Taking the bit between the teeth

Well, that was a false start.  But I remain undeterred. There's so much to blog about - our trip to the former leper (Hansen's disease) colony on Moloka'i and the heart-grinding reading I did while there;  Satyajit Ray's Chekhovian Music Room and the Fellini-tinged, pharaonic wonder of Cairo Station, the weeklong visit from my Dorothy Parker-esque grandmother, my wrangle with Spinoza - and the term's just beginning this week.  So... what better time to blog up a storm?

Happy Labor Day, all.  May your labors be fruitful and fair, and your three-day weekends be giddy and hedonistic.

Monday, September 4, 2012
Farfara

The Return (of the Repressed)

Oh, my fine friends, I have the same sad story to tell that rings like a bell-tower carillon on too-long-dormant blogs all over the nation. It’s been some time since last you heard from Sycorax Pine.  Much has happened this summer: I’ve been to London, Washington, and now am happily ensconced in Honolulu, where D’s been posted for work.  But since being here, I’ve been sunk in the most pernicious slough of writer’s block that has hit me in some time.  Work writing, pleasure writing, and increasingly even reading of all but the most escapist sort, has filled me with a paralyzing anxiety that bodes no good for the looming tenure process. I have a clutch of projects on the go, and clutch them I have, fretfully and fruitlessly, to my erratically-pulsing heart. 

Sadly, a rockin' new haircut and Carolina blue espadrilles didn’t help me kick anxiety’s ass.

So I have to break the stalemate, and I hope to do it with more regular blogging (and apparently with some exuberant mixing of metaphors, if this post is to set the trend).  My hope is that by putting aside a daily time and space for writing here, I’ll prime the pump for all my other projects.  We’ll see how it goes. 

And, in the meantime, how I’ve missed you! And oh the many things I wanted to blog about that have faded into the mists of time!  Cursed mists. They cling and expand, and if I don’t record a film, a book, a play in writing, swallow the experience whole.  Here’s to a little sunshine amidst the humid anxiety.


Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Waikiki, Hawai'i