Sitemap - 2023 - Woman of Letters
Have you ever just...tried remembering stuff?
Real phenomenon or just a literary trope?
My twentieth year writing for publication
Tolstoy and Austen aren't world-historically unique and special geniuses
The conflict between the Great Books and historicism
It takes an entire culture to produce great literature
Of course pre-modern people had a self
Finally giving up on half my library (the shitty half)
Beethoven still has plenty of life in him
Creating beauty is a more practical goal than "helping people"
High culture is both boring and intense at the same time
I'm one of life's bronze medalists
We must re-learn how to be good courtiers
My three difficulties with getting into contemporary poetry
On Rainbow Diversity, Short Fiction Submissions, and Failing To Be A DFW Litbro
How metaphysics structures our understanding of poetry
The futility of writing about "ordinary people"
"Escaping from the grind" is just another form of grinding
Don't enjoy the Faerie Queene as a story
A little bored with the new critical consensus on Substack
A defense of contemporary fiction
Becoming cultivated will always be an uneconomical endeavor
Millennials are unprepared to wield power
Reading the Great Books will never be cool
Liberalism and movement conservatism are both essentially conservative forces right now
On the strong temptation to use demagoguery to get ahead in literature
The Liberating Arts aren't really for everyone
What do I mean by "eliminationism"
"Monsters" pose no conflict for me
You don't read the Great Books to "learn how to think"
A writer only has one ethical responsibility
I've fallen prey to the sociological illusion
Freud can't explain transgenderism
Some are predestined to sell their literary novels; others are predestined to fail
Who owns the literary canon? Does it belong to the left or the right?
On not doing the required reading
How to start your para-intellectual career
"Self-taught" is another word for uneducated
Ridiculous extended metaphors are proliferating in PoC writing
The left owes a huge debt to Nietzsche
What do I mean by "The Great Books"?
If every white person died tomorrow, PoC Americans would lose all our hang-ups about the Great Books
Political correctness is just one form of aesthetic mediocrity
You all can (and many of you should) unsubscribe from this newsletter. I will not be mad.
Criticizing Nietszche for misogyny seems somehow to miss the point
Tired of Substackers’ exhausting trans takes
I suppose that I’ll actually have some books come out next year
A little panicked about the situation for the trans folks in Florida
What trans women need is more and better hair
Digital piracy, crisis of the negro intellectual, pindar’s odes, my face hurts!!!!!
On ChatGPT, Loneliness, and some other stuff
The more I automate, the more there is to automate
Adjusting To The Nonfiction Writer Lifestyle
Notes on a recent facial feminization surgery
Extracted and analysed ten years worth of my Kindle highlights
Rebranding this blog. Not moving to substack. Still hate transphobes
Switching to Android; and reactions to Aldington's DEATH OF A HERO
A short description of how I came to write for Tablet
Watched IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, and I am forever changed
Watched Vertigo, Rashomon, and a bunch of other really old movies
Paul Park's City Made of Words
Books show people at their best; Twitter at their worst
I feel about writing the same way I feel about parenting
Gone full productivity nerd, also a review of Hitler’s Commando
Spent my India trip reading Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of an Italian
The Good Fight, Emily The Criminal, Natalia Ginzberg, and Alessandro Manzoni
Reviews of books by Dag Solstad, Julien Benda, and Mary Wollstonecraft
Spotlight on: anthologies of 1950s romance comics
Golden Age Superman is my favorite Superman (even more than All-Star Superman)