7/31: porch morning
It was cool enough this morning to spend time on the porch, mostly with Tilde the Cat, though Chris and the other cats also came out for awhile. I read some more of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, which I remember loving as a younger person and have wanted to reread; Chris' reading it right now gave me the incentive to actually do it. Then I decided to do my Friday writing early and take advantage of the unexpected chance to write in nice air. I wrote about allegory in Yõko Ogawa's Memory Police and similes in Henry Green's Concluding, and I think that helped me bring the odd experiences of reading those novels to a close.
7/30: experimenting
...with pop-up-book folding and cutting techniques and learning by doing. It wasn't always comfortable and entailed a lot of trial-and-error, but even so it was a good thing.
7/28: another round
...of collaging on the cards that my sister and I are mailing back and forth. It was interesting to see what she chose to add and then decide what I want to contribute this time.
7/27: diving in
...to the last selection of similes for my share of a collaborative Melville project. I only meant to do a little preliminary work this evening, but then I got pulled in as I tried finding ones that worked as a sequence but also spoke to my partner's prior sequence. I ended the night with a full set.
7/26: coming across
...some color books on Project Gutenberg.
From A Color Notation by A. H. Munsell: "Two dimensions fail to describe a color." And "The tuning of color cannot be left to personal whim."
From Colour as a Means of Art by Frank Howard: "As it is impossible with pigments to rival the brightness of light, it has been found necessary to adopt some method of forcing the effect of colours, so as to conceal or to supply a compensation for this deficiency, and apparently to produce the vigour of truth."
From Field's Chromatography by Thomas W. Salter: "Blue and green have been termed discordant, and in painting they may undoubtedly be made so. Yet those are two colours which nature seems to intend never to be separated, and never to be felt, either of them, in its full beauty, without the other—a blue sky through green leaves, or a blue wave with green lights through it, being precisely the loveliest things, next to clouds at sunrise, in this coloured world of ours."
7/25: watching the livestream
...of Aeschylus' Persians from the theatre at Epidaurus. And Chris watched, too.
7/23: getting into
...Trollope research this afternoon and realizing that I'd rather be doing it than anything else right then. My job troubles at the end of the semester had been making me uneasy about my academic work, as if it too was colored by that unpleasantness. I'll be glad if that's beginning to feel less the case.
7/22: attending
...a Zoom sketchbook workshop facilitated by Daniel Coston and sponsored by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
7/21: doing practical things
...out in the world (appointments and errands) and inside the house (cleaning). And thinking about "impractical" things, like fairies, abstract comics, and asemic writing.
7/19: sky smudge
We drove into some farm fields south of town, where it's dark and flat, to see the comet.
7/18: a beautiful chapter
...about the disappearance of roses in The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.
7/17: some smooth interactions
...online and on the phone. Summer and COVID have meant that I'm interfacing with other people less in general, so I'm out of practice, but today's exchanges were all good, and that gives me hope.
7/16: letting myself
...get lost in pamphlet-making. I had an idea mid-afternoon, and I just went with it, working on it until bedtime.
7/15: making
...a pearl couscous recipe a second time, with some tweaks. In addition to the pearl couscous cooked in broth, it includes chopped onion, melted butter, cinnamon, cayenne pepper, pistachios, pine nuts, golden raisins, lemon zest, and lemon juice. I put it on a bed of greens lightly tossed with oil and vinegar. I think the recipe is a keeper, and I'm grateful to Chris for suggesting the cayenne.
7/14: going through
...all the pamphlets I've made in recent years, making sure I have two copies of each to save and seeing how many extras I have to send out. Some I've sent out entirely, so I'll remake two of each of those in the coming days, and then I'll have an archive as well as a browsing collection. Having a browsing collection was Chris' idea, and he was kind and supportive as I show-and-tell-ed him through the big stack.
7/13: finding
...my translation of the opening of one of Cavafy's poems on the sidewalk at school today.
7/12: in the home stretch
...of The Deerslayer. It's been harder for me to read than I had expected; I couldn't get consistent momentum. But Chris (who finished reading it a couple of weeks ago) and I have been talking about it as I've been going, and that's been great. The project of the book is stranger, and more philosophical, than I thought it would be.
7/11: seeing
...a photo of my assembled high-school home-room, 1984-1985. I have a probably intentional, bad attitude, "I'm not into having my picture taken" expression on my face, but everyone else looks so incredibly sweet.
7/10: maybe
...just maybe, a truly unpleasant, anxiety-inducing situation at work drew mostly to a close today. It lasted 11 weeks, and may take me almost that long to recover from. While a slow re-set is not a great prospect, I'm glad that I can at least try to get into re-set mode now. And maybe sooner rather than later I'll stop feeling nervous and queasy every time I open my work email, wondering if some new chapter of yuck awaits me.
7/9: refinding blueberry lane
Years ago Chris and I were driving randomly on backroads and came across Blueberry Lane. Today I was at odds-and-ends after doing some (more!) troubling email for work, and we thought we should go for a drive. I suggested that we try to get to Blueberry Lane again. So we did.
The first two photos were taken on Blueberry Lane itself; the last one shows Cadron Creek from a bridge we crossed to get to the lane.
7/8: Q & A period
I listened to a Zoom presentation today. Although the lecture was full of information, it didn't highlight ideas, signal themes, or mark milestones in the argument. But people used the question and answer period really nicely to prompt the speaker to make possible connections between his information and bigger, richer questions. That was nice to witness.
7/7: adding
...my next snippets to the collaborative collage cards my sister and I are sending back and forth.
7/5: timing
I woke up shortly after 4 a.m. and couldn't fall back to sleep, so I turned to The Deerslayer--and as night became morning I was reading Cooper's descriptions of dawn.
7/4: reading the last chapter
...of Finn Family Moomintroll out loud with Chris. There was a summer party with fireworks in it, which made it unexpectedly à propos for today. And parts of it were very lovely: the ruby! the wishes! When we finished, Chris went online and ordered the other books in the series so we can continue reading soon.
7/3: actually arranging
...some similes from Moby Dick as part of a collaborative project that had lingered long in the hypothetical stages.
7/2: thinking about
...the various ways the word "as" works: expressing a time relationship, signaling a simile, completing a comparison, showing extent, qualifying or particularizing, helping to introduce a conditional clause of comparison, offering a reason or cause, showing purpose. Sometimes the categories of usage seem quite separate, but as I've been looking at Herman Melville's uses of "as" in Moby Dick, I'm realizing how often they blend into one another.
7/1: starting
...to listen to The Radiant Road by Katherine Catmull. I loved her Summer and Bird back in 2013 (I wrote about it enthusiastically here and here), and I'm excited to see how this novel of hers will go. Hearing the first chapter made me eager to continue tomorrow, and it made me want to revisit Summer and Bird too.
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