From which exile he escapes, passing through San Francisco, where he pops up in a short story of mine, published in Sortes: drive.google.com/file/d/1TMIu...

From my garden for tonight’s dinner, snow peas and (for omelettes) fines herbes (chervil, parsley, chives, tarragon/cerfeuil, persil, ciboulette, estragon) (and red bell pepper from Safeway, because, you know, San Francisco’s climate gives, San Francisco’s climate denies)

We are going to savor this one. Our client, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is freed of these outrageous, vindictive charges. It’s a good day.

20 mai 1799 : Naissance de l’écrivain français Honoré de Balzac. Il est l'auteur de l'une des plus imposantes œuvres romanesques de la littérature française, avec plus de quatre-vingt-dix romans et nouvelles. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C... #CeJourLà

My grandmother recalled being led by an open coffin where lay my great-grandfather Docite Pelletier, struck by lightning while running with rosary in hand for the shelter of a barn in Northern Maine. He was, she said, black all down one side. This orphaned her. Now I picture this going through him.

My copy of Querencia Press’s magazine Scavengers has arrived. Hanging onto its tail is my short-short story Bolt Head, which plays with prose form. My thanks to Editor/Curator Shilo Niziolek. It’s a wild ride. See for yourself: www.querenciapress.com/scavengers-3...

Word has come that Tension Literary will publish my story The Gift of a Ring, which somehow combines Ironworkers Union picnics, protein construction, swimming, Jane Austen, and fugal counterpoint. I’ll post a link when it’s out so you can see how. My thanks to editors Libby Feltis and Madison Betts.

Owl pellet from under our San Francisco Monterey pine today. We often hear great horned owls at night. Forgive the blur, and note the flecks of bone in the fur matrix.

Brought home tomato plants from Sloat Garden out by the beach across San Francisco this afternoon on my City beater bike. Every urban cyclist could use a city beater, something almost no one wants to steal, something not at all pretty and that totes a load, as a modern burro that needs no grazing.

Inexplicable, I suppose, officially. But the Post Office seems officially to anticipate a prolonged effect.

The Muni rider concurs.

Mr. President, as soon as you’re done with your reading, let’s put together a seminar.

At coffee this a.m. I was talking to my wife about kids in my 1960s parochial elementary school wearing pimp socks (no moral judgment, just a hosiery type then in San Francisco urban lingo) then was obliged to provide lengthy explanation. We here occupy the same country but in botched translations.

Okay I like this, but I am generally fond of the unhinged stringbean dancing to which I once aspired, and also of a sweet falsetto: youtube.com/watch?v=kb3V...

A gorgeous thing. My copy of Issue 3 of The Nature of Things, from San Francisco’s own Lone Mountain Lit, landed in my mailbox, and with it my piece The Garden of Glass, hybrid of garden memoir and sequence of fictions. It’s at store.bookbaby.com/book/lmls-th... if you want one.

I'm in London on Sunday if anyone doesn't mind buying a ticket to hear me read some poems. Link below.

Por una curiosa coincidencia #Sartre falleció un 15 de abril, el de 1980, y Simone de Beavoir el 14 de abril de 1986. 45 años después de su muerte recordamos una de sus reflexiones que más nos gustan: "Como todos los soñadores, confundí el desencanto con la verdad”. Jean-Paul Sartre #DOTD 1980

Diana tipsy from fresh snow this morning in Truckee, California, before we catch Amtrak back to San Francisco. I read yesterday in the Truckee Litcrawl.

Rode the California Zephyr into the Sierra today w my wife to read my story And So a Terror (www.driplitmag.com/theriault-8) this Sat 11Apr for the Truckee Litcrawl of the Tahoe Literary Fest. Forecast is for Saturday snow & freezing rain to make the Litcrawl thru the historic downtown exactly that.

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.