Harrison Solow's Blog
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Apr.27.2013
This day seems surrealistic and there is a shift in the space-time continuum which makes it seem like everything is amorphous, even making tea or wandering across the great room to the west windows - to watch the evening hold its breath, like the few milliseconds before an earthquake... This puts...
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Apr.12.2013
I was early, an alien in a now familiar world. It seemed somehow appropriate as I approached the Hart Building, that there were two skies at Paramount: the real one, brown and hazy and the bright pristine "on a clear day you can see forever" one, standing on the lot like a giant drive-in movie, to...
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Feb.18.2013
In a deep and unknown part of Wales (not the Wales you can see, but the Wales behind that) I wrote an essay that became a story that became a poem that became a PhD dissertation. The essay won a Pushcart Prize for nonfiction, the story won a first place award for fiction - and on the...
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Jan.21.2013
In The Sense of Beauty, Santayana says “Beauty, as we feel it, is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.... It is an affection of the soul, a consciousness of joy and security, a pang, a dream, a pure pleasure. It suffuses an object without telling why; nor has it...
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Dec.28.2012
"The summer did indeed disappear with frightening rapidity - as the days do, here, now, as well. I get to the university about nine most days and about the time I think about getting some breakfast, it seems to be seven pm and I swear, Allan, that the gods have stolen the day away to secrete in...
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Dec.20.2012
This is a very early letter home from Wales - long before I learned to speak and understand Welsh, long before I came to know the people in this letter better than I knew old friends at home - long before many mysteries opened the door to enchantment. But as it is a Christmas letter, it is...
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Nov.13.2012
One somber afternoon,
authentic as a film,
the London street vendors
charmed us with chestnuts.
Fragrant, hot, cracking
in their glossy hulls,
they were only half a crown.
We bought two paper cones.
Under the foggy yellow circles
of legendary streetlamps,
pigeons gathered hopefully....
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Nov.13.2012
yes, I know you dream and writhe about that kind of love.
and no, i know you don’t mean parent love, nerves stretched into the night that holds the child who has not come home. or the ties kept willingly by the rare families who value their members.
i know what you mean. yes. you can hunger...
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Oct.12.2012
An Excerpt from The Bendithion Chronicles, by Harrison Solow:
"In the Wales in which I lived, much more than language was used to ‘speak’ Welsh, to convey thought, meaning, nuance, ipseity and warning, those unarticulated elements alive in the shadow of words, where the most profound...
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Sep.19.2012
Excerpt from The Bendithion Chronicles [PhD Dissertation], by Harrison Solow
"There is an intricate tapestry in the Red Kite Centre in Tregaron, part of the Ceredigion Museum system,[1] not far from Llanbedr Pont Steffan. One late afternoon, on the way back from a Welsh immersion...
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Sep.10.2012
"My time in Wales was binary and distinct. There was the university, which turned out to be, despite notable exceptions, a very English experience in Wales, and thus a mere backdrop to the tale I am telling in Bendithion.[1]
"…And then there was jewelled and fragrant Wales, where we danced and sang...
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Aug.13.2012
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
The place I am writing about doesn’t exist. That is, it doesn’t exist for you.[1] You’ll never see this place or these people. You’ll never hear them say the things that I have heard them say, sing the songs they sang to me, carry the scent of lanolin on your skin – or hear...
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Aug.10.2012
"...and I was thinking of how we have been the source of sustenance and suffering to each other - and of all the pain and elation and fear and hiraeth - the evolutions and revolutions and progress and estrangement and bedrock of understanding and the falls from grace - the remorse, the essential,...
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Jul.20.2012
If we begin with the Big Bang, we are beginning in the middle – or maybe, just maybe, at the end of creation. If we begin with infinity, we begin on a scale we were made for. Time on this scale would not record the formation of the earth, the separation of land and sea, the fish, the...
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Jul.11.2012
1. From "Winged Words" in The Imaginative Conservative: http://bit.ly/NoR94T
"St. John’s College and the Great Books Program here at Mercer University have much in common. Both programs revolve around a set of great works of Western civilization...
Reading great books is vital for anyone who...
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"dazzling ... fills me with the most exquisite professional envy!"
”
—Thomas Vinciguerra, New York Times contributor & consultant, and editor, writer, critic for New Yorker, People, New York, The New York Observer, Newsday, Lingua Franca, GQ, etc.
About Harrison
Dr. Harrison Solow’s writing awards include the Pushcart Prize for Literature (2008). She is published by Simon & Schuster, The University of California Press, Harper Collins, Carpe Articulum, AOL, Cinnamon Press, AGNI, The Pushcart Press and several...
Causes Harrison Solow Supports
Lupus Foundation of America
Museum of Tolerance
Humane Society
Harrison’s Favorite Books
Our library consists of several thousand books. Favourite books span a wide range of genres, categories and eras. Among these are books of/on theology, art,...