One Thing Leads to Another

One thing leads to another and I came across two poets who write in a style similar to mine.

I recommend them:  Craig Dworkin, and Robert Grenier.  As an example here’s a Craig Dworkin poem, a wonderful one, from his book Motes (a fabulous bargain at the Kindle price):

QUAIL DAMAGE

how sad for

those birds

Another recommendation---and a fascinating and easy two-day read---is The Professor and the Madman:  A tale of murder, insanity and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester.  Behind the scenes in the creation of the OED.  Wiki-schmiki----how did they do it?  And where would we be without it?

Finally, this Saturday (June 20, 2014), the city where I live celebrates the Summer Solstice with a big parade through downtown and concomitant festivities and merrymaking everywhere else. I’ve not been a devout parade–goer in my time here, but this year, after what has transpired (and been overcome) in my family in the 12 months preceding, I’m ready to rumble, and am planning to blatantly defy doctors’ orders and binge on everything I’ve been specifically told to moderate or avoid---with gluttonous emphasis (or énfasis, as they say in Spanish) on spinach and broccoli and bread and cheese and wine, thank you very much.  If there is another posting after this one, we’ll know I made it.

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Summer...travel...reading...Mary Shelley

Permeated by a sense of transition, this time of year in North America is redolent with graduations, summer plans, travel plans…travel…travel.

 

Amazon’s Kindle re-kindled my reading desires, and among the works loaded onto my reader, like giraffes and zebras populating the savannah, is the travel writing of Mary Shelley, essays and letters, some nearly 200 years old----200 years!----recounting her travels from England through Europe.  

 

Her observations are sympathetic in a general sense, her discourses on politics and art insightful, and her quite entertainingly bitchy and bratty impatience and exasperation with ugliness (people and geography) and inconvenience (transportation and lodging snafus) secure the impression that travel two centuries ago is, in its essence, not much different from travel today, sublime but also, as everyone who has done it right knows, hard work.  Mary Shelley’s travel writing is an ideal companion for when the journey gets tough.  Mary Shelley's Amazon page.