When life gives you snow… Continue reading

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About two years ago, I started a list on Wordie of fine-sounding words. When I last went to add a word, however, the update function was disabled. I’d probably logged in so infrequently that a defunct-account subroutine kicked in, though I prefer to think of dust gathering on the computers, and a repairman’s sneeze sending words sparkling into the air like motes in a sunbeam. Continue reading

I stumbled across this photograph several days ago, and am endlessly cheered by it: the shipwreck’s skeleton a classic symbol of human aspirations broken and forgotten and on the shoals of fate, as embodied by nature; but the penguins give fate’s indifference a comic, even absurd, aspect. Continue reading

Something I’ve been wondering: Why does style matter? One possibility: because the context in which style is expressed — a task, an ordeal — is often unavoidable, or unimportant, or impossible, and requires nothing more than utilitarian resignation; style is personal triumph against the impersonality of fate, a joy in process rather than product, a form of control over destiny, like a leaf charting its own course in the wind.

Three vague story ideas which for lack of time and talent I will probably not write:
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There’s something magical about old postcards, especially hand-colored; a mélange of real and imagined,  medium fitting the passage of time; perhaps on the back is a message, and no matter how mundane it has the quality of sea glass. Continue reading