"Would you like anything to read?"

"Where's the fire?
Fire engine menorah arriving on the scene."
~ Michael Lipsey ~

I love everything about this picture
of my friend Michael's favorite menorah,
right down to the reflection of the row of flames,
along the edge of the counter top -- what a great touch!

**********************

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said: "Would you like anything to read?"

from A Child's Christmas in Wales
by Dylan Thomas

**********************
If you'd like something to read amidst all the year - end household chaos, or if you're simply looking for some good holiday gifts, here are a few ideas from my recent reading, giving, and receiving:

1.Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir

& What I Hate: From A to Z

both by Roz Chast

A Brush with Greatness! Marguerite writes:
"Roz Chast signing your book. She signed your copy first!"

Can you imagine my surprise when I received the very book you see in this photo, totally unaware that Marguerite had been to a recent Roz Chast lecture, or met her afterward, or purchased a copy of Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant for me, or had it autographed -- none of that!

I have been a Roz Chast fan since forever (1980 or so)! Last year, she visited Purdue, but at a time when I was out of town. Regretfully, I felt that I had missed the chance of a lifetime -- until the moment when I discovered in my mailbox not only her latest book but her autograph!

I was overwhelmed, star - struck, and tear - struck by the kindness and generosity of this amazing present, and I had to sit right down, right then and there, and read Chast's memoir and every cartoon from cover to cover -- and then immediately order another copy to send to another friend, who I just knew would love it as much as Marguerite and I did. It's a most timely text for anyone dealing with the unpleasant realities of aging and parental issues -- which, these days, is practically every one I know, even my own dear children!

I couldn't be more thrilled that Marguerite got to meet and visit with Roz. Nor can I imagine that any gift I receive this season is going to top my very own autographed copy of Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant! Thanks again, Marguerite!

Update ~ October 2017
Great interview with Roz Chast!
And Epilogue ~ July 25, 2016

Upon re-reading recently, I was reminded of
many similarities between her situation and mine,
even though Brooklyn is so far away from rural Kansas.

Particularly this:
"From 1990 to 2001, I had not set foot in Brooklyn ONCE"
[for me it was 1991 - 2007].

Then she talks about
"the Brooklyn of people who have been left behind
by everything and everyone"
-- just like small - town mid - America!

"If you pick up a sponge and start cleaning
it will not necessarily be perceived as helpful" --
as I learned the hard way a couple of years ago!

And so forth! Such a great book!

2. The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
by Robert A. Heinlein

My oldest brother Dave and I have been Heinlein fans from way back, but I didn't know about this beautifully illustrated / illuminated gift book until just a couple of months ago when Dave passed his copy on to our brother Bruce. I took an introspective hour to read through and admire it and knew that I would be ordering more copies to share with like minds.

3. Franzlations [the imaginary Kafka parables]
by Gary Barwin and Craig Conley

The perfect gift for anyone who loves Kafka, especially the parables.

A few of my favorite franzlations:
"There are more stories than could be read in a single lifetime. And even if you, dear reader, began reading, by the time you read even a fraction of them, the meanings of the previous stories would have changed. . . . Now all we need to create is more time, more memory, and a few more infinite readers like you." (57)

"Everyone carries a TRAIN about inside of him. Sitting across the table from someone, when all is quiet, sometimes you can hear the whistle blow."

"We were SNAKES. Around us the jungle sighed. A woman offered us fruit. We ate and knew that we were not naked, nor human. She and her companion left. We remained."

"'We are old friends,' I said. 'We do not need a destination.' . . . 'The journey is so long that I must go hungry. No provisions can help me. It is, fortunately, a terribly long journey.'" (44, 62)


"If you were walking across a barren plain and had an honest intention of walking on, then it would be a desperate matter, but you are flying, gliding and diving, SOARING and swooping, high above the plain, which, seen from above, is a tiny blot on a vast and various landscape." (85)

4. A Cat's Little Instruction Book
by Leigh W. Rutledge

Plenty of great advice, for cats -- and humans!

Thanks Megan!


5. Red Sings from Treetops: A Year in Colors
[for little kids]
& What The Heart Knows: Chants, Charms & Blessings
[for medium kids]
both by poet Joyce Sidman & illustrator Pamela Zagarenski

"But we still believe in the power of the words themselves. . . .
Finding phrases to match the emotion inside us still brings
an explosive, soaring joy

"See how many other hearts are burning,
burning as brightly as yours."
"When Death Comes"
6. Christmas on Jane Street: A True Story
by Billy Romp

Rural, urban, and seasonal!

7. The Flair Annual 1953
by Fleur Cowles ~ Editor
Those with a true flair for giving and receiving, might like to peruse this fabulous book given to me last summer by my friend Nikki:

For more on these last two titles,
see my current Fortnightly Blog: "A Story About a Tree"

HAPPY BOOKGIVING!

Mr. Pumpkin, Mr. Halloween & Mr. Moundshroud

Some books for the long weekend:
All Hallows Eve, All Saints, All Souls


from Fears of Your Life

by Michael Bernard Loggins

A winsome, artful turn of phrase is Michael's gift. In addition to his Fears, take a look at Imaginationally: Michael's Lovable Fun of Dictionaries, where you'll find some great concepts such as

unclude ~ the act of keeping things
that you don't appreciate out of your life

foodful ~ like food but not as good,
e.g., cheese - food - products and hot dogs
(kind of like Colbert's truthiness!)

you - ness ~ what makes you special and unique
(what Czeslaw Milosz calls my - ness: "our tiny, tiny my-ness")

Book & Movie & More

The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. . . . Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. . . .

"In old times, the first of November was New Year’s Day. The true end of summer, the cold start of winter. Not exactly happy, but, well, Happy New Year!" . . .

"Always the same but different, eh? every age, every time. Day was always over. Night was always coming. And weren't you always afraid . . . that the sun will never rise again?" . . .

"Night and day. Summer and winter, boys. Seedtime and harvest. Life and death. That's what Halloween is, all rolled up in one. Noon and midnight. Being born . . . racing through thousands of years of death each day and each night Halloween, boys, every night, every single night dark and fearful until at last you . . . could get your breath.

"And you began to live longer and have more time, and space out the deaths and put away fear, and at last have only special days in each year when you thought of night and dawn and spring and autumn and being born and being dead.

"And it all adds up. Four thousand years ago, one hundred years ago, this year, one place or another, but the celebrations all the same -- "

"The Feast of Samhain -- "
"The Time of the Dead Ones -- "
"All Souls'. All Saints'."
"The Day of the Dead."
"El Dia De Muerte."
"All Hallows'."
"Halloween."

The boys sent their frail voices up, up through the levels of time, from all the countries, and all the ages, naming the holidays which were the same. . . . Trick or Treat!

( ~ 4, 68, 136, 138-39 ~ )
Happy Celtic New Year!
Sung by Van Morrison

P.S. See also
"Godspeed October"
"Lurking and Lingering"
"Day of the Dead"
A Year of Reading

The Not So Grand Test of Virtue

"Once again it was jolly autumn weather,
and the road was quiet, with few cars passing.
The air was like sweetbriar . . .
We two seemed the only tramps on the road."

~ from Down and Out in Paris and London (177)

Fuqua dozing and reading his Orwell
Despite the autumnal charm of Orwell's irresistible imagery, his grim account of underemployment in Paris and unemployment in London in the early 1930s is anything but jolly; and I admit to pulling out just about the only romantic sentence in the entire book for my epigraph above.

More in keeping with the tone of his book is this sad conclusion:

It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary "working" men. They are a race apart--outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes. Working men "work," beggars do not "work"; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not "earn" his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic "earns" his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honor; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

See Chapter 31, 153 - 155
in Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell (1903 - 50)
English writer and social critic

Now, compare what Orwell wrote in 1933 to Wayne Muller, writing in 1999 about the mathematical formula of the Gross Domestic Product:

For when wealth is measured only in terms of goods and services bought and sold, only those actions involving money are seen as good and useful. Anything done in time is seen as useless. . . .

This horrific paradox is the very foundation of the world's official economic policy. It is repeated a billion times a day, everywhere on earth. Actions performed with love are dismissed, while actions performed with money are honored and rewarded.

What is the true measure of the wealth of a people? The creation and preservation of beauty? A strong and healthy citizenry? An educated and compassionate leadership, ensuring justice for all? A palpable sense of civic joy? A collective sense that serving our neighbor is our highest civic good? Sadly, none of these rises to the top of our list. By current standards, the Holy Grail on the altar of civilization is the health of the economy, measured by the G.D.P. Economic growth is the measure of a life well lived, a nation well run, a civilization well built. . . .

Waste, stupidity, and evil all cost money, and are, by extension, economic goods; each feeds the machine of growth.

Today we are relearning to assign economic value to parks, endangered species, air and water quality, and even solitude and sunsets. We estimate the ratio of benefits to costs when we build roads and parks and reservoirs. But these "nonmarket" values are not reflected in overall measures of the national wealth. In fact, G.D.P. rises if we replace a park with a factory, and it rises even more if the factory happens to pollute the environment. Paying for the cleanup adds yet another monetary benefit to our total.

What have we done? How have we so disordered the value and meaning of human endeavor? . . .

How do we value these simple acts of kindness? This is what the official statistics will show: Nothing. Nothing noteworthy, nothing of any value was achieved through these actions.

Yet every time someone gets cancer, the G.D.P. goes up. Every time an infant dies, the G.D.P. rises. A drive-by shooting improves the economy by $20,750. If the victim dies, and there is a murder trial, the benefit to the economy leaps to well over $100,000. . . .

But anything that grows without money changing hands--parents who care for their children, people who voluntarily care for the sick, the dying, or the homeless, people who pray or meditate or walk in the woods--these, at best, have no value. At worst, they take away precious time and energy that could be used to grow the G.D.P.

. . . [without these] things that grow only in time, we will become more impoverished than we will ever know.

See "Why Time is Not Money," 108 - 112
in Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives
by Wayne Muller (b 1953)
Contemporary American author and community advocate

As my friend Len wrote:
"It's important to give cats access to the great books."

Paper Roses, Paper Moons, Paper Towns

Free Paper City

A few more thoughts concerning
Paper Towns by John Green

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail. And all the people, too. I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters." (57 - 58, emphasis added)

I think Green should have pointed out here that "demented with the mania of owning things" comes straight from Walt Whitman.

I'm not sure about his conflated use of the term paper town, which he explains at some length . . .

Copyright traps have featured in mapmaking for centuries. Cartographers create fictional landmarks, streets, and municipalities and place them obscurely into their maps. If the fictional entry is found on another cartographer’s map, it becomes clear a map has been plagiarized. Copyright traps are also sometimes known as key traps, paper streets, and paper towns . . . . Although few cartographic corporations acknowledge their existence, copy-right traps remain a common feature even in contemporary maps. (235 - 236, see also 306)

. . . despite the fact that he is using it, in his title and throughout the novel, to mean something completely other than that.

I see what he's doing here; I just find it difficult to appreciate the self - serving inconsistency with which he shifts the meaning from that of a cartographic anomaly, to the shallowness of a "Paper Moon" in a cardboard sky, or the superficiality of Maria Osmond's "Paper Roses." Only imitation: "She kind of hates Orlando; she called it a paper town. Like, you know, everything so fake and flimsy. I think she just wanted a vacation from that" (108, see also 194, 227). Okay, it makes sense; it's just not how he started out.

And then there are the planned but unbuilt or unfinished sudivisions that dot the landscape surrounding Orlando (Gerry and I also saw them in Ireland the last time we were there): "Looks like Madison Estates isn't going to get built . . . A pseudovision! You will go to the pseudovisions and you will never come back" (152). Green lumps these pseudovisions into his "Paper Town" metaphor, although they signify an entirely different phenomenon -- an intended project that never materialized -- not an imaginary red herring to fool map-readers.

Also worth remembering:
1. Fear:

As soon as the car stopped, my nose and mouth were flooded with the rancid smell of death. I had to swallow back a rush of puke that rose up into the raw soreness of the back of my throat. . . .

There is no evidence that anyone has been here in a long time except for the smell, that sickly sour stench designed to keep the living from the dead. . . .

Standing before this building, I learn something about fear. I learn that it is not the idle fantasies of someone who maybe wants something important to happen to him, even if the important thing is horrible. It is not the disgust of seeing a dead stranger, and not the breathlessness of hearing a shotgun pumped outside of Becca Arrington's house. This cannot be addressed by breathing exercises. This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

The smell leaves me seized by desperate panic ― panic not like my lungs are out of air, but like the atmosphere itself is out of air. I think maybe the reason I have spent most of my life being afraid is that I have been trying to prepare myself, to train my body for the real fear when it comes. But I am not prepared. (139 - 141)

2. Lastness:

And all day long, it was hard not to walk around thinking about the lastness of it all: The last time I stand in a circle outside the band room in the shade of this oak tree that has protected generations of band geeks. The last time I eat pizza in the cafeteria with Ben. The last time I sit in this school scrawling an essay with a cramped hand into a blue book. The last time I glance up at the clock. . . .

And on the last day, the bad days become so difficult to recall, because one way or another, she had made a life here, just as I had. The town was paper, but the memories were not. All the things I’d done here, all the love and pity and compassion and violence and spite, kept welling up inside me . . . like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia. . . .

All along, I kept thinking, 'I will never do this again, I will never be here again, this will never be my locker again, Radar and I will never write notes in calculus again, I will never see Margo across the hall again.' This was the first time in my life that so many things would never happen again. . . .

As I walked past the band room, I could hear through the walls the muffled sounds of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I kept walking. It was hot outside, but not as hot as usual. It was bearable. 'There are sidewalks most of the way home,' I thought. So I kept walking. (227 - 228, emphasis added))

3. And to conclude:

I don't know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite. (254)

It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly . . . (257)

Free Paper City ~ by Joel

Guest Blog: HiyaKiyah

Thanks to my insightful and talented niece
for sharing her vlog on my blog!

For some heartfelt summer reading ideas,
please tune in right this instant to:
Book Recommendations by HiyaKiyah
After viewing, I was immediately inspired to order a few of Kiyah's top pics:

1. Paper Towns by John Green

When a novel begins in a band room, I'm game!

" . . . the half hour before the first bell was the the highlight of our social calendars: standing outside the side door that led into the band room and just talking. Mot of my friends were in band, and most of my free time during school was spent within twenty feet of the band room. . . . What happens in the band room stays in the band room" (11, 37).

Sounds like August to me!

"It was May fifth, but it didn't have to be. My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn't want to, but I did. And so May fifth could have been any day . . ." (23 - 24).

2. The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Teaching us to see others with a kinder eye and ourselves -- if not with a harsher eye -- at least as others see us:

"Gorillas are not complainers. We're dreamers, poets, philosophers, nap takers" (51).

" 'You could try remembering a good day,' Stella suggests. 'That's what I do when I can't sleep. . . . Memories are precious . . . They help tell us who we are' " (53).

3. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

A kinder gentler Lord of the Flies, where the kids maintain their comradery or camaraderie (you decide!) in the face of a common enemy.

And, if you're so inclined, the sequel, available now . . .

And more . . .

For additional summer fun and entertainment,
check out all of Kiyah's recent vlogs!
A couple of my favs, to get you started:
Inanimate Objects & Packing

Thanks again Kiyah!

***********

"We were in the business of mutual entertainment,
and we were reasonably prosperous" (18).

John Green ~ Paper Towns ~ more next month . . .

Guest Blog: Critical Mode

Photo by Tammy

“Drawing is the poet's written line, set down to see
if there be a story worth telling, a truth worth revealing.”
Irving Stone ~ The Agony and the Ecstasy
My insightful and critically astute friend Tammy wrote to share an article on the distinction between casual and critical reading from Lumostiy and to confess that for better or worse:

I never had a literature class is college or grad school. Can you imagine?! I placed out of the English courses needed for my marketing degrees, and so, moved on to required courses. I ended up taking some great electives (Spanish, the development of music in America, recitative and the development of opera), but no literature.

. . . I have always read for love and light and ideas, casually and I think also critically in terms of applying everything to living life. For months I have been feeding on Irving Stone's The Agony and The Ecstasy, taking my time - forced to take it - to chew in and savor and digest the images and lyricism and meatiness of his words. My version of critical reading is: 1) this paperback book, now post it tabbed, dog-eared, and marked by pencil and pen, 2) the same book on Audible with me listen-reviewing what I've already read with my eyes, saying the Italian names of people and places with the reader, and 3) a giant art book, The Complete Works of Michelangelo, that I perused once before I started the biographical novel and now make myself wait to look at again until Michelangelo has completed a piece in the novel."

And in November, I'm going to Florence and Rome!

Thank you for reading this note from me and knowing in your bones what it can mean to fall in love with a person or idea or with life itself through a book, in any way (I believe) we read. Enjoy with me Lumosity's "proof" -- "Researchers observed a significant shift in brain activity patterns as the PhD students went from casual to critical modes. Critical reading increased bloodflow across the brain in general, and specifically to the prefrontal cortex." -- about close reading and why it's okay to have my nose in a book and a pen in my hand. ~ Tammy

Previous Posts by Guest Blogger Tammy Sandel

FORTNIGHTLY

Every Chocolate Flake

Heart of Hearts

QUOTIDIAN

Guest Poet

Strip the Willow & Cadbury Flake

Heartfelt

Refinishing

THANKS TAMMY!

A Girl and Her Book

Portrait of Elizabeth Blaney, 1916
William McGregor Paxton, 1869 - 1941
The experience of academia from the perspective of the female student, according to modernist Virginia Woolf and contemporary critic Jane Gallop, is often modified by the body she inhabits. Despite the sixty years separating the work of these two writers, they both capture the dilemma of writing as a woman and working as a student in the male - dominated academy. Woolf, in A Room of One's Own and "Professions for Women," and Gallop, in Thinking Through the Body, discuss the inappropriate ways in which the female student's body has set her apart socially and academically from her male peers. The fictional students who come to life in Woolf's essays and the autobiographical figure who comes of age in Gallop's text exemplify the efforts of a generation of writers to present the body wholly and fairly.

The body - centered criticism of Gallop, Woolf, and a number of other writers treats the concept of how our educational experience is determined by the physical bodies we inhabit, addressing a constellation of concerns, all of which aim to acknowledge rather than censure the physical body as it affects both an author and the texts she creates. A comprehensive definition of the varied efforts to incorporate body and text would include raising the issue of sexual difference, suggesting that such difference is produced in language, refusing to accept the traditional Western separation of mind and body, attempting to refute the sense of writing as a strictly mental activity, and seeing female sexuality as something which is likely to be apparent in a woman's written text (see Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl). A body - centered theoretical approach looks for a way to tell "the story of the fate of the body in feminism," to examine "the body [as] a site of political struggle" and to bring "public discourse, knowledge, and meaning into the intimate space of love and the body" (Mulvey, Gallop).

Both Woolf and Gallop write within the belief that experience -- and the language used to describe experience -- is influenced by one's gender and by one's body. An experience they both describe is how women have been excluded as students, how they have processed this exclusion in their thinking and writing, and how such inequity might be rectified. One possibility, which they both suggest and implement, is the production of written narratives of female experience, accounts which tell the truth and refuse to suppress the perspectives of their sex. As their own works demonstrate, empowerment and embodiment are the dual rewards of a narrative tradition which neither denies nor insists upon difference. Such a discourse might enable the female student to claim her rightful place in the academy and to inhabit her own body with ease and confidence.

"The book," says Woolf, "has somehow to be adapted to the body," and the female novelist must be allowed "the free use of her limbs" (A Room of One's Own); she must be allowed to speak "the truth about her passions," and to tell the truth about her "own experiences as a body." Both the fictional and non - fictional stance of the female student in the male dominated academy are presented in Woolf's 1931 essay "Professions for Women." Here she vividly describes a writer's imaginative trance: "[F]igure to yourselves," she says, "a girl sitting with a pen in her hand . . . letting her imagination sweep unchecked." But abruptly this writer is roused from "her artist's state of unconsciousness" and thrown into "a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure she had thought of something, something about the body, about the the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, wold be shocked" ("Professions," 238). The dilemma of this fledgling writer is that she dare not voice her subjective experience. Woolf encourages women writers, thinkers, readers and students to utilize the power of discourse that was denied or unclaimed by their more hesitant predecessors.

In works such as Germaine Greer's Kissing the Rod, the legacy of these forerunners, known and unknown, is being restored. Greer introduces this anthology with the observation that "we are at the beginning of a long process of literary archaeology," seeking to recover the buried legacy of those early practitioners of the craft who left behind a written record of their experience.

from "The Preface to Divine Songs and Meditacions" ~ 1653
by An Collins

When Clouds of Melancholy over-cast
My heart, sustaining heavinesse therby,
But long that sad condicion would not last
For soon the Spring of Light would blessedly
Send forth a beam, for helps discovery,
Then dark discomforts would give place to joy,
Which not the World could give or quite destroy.

So sorrow serv’d but as springing raine
To ripen fruits, indowments of the minde,
VVho thereby did abillitie attaine
To send forth flowers, of so rare a kinde,
VVhich wither not by force of Sun or VVinde:
Retaining vertue in their operacions,
Which are the matter of those Meditacions.

The editors of Kissing the Rod (including my dear friend Jes Medoff) convey a hope that it will be possible to read the collection "on the train or in any other of the short intervals of time that are all most women get to themselves." Thus has Virginia Woolf's advice been taken to heart: "The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be" (Woolf, 81).

The Housemaid, 1910
William McGregor Paxton, 1869 - 1941

P.S. 2022
See also: Kitchen Art