Dreamers Rise

UNDERGROUND RIVERS

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Youth

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My father's namesake in a photo taken in September 1897, when he would have been about six. According to the inscription on the back, pa...
Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Escaping the Waters (Defoe / Dante)

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I have no idea whether Defoe read Dante, but there is a possible echo of the Inferno in a 1706 pamphlet devoted to the question of the prop...
2 comments:
Saturday, March 02, 2024

Fate

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Since it's in Lithuania there's virtually no chance that I will ever visit it, but it cheers me no end to know that there is now an ...
Monday, February 19, 2024

Prickly issues

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The poet Donald Hall was born and raised in suburban Connecticut, but he spent many of his summers at his maternal grandparents' farm in...
Monday, February 05, 2024

Who was Rará?

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Cortázar's short story "Carta a una señorita en París" (Letter to a Young Lady in Paris) is narrated by a man who has a peculi...
1 comment:
Monday, January 29, 2024

The Drifter

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When I was growing up there was a commercial artist in our neighborhood named Gordon Johnson, whose specialty was paintings for advertising ...
Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Notebook: James Boswell Imitates a Cow

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John Brewer, describing a night at the Royal Drury Lane Theatre in 1769: During the hour before the curtain rose the theatre was filled by w...
Tuesday, January 02, 2024

Notes for a Commonplace Book (30)

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Henry David Thoreau: I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their vario...
Thursday, December 14, 2023

Forthcoming

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Something for me to look forward to: this Spanish translation of a book by the Italian writer Leonardo Piccione. The publisher's descri...
2 comments:
Monday, December 04, 2023

Produce department

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We're lying in bed and there's a rap on the window glass. I get up and open the window. A middle-aged couple are standing on the sid...
Tuesday, November 28, 2023

(Not) Reading George Eliot

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Two hundred pages into my second attempt to read Middlemarch I've thrown in the towel. I went into it with high hopes, having recently ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Welcoming committee

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We're in the process of completing our second relocation of the year, having most recently moved from temporary digs in Portsmouth NH to...
4 comments:
Monday, September 25, 2023

Hard Times

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Sarah Orne Jewett was known for her portrayals of the lives of the farmers and fisher-folk of her native state, but she wrote at least one s...
2 comments:
Saturday, September 09, 2023

The Harbor of Lost Ships

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Brad Fox, paraphrasing William Beebe's "final, disorganized notes on marine subjects," here describing the fate of shipwrec...
Sunday, August 06, 2023

August notebook

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Here's a little object lesson in the compartmentalization of modern life. One afternoon we went out for a drive and as we headed to our ...
Thursday, July 27, 2023

Sweet Thames Flow Softly

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I've always enjoyed this Ewan MacColl song, which I first heard on Planxty's eponymous debut album, but this gentle version (featur...
1 comment:
Monday, July 17, 2023

Displacement

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About six weeks ago we moved out of the house where we had lived since 1990, leaving the town where we had roots stretching back much longer...
2 comments:
Sunday, July 09, 2023

Perpetual Care

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A cemetery, New Hampshire.
Thursday, June 15, 2023

Findings

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Miscellaneous sightings from June wanderings. From top: self-portrait with kodama ; white morph of pink lady's-slipper ; trailside sh...
Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Reading Matter

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Over the past few weeks we've been in the midst of major preparations for an upcoming relocation, but a few days ago I realized that I h...
4 comments:
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