As it is April, and as I am dreaming of ancient languages and points north, we will read in Middle English of sweet showers, and listen to the original sounds while reading a modern translation of Chaucer right here. I do not read Middle English well, but I am hoping to read Faroese at least … More Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury
This evening as I attempted to track down certain modern Faroese poems, I discovered that the language of the Shetland Islands was called Norn, and that it greatly resembled Faroese. I came upon this English-Norn vocabulary list, gathered from informants in 1774: Foula,… … Fugla or Uttrie An Island,… … Hion. Bread,… … Coust. Oat … More Norn
Here is Alice Fulton’s essay Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions (Thumbscrew 12 [Winter 1998-99]: 53-66). In the preamble to her Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (St. Paul: Graywolf, 1999), Fulton suggests that poetic speech is uheimlich in the sense of the undomesticated and ex-centric. It takes place in an … More Alice Fulton
It is windy here, so we will read an autumnal poem. Animistic, I like personified seasons, and I have bolded the lines which brought this poem to mind. To Autumn (1819) Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines … More John Keats
Nothing about pain Except that it is cloistered like a madonna in heat and at the finest impulse grasps and embraces me The little dog that looks from behind a nearby tree Nothing cleans the scab of a healed scar It sleeps warm and comfortable intertwining legs Its desolate silence freezes my strength It casts … More Nada sobre el dolor
Looking back on my state of mind at the time, I am reminded by analogy of the enormous power of Christianity to convince the believer of his fundamental and never-ending guilt; I also stood (we all stood) before the Revolution and its Party with permanently bosed head, and so I gradually became reconciled to the … More Milan Kundera II
When the Comrades classified my conduct and my smile as intellectual (another notorious pejorative of the times), I actually came to believe them because I couldn’t imagine (I wasn’t bold enough to imagine) that everyone else might be wrong, that the Revolution itself, the spirit of the times, might be wrong and I, an individual, … More Milan Kundera I
He was wearing a white summer suit with mother-of-pearl buttons, over which he had thrown a duster of the same color. Beneath his fine straw hat, broad-brimmed and newly washed, his great dying eyes shone around his sharply honed nose. His right hand was of hard plaster and he carried, hanging on his arm, a … More St. Lucy and St. Lazarus VII
I struck out walking again, impelled by my rubber soles. I was crowned by a magnificent silence surrounded by baby grand pianos everywhere. In the darkness, traced out with electric light bulbs, one could read with out effort: St. Lazarus Station. St. Lazarus was born very pale. He emitted a smell of wet sheep. When … More St. Lucy and St. Lazarus VI
On one of the doors leading out of the cathedral the skeleton of an ancient fish had been hung; on another, the skeleton of a seraph, gently rocked by the oval breeze of the opticians’ shops, which wafted in with its fresh smell of apples and coastline. It was lunch time, and I asked for … More St. Lucy and St. Lazarus V
