imani

this is my commonplace book overflow channel

[imani @sensitive_bore]

“cutting up” is one of my favorite idioms for having fun.

roland barthes, the pleasure of the text, 1973

trans. richard miller, 1975

[imani @sensitive_bore]

gordon s. wood wrote the very first “serious” book i ever read (bc my 7th grade history teacher assigned it).

may he rest in peace, and may america one day be freed from its beloved tyrant, the automobile

[WPRI 12 @wpri12]

Gordon S. Wood, the eminent historian of the American Revolution, has been identified as the pedestrian struck and killed in the parking lot outside Shaw’s in East Providence on Sunday. He was 92: https://t.co/r098x6i1fD

[imani @sensitive_bore]

one of the only recipes in the essentials of classic italian cooking that is designed for 2 people rather than 4 - 8

(see also t-bone steak, florentine style)

marcella hazan, 1992/2022.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

here (and in “the anniad”) we see brooks exploit the gaze/gauze proximity.

re: the “gaze,” the historical association of “gauze” w/gaza makes me think of samson “eyeless in gaza,” as milton put it.

1. OED
2. samson agonistes, 1671.
3 + 4. book of judges chapter 16

[imani @sensitive_bore]

from “gay chaps at the bar,” gwendolyn brooks, 1945

happy birthday to the queen of the sonnet.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

woolf’s acknowledgments are quite exhaustive bc she thanks the dead, the living, and also “a gentleman in america” whose name she doesn’t know

also just like every other british book written c. 1860 - 1960 she has to mention at least one strachey
https://t.co/LvYoRyo3aI

[imani @sensitive_bore]

probably the most interesting victorian siblings: the 3 most literary of the 13 strachey siblings

dorothy: olivia (1949) + gide translations

james: standard edition of freud’s work

lytton: eminent victorians (1918)

[imani @sensitive_bore]

the first portion highlighted was more surprising for me to read than the second one, but just barely.

in all fairness, learning that the (“any”… ) victorian era was over by 1890 would have shocked queen victoria too.

louis untermeyer, the forms of poetry, 1926.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

woolf picks her c19 allegiances from what is more or less a grab bag

the walter scott/emily brontë pairing that elides charlotte as the link between the 2 is useful…bc now i #overstand why woolf didn’t get jane eyre

preface to orlando, 1928.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

my backbone / through these endless etceteras painful

for the hunchback girl, heaven is “surely a blue place”

cf.

paul klee, dieser stern lehrt beugen (“this star teaches bending”), 1940.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

i rewatched phantom thread for new years & i’m always struck by leslie manville as cyril. she’s like some kind of ceramic: hard, beautiful, smooth, but also a distinct kind of brittle. like you know one day she’ll just be shards

[imani @sensitive_bore]

bishop’s keaton:

“my backbone / through these endless etceteras painful”

“i was made at right angles to the world / and i see it so. i can only see it so.”

cf. brooks’s “hunchback girl,” 1945.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

more material as metaphor

[imani @sensitive_bore]

marinating on marination

1. sontag’s rolling stone interview (1979)
2. kissing jessica stein (2001)
3. joseph brodsky’s thoughts about nabokov (qtd in sempre susan, 2011)

[imani @sensitive_bore]

“material as metaphor,” like the title of the anni albers talk

[imani @sensitive_bore]

elizabeth rigby, lady eastlake, on jane eyre:

“it bears no impress of being written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and hurry of an instinct…” quarterly review, 1848.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

@ulteriority1 thanks 🙂

[imani @sensitive_bore]

i taught jeffrey eugenides’s the marriage plot as the last novel for my course on domestic fiction & matchmaking and i was surprised (nonplussed?) that this was the position of most of my students… they were quite hostile to it & to the characters/questions that engaged it.

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

recalling English graduate student seminars of the late 20th century in which "literary theory" was the rage, & within a decade or two most of these "literary theorists" were totally out of fashion & near-forgotten.
imagine spending months or years of your life reading "literary theory" instead of what is called primary sources: literature itself.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

@pineredemption wait i just realized you probably meant pamela 😭😭 anyways if you do read pamela again i’d love to talk to you about that too

[imani @sensitive_bore]

@pineredemption i had only read it once when i put it on the syllabus and i was really glad to give myself an excuse to spend more time with it! i’d love to know what you think if you do.

[imani @sensitive_bore]

@DLaurence401 in this case, i found that the representational questions tended to collapse into moral ones bc of the ideological weight of domestic fiction for students who considered it the hallmark of “real” literature. for me this is cue to demand more abstraction, even if just for a bit

[imani @sensitive_bore]

my favorite question asked by a student all semester:

“why aren’t we reading pamela?”

[imani @sensitive_bore]

@essy_stone that’s kind of you to say!

[imani @sensitive_bore]

@ulteriority1 i kept the reading light bc the course was a writing seminar of mostly 1st/2nd yrs and I wanted them to pay attention to the form and actually read without many other distractions (like secondary lit) for their writing

[imani @sensitive_bore]

@aisiantonas me too! but i think i did a poor job of preparing them to see the book as anything other than a failed contemporary attempt to make a (domestic) fiction like the ones they had already read