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
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...
Craig Sunter from Manchester, UK. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons For a number of reasons, I’ve been rereading a few books. It’s been enjoyable, rediscovering turns of phrase and plot twists and characters stuck so deeply in memory, you...
Erkki Voutilainen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons This is the second time I’ve taken this effing hat apart, unraveling hours’ worth of work and starting again from almost the very beginning. I’m not a bad knitter, but when things...
YuliaAndreeva, Repetition (1995). CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons Thanks to Simon Critchley’s use of it in Mysticism, I dove this weekend into Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm. Dillard comes in in part to help Critchley illuminate...
Embracing the existentialists in the face of subservience to AI.
The scary podcast Uncanny draws me in with much-needed conversation
Thinking about community, beauty, and knowing your neighbors.
Lamenting powerlessness in the face of growing US authoritarianism.
A review of David Hoon Kim's Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost
Looking at the necessity of emotional freedom and the education, especially via art and literature, required to attain to it.
Consideration of Anders Kølle's tech criticism via information theory