If you’re in Truckee CA next weekend or have thoughts of being there, come to this! On Saturday afternoon I’ll be reading my story And So a Terror, which appeared in drip literary magazine, @driplitmag, www.driplitmag.com/theriault-8. Say hello if you’re there.

4/1/1919 Maine Governor Carl Milliken signed a law criminalizing the use of French in public schools, except in language classes. One of the most racist and culturally repressive acts in our nation’s history. A government-led campaign of forced assimilation targeting French Catholic immigrants.

Gone at 90, gone too soon. We are fortunate in having what we do from Agnès Varda. We are desolate in having no hope of more.

Muni buses in San Francisco now bear ads for AI companies. Often they wrap the entire bus. They are incomprehensible to the ordinary San Franciscan (if I’m one). The geniuses of tech seem to have decided that to impress their kind the ancient medium of print on public transit is the way to go.

Mario Vargas LLosa habría cumplido hoy 90 años. Lo celebramos con esta maravillosa fotografía que retrata una generación literaria: Juan García Hortelano, Julio Cortázar, Salvador Clotas, Félix de Azúa, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Barral, Gabriel García Márquez y José María Castellet. Barcelona, 1970

Line from this morning’s reading of Paul Éluard: J’ai besoin des oiseaux pour parler à la foule. And so, Messiaen: youtu.be/aPHuY5ZrVQI?...

I’m looking again at the letters of Madame de Sévigné for something I’m working on and I find this, from 27June1672, on Mme de Longueville, all too applicable now: Enfin la guerre n’a été faite que pour tuer son pauvre enfant. In the end the war was made only to kill her poor child.

As holiday gift I bought my entomologist wife Moths of Western North America from @princetonupress.bsky.social. She’s enjoying it, & as she goes through it leaves it open where she stops. So I know that for so many species the larval hosts are unknown. All that gnawing, and what’s gnawed is mystery.

I’m not in Baltimore for AWP (maybe Chicago next year) but my stories are, two very different from each other and … different. If you’re there stop by McNeese Review (booth 870) and Lone Mountain Literary Society (table t403) and have a look at The Excelsior Water Tower and The Garden of Glass.

The answer as of yesterday is Yes, still more is.

The McNeese Review 63 is out with my story The Excelsior Water Tower & notes on writing it the editors requested (& George Saunders as a neighbor!). I look forward to reading all my neighbors. You can order our work at www.mcneese.edu/thereview/po... Many thx to editors Taryn White & Michael Robins

Mademoiselle Billaud after winning a cyclocross race February 14, 1925

Yesterday, after updates from both Apple and Microsoft, scrolling between chapters at section or page breaks stopped working in my MSWord. Attempts to get MS help resulted in the twirly wheel of death. Is this a product of Microsoft layoffs and AI adoption? Contemplating alternative software.

Youngest bro often quotes a prof of his from long ago: ‘Shakespeare. Every time I re-read him it’s like he knows everything that’s happened to me since I read him last.’

The poster for my forthcoming event in Oxford...

Brutal string. My forebears escaped from Acadie up into the Bas-St-Laurent region of Québec. This is what they escaped.

He rode, so we rode. Yesterday many hundreds of cyclists took over the northern part of San Francisco, stopping traffic bay to beach, Golden Gate Park to Golden Gate Bridge, and passed the VA hospital, where we slowed to mourn a nurse who cared for veterans before ICE murdered him.

I came through Burlingame CA on my bike ride today & the suburban high school kids were flooding the intersection by the Catrain station & carrying signs, MELT ICE etc. I raised a fist for them & one even responded in kind, skinny arm, small fist. From such tender beginnings good things may come.

People are organizing We Ride in Unity rides on Saturday, January 31, in memory of Alex Pretti. Here's an article with a map of where rides are happening. I'm also posting info for rides in this thread. You're welcome to post for your own area in the comments.

18 langues à présent dans Wikipédia pour les articles sur le meurtre d'Alex Pretti par l'ICE à Minneapolis.

In which he demonstrates to himself that at 70 this is still possible to him on a bicycle, and wonders if still more is.

Introduce yourself with: 1 movie 1 book 1 TV show 1 album Les Enfants du paradis Ulysses The Prisoner Hejira

We’ve been married forty-four years today.

Back from a bike ride yesterday I learned Lone Mountain Lit will publish my story The Garden of Glass. Then, about to celebrate, I saw the news. The story runs some of the long arc of US violence & militarism thru a tiny San Francisco backyard. Now I’m at once glad & horrified to have written it.

Organizers in Twin Cities making rare plea for folks to share broadly: ICE ops have changed & escalated this week. They've moved to a 'flood-the-zone' strategy, nabbing anyone they can from bus stops, the sidewalk, cars, or homes. This means indiscriminate abductions and obviously no warrants.

We’re in a room across town from home to celebrate our anniversary early. Sushi dinner, moules marinières lunch, & I had a shop reopen my left ear piercing, which closed 2yrs ago when I left the earring out for frequent x-rays for a fractured neck. Good to be alive with the woman I’ve loved so long.

Yeah I can live with this.

The early role in the New England whaling industry of Jews who had fled persecution in their native Portugal, the long role of the Wampanoag, Wampanoag-carved whale stamps to record the take, and more: Yesterday’s entry in Flaming Hydra’s Moby Dick Week gives great, great context to the novel.

A little taste of my San Francisco ‘hood, the Excelsior: Walking home with banh mi for movie night from the Vietnamese takeout place next door to the Hawaiian BBQ, we came by this taquería shut down for a private fiesta, and these guys sounding pretty good.

Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste being swept away reaching out like a drowning man in the waves of the joyous Parisian Mardi Gras crowd, while Arletty as Garance in her carriage becomes ever more distant. Les Enfants du paradis.

Could someone leak Canada the Epstein files? We'll only use them in self defence, honest.

I am of an age and of a crowd of siblings (we’re 9) where the 3rd generation is multiplying, and today’s beautiful and fragile new arrival and hope in the future is my great-nephew Luís José.

My story “And So a Terror” is out for a predawn run through San Francisco’s Excelsior District now in issue 8 of driplitmag.com, the “fear” edition. Tie on your running shoes and tag along: www.driplitmag.com/issue-8-fear

Complete the 3rd draft of a very very long novel. Start submitting self-contained chapters from it. Find a taker for a collection of 20 stories pub’d since 2022. Complete a 5th run of 10 stories (since 2022) through 4th or 5th draft and begin a 6th run.

Got up at night for old man reasons, heard an owl but didn’t recognize its hoots. Sad experience says I can’t trust memory to carry to morning what I encounter in thought or fact by night, so I made a note of the hoots’ rhythm. My wife insisted I post it. Audubon says it was a great horned owl.

Also, says this Ironworker, whatever place they’ve earned, it isn’t a seat on that beam.

After writing a poem on language, re-reading some Wittgenstein today.

Busy literary 24hrs. This a.m. @twinbirdreview.bsky.social published my story I and the I-not-I. A roving lineman who can no longer rove finds an alternative self who can: www.twinbirdreview.com/issue-32--wi... And last night the magazine drip, driplitmag.com, accepted my story And So a Terror.

Now I live by a famous strand where seabirds cry in the small hours like incredible souls and even the range wall of the promenade that I press down on for conviction hardly tempts me to credit it. -Seamus Heaney, In Illo Tempore

Hoy para el día de Santa Barbara y @mariabustillos.com : “Dicen que cada vez que cae la lluvia vuelven a renacer las esperanzas.” -La Excelencia, “Ochun y Changó” youtube.com/watch?v=MQ1G...

Parce que Wikipedia est fondée sur le principe du partage libre et égal des savoirs et que dans partage libre et égal des savoirs il y a deux substantifs et deux adjectifs que Musk et ses amis détestent.

okay, nice little jolt in a San Francisco quake just now

And over on French Wikipedia, the delicious controversy, one that seems a luxury here, is whether Cinderella’s slippers were of glass or of squirrel fur:

Morning poetry Seamus Heaney

Tonight’s head of radicchio from my San Francisco fall garden.

Cost me more than an hour of sleep, but I rescued my wife from a mosquito last night. I am merciless in fulfilling this marital obligation. San Francisco fortunately doesn’t impose it often.

I’d love to attach this Diane Seuss poem to ChatGPT like a block of C4, light its fuse, and walk away in slow motion.

sorry to report that if you want to get up early to write for an hour & exercise outside, you have to get out of bed when the alarm goes off in the morning

Over at @flaminghydra.com, a first verse of fado?: