When I saw signs the owner of the land next to ours is plannning to log it, we made an offer on 20 acres to try to build a better buffer. I’ve been walking it every day just to get a feel for it, and there was a riot of elf cups coming up yesterday. …
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My Latest Literary Obsession: Bring on the Bard
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest … Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? @UncitedPod re: pet pics pic.twitter.com/GL2ZZCev1r — …
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Of Walking In Ice … from Berlin to Paris via Athens (Ohio)
I’m wading through a dreary winter rain, bound for Paris with Werner Herzog. Today dripped into existence more than dawned. From the cabin window, I watch water course through the diamond-patterned bark of a nearby ash that’s slowly succumbing to boring insects. More distant trees are a jumble of twigs floating in a cloud crowning …
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The Tao of the Carolina wren
A 7-degree Wednesday morning. Dawn barely broken. Sydney the Cockatoo perched atop his cage next to the black walnut breakfast table. Normally, he’d spend the night out in the Forest Room, which stays surprisingly warm despite its three walls of windows. I keep the HVAC fan running to circulate warm air from the wood stove. …
‘An Elephant Sitting Still’
I’ve been dabbling in Chinese cinema recently, with mixed results. I swung and missed with the Flowers of War, ostensibly about the Rape of Nanking, a topic that I’ve read about extensively, but it turned out to be a variation on the hookers-with-a-heart-of-gold film mashed up with an American action picture (though the lone Chinese …
A piliated woodpecker and a whitetail buck walk into a bar …
On Reading Rilke: The Delight and Terror of Mortality
And how bewildered is any womb-born creaturethat has to fly. As if terrified and fleeingfrom itself, it zigzags through the air, the waya crack runs through a teacup. So the batquivers across the porcelain of evening. — Marie Rainer Rilke, Duino Elegies, No. 8 I’ve been reading Rilke, driven by a bungled attempt to taunt …
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Reading List of a Plague Year
If there was an upside to spending the better part of 2020 sheltering in place, it was that I had plenty of time to read. I generally had two books going at any given time, one audio and one text, with the text usually on my Kindle but occasionally buried in glyphs on wafer-thin chunks …
Keeping my cockatoo warm …
With the temps dipping into the teens recently, I’ve been closing off the back porch at night and pulling Sydney inside since the woodstove doesn’t do a great job of heating that space. So we’ve been spending our mornings up close and personal, which means we’re watching parrot videos on YouTube and having breakfast together …
Birdsongs as sweet as the sound of a chainsaw …
I’ve been listening to an audiobook version of “The Bird Way” by Jennifer Ackerman and she was discussing the incredible vocalizations of lyrebirds, prompting me to Google around so I could hear what she was talking about. That’s how I came across this example. Wow. This is the coolest 2 minutes and 54 seconds you’ll …
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