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some notes from edward tufte
“A good diagram isn’t necessarily meant to be taken in at a glance. We should read a good diagram as seriously as we might read two or three paragraphs or even a couple of thousand words of text.” “It...
View Articlesmall, good things
I would like to have an editor like Gordon Lish; only, instead of ruthlessly editing my stories, he would write them, then let me collect the accolades, royalties and hot poet wife. Takers? Me to...
View Articlesumerian literature for fun and profit
I just learned that the first writer in recorded history was a woman who wrote political poetry: her name is Enheduanna. I thought her hymn to Inana seemed very fresh, so I had a go at translating it...
View Articlepunting on the cam
So we are in Cambridge! It didn’t help that we got here at the end of the week that started, for me, in Vegas; so what with the implausible Northern twilight and the pretty pretty greens and colleges...
View Articlein queens
There are shirtless water polo players frolicking in the hallways of my cheap-ass airport hotel. I sorta finished a not-quite-so-embarrassing draft of “Everywhere” on the plane. Anyone wanna beta read...
View Articlealso nablopomo! all rach all the time
I decided to do Nanowrimo for the first time in a few years. My novel is called “The New International Version”, and it takes the form of two LiveJournals. Masochists and the more indulgent of my...
View Articlemonday night writers (with drinks)
Me: “I’d like to write a writing group. ‘Have you thought about writing it in the first person?’ ‘I think your story really starts on page 9.'” Liz: “The poetry group would be ‘Why don’t you make it...
View Articleor maybe salome
Last night’s turnout included a Rachel, a Rebecca, a Naomi and an Elizabeth. We need to recruit a Mary or an Eve so we can start a Biblical Heroine Fox Force Five.
View Articlealso epona, goddess of horses, helps me find parking
When I met her in Sydney in January my childhood friend Anna asked if I still believed in God, and I said “Oh, no,” which felt at the time and still feels like an evasion (and also unfairly...
View Articleas of tonight
…my novel fragment is twice the length it was when I left California. Ten thousand words down, seventy thousand to go.
View Articlepossible first line
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a girl in possession of a retirement-level liquidity event must be in want of a tax shelter.
View Articleworks in progress
The Pony Club Manual – second draft The New International Version – first draft Awful – notes The Great Gamgee Rivendell Revisited
View Articleiphigenia in forest hills, by janet malcolm
Brilliant and chilling. A timely reminder that weird women (such as myself) should never get in any position where other people have power over us. Borukhova’s contained, Cordelia-like demeanor at the...
View Articlei listen to history books in my car
This post on Cool Tools changed my life. I drive more than I should. I drive to the barn two or three times a week. I drive the kids to swim class and piano class and summer camp. I used to suffer...
View Articlelighter reading
I came across a notebook the other day with this written on the back: JULIA FIZHARDING A GIRL HER BUK SHE ROTE IT THIS IS HOW YU RITE MI NEM J-U-L-I-A
View Articleprimarily updatey in nature
We’ve been back in Sydney for a week. I’ve been working and trying to get the kids to do their independent study, all while missing my family sorely. We had a few sunny days but lots of blustery windy...
View Articlewhy be happy / are you my mother
Yes, they are both meditative middle-aged memoirs by great lesbian writers. Both dramatize the writer’s complicated relationship with her mother and both name-drop Woolf and Winnicott all over the damn...
View Articlepanic, by david marr
Marr is Australia’s best journalist right now, as far as I can gather. He is acute on both what makes us different… David Malouf has a wonderful theory that it’s the English we carried in our baggage...
View Articlewhat the living do, by marie howe
I picked this up because one of the Rumpus bloggers read it in the Australian coffee shop in Brooklyn that Matt took me to – what? That’s cromulent! – but no one told me it was an AIDS memoir. The Last...
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