What in the world is this blog about?

I have no idea.

It started as a travelogue and has since wandered all over the map--from recipes to reports on my days to movie reviews to pictures of my grandchildren.  One day I'm writing about the banal Bachelor, the next day I'm writing about Middlemarch--which has been called by some "the greatest English novel ever written."

Whatever it is, I'm having fun! For myself and for those who are still following my random, disorganized "things," this is something of a diary/extended e-mail. It's possible that a theme will emerge, though I have no idea what it might be.

I wrote in my last post about My Life in Middlemarch and the relationships between the British authors of Eliot's age.  A book that similarly illuminates what was going on in America at the same time is Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Louisa Mae Alcott, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson: these writers were producing great American literature on our side of the pond--while Eliot was writing in England.

Philip Lopate, in To Show and To Tell/ The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, writes, --"We tend to value renegades like Thoreau, doomed alcoholics like Poe, reclusives like Dickinson, misunderstood visionaries like Melville, expansive gay bards like Whitman...."  

When I was a student teacher in 1970, my first teaching assignment was a six-week unit on   transcendentalism. I  loved studying Emerson and Thoreau way more than teaching grammar--which I did the second six weeks. In graduate school, I got  better acquainted with  Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman.

Later, studying 20th century fiction, I was startled to discover that Flannery O'Connor was on the syllabus.  I had heard of her all my life.  She and Carlene (my mother)  were classmates at Georgia State College for Women, mid-1940s.

I had seen Flannery in Carlene's college yearbooks and I knew that Flannery was the assistant editor of the literary magazine, The Corinthian, and my mother was the editor!  But I had no idea that she'd made it into the canon and that I'd be reading her fiction and letters thirty years after their shared college days.

What does Carlene have to say about this?

"Flannery went on to fame," she says with a grin.  "I just went on...."