No.258

March ending, a list:

1. Green things beginning to make themselves known, all at once and insistently and cautiously and then on a Thursday afternoon you notice there are various tulips about to flower and the rhubarb is almost a foot high and isn’t everything just miracles anyway

2. Retrieved the tiniest spider from the beard of a friend—how do those tiny spiders just appear like that, from nowhere at all? Are they the ones floating about the atmosphere on silk strings, like weightless many-legged balloons?

3. The fridge decided to give up and go warm on the inside, and although an open-fridge transplant was attempted with with some kind of spare part the proceedure didn’t work well and as such the fridge must be retired, which leads me to think about how many fridges there are on the surface of the planet—apparently in the realm of 1.5 billion—and subsequently feel very uncomfortable

4. On the plus side the town forty-five minutes drive away where I will in due course collect a shinier fridge from a woman called Gabrielle—“house with the red door by the iron cows”—also contains a delicatessen which is the only place I’m yet to find around here which stocks Norwegian gjetost

5. You cannot have gjetost without a fridge and soon enough I shall have both

6. Accidentally stepped on a small pavement snail while getting ready to drive to some botanical gardens, this brought on a bout of immense sadness

7. “She tried to work a little, but found she was not in the humor.” — Kate Chopin, The Awakening

8. Personally I am not in the humor about a great number of things

   

9. ‘Ecology’ being derived from the Greek oikos, meaning home

10. Lucy Ellman: “As if the end of the world had not already come and gone.”

11. I keep forgetting and then remembering and then forgetting again that my new book will be out next March and as of right now in the midst of a world screaming in various types of human-inflicted pain am unsure how exactly to feel about that; I want my published work to be properly useful if it is to take up space and time and trees

12. Some people foster one-eyed cats or ex-racing, long-nosed dogs but I shall be fostering a piano which to my mind is not actually dissimilar to an animal

13. How someone will say they have a list of things to do a mile long

14. That we take more photographs every minute than were taken during the entirety of the nineteenth century

15. For the first time ever I arrived to the local store before it actually opened, having neglected to check my watch or any other device concerned with minutes, and so at 6:55am I joined three elderly, bundled-up men outside the automatic doors and listened to their conversation—how was your fish supper last night—before an employee let us in; each of the three men purchased a single newspaper and I purchased a tiny carton of milk

16. Sometimes you just have to make things easier for yourself

17. Loaned a book by a friend, written in the early 1900s by the Scottish author Catherine Carswell—in the preface, this from her unfinished autobiography Lying Awake: “Writing—for women. Inherent difficulties.”

18. How the other day you, without announcement or warning, gently tied a thin piece of red suede string around my right wrist and said it was so you wouldn’t lose me

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THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:

Paintings by Australian artist Nick Dridan.

“People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don’t think it’s for the children at all. I that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’

Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: “This is not a world, this is nothing, there's no way to live at all.’”

— Russell Hoban

Again and for however long necessary: (Actions for demanding a Free Palestine and an end to occupation.) / (Reading list for a Free Palestine.) / (Postcards for Palestine, free PDF downloads.) / (Send a physical postcard.) / (Ten free ebooks for getting free from Haymarket Books.)

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