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Paperback novelette still open and the door is closed
I dreamed of taking a transcontinental train with as little difficulty as traveling to D.C., which I am not convinced has been the state of American rail for decades. Otherwise since my sleep has gone principally to hell again, I feel burnt and friable and past my last fingernail of whatever I am supposed to be doing. On the one hand we are a communal species; on the other I would like to feel I had any right to exist beyond what other people require of me.
I am relieved to see that the enraging article I read last night about the deep-sixing of Yiddish at Brandeis has since been amended to a reduced but not eradicated schedule, but it would have been best to leave the program undisturbed to begin with. The golem reference is apropos.
My formative Joan D. Vinge was Psion (1982/2007), which even in its bowdlerized YA version may have been my introductory super-corporatized dystopia, but I had recent occasion to recommend her Heaven Chronicles (1991), which I got off my parents' shelves in high school and whose first novella especially has retained its importance over the years, of holding on to the true things—like one another—even in the face of an apparently guaranteed dead-end future, the immutably cold equations of its chamber space opera which differ not all that much from the hot ones of our planetside reality show. Not Pyrrhically or ironically, it chimed with other stories I had grown up hearing.
Jamaica Run (1953) is an inexplicably lackadaisical film for such sensational components as sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation climactically burning down on Caribbean Gothic schedule, but it did cheer me that it unerringly cast Wendell Corey as my obvious favorite character, the heroine's ne'er-do-well brother whose landed airs don't cover his bar tab and whose intentions toward the ingenue of a newly discovered heir may be self-surprised sincere romance or just hunting his own former fortune, swanning around afternoons in a dressing gown and getting away with most of the screenplay's sarcasm: "What is this, open house for disagreeable people?"
I cannot yet produce photographic evidence, but the robin's eggs in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen have hatched into open-mouthed nestlings. A dozen infant caterpillars are tunneling busily through the milkweed.
I am relieved to see that the enraging article I read last night about the deep-sixing of Yiddish at Brandeis has since been amended to a reduced but not eradicated schedule, but it would have been best to leave the program undisturbed to begin with. The golem reference is apropos.
My formative Joan D. Vinge was Psion (1982/2007), which even in its bowdlerized YA version may have been my introductory super-corporatized dystopia, but I had recent occasion to recommend her Heaven Chronicles (1991), which I got off my parents' shelves in high school and whose first novella especially has retained its importance over the years, of holding on to the true things—like one another—even in the face of an apparently guaranteed dead-end future, the immutably cold equations of its chamber space opera which differ not all that much from the hot ones of our planetside reality show. Not Pyrrhically or ironically, it chimed with other stories I had grown up hearing.
Jamaica Run (1953) is an inexplicably lackadaisical film for such sensational components as sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation climactically burning down on Caribbean Gothic schedule, but it did cheer me that it unerringly cast Wendell Corey as my obvious favorite character, the heroine's ne'er-do-well brother whose landed airs don't cover his bar tab and whose intentions toward the ingenue of a newly discovered heir may be self-surprised sincere romance or just hunting his own former fortune, swanning around afternoons in a dressing gown and getting away with most of the screenplay's sarcasm: "What is this, open house for disagreeable people?"
I cannot yet produce photographic evidence, but the robin's eggs in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen have hatched into open-mouthed nestlings. A dozen infant caterpillars are tunneling busily through the milkweed.
coast to coast rail
Re: coast to coast rail
I used to talk about it with
Re: coast to coast rail
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At this point in the economy, riding freight has started to sound appealing.
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https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-ridin-dirty-a-basic-reference-for-freight-hopping
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Pre-pandemic, I was looking in a not totally pipe-dreamy way at travelling aboard a cargo ship. Post-pandemic, no chance. I hate it.
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Okay, I really admire using the roll of the ship to do the Orphée-and-Heurtebise round-the-vertical-corner trick.
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In 2023 I had my mask on the entire time I was in the East-West trains. I carefully noted which station stops were long enough to me to eat a PB sandwich and fruit on the platform. I took it off briefly a couple of times in my Tampa to Raleigh roomette.
*Calgary to Vancouver in 1981 is my only Canadian rail trip, I think.
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I was genuinely reassured that it still does some good to yell at a university, because boy, has it not felt that way for a while.
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*hugs*
Thank you for telling me. It's not great inside my head right now, and it doesn't help that it isn't great outside my head right now, either.
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That's wonderful! I spent so much of the summer worried that we had seen no activity on our milkweed, but I think the migration was just later this year. I hope to get close enough to see the nestlings through more than the windows of the sun porch sometime.
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*hugs tight*
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*hugs*
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Coincidentally, Instagram recently served me up a video of a green heron using bread crust to fish. I don't have that specific video, but here's another one, with a much larger fish caught at the end than I was expecting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Porp5v5lLKk
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There are three of them!
Coincidentally, Instagram recently served me up a video of a green heron using bread crust to fish. I don't have that specific video, but here's another one, with a much larger fish caught at the end than I was expecting.
That's so neat! Thank you.
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And laughing at lackadaisical in combination with sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation.
One day I'd like to see commercially grown sugarcane. The sugarcane I've seen growing has been just a couple of plants--not a whole plantation.
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It's one professor and irreplaceable to the identity of the university! How could it have been up for question?
And laughing at lackadaisical in combination with sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation.
It all just sort of . . . happens.
One day I'd like to see commercially grown sugarcane. The sugarcane I've seen growing has been just a couple of plants--not a whole plantation.
I don't think I've ever seen sugarcane in the wild in person.
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But I think it grows to be really tall--like towering above you, like the banks of phragmite reeds you can see in places. This was tall, but not THAT tall.
But getting raw sugarcane from one of these plants, all warm from just growing in the sun, and SO JUICY--it was like the guy from Bism telling you about fresh-squeezed rubies. Mind blowing. "I am eating living sugar!"
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That's so cool.