Ten Things, 2023-02

Down, loop, up, and over

Here are ten things.

  1. We had a big snow this week from the West. I went for a walk one night during the worst of it. There's romance to snowfall illuminated by the floodlights of a baseball diamond.
  2. I finished a notebook, this pocket-sized purple deal I had for a while, home to grocery lists, lines for repotting in poems, and other assorted scribblings. So to the stationary drawer I went, where notebooks old and new are patiently waiting their turn to be filled out. I took out a Field Notes Dime Novel notebook I had started in 2018 and, for some reason, abandoned. Turns out, reading notebooks and journals is the cheapest form of time travel.
  3. I think I'm going to try and become a cursive sicko. One evening last week, I did the teenage-girl thing of trying out new signatures, looping my D differently, completely changing the shape of the G. We'll see if this sticks.
  4. The great Louie Zong released a two-fer of Animal Crossing-fied covers, one of “Rich Girl” by Daryl Hall & John Oates, and one of “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest.
  5. Steph got the Tachsen Astrology book from their Library of Esoterica (we also own Tarot), and now I'm just out here coveting Taschen books about graphic design and movies. Hell, I'll even take a look at those books about copy writing and restaurant menu design.
  6. I'm trying to engage in what Austin Kleon calls promiscuous reading. I told a friend recently that I wanted to get back into capital-F fiction but have failed spectacularly in that respect. On my bedside table, so to speak, are Bluets by Maggie Nelson (prose poetry), Equipment for Living by Michael Robbins (essays; file under “Klostermania”), and How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark (I will ready any “how to” book on writing).
  7. The 2022 catch-up train keeps rolling on: Henry Selick's Wendell & Wild (good but fractured) and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (dazzling and devastating).
  8. This week on PlutoTV: 48 Hrs., a true-blue cable classic.
  9. RIP Charles Simic. “A 'truth' detached and purified of pleasures of ordinary life is not worth a damn in my view. Every grand theory and noble sentiment ought to be first tested in the kitchen—and then in bed, of course.”
  10. A poem, via poem.exe:
    we humans
night after night
blinking back tears

#tenthings