So last night I was emotionally miserable and my lower back seized up for no obvious reason and my room was a swamp of heat and humidity and I slept through nightmares for about three hours in the mid-morning and this afternoon I finished my first poem in two months. At last I can start suffering and write that symphony? Have some things I've been meaning to post.
1. Dean sent me this one: archaeologists have uncovered the shipbuilding harbors of the Persian Wars. Now I want to re-read Jill Paton Walsh's Farewell, Great King (1972).
2. I am delighted that a former poet laureate of the UK wants to widen the definition of war poetry to include the anonymous soldiers' song "I Don't Want to Join the Army." I have an unreasonable affection for this jaunty, sweary bit of the folk tradition. I learned it about ten years ago—a side effect of trying to trace a racy jingle from The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), I believe—even before I heard its parent "A Conscientious Objector" and it tends to come into my head while I'm washing dishes.
3. In case you have not yet seen, the full source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer has been published online and it is full of programmers being clever at one another. I had not realized that Margaret Hamilton the software engineer was still alive. I am really happy to know she's still in the world and still doing things with it.
4. Capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been using stone tools for seven hundred years without needing humans to show them how. This is probably the best news I've heard all week.
5. These are the songs that have been in my head for the last forty-eight hours. I suspect them of trying to organize themselves into a mixtape. It's more instrumental than my usual internal soundtrack, at least.
( The sweetest pleasure in all my roaming, babe. )
I am now caught up on work for the week. I suppose that explains where it all went.
1. Dean sent me this one: archaeologists have uncovered the shipbuilding harbors of the Persian Wars. Now I want to re-read Jill Paton Walsh's Farewell, Great King (1972).
2. I am delighted that a former poet laureate of the UK wants to widen the definition of war poetry to include the anonymous soldiers' song "I Don't Want to Join the Army." I have an unreasonable affection for this jaunty, sweary bit of the folk tradition. I learned it about ten years ago—a side effect of trying to trace a racy jingle from The Notorious Bettie Page (2005), I believe—even before I heard its parent "A Conscientious Objector" and it tends to come into my head while I'm washing dishes.
3. In case you have not yet seen, the full source code for the Apollo Guidance Computer has been published online and it is full of programmers being clever at one another. I had not realized that Margaret Hamilton the software engineer was still alive. I am really happy to know she's still in the world and still doing things with it.
4. Capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been using stone tools for seven hundred years without needing humans to show them how. This is probably the best news I've heard all week.
5. These are the songs that have been in my head for the last forty-eight hours. I suspect them of trying to organize themselves into a mixtape. It's more instrumental than my usual internal soundtrack, at least.
( The sweetest pleasure in all my roaming, babe. )
I am now caught up on work for the week. I suppose that explains where it all went.
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