When you look back on your time in lockdown, and consider all of the craziness we experienced together but apart, don't scroll endlessly through your 2020 messages, pull your Keepster book from the shelf!
Tag: friendship
We Talked ‘Big Friendship’ with Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman
As the latest instalment in the Bookstr Talks series, we hosted a timezone-crossing conversation with the hosts of the 'Call Your Girlfriend' podcast.
From Podcast to Page, These Women Have Cracked the Friendship Code
Long-distance BFFs, podcast co-hosts, and now authors, Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman's new book shares just how important friendship is.
5 Poems About Friendship
I know, I know. This is a super cheesy topic to write about, but hear me out: in a time like this, where we are required to distance ourselves from others, one comes to appreciate certain things a little more. We can most definitely stay in touch with people online and over the phone, and I would say that these are excellent ways to socialize.
All the same, a time like this also makes us realize how lucky we are to have these people in our lives. And while I can wax poetic about friendship, I think I’ll just let these poems do it for me.
Here are five poems about friends and friendship:
1. “impossible friendships” by adam zagajewski
image via psychology today
For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.
Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden
porcelain cups—and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.
A passerby with proud eyes
whom you’ll never know. (read more)
2. “To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship” by Katherine philips
image via Today Magazine
I did not live until this time
Crowned my felicity,
When I could say without a crime,
I am not thine, but thee.
This carcass breathed, and walked, and slept,
So that the world believed
There was a soul the motions kept;
But they were all deceived.
For as a watch by art is wound
To motion, such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A soul till she found thine; (read more)
3. “A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me” by Ross gay
image via exposure.org.uk
Because I must not
get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest,
I hold something like a clownfaced herd
of bareback and winged elephants
stomping in my chest,
I hold a thousand
kites in a field loosed from their tethers
at once, I feel
my skeleton losing track
somewhat of the science I’ve made of tamp,
feel it rising up shriek and groove,
rising up a river guzzling a monsoon,
not to mention the butterflies… (read more)
4. “grand expensive vista” by andrew hudgins
image via Country living magazine
As we sipped and mingled,
regaled
with oldfangled
canapés and beguiled,
or entertained at least, by gargled
oldies, I disengaged
and angled
across grass tenderly groomed,
past where electric tiki torches gleamed,
and, alone, gazed,
now truly beguiled,
at my hosts’ grand
expensive vista, mortgaged,
yes, and, yes, remortgaged. (read more)
5. “the friend” by matt hart
image via vocal
The friend lives half in the grass
and half in the chocolate cake,
walks over to your house in the bashful light
of November, or the forceful light of summer.
You put your hand on her shoulder,
or you put your hand on his shoulder.
The friend is indefinite. You are both
so tired, no one ever notices the sleeping bags
inside you and under your eyes when you’re talking
together about the glue of this life… (read more)
Featured Image via Medium
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Our Favorite Tolkien & Lewis Apocrypha
Tolkien and Lewis were both in residence at Oxford for many years, studying and teaching both. They were also close friends, even though they disagreed on almost everything. Sure, they had a shared interest in language, and in what we now call fantasy, but they disagreed on religion, and on the tones of their books. There are also a lot of stories about their friendship, few confirmed, but all amazing. Here are our favorites!
1. The Lamppost
Image via Dissolve
There’s a story that says Lewis specifically put the lamppost in Narnia because Tolkien said a good fantasy story would never have one. The sheer pettiness. What an icon. No fantasy story would have a lamppost? Well this one does! Please, TELL Lewis what his story can have. There’s no slowing him down. A lesson in spite we should really all take to heart.
2. Religion
Image via IOL
Tolkien was, as well as being a linguist and historian, quite Catholic, and Lewis found his philosophical suggestions appealing, becoming religious himself. Tolkien didn’t get what he wanted, though, because though Lewis became more religious, he was Protestant, and Tolkien didn’t at all appreciate how much religion was in Lewis’ books. Kinda played himself.
3. The Draft
Image via The Creative Penn
Apparently when Lewis first read his draft of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe to Tolkien and a croup of friends, Tolkien hated it. He thought it was terrible and combined too many mythologies. He wanted more consistent world building, and I don’t have a good source for this, but I’ve heard he even told Lewis to stop writing.
Featured image via J A Carlisle
