[The subject line's from Rilke's "Portrait of My Father as a Young Man"]

How is it mid-January already? Tu b'shevat is this weekend, and we in fact have a crepe myrtle to plant, but with one of us recovering from his Moderna booster and the other still slogging through respiratory crap, and the forecast reviving the ululations of Panic Catfish, who ( Read more... )

I have no business writing any more fic until after the holidays, but I still have a half-dozen books on UK life between 1880 and 1930 on loan from the Nashville and Vanderbilt libraries, and they of course are rabbit-hole-infested grimoires that have me looking up how wonderful Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson were -- he because he apparently ( Read more... )

This essay was nowhere on my radar when I went to the eighth floor of the Central Library stacks this afternoon. I knew I was likely to haul back across campus more books than I'd come for, but I still absolutely blame Daniel da Silva and his banter with Archie Curtis about sonnets and Seurat:


( Read more... )

[If you don't want to know anything about K.J. Charles's England World/Will Darling Adventures before reading them yourself, come back to this entry later. Since they're romance novels, I don't consider the mention of pairings = spoilers, especially given my lurid history of non-canonical shipping, but mileages do vary.]

Many things are going well ( Read more... )

I don't have time to fall back in love with Monteverdi right now, but golly, what I've seen of the 2017 Venice production so far of Il ritorno di Ulisse is fantastic (and on a completely irrelevant note, I would cast Lucile Richardot as Harriet Vane in a heartbeat were it up to looks and voice alone): https://youtu.be/Sstr12-IrjE

(My birthday ( Read more... )

Or, TFW when you start writing a drabble because the phrase "obvious competence" in Think of England delights you, as does the character it's used to describe, but an hour later you realize it's turning into a 4+1 crossover between England World and the Wimseyverse, and the next day it morphs into a three-part deeper dive that no longer includes ( Read more... )

https://www.ebay.com/itm/THE-LORD-PETER-WIMSEY-COMPANION-revised-and-expanded-2nd-ed-association-copy/323998318377Read more... )

... when you see a New York Times piece about the fish market's imminent move ...

... and your first reaction is, "Oh, saints and gills, that's going to complicate what I might yet get around to writing."

And your second reaction is to swat away the hordes of plotbunnies suddenly swarming around your ankles with each new paragraph.

This entry ( Read more... )

The Cubs are inflicting the usual dose of October heartache/heartburn, so I'm going to pickle carrots instead. (There's also work to get through, but staying away from monitors for the next few innings seems like a good idea.)

There seems to be no escaping Thoreau today, albeit in texts that address the mythologizing of him. In Mark Caldwell's The ( Read more... )

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