Once upon a time, I had a blog other than Jam and Idleness. And on that blog, I for a time hosted a feature called The Reading Lamp. I sort of let it die around about the same time that Mr. Interpolations created his own version thereof, and through which he totally out-classed me by…
Month: January 2013
Her axiomatic and seraphic super-humanity
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve found Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way to be an extremely delightful but much too filling dish; I cleansed my palate with the fun and silly, if very slightly disappointing, Kraken, and then dove back in. I finished Swann’s Way last night after a couple of days of sweaty-browed…
Surviving Farch
Friends, it’s almost here–the longest, cruellest month of the year: Farch. (Sorry, Eliot, it’s not April. April is when we remember that we once didn’t loathe existence as either a theory or a practice.) Farch: known more popularly as the nigh endless period of time spanning February 1st to March 31st. You know what I’m…
Apocalypse!
I hear today is something called Blue Monday; before today, I was familiar with this phrase only as the title of a lesser example of the music of a great dancey 80s band. Apparently, we should all be sad and restless today, wondering how “ennui” is spelled and where we can use it in polite…
Like one of Shakespeare’s fairies: The Year of Reading Proust has begun
My dear friend, Catastrophizer, and I met during our PhDs. She is a dyed in the wool Modernist while I think the last time anyone wrote good poetry was prior to the year 1700. She hates Henry James, without exception, and does a bitterly funny send-up of The Wings of the Dove. It goes something…
The year I fell out of love with winter
In my last post, I mentioned being constitutionally incapable of going outside on New Year’s Day when I still lived down east–i.e., 1975-1999. But after I left the east coast, where the damp cold had this malicious way of seeping into your bones and never leaving, I went to South Korea. Winter in Seoul, anyway,…
2012: More and less; or, something deep and maybe a little bit pretentious about slow reading
Before we lived in the internet age, I used to find New Year’s Day simply interminable. The last time I lived a life in which access to the WWW wasn’t pretty much constant was when I still lived in Halifax, in the late 90s. New Year’s Day, in all the years leading up to my…
Jam and Idleness 