Loved reading more about the resistance fighter and writer Alba Cespedes, Jean-Paul Sartre’s favorite “agony aunt.”
And also through Cespedes, read more about the writer Natalia Ginzburg.
The always interesting Imaginary Worlds podcast had an episode about Margaret Cavendish, one of the first science fiction writers who published an astonishing book in 1666 called The Blazing World which I wrote about last year—about portals in the arctic, and animal-human hybrids, as well as refuting the Cartesian philosophy of the day. Hooray!
A fascinating history of women drinking in pubs, um, publicly.
I’m not a fan per se of converting older churches into houses (not sure why really) but this feels like it could be advertised as a modern-day anchorhold—and I suspect I could happily live in one like this…
And remember, it is necessary to talk about trees…
What Kind of Times Are These There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees. —Adrienne Rich from Selected Poems: 1950-2012
"Plenty of American men of the mid-1800s to early 1900s saw the local bar or saloon as the place to get away from their spouses."
A win-win for 'spouses', one has to assume. 😊
What a perfect Adrienne Rich poem.