Currently Reading: Synthesizing Gravity by Kay Ryan 📚

I have loved a few of Kay Ryan’s poems for a time, but only recently have I read any of her poetry in bulk. (An awful word for poetry collections, I admit, but I’m not implying any sort of speed in reading them.) Then I found this collection of her essays and — between the poems and the prose, she has quickly become one of my favorite writers on the planet.

Writing about Marianne Moore’s poetry, Ryan remarks, “She commonly looks at something quite remote and rustic … and it explodes in a variety of alarming directions.”

“Yet in another way,” she says, “observation is just the detonator for an explosion of private associations, glittering in their rhetorical arcs, and upon there descent into the reader’s brainpan randomly meaningful and meaningless.”

I love reading, love all the glittering, meaningful and meaningless rehetorical arcs.

Lots of murals in Phoenix. Like this one, on the old Channel 5 building on 1st Ave, with interesting history behind it. More importantly, there’s a love of history in things like this.

Somewhere south of Salt Lake

Goat-a love a good sunrise, eh?

A law of the universe, as true as any other: “If I make this face, you have to scratch my head.”

Somebody wants to be friends

July (s)newsletter!

Highfalutin fido

Finished Reading (2023): Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth by Jennifer Banks 📚

An excellent biographical-philosophical flyover and a much needed spark to shift our thinking. There’s definitely room for her “Philosophy of Birth” to grow.

Each person, in simply being born, creates an opportunity for history to begin again. … We are more than history’s byproducts; we are instead creative participants in history, nature, and time. A human is born a tiny, infinitesimal piece of some massive whole, but that macrocosm is not impervious to the smallness of our individual births.

Marilynne Robinson:

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light. … Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.