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A Writer’s Vacation
In honor of this being Labor Day weekend, the last three-day weekend of summer, let’s look at “The Writer on Vacation,” a short essay by Roland Barthes contained in his collection Mythologies. In the summer of 1954, a footnote in the 2013 edition of the book says, the right-leaning newspaper Le Figaro asked French writers…
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Agency of Influence
Content warning: quick mentions of suicide and depression Spoilers: The Girl Who Was Plugged In, James Tiptree, Jr., 1973 In December 2022, Channel 4 in the UK reported on the very bad factory conditions of Shein (pronounced shee-in), a fast-fashion clothing company. Given that during Shein’s July Fourth holiday sale a plain t-shirt was on…
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I Was Replaced by AI
For more than a decade, I wrote for How Stuff Works. I started as an automotive writer, and after a few years, the editors figured out that I could take on almost any topic they threw at me. So I was farmed out to other departments (except health; they were very picky about those writers…
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Mogador: A Translation Diary
When I started revising my translation Celeste Mogador’s memoir from 1848, I thought I’d try keeping a translation journal, similar maybe to the writing journals Steinbeck kept while he worked on his novels. I took a month off of editing work over the holidays just to work on this book, so it was a limited-duration…
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That One Time I Was Wrong
A few weeks ago, I was struggling with a paper I needed to write for my course on Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. We’re reading his translation as well as the original in Old English, and critiques of and essays about both poems, plus many of Heaney’s other poems. The assignment was to respond to…
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Digging into Metaphors
I’ve been reading The New Life by Tom Crewe, a novel about gender and sexuality and the cultural expectations of domestic life in 1890s London—to put it in a very small and inadequate nutshell. It’s a very good book, one I would very much recommend (content warning: sex scenes). However, this is not a review…
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Introducing Leo Bloom, Courtesy of His Cat
Leopold Bloom is the protagonist of Ulysses, yet he doesn’t show up until page 55. And even then, he’s not the first to speak in his own chapter. James Joyce gave that honor to Bloom’s unnamed cat. Scholars have long noted that Joyce was a cat lover and that he may even have preferred their…
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Ice, Isolation, and Solitude
I. On Friday, the snow started falling and falling, but it was soft and dry, unusual for the Portland area. The ice came quickly after in some areas, which is not so unusual. The snow in my back yard remained about a foot deep. The city is famously ill-equipped for dealing with snow, but no…
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A Gawain for All Seasons
SAYING IT IN LARGE TEXT: I 100% REVEAL THE ENDING OF THIS MOVIE IN THIS ESSAY. If you’ve seen it or that doesn’t bother you (it is a good movie worth watching), read on. Here’s the thing about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: every version depicts an imagined past. The original, written in the…
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Sci-Fi Facing Backward
For decades, genre fiction of all kinds—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance, and historical fiction—was relegated to the pulp racks and considered beneath the notice of serious readers. Many of these books, while fun, were not masterpieces, and the few that could have been considered masterpieces—maybe a Ray Bradbury novella or an Ursula le Guin series—were disdained…