José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, Saudade (Longing) (detail), 1899, oil on canvas, 77 1/2″ x 40″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A kitchen is the best—I mean the saddest—room for tears. A bedroom is too easy, a bathroom too private, a living room too formal. If someone falls to pieces in the kitchen, in the space of work and nourishment, they must be truly coming undone. The bright lights offer no comfort, only illuminate. The floor should be vinyl and cold.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman—feminist, writer, sufferer of postpartum and other depressions—proposed in 1898 that private kitchens be abolished, as the work they demanded of women left them with no time for any other activities. “The cleaning required in each house would be much reduced,” she argues, “by the removal of the two chief elements of household dirt,—grease and ashes.” She does not mention a corresponding reduction in tears.

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Some churches have designated “crying rooms,” soundproofed spaces to which parents of wailing infants can retreat if they are concerned about bothering their fellow parishioners. Often the room will have a large window, so that its inhabitants can still look out upon the nave and chancel, as well as speakers, so they can hear the sound of the sermon and hymns. People unfamiliar with the practice—guests, for instance, at a wedding or funeral—sometimes, understandably, mistake its purpose. The poets I know who have made this mistake are without exception very taken with the idea. Read More

Here is the grandmother of the English novel, Fanny Burney:

Looks young in the picture, right? Well, that’s ’bout how young she was when her first novel came out, in 1778. She was twenty-five.

That novel (Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World) made her famous. I’m reading it right now. It’s nothing like what I thought it was gonna be. I thought it was gonna be comic; it’s realistic and intense.

She wrote only four novels: three hits and one dud, or so I’ve been told a hundred times. Very few people read any of ’em, unless you’re psycho for the history of the novel. Then you have to read all of ’em.

I think her name puts people off sometimes. It’s like her name is “Kimmy Peanut.” How can these books be any good if they were written by somebody named Kimmy Peanut.

Plus, just from that engraving, you can see how all these white-wigged literary guys (Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, et al.) would be dying to pat her on the head. Which basically gives you another excuse for skipping the books. (She must be overrated, right?)

I wasn’t gonna read her novels either. I just wanted to look at her journals and letters. I’d seen ’em quoted from time to time, and it looked to me like she had an eye for the telling detail. She was clearly witty and down to earth, and she knew everybody, including King George III.

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