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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.

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

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.

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.

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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

Oh look, it’s Bandcamp Friday again.

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.

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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

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.

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Last, next.

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

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