I read The Pastures of Heaven, by John Steinbeck (1932). A skein of stories about the inhabitants of Las Pasturas del Cielo [real-life Corral de Tierra, situated in the hills between Monterey and Salinas]. Among my Steinbeck favorites.

I read Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell (1933). I'm grateful that Orwell had these experiences (and made a fine book of them) and that I haven't.

I read Christianity & the Writer's Task, by Georges Bernanos (Wiseblood Books, 2022). I'm neither Catholic nor writer but thought the author of Mouchette & Diary of a Country Priest might have something interesting to say.

I read Distant Light [La Lucina], by Antonio Moresco (2013; 2016 translation by Richard Dixon for Archipelago Books).

I read The Old Glory, by Robert Lowell (1965), a trio of plays (Endecott and the Red Cross; My Kinsman, Major Molineux; & Benito Cereno), based on stories by Hawthorne and Melville.

I read The Invention of Love (1997), by Tom Stoppard, who has lately left us. "...what emotional storms, and oh what a tiny teacup."

I read Vaim, by Jon Fosse (2025, translated by Damion Searls). Lonely men and their boats. And one headstrong gal.

I read Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis (1943), the second in his Space Trilogy.

I read Mimes, by Marcel Schwob (1893). Short vignettes, inspired by the recent discovery of the Mimes of Herodas (3rd century BC), but transformed into something between symbolist and surreal, with a whiff of opium about them.

Gerhard Richter, 1025 Farben (1974). In situ at the Louisiana in Humlebæk, Denmark.

I read Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, 2015). Just for fun, a breezy introduction to the major meters, with a dozen or two examples of each showing its character and range of effects and uses.

#MelvilleMonday scanning dad's slides - I found this one of our 1966 31' Trojan Sea Skiff (Juneau, 1973). From which we saw lots of humpbacks and orcas.

I read A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines (1968). I do love this book.

snack for a fall day (I just got a hefty load of pecans from Limestone Creek Pecans down there in Georgia) @theorchardkeeper.bsky.social

I read Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, by Dorthe Nors (2015; 2017 translation from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra). Did I devour a whole jar of salty licorice while reading this? That I did (Lakrids by Bülow #2).

<sigh> another project . . .

I read Beowulf: Dragonslayer, by Rosemary Sutcliff (1961). Just checking it out before I hand it off to a great-nephew, a bright boy.

I read The Haidah Indians of Queen Charlotte's Islands, by James G. Swan (1874), a Smithsonian Institution paper. Swan's dream destination almost from his arrival in the Northwest, he begged the American Museum of Natural History for years and years to fund a study trip to the Queen Charlottes 1/2

I read Old Friend from Far Away: 150 Chinese Poems from the Great Dynasties, an anthology compiled and translated by C.H. Kwock & Vincent McHugh. This 1980 North Point Press edition gathers several earlier publications, really just pamphlets, sold through City Lights Bookstore.

I intended yesterday to mow the lawn one last time but it started raining so I went to the bookstore and found some good used books to bring home. Curious, the two 1970s books use the exact same typeface on the cover.

I read An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf (1978), in which the poet Ovid undergoes a surprising metamorphosis of his own.

Poking around in my mom's things I found a packet of letters, 112 of them, from my great-grandmother to my grandfather, 1938-1945. She and my gr-grandfather had just moved from Seneca, Missouri, to Olive Branch in Illinois' Little Egypt region when the letters start, 1/2

I read The Poems of François Villon, in poet Galway Kinnell's 1977 translation. A scoundrel and a scapegrace, but a poet.

I read Bucolics, by Maurice Manning (2007). A farmer addresses God ("Boss") on subjects high and low, in an Appalachian mode.

I read Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, by Raymond Carver (1983). The hunk on the cover looks like my brother did around that time.

oh lordy

Celebrating over here in my little corner: Krasznahorkai in the late lamented Music & Literature (#2, Spring 2013).

I read Ways of Seeing, by John Berger and some others (1972). Should've been called Berger's Way of Seeing.

I read Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1837). The Library of America arranges the stories chronologically by first publication in various periodicals, but also offers an arrangement by the books in which they were first collected (see pg 1479), which is how I'm making my way through them.

I read Black Light, by the poet Galway Kinnell (1966, but extensively revised for this 1980 North Point Press edition). Made me think at times of The Stranger, at times of The Sheltering Sky, with occasional wafts of Hafiz and Rumi.

I read The King Must Die, by Mary Renault (1958), the first of two novels inspired by the legend of Theseus.

I read Penitential Cries, by Susan Howe (New Directions, 2025). Two thirds of the book is her word collages (see attached example), the rest seems to have to do with getting old and hanging out at Yale's Sterling Library. Has a nice poem for her sister Fanny.

I read Autumn Journal, by Louis MacNeice (1939). Not a journal of just any autumn, it's the autumn of 1938 and much is afoot in the world.

I read Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America, by Ivan Doig (1980), his account of reading over the winter of 1978/79 the voluminous diaries of James Gilchrist Swan, an early settler on the Olympic Peninsula.

I read The Fall, by Albert Camus (1956). Gotta love a good mad confessional monologue.

my word of the day: 'grippleness,' which appears in William Watts' 1631 translation of Augustine's Confessions (for the Latin 'avaritia'). Arthur Golding had used it earlier in his 1571 translation of John Calvin's Latin Psalms, the first use found by the OED's philologists.

I read The Bible in Spain, by George Borrow (1843). The fascinating adventures of G.B., an agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, who crisscrossed Spain peddling Spanish New Testaments in the midst of one of its civil wars and in the teeth of obscurantist Roman Catholic clergy.

I read Fossil Sky, by David Hinton (2004). A curiosity from the early days of Archipelago Books, a map-folded poem, fragments that meander inside a 4' dia. circle, in no discernable order, to be wandered around in like you would a Chinese shan shui painting.

I read The Bible: A Very Short Introduction, by John Riches (2000). Less interested in what the Bible is than in the diversity of readings of it, of which he gives sundry examples. Vaporings about Ambiguity, Multiplicity, Appropriation, Identity, Alienation, etc.

Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis). A photo I took with my new Nikon F2 in 1975 (I worked in a camera store in high school).

I read Omoo, by Herman Melville (1847). I probably won't repeat the experience but it's nice finally to check this off my list.

I read The Poet Assassinated and Other Stories, by Guillaume Apollinaire (1916). My copy is the 1984 North Point Press reprint of Ron Padgett's 1968 translation. That's Apollinaire's own helmet on the cover.

I read Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner (1971). Yep, one of the great novels of the American West, but it's almost as if it were calculated to appeal specifically to me, with its settings in places like Santa Cruz, New Almaden, Boise, Grass Valley, where I grew up or have spent lots of time.

I read some Georg Trakl: Song of the West (North Point Press, 1988) & Song of the Departed (Copper Canyon, 2012), in Robert Firmage's translation, the latter a revised & expanded edition of the first.

I read Alexis, by Marguerite Yourcenar (1929; 1984 translation by Walter Kaiser). I forgive her because of the many fine books that followed, but I can't recall the last time I read a book more tedious than this.

I read Empire of Signs, by Roland Barthes (1970/1982 translation by Richard Howard). This fascinated me thirty years ago. Now it seems sublimely ridiculous, Japan analyzed by a visitor from Alpha Centauri.

I read Eggs, by Fanny Howe (1970), her first collection of poems.

I read Five Great Odes, by Paul Claudel (1900-07; 1967 translation by Edward Lucie-Smith). Ecstatic, in long lines that often overrun the page, made me think sometimes of Whitman, sometimes of Hopkins, its theology perhaps not far from Traherne's.

I read The World of Herodotus, by Aubrey de Sélincourt (1962). Hardly a chapter without something your caviling scholar would disallow, but the same could be said for Herodotus himself, so Aubrey's in excellent company. A fine book.

My afternoon: in the shade of my favorite chestnut tree, with a hefeweizen and a book ostensibly about Herodotus. It will soon be a bit risky to sit here.