Without Lifting A Finger

  New Zealand Blue Duck @ Orana Wildlife (near Christchurch). I didn't see this beauty in the wild (it's endangered), but was lucky enough to get a few good shots at Orana. TGIF. Enjoy the weekend. #rlswihart #newzealand #christchurch #oranawildlifepark #blueducksofinstagram #blueducks #magical #nature #beauty #poetry #endangeredspecies #readmorepoetry2024🎈♥️🪶

New Zealand's Red-crowned Parakeet (Maori name kakariki) in the Orana Wildlife Park (near Christchurch). A Happy Little Fella for you on a cloudy Friday in SoCal: TGIF. Enjoy your weekend.;)🎈🦜 #rlswihart #oranawildlifepark #newzealand #christchurch #parakeetsofinstagram #redcrownedparakeet #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024🎈🦜🪶

One of the best scholars of Sebald, Uwe Schütte, argues that his grief for his grandfather was the real one in his life and work, the one for the victims of the Third Reich a psychic cover. That is going much too far: it is as wrong to say that the Holocaust is not Sebald’s subject as to say that it is his only one. His grief over German crimes was what broke him, and what he wrote about. But this grief was the first.†

New Zealand Birds: White-fronted Terns @ Rangitoto Wharf. They and some Variable Oystercatchers (my shots of those were less impressive) were there to greet us. Gone by the time we went back.  #rlswihart13 #newzealand #rangitotoisland #newzealandbirds #whitefrontedterns #ternsofinstagram #summithike #insearchofthesaddleback #pestfreeisland #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️ 🪶

The other question concerns Dr Abramsky. He is certainly invented: no doctor can talk about a patient, and everything he tells the narrator about Ambros’s torture is in the books Sebald consulted. He is also symbolic: a saint and martyr for the guilt of Samaria, with his fire-red hair like the flames over the heads of the Apostles. But now there’s a problem. The horror for which he bears the guilt, though he has deeply repented, is German: the annihilation method, so reminiscent of other German annihilation methods. But Abramsky is a Jewish name, and he grew up in Leopoldstadt, which is the Jewish quarter of Vienna. And Samaria, as Abramsky’s sanatorium is called, is Jewish too – Judea and Samaria made up the ancient kingdom of Israel. Sebald certainly knew all these things; yet he chose them. It is strange enough that the models for Sebald’s Jewish characters are so often non-Jews. But that is a hidden strangeness; this one is visible to every reader. Why is Abramsky, the bearer of Ge

Cosmo Solomon is Sebald’s image of what happens when you can hear the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, as George Eliot wrote; when you hear the roar on the other side of silence.

NZ Fantail (I thought "Helicopter Bird" but I guess for the Maori he had several long names, e.g., piwaiwaka, and was a messenger from the gods concerning life or death). This one I shot in heavy shade on Rangitoto (pest free island about a 40 minute ferry ride from Auckland), and if you don't like the flowers I'll try to post one later that I took mid-trip near Hokitika (South Island, West Coast). New Zealand: trip of a lifetime, though I told my wife if we ever go back I want to go all the way to Stewart Island. New Zealand Birds: many "lifers" (seen or "sacked"). But also nice to be back.♥️ 🪶 #rlswihart13 #newzealand #rangitotoisland #pestfree #shoescrub #summithike #newzealandfantail #helicopter #messengerofgods #lifeanddeath #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

Idly I turned the pages of an India paper edition of Samuel Pepys’s diary, Everyman’s Library, 1913, which I had purchased that afternoon, and read passages at random in this 1,500-page account, until drowsiness overcame me and I found myself going over the same few lines again and again without any notion what they meant. And then I dreamed that I was walking through a mountainous terrain. A white roadway of finely crushed stone stretched far ahead and in endless hairpins went on and up through the woods and finally, at the top of the pass, led through a deep cutting across to the other side of the high range, which I recognised in my dream as the Alps. Everything I saw from up there was of the same chalky colour, a bright, glaring grey in which a myriad of quartz fragments glimmered, as if the rocks, by a force deep inside them, were being dissolved into radiant light. From my vantage-point the road continued downward, and in the distance a second range of mountains at least as lofty

Over the years that followed, lengthy shadows fell upon those autumn days at Riva, which, as Dr K. on occasion said to himself, had been so beautiful and so appalling, and from these shadows there gradually emerged the silhouette of a barque with masts of an inconceivable height and sails dark and hanging in folds. Three whole years it takes until the vessel, as if it were being borne across the waters, gently drifts into the little port of Riva. It berths in the early hours of the morning. A man in blue overalls comes ashore and makes fast the ropes. Behind the boatmen, two figures in dark tunics with silver buttons carry a bier upon which lies, under a large floral-patterned cover, what was clearly the body of a human being. It is Gracchus the huntsman.

 

 

In De l’Amour he describes a journey he claims to have made from Bologna in the company of one Mme Gherardi, whom he sometimes refers to simply as La Ghita. La Ghita, who reappears a number of times on the periphery of Beyle’s later work, is a mysterious, not to say unearthly figure. There is reason to suspect that Beyle used her name as a cipher for various lovers such as Adèle Rebuffel, Angéline Bereyter and not least for Métilde Dembowski, and that Mme Gherardi, whose life would easily furnish a whole novel, as Beyle writes at one point, never really existed, despite all the documentary evidence, and was merely a phantom, albeit one to whom Beyle remained true for decades. It is furthermore unclear at what time in his life Beyle made the journey with Mme Gherardi, always supposing that he made it at all. However, since there is much about Lake Garda in the opening pages of the narrative, it seems probable that some of what Beyle experienced in September 1813, when he was convalescin

And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.

After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffers on the ceilings, every one of the hundreds of columns, and every single one of the many thousands of diminutive stone blocks by hand, and paint them as well. Now, as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time.

Does one follow in Hölderlin’s footsteps, simply because one’s birthday happened to fall two days after his? Is that why one is tempted time and again to cast reason aside like an old coat, to sign one’s poems and letter “your humble servant Scardanelli”, and to keep unwelcome guests who come to stare at one at arm’s length by addressing them as Your Excellency or Majesty? Does one begin to translate elegies at the age of fifteen or sixteen because one has been exiled from one’s homeland? Is it possible that later one would settle in this house in Suffolk because a water pump in the garden bears the date 1770, the year of Hölderlin’s birth? For when I heard that one of the near islands was Patmos, I greatly desired there to be lodged, and there to approach the dark grotto. And did Holderlin not dedicate his Patmos hymn to the Landgrave of Homburg, and was not Homburg also the maiden name of Mother? Across what distance in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How

I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

 

A Conversation With Jeanne By Czeslaw Milosz Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne. So many words, so much paper, who can stand it. I told you the truth about my distancing myself. I've stopped worrying about my misshapen life. It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies. For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics. We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again, And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves. We submerge in foam at the line of the surf, We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush, With little windmills of palms. And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre, That I do not demand enough from myself, As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers, That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack. I roll on a wave and look at white clouds. You are right, Jeanne, I don't know how to care about the salvation of my soul. Som

Janine maintained that the source of Flaubert’s scruples was to be found in the relentless spread of stupidity which he had observed everywhere, and which he believed had already invaded his own head. It was (so supposedly once he said) as if one was sinking into sand. This was probably the reason, she said, that sand possessed such significance in all of Flaubert’s works. Sand conquered all. Time and again, said Janine, vast dust clouds drifted through Flaubert’s dreams by day and by night, raised over the arid plains of the African continent and moving north across the Mediterranean and the Iberian peninsula till sooner or later they settled like ash from a fire on the Tuileries gardens, a suburb of Rouen or a country town in Normandy, penetrating into the tiniest crevices. In a grain of sand in the hem of Emma Bovary’s winter gown, said Janine, Flaubert saw the whole of the Sahara. For him, every speck of dust weighed as heavy as the Atlas mountains.

The young woman in the middle is blonde and has the air of a bride about her. The weaver to her left has inclined her head a little to one side, whilst the woman on the right is looking at me with so steady and relentless a gaze that I cannot meet it for long. I wonder what the three women’s names were – Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.

Afterwards we were in the great hall of the palace, and I stood beside Uncle, craning up at Tiepolo’s glorious ceiling fresco above the stairwell, which at that time meant nothing to me; beneath the loftiest of skies, the creatures and people of the four realms of the world are assembled on it in fantastic array. Strangely enough, said Ferber, I only thought of that afternoon in Würzburg with Uncle Leo a few months ago, when I was looking through a new book on Tiepolo. For a long time I couldn’t tear myself away from the reproductions of the great Würzburg fresco, its light-skinned and dark-skinned beauties, the kneeling Moor with the sunshade and the magnificent Amazon with the feathered headdress. For a whole evening, said Ferber, I sat looking at those pictures with a magnifying glass, trying to see further and further into them. And little by little that summer day in Würzburg came back to me, and the return to Munich, where the general situation and the atmosphere at home were ste

According to the article, the British Medical Association’s archives contained the description of an extreme case of silver poisoning: in the 1930s there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact (as Ferber solemnly informed me) that the man’s face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed.

Red-breasted Merganser (male) @ Bolsa Chica. I've seen him many times but never got any decent pics. These are a bit of an improvement.🎈 Happy Sunday! #rlswihart13 #bolsachica #socal #huntingtonbeach #mergansersofinstagram #redbreastedmerganser #nature #winterbirds #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️ 🎈

It had always been of the greatest importance to him, Ferber once remarked casually, that nothing should change at his place of work, that everything should remain as it was, as he had arranged it, and that nothing further should be added but the debris generated by painting and the dust that continuously fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything else in the world. He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.

The last entry in my Great-Uncle Adelwarth’s little agenda book was written on the Feast of Stephen. Cosmo, it reads, had had a bad fever after their return to Jerusalem but was already on the way to recovery again. My great-uncle also noted that late the previous afternoon it had begun to snow and that, looking out of the hotel window at the city, white in the falling dusk, it made him think of times long gone. Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

My Best Three Pics (IMHO) of the Broad-billed Hummingbird Visiting in Glendora CA. (A smart photog who stopped by while I was there claimed this beauty has another name South of the Border: something like The Blue Gem, which, right or wrong, easily makes sense. Beautiful by any other name. I'm thinking: He probably has a secret name and/or a silent name.;))♥️🎈 #rlswihart13 #glendora #socal #magicalvisitor #hummingbirdsofinstagram #broadbilledhummingbird #bluegem #secretname #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

Ambrose was one of the first of our patients to undergo a series of shocks, over a period of weeks and months; but that docility, as I was already beginning to suspect, was in fact due simply to your great-uncle’s longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.

It was, I thought, particularly auspicious that the rows of houses were interrupted here and there by patches of waste land on which stood ruined buildings, for ever since I had once visited Munich I had felt nothing to be so unambiguously linked to the word city as the presence of heaps of rubble, fire-scorched walls, and the gaps of windows through which one could see the vacant air.

Is someone getting all the food?;) Anyway the older sib is in charge and looking for Momma. Spring has sprung, or is at least on its way. #rlswihart13 #valenciaca #nearmagicmountain #owlets #waitingformom #owlsofinstagram #greathornedowl #nature #beauty #poetry #tgif #weekend #readmorepoetry2024♥️

This morning everything changed, but rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory about fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with absolute levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at hand—at Park Chambers—and belonged supremely to the class that wired everything, even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote, his correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might be in and out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the prospect, and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse melancholy, a gratuitous misery.  This was at once to give it a place in an order of feelings on which I shall presently touch.

By this time Daisy had turned her attention again to Winterbourne. "I've been telling Mrs. Walker how mean you were!" the young girl announced. "And what is the evidence you have offered?" asked Winterbourne, rather annoyed at Miss Miller's want of appreciation of the zeal of an admirer who on his way down to Rome had stopped neither at Bologna nor at Florence, simply because of a certain sentimental impatience. He remembered that a cynical compatriot had once told him that American women--the pretty ones, and this gave a largeness to the axiom-- were at once the most exacting in the world and the least endowed with a sense of indebtedness.

Certainly, I am inclined to think, if one had encountered these delicate, dusky flowers in the blossomless garden of American journalism, one would have plucked them with a very tender hand; one would have felt that here was something essentially fresh and new; here, in no extraordinary force or abundance, but in a degree distinctly appreciable, was an original element in literature. When I think of it, I almost envy Hawthorne's earliest readers; the sensation of opening upon The Great Carbuncle, The Seven Vagabonds, or The Threefold Destiny in an American annual of forty years ago, must have been highly agreeable.

 

"By my little point I mean--what shall I call it?--the particular thing I've written my books most FOR. Isn't there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn't write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it's THAT!" I considered a moment--that is I followed at a respectful distance, rather gasping. I was fascinated--easily, you'll say; but I wasn't going after all to be put off my guard. "Your description's certainly beautiful, but it doesn't make what you describe very distinct." "I promise you it would be distinct if it should dawn on you at all." I saw that the charm of our topic overflowed for my companion into an emotion as lively as my own. "At any rate," he went on, "I can speak for myself: there's an

 

Yesterday: An Eagle landed @ Bolsa Chica Yesterday: Lucky Me.🎈 #rlswihart13 #happyfriday #tgif #baldeaglesofinstagram #baldy #baldeagle #bolsachica #socal #huntingtonbeach #nature #beautiful  #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

There could be no Venetian business without patience, and since I adored the place I was much more in the spirit of it for having laid in a large provision. That spirit kept me perpetual company and seemed to look out at me from the revived immortal face--in which all his genius shone--of the great poet who was my prompter. I had invoked him and he had come; he hovered before me half the time; it was as if his bright ghost had returned to earth to tell me that he regarded the affair as his own no less than mine and that we should see it fraternally, cheerfully to a conclusion. It was as if he had said, "Poor dear, be easy with her; she has some natural prejudices; only give her time. Strange as it may appear to you she was very attractive in 1820. Meanwhile are we not in Venice together, and what better place is there for the meeting of dear friends? See how it glows with the advancing summer; how the sky and the sea and the rosy air and the marble of the palaces all shimmer and m

One doesn't defend one's god: one's god is in himself a defense.

"She's going to stick, by Jove! she's going to stick." "Do you mean that she is going to marry him?" Mrs. Almond inquired. "I don't know that; but she is not going to break down. She is going to drag out the engagement, in the hope of making me relent." "And shall you not relent?" "Shall a geometrical proposition relent? I am not so superficial." "Doesn't geometry treat of surfaces?" asked Mrs. Almond, who, as we know, was clever, smiling. "Yes; but it treats of them profoundly. Catherine and her young man are my surfaces; I have taken their measure." "You speak as if it surprised you." "It is immense; there will be a great deal to observe." "You are shockingly cold-blooded!" said Mrs. Almond. "I need to be with all this hot blood about me. Young Townsend indeed is cool; I must allow him that merit."

The Doctor had been rather disappointed at not finding his compact and comfortable little hostess surrounded in a more visible degree by the ravages of Morris Townsend's immorality; but he had said to himself that this was not because the young man had spared her, but because she had contrived to plaster up her wounds. They were aching there, behind the varnished stove, the festooned engravings, beneath her own neat little poplin bosom; and if he could only touch the tender spot, she would make a movement that would betray her. The words I have just quoted were an attempt to put his finger suddenly upon the place; and they had some of the success that he looked for. The tears sprang for a moment to Mrs. Montgomery's eyes, and she indulged in a proud little jerk of the head. "I don't know how you have found that out!" she exclaimed. "By a philosophic trick--by what they call induction. You know you have always your option of contradicting me. But kindly answer

First Burrowing Owl @ Salton Sea (Thanks! Tony for the Tip). This little guy is "just doing his job" so I hope those BIG MACHINES don't roll over his inverted castle. I want to go back in the spring and see the family.♥️🎈 #rlswihart13 #saltonsea #scal #burrowingowlsofinstagram #burrowburrow #nature #beauty #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

She confessed that she was not particularly fond of literature. Morris Townsend agreed with her that books were tiresome things; only, as he said, you had to read a good many before you found it out.

In those days in New York there were still a few altar-fires flickering in the temple of Republican simplicity, and Dr. Sloper would have been glad to see his daughter present herself, with a classic grace, as a priestess of this mild faith. It made him fairly grimace, in private, to think that a child of his should be both ugly and overdressed. For himself, he was fond of the good things of life, and he made a considerable use of them; but he had a dread of vulgarity, and even a theory that it was increasing in the society that surrounded him.

Once, when the girl was about twelve years old, he had said to her: "Try and make a clever woman of her, Lavinia; I should like her to be a clever woman." Mrs. Penniman, at this, looked thoughtful a moment. "My dear Austin," she then inquired, "do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?" "Good for what?" asked the Doctor. "You are good for nothing unless you are clever."

 —The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought: —The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.

The dean rested back on his hunkers and watched the sticks catch. Stephen, to fill the silence, said: —I am sure I could not light a fire. —You are an artist, are you not, Mr Dedalus? said the dean, glancing up and blinking his pale eyes. The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question. He rubbed his hands slowly and drily over the difficulty. —Can you solve that question now? he asked. —Aquinas, answered Stephen, says pulcra sunt quæ visa placent. —This fire before us, said the dean, will be pleasing to the eye. Will it therefore be beautiful? —In so far as it is apprehended by the sight, which I suppose means here esthetic intellection, it will be beautiful. But Aquinas also says Bonum est in quod tendit appetitus. In so far as it satisfies the animal craving for warmth fire is a good. In hell however it is an evil. —Quite so, said the dean, you have certainly hit the nail on the head.

Blue Morph Intermediate Snow Goose @ Sony Bono SSNW Refuge. Yes, he's thirsty (and hungry) and I was lucky enough to see him in action (from a distance).🎈 #rlswihart13 #sonnybonosaltonseanationalwildliferefuge #sonny #saltonsea #snowgeeseofinstagram #bluemorph #thirsty #beauty #nature #poetry #readmorepoetry2024♥️

Art thou pale for weariness  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,  Wandering companionless …?  He repeated to himself the lines of Shelley’s fragment. Its alternation of sad human ineffectualness with vast inhuman cycles of activity chilled him, and he forgot his own human and ineffectual grieving.

On the way home uncle Charles would often pay a visit to the chapel and, as the font was above Stephen’s reach, the old man would dip his hand and then sprinkle the water briskly about Stephen’s clothes and on the floor of the porch. While he prayed he knelt on his red handkerchief and read above his breath from a thumbblackened prayerbook wherein catchwords were printed at the foot of every page. Stephen knelt at his side respecting, though he did not share, his piety. He often wondered what his granduncle prayed for so seriously. Perhaps he prayed for the souls in purgatory or for the grace of a happy death or perhaps he prayed that God might send him back a part of the big fortune he had squandered in Cork.

 

I am nauseated by their lying drivel about pure men and pure women and spiritual love and love for ever: blatant lying in the face of the truth. I don’t know much about the ‘saince’ of the subject but I presume there are very few mortals in Europe who are not in danger of waking some morning and finding themselves syphilitic. The Irish consider England a sink: but, if cleanliness be important in this matter, what is Ireland? Perhaps my view of life is too cynical but it seems to me that a lot of this talk about love is nonsense. A woman’s love is always maternal and egoistic. A man, on the contrary, side by side with his extraordinary cerebral sexualism and bodily fervour (from which women are normally free) possesses a fund of genuine affection for the ‘beloved’ or ‘once beloved’ object. I am no friend of tyranny, as you know, but if many husbands are brutal the atmosphere in which they live (vide Counterparts) is brutal and few wives and homes can satisfy the desire for happiness. In

Two bits: To Stannie (1906): Can you tell me what is a cure for dreaming? I am troubled every night by horrible and terrifying dreams: death, corpses, assassinations in which I take an unpleasantly prominent part. & Nora has a talent for blowing soap-bubbles. While I was wading through a chapter of Dorian Gray a few days ago she and Georgie were blowing bubbles on the floor out of a basin of suds. She can make them as big as a football.

Was late to the game but he's still there, and for a few moments (on an in-and-out sun kinda day) I had him all to myself: the leucistic hummingbird in Crystal Cove SP.🎈 Thanks for the help with location: Just.birdies. #rlswihart13 #southerncalifornia #crystalcove #hummingbirdsofinstagram #leucistichummingbird #sealsandcrofts #poetryinmotion #dontflyaway #readmorepoetry2024🎈

To Grant Richards (1906): I believe Richards would eventually publish Joyce's Dubliners , but there was a lot of back-and-forth before that happened (e.g., the slang term "bloody" -- mistakenly believed to be an allusion to Christ or the Virgin -- was a big trip at the time): Perhaps this may reconcile you to Dubliners. It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.

"Ranch' io son pittore!" I cried. "Unless I am mistaken, you have a masterpiece on the stocks. If you put all that in, you will do more than Raphael himself did. Let me know when your picture is finished, and wherever in the wide world I may be, I will post back to Florence and pay my respects to--the MADONNA OF THE FUTURE!"

More from the Redheads @ Colorado Lagoon. In their fave afternoon resting spot. Had to ruffle a few feathers to get their attention.:)🎈 #rlswihart13 #coloradolagoon #longbeachca #ducks #redheads #redheadsofinstagram #readheads #bookheads #natureandnurture #readabook #readmorepoetry2024 #enjoytheweekend 🎈🇺🇦🇮🇱🇵🇸🙏

The young James Joyce has gone from Trieste to Pola. In a letter to his brother Stannie he says that Nora's making his cigarettes and that he's going to buy Henry James' story "The Madonna of the Future" (which I've never read) that very day. Then JJ finishes the letter with the seemingly frustrated:  "I really can’t write. Nora is trying on a pair of drawers at the wardrobe Excuse me." & I check my Kindle trove and sure enough: I have the Madonna. I'll pingpong between the two Jameses.:) Excerpt: We live in the evening of time! We grope in the gray dusk, carrying each our poor little taper of selfish and painful wisdom, holding it up to the great models and to the dim idea, and seeing nothing but overwhelming greatness and dimness. The days of illumination are gone! We live in the evening of time! We grope in the gray dusk, carrying each our poor little taper of selfish and painful wisdom, holding it up to the great models and to the dim ide

To Nora (1904): My mind rejects the whole present social order and Christianity—home, the recognised virtues, classes of life, and religious doctrines. How could I like the idea of home? My home was simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited. My mother was slowly killed, I think, by my father’s ill-treatment, by years of trouble, and by my cynical frankness of conduct. When I looked on her face as she lay in her coffin—a face grey and wasted with cancer—I understood that I was looking on the face of a victim and I cursed the system which had made her a victim. We were seventeen in family. My brothers and sisters are nothing to me. One brother alone is capable of understanding me. Six years ago I left the Catholic Church, hating it most fervently. I found it impossible for me to remain in it on account of the impulses of my nature. I made secret war upon it when I was a student and declined to accept the positions it offered me. By doing this I made

To Nora (1904): I have been a half-hour writing this thing. Will you write something to me? I hope you will. How am I to sign myself? I won’t sign anything at all, because I don’t know what to sign myself.

To His Mother (1903): He had recently met JM Synge in Paris: Every Sunday I try and get out into the country. Last Sunday I went out to the woods of Clamart and walked through them to Sèvres—coming back by steamer. I read every day in the Bibliothèque Nationale and every night in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. I often go to vespers at Notre Dame or at Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. I never go to the theatre—as I have no money. I have no money either to buy books. Synge was over here selling out and gave me his play to read—a play which is to be produced by the Irish Literary Theatre. I criticised it. Synge says I have a mind like Spinoza!

To Lady Gregory (1902): All things are inconstant except the faith of the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light. And though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.

She was a little vulgar; sometimes she said I seen and If I had’ve known. But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?

Brewer's Blackbirds @ Schat's Bakery in Bishop CA. The line of hungry skiers et al. wound like a snake through the bread racks and pastries. The blackbirds were atop the roof and sign. Beneath your feet or in an empty chair, waiting for the crumbs to fall. Too chilly to sit outside? Go eat in your car at the park across the road or the Vons parking lot.🎈 #rlswihart13 #bishopca #schatsbakery #travelingwithoutcharlie #ontheroadagain #brewersblackbirds #blackbirdsofinstagram #goblue💙 #readmorepoetry2024🎈

I was talking to a friend of yours last night, I said drily. I mean Mr. Trellis. He has bought a ream of ruled foolscap and is starting on his story. He is compelling all his characters to live with him in the Red Swan Hotel so that he can keep an eye on them and see that there is no boozing.

Biographical reminiscence, part the first: It was only a few months before composing the foregoing that I had my first experience of intoxicating beverages and their strange intestinal chemistry. I was walking through the Stephen’s Green on a summer evening and conducting a conversation with a man called Kelly, then a student, hitherto a member of the farming class and now a private in the armed forces of the King. He was addicted to unclean expressions in ordinary conversation and spat continually, always fouling the flowerbeds on his way through the Green with a mucous deposit dislodged with a low grunting from the interior of his windpipe. In some respects he was a coarse man but he was lacking in malice or ill-humour. He purported to be a medical student but he had failed at least once to satisfy a body of examiners charged with regulating admission to the faculty. He suggested that we should drink a number of jars or pints of plain porter in Grogan’s public-house. I derived consid

—You are a native, I suppose? —No, no. No indeed. Mick toyed with his glass, showing nonchalance. —My own little trip to Skerries, he remarked, isn’t really for the purpose of holiday. I came here looking for somebody who’s in the town, I believe. —A relative? —No. A man I admire very much, a writer. —Ah. I see? —My good sir, I will not be so presumptuous as to ask you your name. Instead, I will tell you what it is. The weak eyes seemed to grope behind their glass walls. —Tell me . . . my name? —Yes. Your name is James Joyce. It was as if a stone had been dropped from a height into a still pool. The body stiffened. He put a hand about his face nervously. —Quiet, please! Quiet! I am not known by that name here. I insist that you respect my affairs. The voice was low but urgent. —Of course I will, Mr Joyce. I shall mention no name again. But it is a really deep pleasure to meet a man of your attainments face to face. Your name stands high in the world. You are a most remarkable writer, a

It was after seven when he entered a rather poky establishment on the periphery of the harbour. One drink and the use of eye and ear told him there was nothing there. There was a big enough assembly, mostly of strangers, but they were loud and rowdy, and well on the highroad to a late night. No quiet, sardonic novelist loitered there. Yet was there any unhurried nook deemed seemly for a writer’s presence? Or was Joyce a recluse tucked away in chimney corner, avoiding all occasions of public concourse, fearing and despising the people and keeping to himself?