Kudos to Irina Zhorov for a terrific report on peaches and global warming. A Peach for a Warming South

Somehow it always does get there in time. At about nine p.m. his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit in a room which grows colder and colder, while the cigarette smoke grows thicker and thicker, skipping expertly through one book after another and laying each down with a final comment, ‘God, what tripe!’ In the morning, blear-eyed, surly and unshaven, he will gaze for an hour or two at a blank sheet of paper until the menacing finger of the clock frightens him into action. Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases – “a book that no one should miss,” “something memorable on every page,” “of special value are the chapters dealing with, etc., etc.” – will jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet, and the review will end up at exactly the right length and with just about three minutes to go.

George Orwell, Tribune, 3 May 1946

But I try to make sure they [my students] understand that writing, and even getting good at it, and having books and stories and articles published, will not open the doors that most of them hope for. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has finally validated their parking tickets, that they have in fact finally arrived. My writer friends, and they are legion, do not go around beaming with quiet feelings of contentment. Most of them go around with haunted, abused, surprised looks on their faces, like lab dogs on whom very personal deodorant sprays have been tested.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), xxx.

Bagels, human fists, herbal tinctures. What do all of these things have in common? And what happens when a large bag of all three of them is dumped out of a window onto traffic? The mysterious story of a bag, and the guy it fell on, and the other person who was also there.

What podcast episode synopses sound like sometimes by Ellie Shechet

After Zeta

Currently reading: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Kimmerer, Robin Wall 📚

Currently reading: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel 📚

he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts

~Mary mother of God

Cooper Lake

I’ve admired Jim Goodman’s work at Rethinking History since I was a wee graduate student. Really happy to finally be publishing something there.

The parable of the railway agent: stories of progress and winter legumes in the twentieth-century South