Hark to the Lark

Bald Coot and Screaming Loon even though compiled in a question answer format, it is not academic, thanks to the informal tone of the Niall Edworthy

Tube noses
Fieldfare
Dovekie

The book is about birds and what they eat(or what we should or should not feed them), where they live and all the other things they do. He degrades them in the beginning to put them on the pedestal after the introduction.

I have read a Q&A book on birds before that didnt sustain my readership for too long. Compared with that, this book is an eye candy with accurate, lyric and funny illustrations. Its an ear candy too with the poems in it. My favourie is Dixon Lanier Merrit's poem in which he rhymes pelican with '(his bill can hold more than his)belican' and '(But i'm damned if I see how the) helican'.

If you are a beginner, you will learn a lot about how the birds 'flying' rules all of its other activities - molting, what organs it can or cannot have. For a bird with scavenging habits, you cannot have feathers on your neck. The most amazing fact to know for me was the duration of day that it takes to make an egg. Again its the need to fly for food. Bird mommy gets no maternity leave. That they discard their nitrogen in a way very differet from mammals which again goes back to how it cant bloat itself so that it can fly. Dusting. Anting and many other phenomenon.

If you have not done birdwatching before, theres a how to.

With so much going on about air controllers caught sleeping while on duty, a patrol crane with a stone held in its feet might have a way out for waking when you fall asleep.

When the author describes how the birds drink water, from what I have seen or remember, I think they posess a soaking ability. I will have to watch more keenly and look for them to hold their head back to gulp it down.

If you are not a beginner, still there are many new things that will you make you wonder about the bird world. That swifts cant walk very well like other birds, having chosen the fast life. The technique of Albatroses and others with their tubenoses that desalinate might help us too. If you knew all this about birds, there are still many quotes, poems and anecdotes to enjoy. The best i like is by Emily Dickinson - 'I hope you love birds,too. It is economical. It saves going to Heaven'.


I have added a new item to my wish list. To watch a mass migration.


Beauty brains

Marisa Silver

Grosgrain in Alone with you
Toby is found reading Pnin

Rita Golden Gelman

Mariposa

Blue Morpho
Laparus Doris
shoemaker
Bamboo page
Nymphalid
owl butterfly
Southern cattleheart
swallow tail

from the world of butterflies

A recent dream of mine had a butterfly with a beautiful pattern just on one side.

Notes to the reader

1. If there is a meeting of people, then there is going to be parting.

If Dream interpretation is the popular genre in prison libraries, what is the popuular dream?

Myth loaded

All these birds by Richard Wilbur

Philomela

Dead poet

Paul Violi

Is sonnet or writing in a form like blowing an animal balloon?

What we hoard

When Graham finds a stash of biblical notes in Legacy of a Pack Rat, I didnt realise the significance not knowing that Billy Graham was an evangelist.

Choice

What element of myth is picked from the myth orchard for your wreath, brocade?

Ichor in Death by Aesthetics poem by Mona Van Duyn

words like chirreting,unchinking logs,

Buzz

Blunderbuss in Message from a cloud of flies: On Distraction

I keep the patio door open to let the fresh air, summer light, dust, bumble bee, flies, black stranger cat with green eyes in.

The fly is insistent in doing certain number of rotations and revolutions before getting out.

Once in a while, starlings hop <2ft into the air.

A sneeze

in an empty apartment sounds like a basketball thump

Common Thread

I wonder if Dakota Spiritual geography and Bird cloud will cross path in experiences.

The fountain of western Classics

Dont judge the book by its cover

All things Shining

Bringing out the truth of a cliche was one of Wallace's writing principle. This is something solid about David Wallace. The more I come across this writer, the more he gets shrouded. But for now, authors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, have bottled good wine in bad bottle.
After reading 'David Foster Wallace's Nihilism' chapter, I am left wondering making sense of 'no constraints whatsoever to the meaning we can construct for our experiences'. The text leading to puzzles likes this skillfully ties the Luther's obsessive confession disorder to Wallace's agonizing writer self. Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert are shown as whats right with the literature world in their works dealing with forging ahead instead of portraying whats wrong with the past. This being common, their philosophies are shown different. Wallace with lack of 'sacred' in his dictionary, experiencing an unbearable quality(pain) in the opposite(bliss) and Gilbert seeing an artist as a medium are pitted as two opposites. A middle ground is subject of the concluding chapter.
Many book characters walk in and out to prove the author's points regarding God perceived by other thinkers in their works.
In the third chapter, the authors go into movie snippets or summaries to illustrate their line of thought on fate and meaning in life. The reader can judge Homer's morals and learn of the Roman Fortuna (with no prejudice) and Grecian concept of lady luck smiling on the chosen.


People or book characters who know what they are all about.
David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Gilbert about how to go forward in life than duplicate the dark of life in their writing.
Obsessive confuser Martin Luther.
Wallace's non-belief in God and self as perpetrator and Gilbert's self view as a medium for art are at odds.

Book fancy

Klezmer in Running the books
I didnt try to decpher the cover, thinking it to be some letter combinations. They are date stamps of book returns to a library.
The author ran in laser tag. I move so cautiously trying not to get tagged.
The prison that produced Malcolm X housed Whitery Bulger too.
Yuppie
Fleet week

Writing in the dark

A way to not read what you are writing until you are completely done with it. Things too happen to us like being written in the dark. We arrive somewhere we do not exactly know.
Night at the beach. Night at the office. They are not lifeless. Theres sea life at the former and mosquitoes throbbing at the latter.
The thing about teeth health, it doesnt matter what goes in there, only nothing gets to stay over for the night.
The world's ink is spreading onto the paper,
exceeding the paper,
onto the blanket, carpet,
out the street, into the lake,
into the sea, dark blue ocean.
Even into the Blue Hole. What happens when it mixes the red hydrogen sulphide. Magenta.
Cannot go hungry to bed. All the tubers in the salt lake see the color enveloping them, some fill their beer bottles with it. One student takes it to his lab. He sees the test tubes filled with it and the litmus test he will put the solution through. The perfume tester changes colors. A dab of the liquid starts a tine, a little more bring out a hue, and then some more colors the molecules in a unique way. Two perfumes with their colors next to each other and close is the mixture of their colors.
White flowers with dash of purple here and there like speckles on an egg shell. What is it chemically? What if we changed colors as we ate?
Grow as a flower. Deliver a flower. Float it.The flower takes after the blue of the water, her vine twirls around the perches on the shore. Sometimes the march of people awakens her. She crouches fro the stealth of unwelcome intentions.
A transparent stomach shows a bed of cookie crumbs.