I've been reading Maintenance: Of Everything, by Stewart Brand, which is great, but I was just now looking in the garage for some old college stuff and found one of his Whole Earth Catalogs (Fall 1969 - I bought it used, I wasn't yet in college in '69). Wow, what a 70s rush!

Just wonderful: Martin Schoeller's portraits of the guys who impersonate/interpret George Washington at historical parks and such. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I read The Gardens of Mien Ruys, by Conny den Hollander (Timber Press, 2025). Ruys (1904-1999) is an icon of early Modernist landscape design. My uni library doesn't have anything by or about her (!), and the county library rejected my request that they buy it, but then they acquired it after all.

a birthday stack for birthday boy Hermann Hesse (1877)

I read The Last Gentleman, by Walker Percy (1966). In part a road trip, a novel of manners, and bildungsroman, with Southern eccentricities. I loved it.

I read the first volume of Paideia, Werner Jaeger's visionary overview of ancient Greek culture (1933; Highet's translation, 1939). Covers Homer, Hesiod, Tyrtaeus, Solon, Theognis, Pindar, the Tragedians, the Sophists, Aristophanes, & more, up through Thucydides.

made me think of this bit of lunacy, the Faxa Bay nest of Icelandic filmmaker Hrafn Gunnlaugsson, which I stumbled upon a few years ago.

I read The Soul of Brutes, by Carlo Ginzburg (Seagull Books, 2026). I was sorry to hear that he passed away today. RIP, Professore

I read A Mere Accident, by George Moore (1887). H/T to Thomas Kitson (@thatiliazdguy.bsky.social) who has been posting it sentence by sentence. One of which tipped me into getting a copy -- I couldn't justify the cost of a first edition (or second) so I got this relatively decent hardcover POD.

It's Burl Ives' birthday (1909). Here's a couple of performances for the Ed Sullivan show, broadcast from the deck of the USS Wisconsin in 1955: 1) Ballad of Davy Crockett www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpdQ...

I read The Memory of Old Jack, by Wendell Berry (1974).

I read A Place on Earth, by Wendell Berry (1967, rev. 1983). One of his early Port William novels and one of my most-loved. "They are in the midst of what they must go through," Berry writes of the Feltners, but as much could be said of every character in the book in all their sundry situations.

I had a look at the Shikimei Sōkan [book of color names], by Wada Sanzō (1931). I think the wall of shelving in the guest bedroom would look fine in Rainette Green. The '53 Chevy pickup will be done in Pale Burnt Lake. I might do the front door in 'French Vermirion.'

A stroll in the Sixty-Acre Wood. There were Nootka roses and what promises to be a bumper crop of thimbleberries. Had the season's first handful of salmonberries.

I read The Bible, a three-year project (festina lente). I used Thomas Nelson's 1611 Edition, which follows the 1611 edition but is reset in modern type - I think it may be a reprint of a 1911 Oxford setting. The type looks very close to the first Roman-type printing of 1612.

I read Conversation in the Mountains, collected from the rather slim pickings of Paul Celan's prose. New Directions reprints Rosmarie Waldrop's 1986 translations.

I read Shopkeeping, by Peter Miller (Princeton Architectural Press, 2024). I've been a fan of Peter Miller Books since the 1980s when, although a poor architecture student, I always had money for books. It has been too long since I've visited his Post Alley shop, I'll have to rectify that soon.

120 years ago today, Terence Hanbury White was born to write this splendid book.

nice day, I got my steps in at the old Bailey hay meadow, now a restored wetland and city park.

I read The Last Movement, by Robert Seethaler (2020; 2026 translation by Charlotte Collins for Europa Editions), a novella on Gustav Mahler's last days.

Happy 91st to Lee Meriwether! A few months ago I decided to look a bit closer at the relations of my 6th great-grandmother, Anne Elizabeth Johnson née Meriwether (1694-1785). Imagine my surprise to find Catwoman there! (and Betty Jones from the classic 70s TV series 'Barnaby Jones'!)

I read Points in Time: Tales from Morocco, by Paul Bowles (1982). Episodes from Morocco's history, given the Bowles touch. A kind of prose poem on his adopted country.

Listening (while doing chores): "Istanbul": Gambist Jordi Savall and his group Hespèrion XXI play works by (or collected by) Moldavian prince and polymath Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723) together with pieces from Sephardic and Armenian traditions.

I read On Duties [De Officiis], by Marcus Tullius Cicero, in Walter Miller's fine 1913 translation for the Loeb Classical Library.

It's still Wednesday here (barely) so ...

I read La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, 2001), by Benedetta Origo, among others.

I read The Meaning of a Liberal Education, by Everett Dean Martin (1926), based on lectures given at the Cooper Union. His approach is largely a Via Negativa, warning us off what is not a Liberal Education, with broad hints as to what it might be.

I read The Water Statues, by Fleur Jaeggy (1980; 2021 translation by Gini Alhadeff). Like a dream, uncertain, enigmatic, seductive.

I read Love Sonnets & Elegies, by Louise Labé (in Richard Sieburth's 2014 translation for NYRB/Poets). I thought they might have some 16th century historical interest, but I ended up enjoying them very much.

I read The World of John Cleaveland, by Christopher M. Jedrey (1979). A great study of rural New England between the Great Awakening and the Revolution, with the 'Separatist' minister at its heart. It really is a world - family, church, community, law, politics, and economics, brought to vivid life.

I read The Comedy of Errors, by Wm. Shakespeare (Pelican Shakespeare, 2018). So it doesn't achieve the Shakespearian Sublime, it's still fun. I read Bloom's bit on it in Invention of the Human, and now I may pull down Plautus's Menaechmi, one of WS's sources.

I read Collected Poems and Other Verse, by Stéphane Mallarmé (Oxford World's Classics, 2006; translations by the Blackmores, E.H. & A.M.).

I read The International Style, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock & Philip Johnson (1932), after finding a box in the garage of my old architecture books.

I read In the Old 'Sun,' a 1908 story/novella by Hermann Hesse, which I believe is not collected anywhere (in English) but in vol 19 of 'German Classics,' a 20-volume set from 1913-14. I'd describe it as a short, German, 'Poorhouse Fair.' (The Sun was a tavern turned poorhouse.)

Happy Hundredth to Whitney Balliett (1926-2007), long-time jazz critic at The New Yorker. I've just started into American Singers. The opening profile, on composer Alec Wilder (the one non-singer in the collection), was quite good and led to some happy hours on youtube & spotify.

In honor of his birthday (1878) my Robert Walser books held a reunion. I'm going to sit down with a cup of coffee and read 'A Field of Snow on a Slope of the Rosenburg,' by Guy Davenport.

I read In the Orchard: Poems with Birds, by Anne Stevenson (Enitharmon Press, 2016). Some of the poet's poems had birds in them: they're collected here. Finely enlivened with etchings by Alan Turnbull.

I read The Yellow Dog, by Georges Simenon (1931; 1987 translation by Linda Asher). Shady doings in the little port town of Concarneau. Revenge? And that poor yellow dog! cover photo (detail): Henry Gruyaert, Street scene - Paris, France (1985)

I read Beneath the Wheel, by Hermann Hesse (1906; 1968 translation by Michael Roloff). Interesting that both this and The Confusions of Young Törless appeared the same year, two 'Schulroman.'

I read Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen (1937). When I was very much younger I read this upon Holden Caulfield's recommendation -- an accidental library loan that he thought would "stink," but turned out to be "a very good book." A very good book, indeed, Holden.

There's a wonderful German audiobook of five of the stories by Martina Gedeck: www.audible.de/pd/Geschicht...

I read Stories of God, by Rainer Maria Rilke (1900, but in 1904 extensively revised and augmented; 1932 translation by M. D. Herter Norton, i.e., Mrs. WW Norton). They start off as droll folktales, but a universe is created in which the stories become something bigger and deeper.

I read Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult, by Bohumil Hrabal. Stories of 1950s Prague, mostly set in and around the steelworks where Hrabal, as a member of the intelligentsia, was assigned to work. First published in 1965, here translated by Paul Wilson for New Directions, 2015.

I love where he’s complaining that them sending political undesirables to work the steelworks had ruined the working class character of the place, bringing in eggheads. Which is somehow funnier knowing it’s formerly a Wittgenstein’s. Inevitable the place would get fouled up that way

On his birthday, remembering Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997). A regular in my reading ever since I read Closely Watched Trains and Too Loud a Solitude two decades ago.

Watching the Midtjylland- Nottingham Forest match and the camera landed on Bak and Cho standing side by side and now I want something Cantonese for lunch.

I read A Parish Chronicle, by Haldór Laxness (1970; 2026 translation by Philip Roughton for Archipelago Books). I thought this delightful. Maybe having once spent a delightful day in the parish had something to do with it?

I read A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami (1982; 1989 translation by Alfred Birnbaum). A shaggy dog story about a wild goose chase, as unputdownable now as the last time I read it (nearly twenty years ago).

His friend Alban Berg wrote songs based on five Altenberg "postcard texts": 5 Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskartentexten von Peter Altenberg, Op. 4 here's a 1960 version with soprano Bethany Beardslee (who turned 100! last Christmas), Robert Craft conducting: youtube.com/playlist?lis...

I read Ashantee, by Peter Altenberg (1897; translated by Katharina von Hammerstein, 2007), and Telegrams of the Soul, selections from across his career (translated by Peter Wortsman, 2005).