The Woodland Witch

 Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage. First of all, I hope all of you had a restful reading break, and enjoyed reading The Time of the Doves . As per usual, I find myself sitting down to write a little before making it to the end of the novel, but at this point I'd like to put down my thoughts before I forget them reading the rest of the story.  As some of you may have guessed from this week's title, I do not like Quimet. I think that he, alongside all the frustrating male characters we've encountered so far, make me even more uncomfortable because there is a good chance that one could encounter them in real life. There is no reassurance that they will remain fictional figures, any of us could meet a Quimet and that  is truly terrifying to me.  If Natalia represents a woman's life gone to ruin, Quimet represents the reason.  My goodness, the things he does to marriage's good name--if I can even give it a good name after seeing what it's done to poor, poor...

 Hello all, and welcome back to the cottage.  I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I sighed during this week's read, and that's only for the beginning. But what an optimal time it was to read Agostino , considering that I recently learned a little more about Freud's ideas (what a silly, peculiar figure he was) and coincidentally was revisiting the rendition of Oedipus that I grew up on.  It's this thread that I'd like to pull on this week--especially because it is relevant to the question presented in lecture (what kind of effect does the omission of certain details create?). I learned the story of Oedipus from a particular series of books on Greek mythology (no, it was not Percy Jackson) when I was very young, and the choice words that the narration used throughout the series to signify the occurrence of sex were 'married' and 'fell in love' or 'made love', which certainly seem like curious and inaccurate substitutes now . ...