Off-Modern Onions
Off-Modern Onions
plainreading
Your basic frustrated writer who hasn’t yet figured out where she falls on the spectrum between poetry and academia. Host of the reading-focused podcast Plain Reading. Gradually finding my groove with Mastodon.
Latest Posts
Mugshot of Raoul Villain, 1914. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. It took me a while to figure out why “Stuck in the Middle with You” has been in my head for most of the morning, and why it’s got me thinking about effective...
Václav Špála, 1924. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. I continue to return to variations of the same conclusion: I lack the artistic creativity, vision, and intellectual confidence of true masters; in this case, Derek...
Friends of the Earth International. CC BY-SA 2.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. I feel like I’m in mourning. Reading my friend Dirk’s post yesterday, I learned about the generative AI crowds’ bulk purchase and destruction of printed, often...
© Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, CC BY-SA 3.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. “Make it new”: I long ago grew tired, not of the phrase itself, but of what felt like its celebratory militant insistence on busting through everything...
Jean Emile Laboureur, Lassitude, 1912. Public domain image courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France and Wikimedia Commons. Maybe every writer hits a point in a project where everything feels useless, your efforts stale and stupid. Where...
Léon Guérin, La Morale en histoires, 1842. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. When a book leaves me feeling vaguely ambivalent, the would-be-writer me should probably ask why; was it something about the book’s style, the subject...
Ines Zgnoc/Amazone 7, The Different View. CC BY-SA 3.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. She wasn’t the first, of course, to put the thought into words, but Laura (Riding) Jackson asserted pretty clearly that if you have to explain what a...
The Outsiders in 1966. Public domain image courtesy KLRA Beat and Wikimedia Commons. Last night, I watched the first episode of Art21, which featured a bit on Louise Bourgeois—and then this morning, found David Byrne tossing out an aside...
Theo van Doesburg, "Base de la peinture concrète," Art Concret no. 1 (April 1930). Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I started wondering a few months ago whether anyone was writing poetic and/or artistic manifestoes anymore. The...
Hermann Hesse looking serious. CC BY-SA 3.0 NL image courtesy Dutch National Archives and Wikimedia Commons. Two weeks away from the ol’ blog felt especially long, trapped as I was in a van with people half my age who were shit-talking...
J.-B. Madou, Le bon conseil (Good Advice), 1871. Public domain image courtesy loki 11 and Wikimedia Commons. If the title of a book a friend recently gave me was intended to be provocative, that intention surely succeeded for yours...
Co. Dublin, 1954. Courtesy National Library of Ireland on The Commons. Image with no restrictions via Wikimedia Commons. Marcel Bénabou tells us about the way his younger self pondered writing a grand epic which, centered upon his...
Colorado State University Libraries. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve written before about what I’ll call my ambivalence about genealogical research—or rather, how it often gets presented in the US American context, as a...
Gigi Ibrahim, Consumerism. CC BY 2.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. In lieu of a real post this week, I’ll offer highlights from the past few days, which has involved attempting to keep up with class assignments while embarking on a...
John Boyd, Argonauts Rowing Club Junior eight-man boat ca. 1925. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. When back in the fifties, Louse Bogan “asked a group of students, recently, to name some definite bodily rhythm which might...