is […]
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