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English Literature

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What book hasn’t been written that you’d like to read?  Jane Austen’s seventh novel, written in maturity, examining what happens to love beyond courtship and the wedding day.

Kazuo Ishiguro in his NYT “By the Book” interview (via lulabo)

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Why Sci-Fi Keeps Imagining the Subjugation of White People

As much as the genre imagines the future, it also remixes the past—often by envisioning Western-style imperialism visited on the Western world.

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‘North Haven’, Bishop

In Memoriam: Robert Lowell

"This month our favourite one is full of flowers"

"Nature repeats herself, or almost does: / repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise."

"And now – you've left / for good. You can't derange, or rearrange, / your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)"

"The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change."

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[A]lthough we need norms in order to live, and to live well, and to know in what direction to transform our social world, we are also constrained by norms in ways that sometimes do violence to us and which, for reasons of social justice, we must oppose.

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (206)

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To say that identity is performative is to say that it is a certain kind of enactment; the ‘appearance’ of gender is often mistaken as a sign of its internal or inherent truth; gender is prompted by obligatory norms to be one gender or the other (usually within a strict binary frame), and the reproduction of gender is thus always a negotiation with power; and finally, there is no gender without this reproduction of norms that risks undoing or redoing the norm in unexpected ways, thus opening up the possibility of a remaking of gendered reality along new lines.

Judith Butler, “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics” (i)

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‘Into My Own’, Frost

"those dark trees"

"some day / Into their vastness I should steal away"

"They would not find me changed from him they knew – / Only more sure of all I thought was true."

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‘Sailing Home from Rapallo’, Lowell

"tears ran down my cheeks..."

"her Risorgimento black and gold casket / was like Napoleon's at the Invalides"

contrasts warmth of the deck of the ship with "our family cemetery in Dunbarton / lay under the White Mountains / in the sub-zero weather."

"The corpse / was wrapped like panettone in Italian tinfoil"

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‘In the Waiting Room’, Bishop

"It was winter. It got dark / early. The waiting room / was full of grown-up people."

"while I waited I read / the National Geographic / (I could read) and carefully / studied the photographs"

"Suddenly, from inside, / came an oh! of pain / – Aunt Conseulo's voice –"

"What took me / completely by surprise / was that it was me: / my voice, in my mouth"

"I was my foolish aunt, / I–we– were falling, falling, / our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918"

"the sensation of falling off / the round, turning world, / into cold, blue-black space"

"you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them"

"Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? / What similarities [...] held us all together / or made us all just one?"

"It was sliding / beneath a big black wave, / another, and another."

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‘Arrival at Santos’, Bishop

"Here is a coast; here is a harbor; / here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery"

"Oh, tourist, / is this how this country is going to answer you // And your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension / of both at last, and immediately"

"So that's the flag. I never saw it before. / I somehow never though of there being a flag, // but of course there was, all along"

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‘Inauguration Day: January 1953′, Lowell

"The snow had buried Stuyvesant"

"I heard / the El's green girders charge on Third"

"Manhattan's truss of adamant, / that groaned in ermine, slummed on want"

"Horseman, your sword is in the groove"

"Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move."

"lack-land atoms, split apart"

"the mausoleum in her heart"

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‘A Pact’, Ezra Pound

"I make truce with you, Walt Whitman"

"I come to you as a grown child / Who has had a pig-headed father"

"It was you who broke the new wood, / Now is a time for carving"

"We have one sap and one root – / Let there be commerce between us."

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‘Filling Station’, Bishop

“Oh, but it is dirty!”, “oil-soaked, oil-permeated”

“Father wears a dirty, / oil-soaked monkey suit […] and greasy sons assist him"

"Why, oh why, the doily?”

“Somebody embroidered the doily”

“esso-so-so-so”

"high-strung automobiles"

“somebody loves us all”

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‘Rainy Season: Sub-Tropics’, Elizabeth Bishop

"My eyes bulge and hurt. They are my one great beauty, even so. They see too much, above, below, and yet there is not much to see."

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‘Epilogue’, Lowell

"sometimes everything I write / with the threadbare art of my eye / seems a snapshot

"heightened from life, / yet paralysed by fact"

"All's misalliance. Yet why not say what happened?"

"We are poor passing facts, / warned by that to give / each figure in the photograph / his living name."

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‘Spring and All’, Williams

"contagious hospital"

"the reddish / purplish, forks, upstanding, twiggy / stuff of bushes and small trees"

"Lifeless in appearance, sluggish / dazed spring approaches–"

"They enter the new world naked, / cold, uncertain of all / save that they enter"

"the stark dignity of entrance"

"rooted, they / grip down and begin to awaken"