Category: Uncategorized
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Reading / Life
Three things for now. First, I just finished reading Erika Swyler’s Light from Other Stars and I’m picking myself up off the floor, as we speak. There are books that seem to have so much of the author’s heart in them that it feels an extraordinary privilege to read. I admired The Book of Speculation…
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Reading/Life
I’ve been keeping busy here out in the prairies. Work and children and the ever-evolving news cycle, which is so horrific at this point that I’m not even going to make vague references to prove the fact that I am a qualifiably Engaged Person, and you’ll just have to trust me that I’m reading the…
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Review: The Rules of Magic
To begin, I was wary, as one often is when an author revisits a beloved book so many years later. But let me say up front, for those of you who might also be a bit hesitant about going back to the Owens family two decades after Practical Magic, that Alice Hoffman’s latest novel, The…
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Ludmila Ulitskaya’s The Big Green Tent
Usually, I cannot abide the claim that a book is “like a love letter to” another book. The expression rarely makes any real sense. And it strikes me as an unnecessarily flowery way to say that one book is like another, or influenced by another, or otherwise responding to another book in some way. But in this case,…
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Motherhood: A Reading List
Appropriately, a helpful list of books covering the subject of motherhood was published the other day…on my due date, in fact… (Which has now past. Clock is ticking people. And seriously, don’t get me started…) I was in the middle of drafting my own list (assuming I am blessed with the kind of magic baby that…
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what is an ‘invention’ ?
I’m still here, working away at the Bach Two-Part Inventions in a race against the baby clock. And the other day, while trudging through # 5 in E min (which, okay, is kind of difficult…ugh…stay in a *&^% key, Bach!), I realized that I had never encountered ‘invention’ as a musical term anywhere except in reference to…
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Time in Two Parts
“I’ve recently started to finish learning Bach’s Two-Part Inventions.” This awkward sentence nudged itself into some of my written correspondence this morning, and I gagged a little when I reread it before sending. My first impulse was to emphatically land my finger on the delete key, and to retype something a bit more polished sounding. I’m revisiting…
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Isidore Okpewho’s Myth in Africa (1983)
Some more Okpewho for you today…no introduction needed… Myth in Africa Isidore Okpewho London: Cambridge, 1983 Preface: Here, Okpewho takes the opportunity to drive in the point that he concentrated on in the previous work The Epic in Africa (1979), which is that the practices of oral literature are not solely related to religious ritual.…
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Isidore Okpewho’s The Epic in Africa (1979)
After a fair bit of study during my undergrad and MA (the latter with Harold Scheub who has recently retired), I had almost entirely forgotten the fascinating body of work dedicated to African oral literature. Oral? Literature? Did I hear you right? Yes. Yes you did. Because despite not being written down, this rich body of tales,…
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self-imposed leisure reading
Okay, I did it. I wrote a dissertation prospectus and passed the defense, which means that in order to be crowned DOCTOR, I have but one tiny, little, no-big-deal hoop to jump through called ‘writing a dissertation’… I also survived the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association in New York City. (ACLANYC2014) These…
Indirect Libre 