Maggie didn’t know Tom was looking at her; she was seesawing on the elder-bough,
lost to almost everything but a vague sense of jam and idleness.
I’m certain that when George Eliot wrote this little piece of The Mill on the Floss, she was not instructing her readers to “Eat pastry like nobody’s watching.” But you know, it’s not bad advice, taken either metaphorically or literally…
Not that I’m trying to give you advice; Jam and Idleness is not an advice column; but we should all acknowledge that baked goods are part of what makes life more than merely survivable.
Jam and Idleness has changed over the years; these days, I’m using it to experiment with the personal essay, a form I recently fell in love with after reading some very fine examples thereof by E.B. White, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Joan Didion, Roxane Gay, MFK Fisher, Marilynne Robinson, and Max Beerbohm. Please feel free to make suggestions for my further reading in the genre!
Ah,I’ve found you again …I hadn’t realised the background to Bookphilia. Sounds a bit likely daughter, at Wayfaring Chocolate, though she decided to defer her PhD, 15 mths ago, and I don’t think she’ll go back. She’s way happier in her life now … Albeit she still has stressful times cos she hasn’t quite got onto her truly desired path. Anyhow, so pleased to see you blogging again.
Damme, you wrote this comment 2.5 years ago and I don’t seem to have responded. I am horribly out of the loop. I’m hoping I’ll be better this year.
Haha Colleen! Nice to hear from you again! I’m still hear and will look out for your posts!
Not sure where else to put this comment/request, so: I won’t be blogging anymore but would still like to keep in touch. Via Facebook, maybe? Please e-mail me at HotchpotCafe@gmail.com if you are interested, or to tell me this request is just plain creepy. 🙂
Not creepy! But as I lost the last year to corporate productiveness and had forgotten your comment was here in the first place, you probably wouldn’t know who I was if I did write. Well, I’ll try to write; I’ll just include a screen shot of this exchange. 🙂