Punk > Recent Status Updates

Libby remembered where I was, but not my highlights. :(

Hey, this came back to me early! The other borrower must have given up on it.

"you never heard so deep a sound, / moss on rock, and years."

On "New Star Song": "This, again, is the working ethos of the early lyrics. Set a scene and put some ghosts in it, then get excited about the ghosts."

So far none of these songs are familiar to me—the furthest back my Mountain Goats collection goes is 2002* and we're in the early 1990s here—but I'm loving the near rhyme of forgetting/Redding in "New Star Song."

* Which was basically yesterday, I feel. Not very long ago at all. However, basic math reveals it was nearly 30 years ago.

Darnielle includes Miron Białoszewski's poem "And Even, Even if They Take Away the Stove / My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy, which he cites as formative for him, reading it at seventeen, and it just explains so much about what he's trying to do with the Mountain Goats.

"Pure Milk" is the first of these earlier songs where I can see the same things that draw me to Darnielle's songwriting today–the intense narrator, the weird circumstances, a whiff of the apocalyptic–and it's clearly a song rather than a poem. Wonderfully, he says it's one of his absolute favorites among his earlier songs because it's still opaque to him and he wants to know more about the story.

Old mistakes come calling: no life / happens just once.

I was away from this for a couple of days and have totally lost track of all these clones.

John Darnielle: "What more fortunate situation could there be, for a person, than to be glad of having been wrong?"

Oh no, this is huuuuuuuuge.

This went back to the library and since they only have one copy and two people are ahead of me, it'll be a while before I see it again.

woman's desire
deeply rooted–
the wild violets

even falling down
it still smiles--
the festival doll

“—but some Orthodox rabbi ruled that digitally reconstituted personalities are ghosts, not golems, and therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges of their originals under Halakhic law.”

"And if his grasp of basic cognitive theory was correct, then he was now being laughed at by the closest thing he’d ever see in his entomologist’s life to a sentient ant swarm."

evening temple bell
stopped in the sky
by cherry blossoms

"The plum blossom was transplanted from China and was Japan's favorite flower until nationalism grew in the eighth century and the sakura (cherry blossom), which is native to Japan, took its place."

This book is so funny: "Here, look at this floor plan."

Jesus Christ, what am I reading? It's like floor plan copypasta. Kurihara needs to go outside and find some grass to touch.

lol using my Japanese to read the floor plan on the cover: "toilet, sofa, table."

I have finally exited the somewhat repetitive introduction and reached the haiku. It puts the transliteration first which is a choice.

This ebook is messed up. You can't even highlight text with any accuracy. :(

Aaaaaaaand the end notes aren't linked. Good thing I didn't pay money for this. (That's what the library is for.)

Natalie Goldberg, immediately, "Now he, a potter and baker, was joining his twin, a young woman, to practice with intensity together in California. "

Ugh, this ebook is actually a PDF with wretchedly small print. I'll try it on the tablet to see if I like it enough to buy a paper copy. Though the words "Foreword by Natalie Goldberg" do not fill me with joy.

"A dry breeze blew across her face, winding from nowhere to nowhere like a desert river."

From Kim Stafford's preface: At a reading, following one of his deft, quiet offerings, a listener helplessly spoke aloud, "I could have written that." And William Stafford, looking kindly at the speaker, replied, "But you didn't." A beat of silence. "But you could write your own."

I guess giving your investigator memory problems is one way to write mystery.

Just now, this very second, learned that this is a trilogy.