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

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.)

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

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.

What I finished reading in February & March.

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”

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.

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.