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The unexamined language
Language is power. It is the most malleable material of our world. And it is also our mightiest, though most treacherous tool. It has the capacity to slither silently between our senses and the world, to burrow deep into our brains and rewire the living cables of our body, to hack our perception of reality.…
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Proust and my day
Proust’s sentences are like extended, protracted, interminable, long-drawn-out silkworms ; precious creatures producing the finest of fabric: text. Even people who have never read any of Proust’s writing know that his sentences are gentle behemoths–so long as to make you forget they even had a beginning once you reach their elusive end. They might not…
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Speech Marks Blowing in the Wind
Frankissstein (2019) by Jeanette Winterson and The Passenger (2023) by Cormac McCarthy don’t have much in common, except that they’re both entirely devoid of speech marks. Better literary scholars probably have deeper things to say about these two very sophisticated meditations on love, life and death, but having to teach literature to students who sometimes…
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Review: The History of Sound (2024), Ben Shattuck
The History of Sound has a sense of the ephemeral and the historical, of continuity and rupture. It creates a present perpetually haunted by unintelligible echoes of the past, siren calls of blighted archives. The stories are spread over some three centuries of New England history, from the colonial era to the recent past, in…
Sarah Owl Jewett
From the desk of –
Sarah Owl Jewett 