No.206

June ending, a list:

1. The green things in the garden have gone completely crackers and I spent some enjoyable but arguably pointless hours pulling out hundreds of rampaging, flowering buttercups by their roots to, theoretically, give others a chance

2. I haven’t been in the river in over two weeks

3. When I find feathers I put them in one of two places, a lidded cardboard box with an elastic band around it (now overly full) or one of the wooden drawers in my office—the wooden drawer is shared with stationery and papers and other useful things but I do envision a time where there are so many feathers that there isn’t room for anything else i.e. I will open the drawer to show someone and declare and look this is my drawer of only bird feathers isn’t it nice!

4. The black-throated sparrow goes its entire life without drinking water; they do not even know how

5. I dreamt about dogs and death and the botanical gardens in Rio de Janeiro and falling spectacularly off a bicycle into a huge, dense field of trilliums

6. The scent of fresh nectarines lingers for a significant time

   

   The Paris Review, interview with Walter Mosley

7. A lot of things that do not appear as violence feel violent and slightly twitchy inside my body, for example: how animals are clipped and shaved and sprayed with hairspray in order to win best in show; those harvesting machines which clasp and shake nut trees hundreds of times per minute;

8. I intend to get up at 6am but this very rarely happens—taking the planetary unravelling into account remaining in bed just seems sensible

9. Considering the words brute, brutish, brutal (‘brute’ from Latin brūtus “heavy, devoid of feeling, irrational”)

10. There is something highly good but highly difficult to explain about the sound of rain of metal roofs—what is this? nothing more than connection to an element? reassurance? ancient memory?

11. I would like to see a list of all the things people have ever left behind on trains

12. I’ve started embroidering an old linen shirt with birds in black thread

13. Slowing yourself down enough to notice single raindrops landing on individual leaves

14. Remembering two summers ago in Ireland, tractors having baled up grasses to dry out in the first strong heat, and how often they are covered in just a black plastic, but some of them were striped in black and white and so looked like giant humbugs

15. “From June to August they choose to forget who they are, or at least what they look like, electing an annual season of non-reflectiveness” — Carol Shields, Dressing Up for the Carnival

    

16. I work on a couple of book proposals at the speed of the very slowest snail but a snail that does have some degree of both direction and determination

17. Option for an epitaph: It didn’t hurt, it was just surprising

18. There are more or less one hundred thousand rocks skipped on lakes each day

19. Scotland in the summer feels like someone has accidentally left the sky turned on

20. I haven’t painted anything in a couple of weeks (perhaps this is also why I haven’t been in the river for two weeks/are the two related) because I broke the small ceramic pot used for washing out brushes, for paint water. There are countless other pots in the house I could have used and could still use, but those are drinking vessels, and I am terribly stuck and seem unable to bring myself to select or find another one for this purpose

21. The incredible difficulty of remembering to retrieve an umbrella if it has stopped raining in between placing the umbrella down and needing to pick it back up (Latin umbella meaning a sunshade, parasol; derivative of umbra meaning shadow, shade)

22. Surfaces gather dust, I can locate no desire to clean them

THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Works with oil pastels on paper and board by Phoebe Stone (Cammeraygal land, Sydney), whose pieces I first found and fell in love with around the time of newsletter No.196.

“Every word claims an authority and every word craves to be believed, and we read others’ words and we find something to relate to, solace in a shared experience. Yet there doesn’t have to be any experience behind a word. A word can be a shadow not cast by any object.”

— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease

“I am sitting here, writing, in order to discover the simple secret of my existence—what sort of creature I am.”

— Sheila Heti, Motherhood