It’s the quick November dark that descends annually, silently on us like a vast black cat – just after we turn our clocks back for daylight savings time.
I’ll be greeting the newly early dark tonight by relaxing with Issue 8 of Peeking Cat Poetry Magazine. I’m going to revisit two poems that I especially like: Scott Thomas Outlar’s “Sucking Vapors” and Erren Geraud Kelly’s “Coffeehouse Poem #43.”
“One link is missing, Prospero,
“My magic is my own;
“Happy Miranda does not know
“The figure that Antonio
“The Only One, Creation’s O,
“Dances for Death alone.”
— from Antonio’s refrain, in W. H. Auden’s
“The Sea and the Mirror”
Known also as the praying mantis.
We’ve got ’em in New York. But they are both larger and far more numerous in Virginia.
Apparently, the ancient Greeks regarded them as magical creatures who could tell lost travelers the way home.
“Oh mother,
“What tree is this?
“What wounds are these?
“I am Attis on the pine.
“Christ on the cedar.
“Odin on the world ash.”
— from “Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth,” by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean
People tend to think of either “The Dark Knight Returns” of “The Killing Joke” as the seminal “dark” Batman graphic novel.
I suggest that this trounces both of them.
Well, this is pretty meta … Dead Snakes has featured two poems about “Dead Snakes,” by author Mary Bone. And they’re both quite good.
http://deadsnakes.blogspot.com/2015/10/mary-bone-two-poems.html
I visited the gardens at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown the other day — after a cruise down Wisconsin Avenue past a couple of old haunts I frequented in my 20’s with characters like Nickolai Butkevich and Rhett Carlson.
The gardens were beautiful, and a sharp fir smell greets entrants like a rarefied, ethereal, quiet host. It reminded me of Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, another quiet place to which I’d like to return one day.
If you’re in the Washington area, and you’d like to see for yourself, check out Dumbarton Oaks’ website here:
Photo credit: http://www.ForestWander.com [CC BY-SA 3.0 us (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/deed.en)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
La Fe Pulpo es deliciosos, en cualquiera marinara o aceite vegetal.
Octopus is a little harder to find in Virginia, but you can find it in specialty supermarkets. Le Fe is a brand I haven’t seen in New York, but it’s damn good.
Anyway, what’s up with the weird rumor going around word nerd circles? Turns out the correct plural for “octopus” actually IS “octopuses,” and not the Latin-sounding “octopi?”
What is the definition of serendipity?
You JUST finish figuring out how to operate your new digital camera that arrived in the mail, you lie back on your bed, and, right at the very moment, AN EAGLE SOARS PAST YOUR WINDOW.
I was so thrilled when I snapped this yesterday. Yeah, I know that you kind of have to squint to see the eagle here. (You can click twice to really enlarge the photo — then you can see it better.)
My Virginia friends probably think I’m nuts for getting so excited about this. But this kind of thing just doesn’t happen every day to a New Yorker.
I rarely have time to write book reviews and, when I do, they tend to be brief.
But I have a few reviews up over at Amazon, including a couple of rundowns of comic book collections in trade paperback. If you’re curious, click here:
Amazon.com book reviews by Eric Robert Nolan
Photo credit for image above: Detail of arch outside the Duomo, in Milano, photo by Giovanni Dall’Orto G.dallorto (Own work) [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 