In the biography I just finished reading (a life: e. e. cummings), the author, Susan Cheever, ends with an update on what Patchin Place, the Greenwich Village cul-de-sac where Cummings lived and wrote for many years, looks like today. She begins one then-and-now comparison with "The place where Dylan Thomas and Cummings sat and talked about ( Read more... )

Truth be told, I haven't the slightest. I mean, if they were advertised as "hardy mums", can I go and ask for my money back? Shrivelled within a few weeks' time hardly meets my definition of hardy. That reminds me of the Demetri Martin joke about how he got a cactus plant and then it died a month later: "I was really depressed because I was ( Read more... )

"Alone until she dies, Bessie Bighead, hired help, born in the workhouse, smelling of the cowshed, snores bass and gruff on a couch of straw in a loft in Salt Lake Farm and picks a posy of daisies in Sunday Meadow to put on the grave of Gomer Owen who kissed her once by the pig-sty when she wasn't looking and never kissed her again although she was ( Read more... )

In a rather round-about way, as is often the case, today I discovered and was enchanted by The Decemberists' The Crane Wife. Where I was in 2006 when the album was released is a puzzlement. Reading that "The Island" is based on The Tempest was enough to send me into geek overdrive. I was unfamiliar with the Crane Wife folktale, but it sounds so ( Read more... )