Ron Slate's blog
July 28th, 2010
on The Pages, a novel by Murray Bail (Other Press)
Murray Bail’s beguiling fourth novel, The Pages, begins with Erica Hazelhurst, a 46-year old professor of philosophy, and Sophie Perloff, a 43-year old psychiatrist, driving from Sydney to a remote sheep farm in New South Wales.
July 20th, 2010
on The Art of Description: World Into Word, essays by Mark Doty (Graywolf Press)
Reflecting on Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Bishop advised herself as follows: “Portray not a thought, but a mind thinking … The ardor of [an idea’s] conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth, and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any existen
