• Poetry

    How to Make Spells

    I don’t think I’d read a word of Atwood before finding her In Love With Raymond Chandler for the last post, but I’ve been browsing through, and thoroughly enjoying, some of her poetry tonight. Spelling My daughter plays on the floor with plastic letters, red, blue & hard yellow, learning how to spell, spelling, how to make spells. I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, closed themselves in rooms, drew the curtains so they could mainline words. A child is not a poem, a poem is not a child. there is no either/or. However. I return to the story of the woman caught in the war & in labour,…

  • Literature

    Literary Smack Talk

    Mark Twain on Jane Austen: I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone. [via Flavorwire – The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults In History] Oh, those drama queens. To counter-balance the negative, Margaret Atwood on Raymond Chandler: An affair with Raymond Chandler, what a joy! Not because…