📚 What I finished reading in April & May (spoiler: not much).
finishedAnother bookmark just resurfaced, this time from Blue Whale in Charlottesville, where I spent some time in the summer of 2000.
(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)
bookmarkWhat? A newsletter? Does the world really need another one of these?
Don’t worry! Mine is obscure, sporadic, and utterly vacuous! You will never feel any pressure to learn anything, be challenged in your beliefs, or even entertained. So go ahead! Subscribe here: “Three Things”
Oh look, that’s me reading some poems at the above/ground press 2023 AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) reading.
On March 3rd, 2003, this quote by Walter Ong was my first post on a long-dead Textpattern blog I installed at a long-gone domain:
The personal diary is a very late literary form, in effect unknown until the seventeenth century… The kind of verbalized solipsistic reveries it implies are a product of consciousness as shaped by print culture. And for which self am I writing? Myself today? As I think I will be ten years from now? As I hope I will be? For myself as I imagine myself or hope others may imagine me? Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxieties and often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries. The diarist can no longer live with his or her fiction.
There were some lost years and there were some silent years, but I’ve always tried to have some sort of blog percolating quietly, like a sad little aquarium in the corner. Even if the fish died from time to time, there were at least a few snails working their methodical way along the glass, and a patient deep-sea diver gazing out impassively from behind its mossy visor, awaiting, like all of us, for a renaissance of wonder.
OTDI have at times heard people, perhaps in an attempt to be clever, point out that the TV show M∗A∗S∗H ran for 11 years when the entire Korean War only lasted three.
Sure, okay.
But all 256 episodes, back to back, only run about 110 hours, whereas the war lasted 27,072 hours.
Oh look, it’s Bandcamp Friday again.
We’ve been in our house for nearly eleven months, so we’ve seen almost a full season cycle here. The sun has moved around, once again peeking in windows to shine in corners that have been dark for a few months.
The family of five crows wintered nearby but were barely noticeable. They have suddenly become much more active in the last week or so, calling to each other in the mornings before dawn.
I may be seeing signs of spring, but two more feet of snow are forecast this week.
Let me remind you that it’s always possible that tomorrow, all of Sappho’s poems might turn up somewhere. Tomorrow!
When it comes to Covid, I’m starting to feel like a final girl.
Ah ha! The mystery package arrived yesterday afternoon, two days early. I had managed, eventually, to work out what it probably was before it arrived, but I still had my doubts.