Three things enchanted him:
white peacocks, evensong,
and faded maps of America.
He couldn't stand bawling brats,
or raspberry jam with his tea,
or womanish hysteria.
...And he was tied to me

-- Anna Akhmatova

There is a long time in me between knowing and telling.

- Grace Paley

… you were saved not in order to live ( Read more... )

One of those things that adults say and consider completely normal, which always struck me as mean as a child, is: "I didn't know what to say to her [or him]." (Usually because the her or him had experienced or said something tragic, hopeless, or inappropriate ( Read more... )

A last attempt: The language is a dialogue called metaphor ( Read more... )

Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life.

I am so intolerant of black-and-white thinking that whenever someone is behaving somehow egregiously, I have to do something at least slightly egregious myself, so as to disperse the egregiousness between us a bit more evenly.

But often, in writing this thesis, I have felt like Maureen watching the skin form on the back of a spoon at the end of “Open Secrets:” as if I am looking into an idea “not startling until [I] think of trying to tell it” (160). What is startling about “trying to tell it” is the same thing that was startling for Maureen: an encounter with an ( Read more... )

"In 'Metaphor and Metonymy,' Gallop goes onto say that metaphor's verticality has caused it to be associated with with freedom, while metonymy's reliance on its context has associated it with servitude. Metaphor assumes an independence while metonymy assumes a dependency, and with the dependency an incompleteness in itself, an absence or a lack ( Read more... )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwBirf4BWewRead more... )