Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at…
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Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), Blonde (2000), and short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. 2Early life and education Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She is the eldest of three children of Carolina (née Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer. She was raised Catholic but is now an atheist. Her brother, Fred Jr., was born in 1943, and her sister, Lynn Ann, who is severely autistic, was born in 1956. Oates grew up in the working-class farming community of Millersport, New York, and characterized hers as "a happy, close-knit and unextraordinary family for our time, place and economic status" but her childhood as "a daily scramble for existence." Her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside, lived with the family and was "very close" to Joyc
The strangeness of time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
Interesting also that Jews wrote so much American popular music & this includes rhythm & blues. Titles you'd never have guessed since they have so passed into popular culture.
Two kinds of grieving: conscious, overt, 'controlled'; unconscious, covert, uncontrolled, roiling & chaotic. We can swim in the waves of the first sort of grief with some measure of control; the second engulfs, obliterates us.
If only that were true. Women are too easily divided: white evangelicals, white college-educated, women of color, immigrant women, lesbian, transgender, ___. GOP seems to know instinctively how to pit one against the other in oldest war strategy: Divide & conquer.
Problem with portraiture: a really good artist will not give you veto power over what she/he does with your image. If you can influence the portraitist to flatter you, the portraitist has no integrity. If you can't, prepare to wince & cringe & as soon as you can get rid of portrait.