The Literary Piano

Of note

“Other beings”: Anna Krien’s Quarterly Essay on the relationships between humans and animals (specifically, the uses of animals by humans for food, research, and environmental control) is not only rigorous and thoughtful, it also voices those strange, unlikely, empathetic and emotional bonds we form with animals, which are often dismissed as anthropomorphism or uncritical sentimentality: “Since I can recall, encounters with animals, their cameos, curious habits and visits, have formed the basis of stories, fragments of poems, childhood touchstones… [P]erhaps I have anthropomorphised the animals in my life. Yet I also loved being with them because they were not human.” (Quarterly Essay)

Hansel remembers Gretel: “Relics” and “Again” are two poems by Kate Middleton: “this, too, is a theory of happiness—/ imperfect, damaged /as all our ideas of perfection are.” (Cordite)

“Someone” is a story by Alice McDermott. She discusses the story in this Q&A (New Yorker)

“Foodie-ism, as youth culture”: Michael Idov on “food’s transformation from a fusty hobby to a youth-culture phenomenon.” (New York Magazine)

Emily Nussbaum reviews the fifth season premiere of Mad Men: “One of the more interesting aspects of the episode was the way it toggled back and forth between two demographics generally unsympathetic to one another, but with a lot in common: women with newborns, and men with younger second wives. Each struggled with these chaotic, sensual new presences at home, adored but unpredictable.” (New Yorker)

Also, from the New Yorker, Lauren Collins on how the Daily Mail became the most powerful newspaper in Great Britain: “To its detractors, it is the Hate Mail, goading the worst curtain-twitching instincts of an island nation, or the Daily Fail, fuelling paranoia about everything from immigration to skin conditions. (“WITHIN A DAY OF HIS ECZEMA BEING INFECTED, MARC WAS DEAD,” a recent headline warned.) A Briton’s view of the Mail is a totemic indicator of his sociopolitical orientation, the dinner-party signal for where he stands on a host of other matters… . The Mail is less a parody of itself than a parody of the parody, its rectitudinousness cancelling out others’ ridicule to render a middlebrow juggernaut that can slay knights and sway Prime Ministers.” (New Yorker)

Joan Didion’s Packing List

To Pack and Wear:

2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with: shampoo, toothbrush and paste, Basis soap, razor, deodorant, aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax, face cream, powder, baby oil

To Carry:

mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key

This is a list which was taped inside my closet door in Hollywood during those years when I was reporting more or less steadily. The list enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do. Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume: in a skirt, a leotard, and stockings, I could pass on either side of the culture. Notice the mohair throw for trunk-line flights (i.e. no blankets) and for the motel room in which the air conditioning could not be turned off. Notice the bourbon for the same motel room. Notice the typewriter for the airport, coming home: the idea was to turn in the Hertz car, check in, find an empty bench, and start typing the day’s notes.

—Joan Didion, The White Album

(Source: girlcrushzine)

Worst suburb names in Brisbane

Beenleigh
Bald Hills
Browns Plains
Cornubia
Boondal
Runcorn
Deception Bay
Geebung
Shailer Park
Burpengary

A list of preoccupations*

1. thesis 
2. a Completion Seminar
3. Surrealism as pernicious cosmopolitanism
4. post-settler Australia  
5. the German Präteritum
6. “elective affinities”
7. narrative
8. discipline
9. sweet things (despite best efforts)
10. polka dots
11. to-do lists
12. the nature of work

*in lieu of/to excuse recent lack of posts and contact

Selected list of novel genres (as listed on MLA International Bibliography)

Academic novel
Adventure novel
American Western novel
Anticolonial novel
Antidetective novel
Antinovel
Autobiographical novel
Avant-garde novel
Baseball novel
Bauernroman
Bildungsroman
Biographical novel
Bourgeois novel
Cine-roman
City novel
Comic novel
Confessional novel
Courtly novel
Crime novel
Detective novel
Diary novel
Didactic novel
Dime novel
Documentary novel
Domestic novel
Dramatic novel
Dystopian novel
Epistolary novel
Erotic novel
Experimental novel
Fantasy novel
Feminist novel
Futuristic novel
Gesellschaftsroman
Gothic novel
Graphic novel
Historical novel
Horror novel
Industrial novel
Interactive novel
Journalistic novel
Kunstlerroman
Lyric novel
Martial arts novel
Metaphysical novel
Mystery novel
Mystical novel
Nonfiction novel
Nouveau roman
Novel of ideas
Novel of initiation
Novel of manners
Novela ejemplar
Novela gaseiforme 
One-day novel
Paranovel
Pastoral novel
Penny dreadful
Philosophical novel
Picaresque novel
Plaasroman
Political novel 
Pornographic novel
Postcolonial novel
Postmodernist novel
Protest novel
Psychological novel
Realist novel
Regional novel
Religious novel
Roman a clef
Roman a these
Roman fleuve
Roman-feuilleton
Romance novel
Satirical novel
Science fiction novel
Sensation novel
Sentimental novel
Short novel
Socialist realist novel
Sports novel
Spy novel
Stream-of-consciousness novel
Surrealist novel
Suspense novel
Tragic novel
Utopian novel
Verse novel
War novel
Working class novel

(Source: collections.chadwyck.co.uk)

Laurence Sterne’s list of travellers

        Idle Travellers
        Inquisitive Travellers
        Lying Travellers
        Proud Travellers,
        Vain Travellers,
        Splenetic Travellers,
               Then follow
        The Travellers of Necessity,
        The delinquent and felonious Traveller,
        The unfortunate and innocent Traveller,
        The Simple Traveller, 
And last of all (if you please) The Sentimental Traveller
(meaning thereby myself) … 

From A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 1927

Tolstoy’s Rules of Life

• Get up early (five o’clock) 
• Go to bed early (nine to ten o’clock) 
• Eat little and avoid sweets 
• Try to do everything by yourself 
• Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater 
• Keep away from women 
• Kill desire by work 
• Be good, but try to let no one know it 
• Always live less expensively than you might
• Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer

(Source: samuelcooney.wordpress.com)

Selected list of Australian travellers

Wanderers
Explorers
Convicts
Fortune-seekers
Squatters
Drovers
Shearers
Swagmen
Miners
Speculators
Missionaries
Soldiers (“Diggers”)
Returning soldiers
“Ten-Pound Poms”
Migrants 
Exiles
Expatriates
Second-wave migrants 
Cosmopolites
Commuters
Tourists
Backpackers
“Grey nomads”
Working Holiday Visas
New Zealanders
Scholars (Rhodes, Fulbright, Commonwealth)
Third-wave migrants
Asylum seekers

Joan Snyder, Response to “What is feminist art?”, 1976

In 1976 Ruth Iskin, director of the Woman’s Building Galleries in Los Angeles, along with art historians Lucy R. Lippard and Arlene Raven, asked artists who consider themselves feminists via mailed invitations to respond to the question, What is feminist art? As her response, painter Joan Snyder (b. 1940) sent this list of words defining “female sensibility”:

FEMALE SENSIBILITY IS LAYERS, WORDS, MEMBRANES, COTTON, CLOTH, ROPE, REPETITION, BODIES, WET, OPENING, CLOSING REPETITION, LISTS, LIFESTORIES, GRIDS, DESTROYING GRIDS, HOUSES, INTIMACY, DOORWAYS, BREASTS, VAGINAS, FLOW, STRONG, BUILDING, PUTTING TOGETHER MANY DISPARAGING ELEMENTS, REPETITION, RED, PINK, BLACK, EARTH FEEL COLORS, THE SUN, THE MOON, ROOTS SKINS, WALLS, YELLOW, FLOWERS, STREAMS, PUZZLES, QUESTIONS, STUFFING, SEWING, FLUFFING, SATIN, HEARTS, TEARING, TEARING, TEARING, TYING, DECORATING, BAKING, FEEDING, HOLDING, LISTENING, SEEING THRU THE LAYERS, OIL, VARNISH, SHELLAC, JELL, PASTE, GLUE, SEEDS, THREAD, MORE, NOT LESS, REPETITION, WOMEN CRITICS, WOMEN, WRITERS, WOMEN ARTISTS, EITHER NOURISHING US OR EATING US UP ALIVE, TOKENISM, CURATORS, UNIVERSITIES, TOKENISM, FEAR OF OTHER WOMEN TO AKNOWLEDGE FEMALE SENSIBILITY, HOSTILE BOY ARTISTS, ACCEPTING MEN ARTISTS, SEPARATING THE MEN FROM THE BOYS, DIVIDING WOMEN, PIECE OF PIE-ISM, MONEY, ART, SEX, BREASTS, LAYERS, SYMPHONIES, MULT-IROLED, MULTI-PART, STORIES, NARRATIVE, PAINT/FLESH, SERIOUS, OVERWHELMING, SOFT, HARD, WOMEN WORKING, WORKING WOMEN, HANGING, DANGLING, BREAKING, BEING FRUITY, ANGRY, NAIVE, BORN AGAIN AND TRYING TO DESCRIBE HOT WHITE FLESH TIES.

From Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, by Liza Kirwin.