The subject line is from Yehuda Amichai, whose poem "God Full of Mercy" is among those I bookmarked in Into English, which I finally returned to the library this morning. The book was recommended by Marissa Lingen earlier year, and I posted about it Monday morning and yesterday night at Vary the Line.

Reading Robert Alter's compilation of Amichai ( Read more... )

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[Today's subject line quotes Stanislaw Jerzy Lee. I forget where I first encountered it.]

A morsel of lagniappe: working at home all day means I get to see these tiny starry flowers when they are open. They close up as night falls, which means I'd previously seen them only as buds.


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Via
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Via
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It's rarely a good sign when I'm quoting Wordsworth, since I do not care for him or his verse, and that's all I'm going to say here about world affairs ( Read more... )

Repeatedly staying up past 2 a.m. to meet deadlines exacts a price, which made itself known earlier today in my absent-mindedly tossing good pepper morsels into the compost pot instead of the to-be-pickled bowl, and not feeling up to fishing them out. It is okay. It was a 99-cent bag of already-iffy capiscum annuums, some far gone enough that the ( Read more... )

I was put in the right front of the dragon boat during practice tonight, and the coach emphasized that those of us in the first two rows needed to stay zen no matter what was being shouted at us, and that what might feel slow to us in the front would be impossible to keep up with in the back if we went too fast, because of how water works ( Read more... )

On the one hand, AARP trying to recruit me before I turn 50? Goddamn...

On the other hand, the issue of O Magazine they sent with the latest pitch includes a page on quilter Bisa Butler, who "may spend 20 hours layering hundreds of silk pieces to creat eone hyperrealistic face." The lead image is of her Four Little Girls, September 15, 1963. And ( Read more... )

Today's subject line comes from an interview of Michael Van Valkenburgh, a landscape designer who "never met a tree I didn't like." Also: "When a new garden is being constructed, Van Valkenburgh has been known to use his body as a tree" to figure out where things should go ( Read more... )