Commonplacing

7 links and a poem:

I loved learning and listening to this brilliant woman’s work before Dylan.

This beautiful essay on the relationships with nonhumans, and how deep those feelings can go has stayed with me since reading it. He manipulated the space between us like prose…Nathan didn’t perform language in a way that would be easy to parse and study, he embodied it.

On the nature of felt presence: Where we stop and the world begins is a constantly negotiated thing.

On this odd holiday, Heather Cox Richardson wrote such a moving post on the many different types of mothers in our lives.

I love Lyz Lenz’s substack Men Yell at Me, and this single mom’s manifesto by Megan Pillow—on what mothers really need, and what mother’s day was originally about—does not disappoint.

I will follow Alena Smith, creator of the tv show Dickinson, anywhere—including on what the writers’ strike and AI have in common.

On the writer Alice James (lesser-known sibling to William and Henry), long Covid, and the problematic legacies of Cartesian thinking in medicine, particularly in treating chronic illness in women. (Surprise—it’s not all in their heads).

Spring has been slower to arrive this year, but still—it always seems miraculous to find green shoots appearing again after months of snow and bare branches.

And this wonderfully caustic poem on the injustice of misogyny by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651-1695), in a translation by Edith Grossman:

Redondilla 92
O foolish men who accuse
women with so little cause, 
not seeing you are the reason
for the very thing you blame:

for if with unequaled longing
you solicit their disdain,
why wish them to behave well
when you urge them on to evil?

You contend with their resistance,
then say gravely that the conquest
arose from their licentiousness
and not your extreme diligence.

The audacity of your mad
belief resembles that of the 
child who devises a monster
and then afterward fears it.

With foolish presumption you wish
to find the woman you seek,
for your mistress, a Thais,
and Lucretia for your wife.

Whose caprice can be stranger than
the man who ignores good counsel,
clouds the looking glass himself,
then complains it is not clear.

You occupy the same place 
whether favored or disdained,
complaining if women are cruel
and mocking them if they love.

You think highly of no woman,
no matter how modest: if she
rejects you she is ungrateful,
and if she accepts, unchaste.
...

But between anger and sorrow
the object of your caprice,
may be one who does not love you,
and then you may truly complain.

To their sorrow your lovers give
wings to restraints; they fly away,
and after you make them sinful
you wish they were filled with virture.

Who carries the greater guilt
in a passion gone astray:
the woman, beseeched, who falls,
or the man who begged her to yield?
...
But I conclude your audacity
does battle with countless weapons,
for in promises and pleading
you join world, and flesh, and devil.

com·mon·place book| ˈkämənˌplās ˌbo͝ok | noun: a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.