2023-06-04 06:25

📚 What I finished reading in April & May (spoiler: not much).

finished
2023-05-08 13:05

Last, next.

94: Kraft Plus (Wednesday Red)
95: Great Lakes (Huron)

Two Field Notes memo books side by side: one used, one new

succession
2023-04-20 16:59

Now playing:

cover for the album Secret Stratosphere by William Tyler and the Impossible Truth showing an illustration of an enormous orange sphere partially draped by a white cloth floating in the sky, with several small clouds nearby

2023-04-08 15:14

Another bookmark just resurfaced, this time from Blue Whale in Charlottesville, where I spent some time in the summer of 2000.

bookmark for Blue Whale Book in Charlottesville VA

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

bookmark
2023-04-04 16:59

Last, next.

93: Signs of Spring (Ghost Flower)
94: Kraft Plus (Wednesday Red)

Two Field Notes memo books side by side: one used, one new

succession
2023-04-01 09:24

Now playing:

Cover image for T Spoon Phillips' album, Lost and Haunted Ways, showing the stone wall of a ruined castle on a green hill, with the English flag (red cross on a white field) flying.

music
2023-03-29 10:49

📚 What I finished reading in February & March.

finished
2023-03-17 16:20

What? 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”

2023-03-16 20:55

Now Playing:

Album cover for the improv album Monstrance by Andy Partridge, Barry Andrews, and Martyn Barker, showing a series of orange and black ovals, as if looking down a deep well made of orange and black plastic, with the word Monstrance across the middle of the image in a typeface that seems almost deliberately designed to be virtually illegible

music
2023-03-16 18:35

Now Playing:

Album cover for the jazz album Trickster by guitarist Miles Okazaki, showing a paper hillside and two origami figures, a coyote and a raven, looking at each other

music
2023-03-11 15:56

Oh look, that’s me reading some poems at the above/ground press 2023 AWP (unofficial) offsite (virtual) reading.

2023-03-09 11:58

Twenty Years

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.

OTD
2023-03-08 08:50

I 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.

2023-03-03 08:09

Now Playing:

cover image for the album Travel by the Necks, showing a dark blue field with several gold arrows pointing mostly to the right but with a few faint images pointing left

music
2023-03-03 06:22

Oh look, it’s Bandcamp Friday again.

2023-02-28 21:05

Happy 50th to Gravity’s Rainbow.

A copy of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon next to a banana-shaped pouch for the game Bananagrams.

OTD Pynchon
2023-02-19 22:20

Now Playing:

Cover image for the album Melt by Blank Gloss, showing a brutalist concrete staircase from below, and beyond is a pale blue sky with a soft pink cloud

music
2023-02-19 07:14

Season Cycle

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.

2023-02-18 07:25

Last, next.

92: Kraft (graph)
93: Signs of Spring (Ghost Flower)

Two Field Notes memo books side by side: one used, one new

succession
2023-02-12 15:17

Now Playing:

Cover image of XTC's 1982 album English Settlement, showing the Uffington Chalk Horse on a plain green field and title and band name barely visible in embossed letters

Released on this day 41 years ago.

music OTD
2023-02-11 08:19

Let me remind you that it’s always possible that tomorrow, all of Sappho’s poems might turn up somewhere. Tomorrow!

2023-02-11 06:26

When it comes to Covid, I’m starting to feel like a final girl.

2023-02-10 14:05

Now playing:

cover image for the album A Light for Attracting Attention by the Radiohead-adjacent band The Smile, showing what appears to be a cartoon rendering of a map of a large lake or inland sea with tributaries and rivers flowing in and out and several stylized mountain ranges or hills; a compass rose or red sun occupies the top right corner

music
2023-02-09 08:29

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.

image of the book Dancing with the Dead: the Essential Red Pine Translations, published by Copper Canyon Press

2023-02-08 17:58

Now playing:

Cover image for Nils Frahm's album Music For Animals, showing a lake in the background and an arm in silhouette holding a plastic bag with water and a small fish; the water in the bag lines up with the horizon in the distance; the sun is reflected in the surface of the lake but the arm blocks our view of it

music