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”
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 was 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.
Nothing like receiving a shipment notification for something you bought so long ago, you don’t remember what it is. I guess I’ll find out on Friday.
If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.
—Russell Hoban, The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973)
SA4QEShe sang the song very softly:
I do not like the way you slide,
I do not like your soft inside,
I do not like you lots of ways,
And I could do for many days
Without eggs.
“What did you say, Frances?” asked Father.
“Nothing,” said Frances, spreading jam on another slice of bread.
“Why do you keep eating bread and jam,” asked Father, “when you have a lovely soft-boiled egg?”
“One of the reasons I like bread and jam,” said Frances, “is that it does not slide off your spoon in a funny way.”
—Russell Hoban, Bread & Jam for Frances (1964)
SA4QEHappiness can be unsettling, like catching a baby that someone has thrown out of a window.
—Russell Hoban, Amaryllis Night & Day (2001)
SA4QERussell Hoban, Riddley Walker:
Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it werent you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.
SA4QE…swimming, swimming, the eye held by the sun, no sharks in the mind, nothing in the mind.
—Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary (1975)
