Without Lifting A Finger

Hard to feed a Family of Four these Days. Spent the morning with four Peregrine Chicks @ Pointe Vicente (Palos Verdes CA) -- hungry as wolves with wings.💗 #rlswihart13  #palosverdescalifornia  #peregrinechicks  #purepoetry  #readmorepoetry2026💕

It is idiotic to write out in one's own hand (in the evenings by candlelight) things already in print. Why not use scissors to cut out items that are worth remembering and deserve a place on the wall? Geiser is surprised that he did not think of this before. There are scissors in the house; all he has to do is find them. Quite apart from the fact that print is easier to read than an old man's handwriting—though he has taken the trouble to use block letters—no one has that much time.  Geological formations, layers that are clearly distinguished from the stratifications beneath and above them by the petrified animals and plants (see Characteristic Fossils) within them and that represent a (stratigraphic) unit. Among these belong the igneous rocks, which evolved at the same time. Related G. F. evolving successively are bracketed together in formation groups. Formations and formation groups reflect periods of the earth's history and are in consequence used as descriptions of ti...

I think he himself said something like his poetry doesn't rise to level of his prose, but this poem is somewhat interesting, especially because it's a companion piece to the story he tells in The Emigrants. * New Jersey Journey  Spent two hours at the end of December on the Garden State Highway In the ancient Ford’s trunk nothing but my heart grown heavier year by year  A protracted catastrophe: the constant river of traffic the endless business of overtaking vicious eye-contact with total strangers in the adjacent lane  Driven by yearning for its prehistoric brothers a Jumbo climbs out of Newark airport over marshes and lagoons a giant smoking mountain of rubbish and the countless lights of the refineries  Mile after mile of stunted trees telegraph poles fields of blueberries a Siberian countryside colonized then run to seed with moribund supermarkets abandoned poultry farms haunted by millions and millions of breakfast eggs harboring the undeciphered sighs of an en...

Still, it is the capital, where until now I’ve failed in all my errands: the Japanese Embassy is closed for a ‘Festival of Flowers’, the freight company hasn’t anything going east before the autumn, and the journalists I hoped to see haven’t kept our appointment. Our new consul — fresh from Hong Kong — on whom I was rather relying, had been knocked down by a taxi the day he took up his post. I visited him in hospital. Multiple fractures. He was swathed in bandages like a mummy, adrift in morphine, dreaming of his longed-for retirement; he could offer only incoherent remarks apropos of Berne’s ingratitude and the mushrooms of the northern Vaud. My seedy hotel is much too dear for what it offers. From my attic I survey varnished tile roofs and a sea of saturated foliage foaming against the low clouds. Silly crows play in nooks and crannies, croaking all the time. Languid, arrogant boys. Long corridors gleaming with polish. Dark figures loafing about or motionless in front of their cups o...

  My "Dipper Day" (all about the bird and more) is in the current Meniscus 14.1 (2026), pp. 141 - 142. See what you think (see "tease" above)! Thanks to Jen Webb and all the Meniscus staff. https://www.meniscus.org.au/_files/ugd/7c40c1_9e1f0dd429934dc88f099994dda0d83a.pdf #rlswihart13 #meniscusliteraryjournal  #dipperday #poetry #readmorepoetry2026💕

 

Claude decided he would go to the Yoeders' today, and to the Dawsons' tomorrow. He didn't like to think there might be hard feeling toward him in a house where he had had so many good times, and where he had often found a refuge when things were dull at home. The Yoeder boys had a music-box long before the days of Victrolas, and a magic lantern, and the old grandmother made wonderful shadow-pictures on a sheet, and told stories about them. She used to turn the map of Europe upside down on the kitchen table and showed the children how, in this position, it looked like a jungfrau; and recited a long German rhyme which told how Spain was the maiden's head, the Pyrenees her lace ruff, Germany her heart and bosom, England and Italy were two arms, and Russia, though it looked so big, was only a hoopskirt. This rhyme would probably be condemned as dangerous propaganda now!

The preacher had his Bible in his hand and was standing under the light, hunting for his chapter. Enid would have preferred to have Mr. Weldon come down from Lincoln to marry her, but that would have wounded Mr. Snowberry deeply. After all, he was her minister, though he was not eloquent and persuasive like Arthur Weldon. He had fewer English words at his command than most human beings, and even those did not come to him readily. In his pulpit he sought for them and struggled with them until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was a simple, courageous man.

Written in 2025 with the release of Meniscus (June 2025):

  Happy Friday! from the bird that looks and behaves a bit like a mouse: Northern House Wren @ Huntington Central Park. Big weekend ahead & Happy Mothers Day to all Moms.;)💗 #rlswihart13  #huntingtoncentralpark  #northernhousewren #thebirdlikeamouse #happymothersday2026💗

When he pondered upon this conclusion, Claude thought of the Erlichs. Julius could go abroad and study for his doctor's degree, and live on less than Ralph wasted every year. Ralph would never have a profession or a trade, would never do or make anything the world needed. Nor did Claude find his own outlook much better. He was twenty-one years old, and he had no skill, no training,--no ability that would ever take him among the kind of people he admired. He was a clumsy, awkward farmer boy, and even Mrs. Erlich seemed to think the farm the best place for him. Probably it was; but all the same he didn't find this kind of life worth the trouble of getting up every morning. He could not see the use of working for money, when money brought nothing one wanted. Mrs. Erlich said it brought security. Sometimes he thought this security was what was the matter with everybody; that only perfect safety was required to kill all the best qualities in people and develop the mean ones.

I haven't gotten to the WWI part yet, the part of the novel that some notable critics had a problem with (e.g., Hemingway). We'll see. War of the Words: Cather vs. Hemingway, 1923 - The American Writers Museum https://share.google/yGmVNWIhAan83WAFr

 

He was thinking about what Dan had said while they were hitching up. There was a great deal of truth in it, certainly. Yet, as for him, he often felt that he would rather go out into the world and earn his bread among strangers than sweat under this half-responsibility for acres and crops that were not his own. He knew that his father was sometimes called a "land hog" by the country people, and he himself had begun to feel that it was not right they should have so much land,--to farm, or to rent, or to leave idle, as they chose. It was strange that in all the centuries the world had been going, the question of property had not been better adjusted. The people who had it were slaves to it, and the people who didn't have it were slaves to them.

His mother was old-fashioned. She thought dancing and card-playing dangerous pastimes--only rough people did such things when she was a girl in Vermont--and "worldliness" only another word for wickedness. According to her conception of education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one, was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before. The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept of history.

  Only recently have they found an interesting "interleaf" beneath Paul Klee's Angelus Novus. What's Behind the Angel of History? https://share.google/bMQdiVj2uJY3Q9hmF #rlswihart13  #paulklee #angelusnovus  #walterbenjamin  #angelofhistory *** From Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History,": A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irre...

One topic leading to another, Monsieur Hamel began to speak of the French language, saying it was the strongest, clearest, most beautiful language in the world, which we must keep as our heritage, never allowing it to be forgotten, telling us that when a nation has become enslaved, she holds the key which shall unlock her prison as long as she preserves her native tongue. [“S’il tient sa langue il tient la clé qui de ses chaines le délivre.” — F. MISTRAL.]

Not far from the margin of the forest stands the Krummenbach chapel, so small that it can surely not have been possible for more than a dozen to attend a service or worship there at the same time. In that walled cell I sat for a while. Outside, snowflakes were drifting past the small window, and presently it seemed to me as if I were in a boat on a voyage, crossing vast waters. The moist smell of lime became sea air; I could feel the spray on my forehead and the boards swaying beneath my feet, and I imagined myself sailing in this ship out of the flooded mountains. But what I remember most about the Krummenbach chapel, apart from this transformation of the stone walls into the hull of a wooden boat, is the Stations of the Cross, painted by some unskilled hand around the mid-eighteenth century, and half already covered and eaten by mould. Even on the somewhat better preserved scenes, little could be made out with any degree of certainty – faces distorted in pain and anger, dislocated li...

Filled by a sense of having been abandoned, I remained standing for a while on the platform. The girl in the many-coloured jacket and the Franciscan nun had long since disappeared. What connection could there be, I then wondered and now wonder again, between those two beautiful female readers and this immense railway terminus which, when it was built in 1932, outdid all other train stations in Europe; and what relation was there between the so-called monuments of the past and the vague longing, propagated through our bodies, to people the dust-blown expanses and tidal plains of the future.

  Scrovegni/Arena Chapel