Without Lifting A Finger

Finished Coetzee's The Pole in two days. An easy read. Titillating but hardly "real" and, like all good reads I suppose, leaving you wanting.:) Back to Wordsworth's Guide to the Lake District. I hope I can find a spot to build. Perhaps in the area of the old Roman fort? Or on that cloud-with-a-view WW suggested earlier in the book? WW: Our fancies could not resist the temptation; and we fixed upon a spot for a cottage, which we began to build:* and finished as easily as castles are raised in the air.—

This came to mind because of all the snow in the Midwest (don't know how much, probably not a lot, but if you're pining for SPRING ...). So: this is for all the shut-ins and snowed-ins, longing for spring to come and/or wanting to get back to England's Lake District (I swear I saw a crowd of daffodils off the path to Buttermere -- years ago). This "clip" is brought to you by the Poetry Foundation: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud . *

No pics from my walk. A little rain and some wonderful clouds (reminding me of Otto Modersohn's obsessive sketching of Wolken). Waiting for Julian Barnes' new book on Shostakovich. Have been flip-flopping between Herbert and the early poems of Thomas Bernhard. From Bernhard's Auf der Erde und in der Holle  (very last poem): In the Bushes, I Know, Are the Souls In the bushes, I know, are the souls of my fathers, in the corn is the pain of my father and in the great black forest. I know that their lives, erased before our very eyes, have found refuge in the ears of corn, in the blue brow of the June sky. I know that the dead are the trees and the winds, the moss, and the night which lays its shadows upon my burial mound. [ Translation by Peter Waugh ]

I know, I know: stop with the same beach pics. Still, it's the morning light that I can't quite escape. It renders a landscape -- even a landscape touched by manscape -- something "other." Then there's the clouds ... * 

Another lie: I took this one from the plane. Though Europe is long gone, I'm still on my way home. First I saw rows and rows of sheep (white and black); then I saw this/these straggler/stragglers. About an hour or so from LA.