beverley bie brahic's Blog
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Jul.08.2009
In the house of my dreams there will be a laundry room, with a big warm white washing machine, and a dryer for the days when it is too wet to hang laundry outside (there will be an outside to hang laundry). The machines will have portholes, and make comforting sudsy and drying sounds. There'll be...
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Jul.03.2009
Last night I almost finished Larkin's second novel, A Girl in Winter. Both books are psychologically unnerving in their grasp of human loneliness. I couldn't read the Girl, whose protagonist is a female version of the male protagonist in Jill, to the end yesterday: it was too disturbing. "...
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Jul.01.2009
The leaves of the oak are nothing like the leather of bookbinding. Leather is supple, tactile, pleasing. It gives like the skin it is. The leaves of the oak in autumn stay on the trees. They scrape in the wind like dead crickets. When they fall they don't rot--not quickly--you can crumble them,...
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Jun.26.2009
"...it made life seem like an unsuccessful attempt to light a candle in the wind."
This is from Philip Larkin's novel Jill, which I am reading or maybe re-reading (troubling not to know which: I know I have read one of his novels, borrowed, when I taught there, from the library--sorry...
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Jun.25.2009
There were two deep cement washtubs in a room that communicated directly with a stoop or porch. An empty, grey, mountainous landscape like the Pyrenees or the Himalayas. I wanted to take a bath. But the tubs were crusted with the residues of communal food--rice--preparation, clothes washing. ...
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Jun.21.2009
A small, but intense, number of erotic experiences may be enough to feed the imagination for a long time. Cavafy, for instance, who knows the life behind the poems of the man who could people houses, rooms, streets of shops, cafés with such pleasures?
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Jun.06.2009
Once I found myself billeted in a boy's room in a college dorm for 10 days. All the other times I'd been billeted in a girl's room, and I was disconcerted, this time, not to find a mirror. I decided boys and men must not be subject to this no doubt socio-culturally-induced need. But when I said...
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Jun.05.2009
You say things to people, in person, on the phone (I seldom use the phone), in messages, you interact with them--old friends, newer friends, acquaintances--you never know whether what you thought you meant to say or do was understood in the way you thought or hoped it would be. Sometimes only...
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May.30.2009
strawberries (2 boxes)
organic roasting chicken with giblets ONLY ONE NECK!!!
roma tomatoes (21)
parsley
3 yogurt, plain, nonfat
honey
Guerlain Apres l'ondee
oatmeal
4 heads lettuce
cucumber
red bell pepper
little green onions
meat
cheese
roll of quarters
cashback $50
Manilla mangoes
Palo Alto...
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May.29.2009
Last night, very cautiously, read Story #2 in Gallant's Paris Stories. "Irina" it is called. On tenterhooks about the protagonist, Irina, till the end. A great deal suggested, little actually told. It is a very good story. I thought--then no, Chekhov would be less claustrophobic, more...
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May.24.2009
Everywhere open books, book-marked books, on the floor, on the bed, on the tea-stained window ledge, on the desk, on the bedside table, in the living room. There are four chairs at the dining room table; two of them are piled with books. The Pleiade Rimbaud right here beside my computer: a month...
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May.23.2009
"The case for working with your hands" says the PhD-in-political-science-turned-motorcycle-repairman in today's New York Times, and I believe him. The zen of manual labor. A catalogue of tasks: washing dishes, making the bed, taking the laundry to the laundry room in the condo...
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May.22.2009
Haven't cleaned the windows, outside, in ages. Mother is coming to visit. "Danny" knocked at the door a few months ago and left a fluorescent wisp of paper promoting his skills and offering to do all five windows for $48. Seemed like a good deal so I stuck the flyer under a fridge...
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May.19.2009
"...thinking, for women, cannot be shut off from carnal sensoriality: the metaphysical body/soul dichotomy is, in these women, unbearable; they describe thought as physical happiness, eros for them is not dissociable from agape and vice versa." says Julia Kristeva.
I come across this...
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About beverley
BEVERLEY BIE BRAHIC was born in Canada, and lives in Paris and Stanford, California. A translator and poet, her work has appeared in Field, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poetry, The Times Literary Supplement, and...