Older blog entries for marnanel (starting at number 1080)

20 Jun 2014 »

Gentle Readers, 2014-06-19: dams and dust

Gentle Readers

a newsletter made for sharing
19th June 2014: dams and dust

What I’ve been up to

I had a lovely evening at Pop Up Poetry in Guildford on Tuesday. The hosts and the regulars are as friendly a bunch of poets as you could hope to meet, and I'm going to miss them when we move up north. I expect I'll be back, though. There weren't as many folk there as usual, because of the football, so nothing's on video. But if you'd like to see part of a set I did at Pop Up a few months ago, click here.

I pitched a book to unbound.co.uk; they're still considering whether to run it. It's like a kind of Kickstarter for books. My pitch went like this:

"Over the holidays, Erica hides away in the university library. She's surprised to find a book about her mothers and how they met, especially since the story seems to be from an alternate history and involves a dragon. Further investigation turns up confirmation that it's true, but why have they never mentioned this, and why are there no dragons now? Asking questions brings unwelcome answers in the form of Yvette of the Order of Merlin, who is searching for parts of the tea-set used on the Round Table: they think Erica might just be the one who can find the missing cup for them. It turns out that Yvette had originally introduced her mothers to one another, when they were on two separate quests (one for library books stolen by a dragon, one for magic cake): Erica begins to suspect a deeper motive. Who was Erica's biological father, and does it matter? What have the Order been hoping to gain from Erica since before she was born? And can you really restore happiness in the land with a tea-set?"

I'm planning to make a podcast and a video version of Gentle Readers, though the email newsletter will still be its primary form. I'm also planning to make a print-on-demand volume of every three months' content. And the website needs sprucing up a lot.

If you have a friend who would enjoy Gentle Readers, please do share this or any other edition with them-- or ask them to join the list themselves! The more the merrier, in many ways.

A poem of mine

As I was going up the stair

I met a cat who wasn't there.

"Whose cat are you?" I asked of her.

She answered, "Dr Schrödinger."

Also:

"Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man."
The daftest thing I've ever read is
to claim enlightenment' in Shreddies.

A picture

I had to draw this because it's what I think of every time I see the instruction "Microwave on high for two minutes".

http://thomasthurman.org/gentle/on-high.jpg

Something wonderful

During the Great Depression, US President Franklin D Roosevelt ordered the construction of the Hoover Dam, then the biggest dam in the world, at a cost of about fifty million dollars-- over 800 million in today's money. It might seem odd at first sight to pour money into public works during a recession, but the dam provided more than hydroelectricity and water-- it provided inspiration, and for thousands of workers it provided a regular paycheque. Tens of thousands more were kept in work at businesses where the pay was spent.

The original design for the dam was planned by the engineers, and was severely functional. For balance, the consortium engaged an architect, Gordon Kaufmann, and an artist, Allen True. Together they made the dam not just a useful artefact, not just an inspiration, but also a thing of beauty in the (then current) Art Deco style. True carried out anthropological research and based his work on ideas and patterns from nearby Native American nations. He included a floor with a star map accurate for the night of the dam's dedication ceremony, so that if one day a civilisation finds the dam but can't read our writing, their astronomers can still work out when it was built.

http://thomasthurman.org/gentle/hoover-dam.jpg

Something from someone else

This poem from 1641 by Catherine Dyer is part of her husband's epitaph, and it is the only verse of hers which survives. She must have written more poetry than this, mustn't she? Maybe we'll find her other work hidden in a dusty library one day, and it will change the hearts and minds of the world. Who knows?

MY DEAREST DUST
by Catherine Dyer

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day
afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay
one hour longer: so that we might either
sat up, or gone to bed together?
But since thy finished labour hath possessed
thy weary limbs with early rest,
enjoy it sweetly: and thy widow bride
shall soon repose her by thy slumb'ring side.
Whose business, now, is only to prepare
my nightly dress, and call to prayer:
mine eyes wax heavy and the day grows old.
The dew falls thick. My blood grows cold.
Draw, draw the closéd curtains, and make room:
My dear, my dearest dust: I come. I come.

Colophon

Gentle Readers is published on Mondays and Thursdays, and I want you to share it. If you have anything to say or reply, or you want to be added or removed from the mailing list, I’m at thomas@thurman.org.uk and I’d love to hear from you. The newsletter is reader-supported; please pledge something if you can afford to, and please don't if you can't. Love and peace to you all.

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/300763.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-06-19 23:20:50 (Updated 2014-06-19 23:22:25) from Monument

17 Jun 2014 »

Paul Erdős double-dactyl

(vague sketch, ideas welcome)

Mathemamagical
Dr Paul Erdős has
Changed mathematics in
Numberless ways.
Won't go a month without
Dextroamphetamines:
Claims it would set the world
Back thirty days.

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Syndicated 2014-06-17 12:26:12 from Monument

17 Jun 2014 »

Gentle Readers, 2014-06-16: mostly about hovercraft

Gentle Readers

a newsletter made for sharing
16th June 2014: mostly about hovercraft

What I’ve been up to

On Sunday, I was a little surprised to notice a hovercraft parked in the churchyard. I was much more surprised a few hours later to find myself riding it around Runnymede. More of that below.

I have an interesting plan about the reboot of the Not Ordinarily Borrowable universe. I'm still working out the details, but I think I'll have enough to tell you next time. And the video versions of Gentle Readers are almost but not quite ready, though you can watch a first draft of the title sequence.

Other than that, I'm still in the middle of moving house and avoiding the football. Oh, all right: here's a football joke.

The Lord said unto Cain, How is it that the team of thy brother Abel lost their match six-nil?

And Cain replied, I know not. Am I my brother's keeper?

A poem of mine

(T85) TWO CREATURES

Two creatures' eyes have seen the sun,
and now their lids are filled with dust.
But if their eyes were blue, or brown,
I cannot tell, and yet I must.

St Claire's an Amiable Child
who sleeps secure and snug as Grant,
but who can tell me of his eyes?
(The city parks curator can't.)

And Johnson had a cat named Hodge
who fed on oysters, and was fine;
his coat was black, but not his eyes,
whose shade I cannot now divine.

Two creatures hold me in their gaze,
and thoughts of it I can't dislodge:
the nature of your eyes, my friends,
your sleeping eyes, St Claire and Hodge?

(By the way: my poems have index numbers beginning with T. I've decided to put the numbers in beside the title.)

A picture

Kit and me riding around on the hovercraft! We were crossing Runnymede, a meadow near where I live at present, which happens to be the place where the Magna Carta was signed just under eight hundred years ago. The meadow had just been mowed, so the air intakes of the hovercraft kept filling up with cut grass.

Something wonderful

The hovercraft turned out to belong to HoverAid. I had never previously heard of them, but I spent quite a while talking to some of their people that day. They are an aid organisation which uses hovercraft to get doctors, medical supplies, clean water infrastructure, and mosquito nets to places in Madagascar which are hard to reach any other way. One of the things I love about this world is that I keep finding people doing good in ways I had never imagined.

Something from someone else

This is a poem I've loved since childhood, and Two Creatures above was clearly based around it. I have a mating pair of giant millipedes (Archispirostreptus gigas) who live in a glass tank in my flat, and I named them Melchizedek and Ucalegon because of this poem. (Ucalegon is the female. I would tell you more about them, because I am very fond of them, but I risk terrifying half my readers.)

TWO MEN
by Edwin Arlington Robinson

There be two men of all mankind
That I should like to know about;
But search and question where I will,
I cannot ever find them out.

Melchizedek, he praised the Lord,
And gave some wine to Abraham;
But who can tell what else he did
Must be more learned than I am.

Ucalegon, he lost his house
When Agamemnon came to Troy;
But who can tell me who he was:
I'll pray the gods to give him joy.

There be two men of all mankind
That I'm forever thinking on:
They chase me everywhere I go:
Melchizedek, Ucalegon.

Colophon

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Syndicated 2014-06-16 23:26:19 (Updated 2014-06-16 23:29:15) from Monument

14 Jun 2014 »

Crusades

(I said elsewhere:) I'm in no way trying to excuse the Crusades, which are inexcusable. But I often hear people talking as if the Crusaders went out to fight followers of a different religion, and this is a misunderstanding. The Crusaders went out, as they thought, to fight followers of the *same* religion: they thought Islam was a heretical form of Christianity rather than a separate belief system. That's why the Pope thought he had jurisdiction to order the crusade in the first place. As I said, that doesn't excuse anything they did, but nobody can begin to understand someone without understanding their motivation.

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/299650.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-06-14 20:33:31 from Monument

14 Jun 2014 »

fury

I have a typesetting system called "fury" (after the poem in "Alice"). I used a previous version of it to set http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~tthurman/not-ordinarily-borrowable.pdf . What I was aiming for is a sort of LaTeX-in-Python; you write your document as a Python script.

write("""
She shrugged, muttered "I have """)
write("no", Emphasis)
write(""" idea", and turned away quickly.")

Most of the system exists, and works well enough to produce the PDF above. But I wonder whether it's worth brushing it up and releasing it; would anyone use it?

Addenda: 1) I wrote fury partly because I had a reasonably complicated document to typeset but mostly because I wanted to learn more about how typesetters work. I didn't intend it to be useful to others, but now I'm wondering whether it might be.

2) I am told that there is already a Python typesetter, https://github.com/mbutterick/pollen . This makes me think I should not release fury.

3) I was asked about the potential audience. If you already know LaTeX, then there's probably no reason. But I was imagining the folk who know little or no LaTeX but would like to begin using it; they are far more likely to know Python already, and TeX is not the easiest language to learn, especially if you want to go off the beaten track and build new modules.

4) OTOH, rjw says: release early, release often! If its not released you will never know if people would use it.
This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/299399.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-06-14 13:27:06 (Updated 2014-06-14 13:42:09) from Monument

12 Jun 2014 »

Gentle Readers, 2014-06-12: dragons and china

Gentle Readers

a newsletter made for sharing
12th June 2014: dragons and china

What I’ve been up to

I'm still preparing for the move, sorting boxes of clothes and books, though I've also applied for a temp job in London that would be useful.

Some of you may remember that I've been working on a YA urban fantasy novel for the last five years. I've sent the current (fourth) draft to an editor friend to look over, but I think it's mostly ready. Looking for an agent will be a very big adventure in itself.

On a similar note, Otter Perry said something which reminded me of the best review I've ever had, for my previous story Not Ordinarily Borrowable. I'm now working on a plan to merge that into a framing story with some others to make something larger.

My friend Kathryn Rose, who has often set my words to music, has started a newsletter called Passing Notes. Check it out.

A poem of mine

Dear Sir:— This application form,
from one potential employee,
will tell you how I should perform.
I have a first-class B.Sc.,
ten years of writing ANSI C,
some Java; Perl with DBI;
and tendencies to wander free
and gaze, all wordless, at the sky.

I know perhaps it's not the norm
to mention this on one's CV.
I wonder if you'd just transform
the job I'm asking for, to be
not writing code, but poetry.
Do ask your boss. It's worth a try.
He'd sing, himself, when he was three,
and gaze, all wordless, at the sky.

I'd stay till ten beneath a warm
duvet, and then I'd climb a tree,
my face upheld towards the storm,
or paddle barefoot in the sea.
Perhaps a friend comes round for tea.
Perhaps among the corn we'd lie
in silent solidarity
and gaze, all wordless, at the sky.

Sir, I enclose an S.A.E.
I wonder if you might reply
and leave your desk to run with me,
and gaze, all wordless, at the sky.

A picture

With apologies to Tenniel.

["I think I can safely say," said Humpty Dumpty severely, "that last summer was one of the most unpleasant episodes of my entire life. Sitting on walls here! Being dragged around by the king's horses there! There seemed no end to it." Alice nodded with sympathy. "I hope your life became better when the autumn came." "Why yes, child," replied Humpty Dumpty. "I had a great fall."]

Something wonderful

Terra incognita, "unknown land", is a phrase that used to be written on maps in places that hadn't yet been explored. We don't see it these days, at least not on maps of the earth, because every last square inch is known about— or at least, we like to think it is. In reality, we don't really know much about the deep sea floor, nor about what goes on in the jungles of the Amazon. There is a story that the mapmakers would write "here be dragons!" to explain why nobody had come back with charts of the area, though there's actually only one such map known.

One of the last pieces of terra incognita to disappear was a tiny island, about quarter of an acre, off the coast of Newfoundland. Somehow, nobody had ever noticed it until the mapping satellite Landsat took its photograph in 1976. The Canadian government duly despatched a helicopter to verify the news, which lowered a scientist onto the island. Sadly, he found no dragons. Instead, there was a large and unfriendly polar bear which attempted to swat the scientist; he got back into the helicopter very quickly. The island is now called "Landsat Island".

Something from someone else

When I was a toddler, my grandfather R.S. Hall was my usual babysitter. He had a talent for reciting poetry, and then naturally so did I: there was nobody to tell me people usually find it difficult. Somewhere there is a cassette tape of him telling me poems; I'd like to put it on YouTube some day, so you can all hear it. This is one of the poems he was fond of; I've found copies in only a few other places, and I haven't discovered who the poet is. Do any of you know?

("Famille verte" and the rest are kinds of antique porcelain; he pronounced it "FAMai", not "famEE" as the French do.)

I went to dine with a friend of mine

who dined off porcelain plate,

of a kind so rare it turned one's hair

to think of their possible fate:

for some were Ming and some were Ching,

whatever those names may be,

and the food was divine, and— ah!— the wine

intoxicated me.

There were ices, those on famille rose,

and coffee on famille noire,

and a choice dessert on famille verte

preceded a fine cigar.

But alas for the end of the dinner, my friend!

for he happened his eyes to raise

as I started to rub the burning stub

on a bit of his finest glaze!

He was awfully nice, but as cold as ice,

as he rang for my coat and hat,

for Ming is a thing— and so is Ching!—

which mustn't be used for that!

Colophon

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/299091.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-06-12 22:49:23 from Monument

9 Jun 2014 »

Gentle Readers, 2014-06-09: plovers and geese

Gentle Readers

a newsletter made for sharing
9th June 2014: plovers and geese

What I’ve been up to

I've been up to Manchester to see some friends. It's a beautiful town, and I'm seriously thinking about moving there. Do any of you have experiences to share?

I did promise that Gentle Readers would have a video version when it reached this level of financial backing (and by the way, thank you all). I didn't expect it to reach that level while I was away from facilities to make it! I'm hoping to have the next edition in video for you.

I've also started work on a new animated short, The Mouse Made Maiden. I'll show you more when there's more to show.

A poem of mine

I wrote this at the request of Kathryn Rose, as the lyrics for a choral anthem.

EPIPHANY

I walked in darkness. Many a lonely mile,
my eyes and footsteps hesitant and blind.
I sought a kindly light I did not find
in land or ocean, asking all the while
if lightless lives are taken in exchange
for light eternal. Still the shades of sight
would whisper, “Even I shall see the light!”

I never thought the light would look so strange.
Not in a temple, echoing and awed,
nor in a palace, glistening and grand,
nor in my home, nor any friendly land.
but distant, dirty, in a shed abroad,
I met a maiden bloody from a birth
and in her arms, the light of all the earth.

A picture

A friend told me he'd pulled a muscle the night before, so I drew a cartoon to cheer him up. (In British slang, "to pull" someone means to persuade them to go home to bed with you.)

http://thomasthurman.org/gentle/heart.jpg

Something wonderful

Stenography is a cross between shorthand and typewriting: it allows you to type at dictation speed, around 250 words per minute. It's often used in courtrooms, to make a permanent record of the proceedings, but it's also used in subtitling (aka closed captioning), and in lectures to display a textual version of the speaker's words for the benefit of deaf students. Whatever the area, if you do a lot of typing, then putting in the effort to learn steno might well pay off.

It takes quite a bit of practice to get good at steno, but the underlying idea is simple: every keystroke forms a syllable. Your left fingers form the consonants that begin the syllable, your two thumbs form the vowels, and your right fingers form the consonants that end the syllable. Until recently, steno equipment was specialised and very expensive, but a few years ago the Plover project began to make an open source steno system. All you need to practice is a gamer's keyboard-- ordinary keyboards don't allow you to press more than a few keys at once.

For myself, I've reached the level where I can type things in steno, but not yet as fast as I can on QWERTY. Have a go, and let me know how you do.

Something from someone else

Bathos, a sudden and incongruous change of mood, is probably the funniest thing there is. If you do it well, the audience will laugh with you; if you do it accidentally, they'll laugh at you. Robert Southey, an early nineteenth-century poet laureate, shows us how it's done in the last two lines of this poem.

TO A GOOSE
by Robert Southey

If thou didst feed on western plains of yore,
or waddle wide with flat and flabby feet
over some Cambrian mountain's plashy moor,
or find in farmer's yard a safe retreat
from gipsy thieves, and foxes sly and fleet;
if thy grey quills, by lawyer guided, trace
deeds big with ruin to some wretched race,
or love-sick poet's sonnet, sad and sweet,
wailing the rigour of his lady fair;
or if, the drudge of housemaid's daily toil,
cobwebs and dust thy pinions white besoil,
departed goose! I neither know nor care.
But this I know, that thou wert very fine
seasoned with sage and onions, and port wine.

"Cambrian" means Welsh. Note also the casual racism in the fifth line, unremarkable in Southey's time, and be glad we notice it now.

Colophon

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Syndicated 2014-06-09 19:57:16 (Updated 2014-06-09 20:01:10) from Monument

5 Jun 2014 »

Gentle Readers, 2014-06-05

Gentle Readers

5th June 2014

What I’ve been up to

I've been staying with my parents-in-law up in Cheshire, attempting to work out how to move house with as little stress as possible. Yesterday we visited Blackburn, where the cathedral is a surprisingly light and airy place, and later Pendle Hill. Pendle Hill is a high place in both senses of the phrase; you can feel why people have always associated it with magic. The name is one of those that mean "hill hill hill" in successive languages, like Sharpenhoe Clappers near where I grew up.

I've also been enjoying Terry Pratchett's Lords and Ladies (thanks, Otter!) and doing preliminary sketches for a new animated short. My YA novel in progress (five years of progress!) is pretty much finished and is being checked over by a friendly editor. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of doing some programming temping to make the move a bit easier.

Oh, and I've set up a Patreon page in case any of you want to sponsor me to write Gentle Readers. If you can't afford to, please don't; I'll always love you just the same. But if you can, it does make a lot of difference.

A poem of mine

THE THRESHOLD FOLK

When you stand at the sand at the end of the land
before you tread the brine
where the driftwood spells with the seaweed's shells,
your barefoot prayers at the shrine
of the unseen queen of the space between
as you pass from old to new
call the gods whose friends are the odds and ends
of the threshold folk like you.

Fin Turner has painted a beautiful picture around this verse; click to see it.

A picture

I love this photo. This is my daughter Rio and me, five years ago. Photo taken by the very talented Carmen Machado.

http://thomasthurman.org/gentle/marn-and-rio.jpg

Something wonderful

In ancient times, when a queen or a king died, their people would raise a hill over their grave; we call these hills "barrows". You might know them from Fog on the Barrow-Downs, a terrifying chapter in The Lord of the Rings, or a particularly sad part of Diana Wynne Jones's The Time of the Ghost. The real thing was certainly chilling to me as a child, especially when I saw people had built houses on top of them; I remember nightmares climbing over barrows and finding them the great grassed-over bones of a giant.

Well, people stopped building barrows somewhere during the Bronze Age, though they were briefly in fashion again when the Anglo-Saxons arrived. I'd sometimes wondered why they didn't find any use for the Victorians, a culture as obsessed with death as ours is with sex (and likewise as squeamish about sex as ours is with death), so I was delighted to hear that someone's building a new one. It's near Devizes in Wiltshire (the red dot on the map), close by Stonehenge (the blue dot), which seems to have been a particularly auspicious or magical site by the crowds of ancient barrows around the place.

http://thomasthurman.org/gentle/stonehenge-map.jpg

Naturally, the stonemason was delighted to be asked to build a barrow. And it seems I wasn't alone in wishing they'd come back-- people from all over the world have been asking to have their ashes interred there.

You can read more, and see pictures, at the BBC report.

Something from someone else

The barrow story reminded me of this song from Rewards and Fairies, in the chapter about the Bronze Age flintworkers called The Knife and the Naked Chalk. I love how the poem feels to chant aloud, and the euphemisms they use for "wolf" throughout.

SONG OF THE MEN'S SIDE
by Rudyard Kipling

Once we feared the Beast– when he followed us we ran,
Ran very fast though we knew
It was not right that the Beast should master Man;
But what could we flint-workers do?
The Beast only grinned at our spears round his ears–
Grinned at the hammers that we made;
But now we will hunt him for the life with the Knife–
And this is the Buyer of the Blade!

Room for his shadow on the grass– let it pass!
To left and right– stand clear!
This is the Buyer of the Blade– be afraid!
This is the great god Tyr!

Tyr thought hard till he hammered out a plan,
For he knew it was not right
(And it is not right) that the Beast should master Man;
So he went to the Children of the Night.
He begged a Magic Knife of their make for our sake.
When he begged for the Knife they said:
"The price of the Knife you would buy is an eye!"
And that was the price he paid.

Tell it to the Barrows of the Dead– run ahead!
Shout it so the Women's Side can hear!
This is the Buyer of the Blade– be afraid!
This is the great god Tyr!

Our women and our little ones may walk on the Chalk,
As far as we can see them and beyond.
We shall not be anxious for our sheep when we keep
Tally at the shearing-pond.
We can eat with both our elbows on our knees, if we please,
We can sleep after meals in the sun,
For Shepherd-of-the-Twilight is dismayed at the Blade,
Feet-in-the-Night have run!
Dog-without-a-Master goes away (Hai, Tyr aie!),
Devil-in-the-Dusk has run!

Then room for his shadow on the grass– let it pass!
To left and right– stand clear!
This is the Buyer of the Blade– be afraid!
This is the great god Tyr!

Colophon

Gentle Readers is published on Mondays and Thursdays,

and I want you to share it. If you have anything to say or reply,
or you want to be added or removed from the mailing list,
I’m at thomas@thurman.org.uk and I’d love to hear from you
The newsletter is reader-supported; please pledge something
if you can afford to, and please don't if you can't.
Love and peace to you all.

This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/298639.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-06-05 16:13:41 from Monument

2 Jun 2014 »

Gentle Readers, 2014-06-02

Gentle Readers

2nd June 2014

What I’ve been up to

I spent this past weekend at a writing retreat at Scargill House in the Yorkshire Dales. In a way it reminded me o my time at Cambridge: though the talks were interesting, most of the value was in meeting people and getting to know them. I know these friendships will last.

My only regret was that I didn’t have much time to explore the area— it’s a beautiful part of the world. Back in Surrey we only hand indoors and outdoors. The mountains up here are a step beyond that, the outdoors of the outdoors.

Speaking of Surrey, I learned that I’m losing my job the day before I left for Scargill. Since it happened around the same time as our rental contract was up for renewal, we’re going to go somewhere else; we have about a month and a half to find out where. This is what you call an Adventure!

A poem of mine

This weekend, Sheridan Voysey spoke to us about his experience of writing autobiography. He mentioned that there’s always a temptation to dress up your experiences when you write them down, but it’s best to avoid it, because people can detect authenticity. People will be able to apply it better to their lives, and they may respect you more than if you’d embroidered it.

That reminded me of this poem of mine.

THOMAS

They named me for my granddad’s father’s father;
they said he’d caught consumption in his youth
and left his son an orphan. But the truth
I learned on reading registers is rather
more horrible, but easy to explain:
his wife had died. And Thomas, left behind,
drowned deep in pain, drank gin, and lost his mind,
died sobbing in a home for the insane.
   And in my brain, statistic turned to story:
   a broken heart, and lovers dying young,
   beyond the brittle lies of broken lungs.
   But, grandpa, may I hope we’ll meet in glory,
and over soda, on the other side,
I’ll let you know I bear your name with pride?

A picture

The point of the Good Samaritan story is blunted if we forget the place of the Samaritans in that culture. Here’s an attempt to redress that:

Something wonderful

If the sky’s the limit, why do we never hear from aliens? There are billions upon billions of worlds out there, but we’ve never heard a word from anyone else. Why not? There are no certain answers to this question, known as the Fermi Paradox, but there are plenty of suggestions: Wait But Why discusses the possibilities. A good read.

Something from someone else

This dates from about 1890, but I haven’t been able to trace the poet. Can any of you make a suggestion?

A DISTURBED REVERIE.

Lying supine on the soft, matted grasses,
Gazing up lazily into the blue
Of the sky, when the wandering wind as it passes
Opens the branches for me to look through,
Idly I ponder, and ponder, and ponder,
Thinking of nothing, yet happy and free ;
Careless of everything, idly I wonder
At the immensity opened to me.

Looking up listlessly, thoughtlessly dreaming,
Mind a vacuity, life full of joy,
All the dull world seems with happiness teeming,
With nothing to worry, or fret, or annoy.
Earth seems a paradise. Why should I trouble
Or toil to win heaven? Why, heaven is here!
Fortune is worthless, and fame but a bubble:
I scorn them both, looking into the clear
Deep blue of the sky while the wild bees are humming,
Above and around me, in harmony deep,
And over the meadows the breezes are coming
To fan me, and soothe me, and lull me to sleep.

This, this is happiness, perfect, unmeasured;
Long shall this day without blemish or fleck
Stay in my memory, lovingly treasured —
Great Scott! There’s a wasp down the back of my neck!

Colophon

Gentle Readers is published on Mondays and Thursdays,

and I want you to share it. If you have anything to say or reply,
or you want to be added or removed from the mailing list,
I’m at thomas@thurman.org.uk and I’d love to hear from you.
(One day we may have comment sections or a forum,
but that day is not today.) Love and peace to you all. This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/298336.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-06-02 18:29:23 (Updated 2014-06-02 18:49:42) from Monument

29 May 2014 »

Gentle Readers

Gentle Readers is my mailing list. Every Monday and Thursday you'll see:

Thoughts, one-liners, and rambling puns
A cartoon
Something in the world I think is wonderful that I want to share with you
A poem of mine
A piece of writing I love from the past.
News about whatever projects I'm working on.

This isn't one-way: you are encouraged to reply, and I'll include your response as appropriate next time. You are also encouraged to bring your friends.
The first issue comes out on Monday 2nd June. Until I get a fancy web-gubbins working, you can sign up by emailing me at thomas@thurman.org.uk. This is free of charge and will remain so, though I'll set up a Patreon thing for anyone who'd like to support my work.
This entry was originally posted at http://marnanel.dreamwidth.org/298092.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Syndicated 2014-05-29 20:10:07 from Monument

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