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
T. S. Eliot expounds; Lord David Cecil wears a poker face. Public domain photograph taken by Lady Ottoline Morrell via Wikimedia Commons. Maybe it’s inevitable, when you read a lot of poetry criticism, to come across discussions of T. S....
Harald Slott-Møller, Spring. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. Well, it’s spring break, and none too soon—because friends, I am exhausted. Attempting to keep afloat in an increasingly difficult class filled with boisterous...
T. W. Rolleston, 1910. Image with no known restrictions via Internet Archive Book Images and Wikimedia Commons. I can’t remember what I was reading recently that referred to Alfred Watkins, the British photographer and amateur...
Ángel Zárraga, The Poet, 1917. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve begun to suspect that I enjoy reading talk about poetry more than I enjoy reading poetry itself. For one thing, the latter takes the pressure off my having to...
Camille Pisarro, L'Île La Croix, Rouen, 1888. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. Here’s something I don’t know how to work out: maintaining reverence for the planet and its forms and creatures without falling into schlock. And...
Closcope, Pandrosion the Mathematician. CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. There’s to be no real discussion of weighty matters in this post. Rather, what follows is a simple, and probably too-personal-for-mass-interest,...
Dietmar Rabich, Dülmen, Kirchspiel, ehem. Sondermunitionslager Visbeck, Laufgang—2023—6796 (bw). CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. I don’t really have much of a post today; I’ve been trying to think my way through Jacques Lacan’s...
Meteorologist John Aitken maybe looking resigned at the thought of having to read dry research. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Well, friends, this weekend’s homework—which I’ll have to get back to after tapping out this...
Ernst Halberstadt, Obsolescence in the Junkyard, 1973. Public domain image via National Archives and Records Administration and Wikimedia Commons. My meditation this week will be brief, since class has begun and I’ve found myself thrown...
Jean Veber, Ulysses and Nausicaa, 1888. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. A friend and I were talking the other day about just how ugly so many US American cities are, their unwalkable sprawl out from an often cohesive core into...
Conrad Poirier, Junior League mobile library at the Montreal General Hospital. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I first came across Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” when I was twelve or thirteen; it was one of the stories...
Howard R. Hollem, Turret lathe operator, 1940s. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. One of the book-based thrills of the past few days has been getting into Hugh Kenner’s beautifully dense doorstopper, The Pound Era. His approach...
Rudolf Kalvach, Inspiration, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. I think it was right before the Covid era that I went to a Patricia Lockwood reading. During the Q&A, someone asked if she ever suffered from writer’s block, and if so, how she...
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Miss Shuttle-cock. Public domain image via British Museum and Wikimedia Commons. Try staying calm and sanguine about humanity after going through an hour lying prone and exposed while a radiographer conducts an...
Portrait of 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud (making it clear he thinks you're dirt) by Étienne Carjat. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. My first real confrontation with Arthur Rimbaud was in a college French class, where "The...