I just got 2666 in the mail. I bought the paperback, three volume set. It is bew-ti-ful! I’m saving for when I’m inconsolable at the end of Moby Dick.

Henry T. Cheever
Miriam Coffin

I have auto-da-fe and archiepiscopacy scrawled on my arm, and what do you know, when I looked up the first, I found the second. It’s like a scavenger hunt where someone else is just ahead of me leaving clues.

Who was Rondelitius? He, or someone of the same name, is referenced in Moby Dick (the section on whales), The Compleat Angler, The Naturalist’s Library, The American Cyclopædia (which attributes to him a “dull religious drama, Judas Redivivus”), and The English physitian: or an astrologo-physical discourse of the vulgar herbs of this nation. The last of which looks like some good reading, especially the Directions for making Syrups, Conserves, Oyls, Oyntments, &c. of Herbs, Roots, Flowers &c. Oh boy, there’s a whole list of these texts online! Huh. Forget Rondelitius, I want to know about a Plain and easie method for preserving (by God’s blessing) those that are well from the infection of the plague : or any contagious distemper in city, camp, fleet, &c. and for curing such as are infected with it ; written in the year 1666.

Miranda July talks about how at some point she decided to pretend that other people understood what she meant and act as though it were true… I could write a cheerful manifesto on this. (Wait! What’s this?) It’s like karate chopping at the air in a dense fog. If you flail hard enough, every once in a while you swirl the air around you enough that someone else will think they saw something and wave crazily back. They might mistake you for someone else or think you meant something else entirely, but it doesn’t matter.

Jane, on writing poetry—saying she didn’t used to believe she had anything worthwhile to say, so she wrote what she did as obliquely as possible, hoping, by eliding what she actually meant, to say it without calling attention to it. I used to do this too, though more because I was intimidated by the weight of Literature. (Another reason I was able to write in a history-less medium. It wasn’t Writing. Things change fast though, that’s over with, though I pretend with all my might it’s not.) I think I was afraid that if I referred directly to what I meant or to something I wanted particularly, I might have to agree if anyone declared me pantless.

Listening to some more interviews with Miranda July (who takes flax seed oil, which is a good thing) made me feel better about worrying about offending everyone and not being able to be too starkly critical. It was a good reminder that it’s okay to be want to provide encouragement, to want to take care of the people who will be looking, to keep them safe. That’s really the only way the collaborative misunderstandings I spend my life looking for can ever happen in the first place. Fear of seeming foolish makes people jittery and small and unadventurous. Nothing made me happier today than knowing that the author of the flash photo of under her bed won a grant. What a fine world.

I completed LTLYM assignment #70 last night. It was a fairly contented set of goodbyes to a lot of things that are simply over whether I like it or not, along with a few things I hope are gone for good. I wrote it very fast and it made me pleased.

Late winter vegetable inspiration from Culinate.

And finally: a bookslut article on Murakami.