A six o'clock feeling

It was time for Jenny to go home with her mother, all the way in the tram car through the haunted November twilight of Edinburgh across the Dean Bridge. Sandy waved from the window, and wondered if Jenny, too, had the feeling of leading a double life, fraught with problems that even a millionaire did not have to face. It was well-known that millionaires led double lives. The evening paper rattle-snaked its way through the letter box and there was suddenly a six o'clock feeling in the house. [19]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

read for the Slaves of Golconda reading group

Children by force

From somewhere below one of the Lloyd children started to yell, and then another, and then a chorus. Deirdre Lloyd disappeared with a swing of her peasant skirt to see to all her children. The Lloyds were Catholics and so were made to have a lot of children by force. [108]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

Miss Brodie and John Stuart Mill

On Saturday afternoons an hour was spent on her Greek lessons, for she had insisted that Jenny and Sandy should teach her Greek at the same time as they learned it. "There is an old tradition for this practice," said Miss Brodie. "Many families in the olden days could afford to send but one child to school, whereupon that one scholar of the family imparted to the others in the evening what he had learned in the morning. I have long wanted to know the Greek language, and this scheme will also serve to impress your knowledge on your own minds. John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill would do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime." [86]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

My Own Delightful Gordon,

Your letter has moved me deeply as you may imagine. But alas, I must ever decline to be Mrs. Lowther. My reasons are twofold. I am dedicated to my Girls as is Madame Pavlova, and there is another in my life whose mutual love reaches out to me beyond the bounds of Time and Space. He is Teddy Lloyd! Intimacy has never taken place with him. He is married to another. One day in the art room we melted into each other's arms and knew the truth. But I was proud of giving myself to you when you came and took me in the bracken on Arthur's Seat while the storm raged about us. If I am in a certain condition I shall place the infant in the care of a worthy shepherd and his wife, and we can discuss it calmly as platonic acquaintances. I may permit misconduct to occur again from time to time as an outlet because I am in my Prime. We can also have many a breezy day in the fishing boat at sea.

I wish to inform you that your housekeeper fills me with anxiety like John Knox. I fear she is rather narrow, which arises from ignorance of culture and the Italian scene. Pray ask her not to say, "You know your way up," when I call at your house at Cramond. She should take me up and show me in. Her knees are not stiff. She is only pretending that they are.

I love to hear you singing "Hey Johnnie Cope." But were I to receive a proposal of marriage tomorrow from the Lord Lyon King of Arms I would decline it.

Allow me, in conclusion to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.

With fondest joy,
Jean Brodie

[77]

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. HarperPerennial, 1999. ISBN: 0060931736.

Spark: An artist and a woman

Now that I come to write this section of my autobiography I remember vividly, in those days when I was writing Warrender Chase, without any great hope of ever getting it published, but with only the excited compulsion to write it, how I walked home across the park one evening, thinking hard about my novel and Beryl Tims as a type, and I stopped in the middle of the pathway. People passed me, both ways, going home from their daily work, like myself. Whatever I had been specifically thinking about the typology of Mrs Tims went completely out of my mind. People passed me as I stood. Young men with dark suits and girls wearing hats and tailored-looking coats. the thought came to me in a most articulate way: 'How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century.' [25]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.

Spark: Fleur the writer

Sir Eric was a small, timid man. He shook hands all round in a furtive way. I supposed rightly that he was the Sir Eric Findlay, K.B.E., a sugar-refining merchant whose memoirs, like the others, had not yet got farther than Chapter One: Nursery Days. The main character was Nanny. I had livened it up by putting Nanny and the butler on the nursery rocking-horse together during the parents' absence, while little Eric was locked in the pantry to clean the silver. [36-37].

I had just that day been writing the chapter in my Warrender Chase where the letters of my character Charlotte prove that she was so far gone in love with him that she was willing to pervert her own sound instincts, or rather forget that she had those instincts, in order to win Warrender's approval and retain a little of his attention. My character Charlotte, my fictional English Rose, was later considered to be one of my more shocking portrayals. What did I care? I conceived her in those feverish days and nights of my bout of 'flu, which touched on pleurisy, and I never regretted the creation of Charlotte. I wasn't writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder, as indeed they did to myself as I was composing them. I see no reason to keep silent about my enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work. I am sparing no relevant facts. [81-82]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.

Spark: The Thoroughly Modern Fleur Talbot

That shocked look of hers reminded me very strongly of the look on the face of my lover's wife, Dottie, on another occasion. I must say that Dottie was a better educated woman than Beryl Tims, but the look was the same. She had confronted me with my affair with her husband, which I thought was tiresome of her. I replied, 'Yes Dottie, I love him. I love him off and on, when he doesn't interfere with my poetry and so forth. In fact I've started a novel which requires a lot of poetic concentration because, you see, I conceive everything poetically. So perhaps it will be more off than on with Leslie.'

Dottie was relieved that she wasn't in danger of losing her man, at the same time as she was horrified by what she called my unnatural attitude, which in fact was quite natural to me.

'Your head rules your heart,' she said in her horror.
I told her this was a stupid way of putting things. She knew this was true, but in moments of crisis she fell back on banalities. She was a moralist and accused me then of spiritual pride. 'Pride goes before a fall,' said Dottie. In fact if I had pride it was vocational in nature; I couldn't help it, and I've never found it necessarily precedes falls. [28]

I too was a Catholic believer, but not of that sort, not of that sort at all. And if it was true, as Dottie always said, that I was taking terrible risks with my immortal soul, I would have been incapable of caution on those grounds. I had an art to practise and a life to live, and faith abounding; and I simply didn't have the time or the mentality for guilds and indulgences, fasts and feasts and observances. I've never held it right to create more difficulties in matters of religion than already exist. [130-131]

Spark, Muriel. Loitering With Intent. Bodley Head, 1981. ISBN: 0370309006.

read for the Slaves of Golconda reading group

Cosmogony, Cloned

Nothing is too clear by nature, least of all language. Connotation: foolhardy replication. This form is called not yet unfolded Grace.
[...]
Would you make replication a style, a pocket coffin? She is awake to bake a cake. Thus identical twins were formed by the division of one fertilized egg. White folded into the same river. Two forms: written and oral.
[...]
Such foolhardy ambition. Under tissue culture conditions. Therefore the written cannot be understood. Never once have I stepped twice. In God's right hand. unpenetrated.

Waldrop, Rosmarie. "Cosmogony, Cloned."

Two voices

Two voices on a page. Or is it one? Now turning in on themselves, back into fiber and leaf, now branching into sequence, consequence, public works projects or discord. Now touching, now trapped in frames without dialog box. Both tentative, as if poring over old inscriptions, when perhaps the wall is crumbling, circuits broken, pages blown off by a fall draft. [3]

Waldrop, Rosmarie. "Prologue: Two Voices", from Reluctant Gravities. New Directions, 1999. ISBN: 0811214281.

thanks, Amanda!

A Short List of Books and Stories That Can't Possibly be as Good as Their Titles, but Are

• Everything That Rises Must Converge
  
• All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace
  
• The Wind From a Burning Woman
  
• Purity of Heart is To Will One Thing
  
• If on a winter's night a traveler
  
• The Way That Water Enters Stone
  
• Tepper Isn't Going Out
  
• The Solace of Leaving Early
  
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  

add your favorites in the comments

Balancing

"Say you have a dream." He spoke earnestly. "In that dream you know that you are dreaming. If you become too aware you are dreaming, you wake up. But if you are just enough aware, you can influence your dream."
"So that's balancing?"
"Pretty much."
He breathed out, relieved and empty. She thought for a while.
"And what is it," she asked, at last, "when you fall?"
Cyprian caught his breath back, almost despaired, but again -- because, in spite of who he was, he loved Delphine -- he dug for an answer. It took so long that Delphine almost fell asleep, but his mind was working furiously, shedding blue sparks.
"When you fall," he said, startling her awake, "you must forget that you exist. Strike the ground as a shadow strikes the ground. Weightless."
"I think I'll leave you," said Delphine.
"Please don't leave me," said Cyprian.
And so they lay balanced on that great wide bed. [28]

Erdrich, Louise. The Master Butchers Singing Club. Harper Perennial, 2005. ISBN: 0060837055.

To crave and to have

Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water - peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing - the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild strawberries [152-153].

Robinson, Marilyn. Housekeeping. Bantam Books, 1982. ISBN: 055327872X.

Revelation

That magician, for instance, wandering through Palestine, performing his feats and rattling the bones of all who looked upon him. He was great! He was fantastic and doomed and he took it on the chin, We could hardly have loved A Man more. But every time he spoke or raised his hand, sometimes even when he blinked the veil grew more sheer; sometimes a corner grew tattered and lifted off the earth like a circus tent in an electrical storm, the carnival of that man! All around him people were puzzling over yeast or no yeast, cloven hooves (not good, they were right), what to do about beards and tattoos, The Law, The Law, The Law, and here He is, a sudden Baal Shem, and everywhere He steps the world flips! upside down. [...] (You didn't understand about Him at all then, You understand less now. He was an impatient man, driven. Imagine Him boarding a train right now, a train you are on, the sinister cut of his suit, the look in his eyes. Maybe he is dangerous, or maybe he is just a man to share a dry martini with: He passes you, you cannot say which He is, and then He's gone. A sexy, impossible, impertinent man not prone to suffering fools.) [...] Never in the history of You Know What have people grieved so mightily, and for so long. You're grieving still, aren't you? You wouldn't know Him if He tipped His hat to you on the street. He would terrify you. [267-277]

Kimmel, Haven. "Revelation." In Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible, edited by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. Free Press, 2004. ISBN: 0743232763.

Natural disorder

The sky was whited by a high, even, luminous film, and the trees had an evening darkness. The shore drifted in a long, slow curve, outward to a point, beyond which three steep islands of diminishing size continued the sweep of the land towards the depth of the lake, tentatively, like an ellipsis. The point was high and stony, crested with fir trees. At its foot a narrow margin of brown sand abstracted its crude shape into one pure curve of calligraphic delicacy, sweeping, again, toward the lake. We crossed the point at its base, climbing down its farther side to the shore of the little bay where the perch bit. A quarter of a mile beyond, a massive peninsula foreshortened the horizon, flung up against it like a barricade. Only out beyond these two reaches of land could we see the shimmer of the open lake. The sheltered water between them was glossy, dark, and rank, with cattails at its verge and water lillies in its shallows, and tadpoles, and minnows, and farther out, the plosh now and then of a big fish leaping after flies. Set apart from the drifts and tides and lucifactions of the open water, the surface of the bay seemed almost viscous, membranous, and here things massed and accumulated, as they do in cobwebs or in the eaves and unswept corners of a house. It was a place of distinctly domestic disorder, warm and still and replete [112-113].

Robinson, Marilyn. Housekeeping. Bantam Books, 1982. ISBN: 055327872X.

Practicing the arts of peace

"I was asked by somebody back at the time of the invasion of Iraq how we could all just go on writing our funny little stories, especially we fantasists, and I said that in my opinion what we were doing is practicing the arts of peace. What we want is a world in which funny fantastical stories are possible and are valued. In which there is nothing so dreadful or urgent that it causes the writing of such things to stop or to be stopped. worlds where the arts of peace can't be practiced are wounded worlds, and that's why we have to go on practicing those arts, so that our worlds don't die."

-John Crowley, "Practicing the Arts of Peace", Branigin Lecture, Institute for Advanced Study, Indiana University, December 1, 2005.

Blogging mandatory @ Penn

PENN TAKES NEW APPROACH WITH BLOGS
Beginning this fall, all incoming students in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania will keep blogs of their academic interests and development. Unlike typical blogs, the Penn blogs will not be public. Access is limited to the student, the student's advisor, and, under certain circumstances, authorized university officials. Penn has a long-standing practice of requiring students to complete questionnaires to help guide their academic careers, and the popularity of online forums such as Facebook prompted university officials to introduce the blog format for the questions. Students will be required to make a small number of entries. Beyond that, they can keep the blog as current as they choose. The blog entries will be part of a student's academic record and cannot be changed later. The introduction of the blogs follows a pilot program last year involving 300 freshmen.
Inside Higher Ed, 9 June 2006

from Edupage, June 09, 2006.
"Edupage is a service of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology."

Reading speed

RB: I do wonder why there is this limiting thing about reading your stories - maybe it's that the density of a story is as if it were a novel. And I only have so much head space available -

GS: When I am imagining it, I will have a longer description and my feeling is that I'd have the physicality in my mind, then it will kind of unpack for the reader - but only at a certain pace of reading. If it's too fast, my experience is that the physicality doesn't have time to unpack, but if you take a story - the story, if you read it slow enough, then you are supplying physicality to it.

Interview with George Saunders at identity theory, June 2006.

Hoboes at the lake

We in our plaid dresses and orlon sweaters and velveteen shoes and they in their suit coats with the vestigial collars turned up and the lapels closed might have been marooned survivors of some lost pleasure craft. We and they alone might have escaped the destruction of some sleek train, some flying shuttle of business or commerce. Lucille and I might have been two of a numerous family, off to visit a grandmother in Lapwai. And they might have been touring legislators or members of a dance band. Then our being there on a bitter morning in ruined and unsuitable clothes, wordlessly looking at the water, would be entirely understandable. As it was, I thought of telling them that our grandfather still lay in a train that had slid to the lake floor long before we were born. Perhaps we all awaited a resurrection [96].

Robinson, Marilyn. Housekeeping. Bantam Books, 1982. ISBN: 055327872X.

Retrieving Sorrow

The dictum was connected with Iowa Bob's theory that we were all on a big ship -- "on a big cruise, across the world." And in spite of the danger of being swept away, at any time, or perhaps because of the danger, we were not allowed to be depressed or unhappy. The way the world worked was not cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair; according to my father and Iowa Bob, the way the world worked -- which was badly -- was just a strong incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well.

"Happy fatalism," Frank would speak of their philosophy, later; Frank, as a troubled youth, was not a believer.

And one night, when we were watching a wretched melodrama on the TV above the bar in the Hotel New Hampshire, my mother said, "I don't want to see the end of this. I like happy endings."
And Father said, "There are no happy endings."
"Right!" cried Iowa Bob -- an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. "Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature," Coach Bob declared.
"So what?" my father said.
"Right!" cried Iowa Bob. "That's the point: So what?"

Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings. Mother resisted this, and Frank was morose about it, and Franny and I were probably believers of this religion -- or if, at times, we doubted Iowa Bob, the world would always come up with something that seemed to prove the old lineman right. We never knew what Lilly's religion was (no doubt it was a small idea, kept to herself), and Egg would be the retriever of Sorrow, in more than one sense. Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too [168].

Irving, John. The Hotel New Hampshire. Pocket Books, 1982. ISBN: 0671440276.