writerly-ramblings - Tumblr blog

[writerly-ramblings]

It’s incredible how much late-night spring cleaning you can fuel with rage. Woke up this morning expecting to have overestimated my progress, but I was not disappointed. Nothing like Other People to propel me into rampant and overdue housekeeping 📦

[writerly-ramblings]

Mono Azul

[writerly-ramblings]

���It’s absolutely horrible to find yourself before a book you can’t write. I was alone with myself. No one could help me.”

Marguerite Duras, “Flaubert Is…”

[writerly-ramblings]

Unknown, Fritware tile panel, painted in blue, turquoise, and moss green under a transparent glaze. Turkey, Iznik; c. 1540

[writerly-ramblings]

Deeply (Catholically) grumpy with my decision, for Lent, to exercise everyday, because I should be giving something up instead. Mildly worried (conventionally) that my life so resembles a decrepit pensioner’s that there isn’t much to renounce.

[writerly-ramblings]

Peter Brown, ‘Morning Sun in the Studio’

[writerly-ramblings]

“What kind of life is it always to plan and do, to promise and finish, to wish for the near and the safe? Yes, by the heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want a boat I couldn’t steer.”

— Mary Oliver, Blue Horses, If I Wanted a Boat

[writerly-ramblings]

ORCHID BUNCH IN OLD FROSTED BOTTLE 2022 BY JAMES PITTS

[writerly-ramblings]

I am that person who will get minor surgery and believe I should be considered incapacitated for 2-3 weeks.

[writerly-ramblings]

Victorian gift book with a black lacquer cover inlaid with mother of pearl. “Gallery of Queens”

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in December:

1). A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing (Hilary Mantel)

2). Big Swiss (Jen Beagin)

3). On Histories and Stories (A.S. Byatt)

4). Fire (Kristin Cashore)

5). The Fun Stuff (James Wood)

6). Tom Lake (Ann Patchett)

7). Love (Hanne Ørstavik, trans. Martin Aiken)

8). Written on Water (Eileen Chang, trans. Andrew F. Jones & Nicole Huang)

9). An Editor’s Burial (ed. David Brendel)

10). Walk the Blue Fields (Claire Keegan)

[writerly-ramblings]

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in November:

1). Antarctica (Claire Keegan)

2). Dottie (Abdulrazak Gurnah)

3). Almost English (Charlotte Mendelson)

4). Things to Come (Hester Styles Vickery)

5). The Dear Departed (Brian Moore)

6). The Child that Books Built (Francis Spufford)

7). Mr. Fox (Helen Oyeyemi)

8). Wild (Cheryl Strayed)

[writerly-ramblings]

Andrew Wyeth, Blackberry Picker, 1943

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in October:

1). Vladimir (Julia May Jonas)

2). The Glutton (A.K. Blakemore)

3). The Late Americans (Brandon Taylor)

4). By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (Elizabeth Smart)

5). The Pleasure of Reading (ed. Antonia Fraser)

6). I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

7). The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (Anne Enright)

8). Let Us Descend (Jesmyn Ward)

9). Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt)

10). Things Are Against Us (Lucy Ellmann)

11). Sleepless (Marie Darrieussecq, trans. Penny Hueston)

12). My Husband (Maud Ventura, trans. Emma Ramadam)

13). So to Speak (Terrance Hayes)

14). Artful (Ali Smith)

15). Time Shelter (Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Angela Rodel)

16). Dandelions (Thea Lenarduzzi)

17). The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (Colm Tóibín)

[writerly-ramblings]

[writerly-ramblings]

Logistics of the evening: I live 3,000 miles from both the man and my parents; the man lives 800 miles from my parents; the man has orchestrated to meet my father whilst they’re briefly both in the same city (where they occasionally work but do not live), a city I am very much an entire ocean away from.