Imagine VM at Manly: Writers have all sorts of hobbies

The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an anti-Nazi dissident, who died on 9 April 1945 few weeks before the end of WWII

About can mean near

or nearly.

A book can be about something

or I can be about

to do a thing

and then refrain.

To refrain is to stop yourself.

A refrain

is a repeated phrase.

           2

This table is an antique

from the early Machine Age.

The indented

circle within a circle

motif

which appears

at three-inch intervals

around the base

may be a nod

to craftsmanship

or may be a summary

dismissal of same.

It is charming

in its mute simplicity.

          3

People will ask, "Why should we care about this unattractive character?"

despite the fact that turning yourself into an admirable character

has been considered gauche for as long as I can recall.

The word "transparent" is often affixed to such efforts

while the mystification surrounding the unflattering self-portrait

at least provides some cover.

Now someone will say, "You don't need cover

unless you're standing naked at a window

shouting, 'Look up here!'"

The Boathouse - Beach of Shelly

First opened in 1933, only a handful of custodians have shared the space, which over the past five years has been managed by Miramare Venues and Events and the Severino family

Once the home of the Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club, it’s now a popular multi-purpose venue comprising a restaurant, cafe and al fresco fish ‘n’ chipper.

Manly Boathouse in Brissie VM

Writers have all sorts of hobbies. Tolstoy liked to play chess. Dostoevsky, as everyone knows, loved to gamble. Nabokov collected butterflies; Hemingway, wives. Jozef Imrich’s and Eugene O'Neill's favorite pastime was drinking. Flannery O'Connor, of course, loved birds. Emily Dickinson loved to bake.

T.S. Eliot was an avid sailor. As a young man he regularly sailed along the shore of Cape Ann. One summer, Eliot and some friends sailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts to Mt. Desert Rock in a 19-foot knockabout in the fog and rough seas. It was a journey of well over 150 nautical miles and could have easily ended in disaster. The sea, of course, appears again and again in Eliot's poetry.

Wallace Stevens and the magic of stuff

Berryman at letters by William Logan | The New Criterion

Letters, if not literature themselves, are servants to literature. They give the public face the texture of the private world. Depressively entertaining as Berryman’s are, they are unlikely to provide a future audience more than those of Dickens, or Shaw, or Elizabeth Bishop. They of course cannot answer the question that will always be asked: were Berryman’s poems any good? That raises a second question. Without the flaws and addictions, would we have had those poems at all? Had Berryman died at thirty-eight, as Dylan Thomas did, there would be no career to discuss.

John Lennon’s son Julian sings ‘Imagine’ for first time in support of Ukraine

“OCLC and Google are working together to link directly from books discovered through Google Search to print book records in the catalogs of hundreds of U.S. libraries. This feature is part of Google’s ongoing effort to connect people to their local libraries through Google Search. The initial phase of this new program connects people using Google Search to the catalogs of hundreds of U.S. libraries whose books are cataloged in WorldCat, a worldwide database of information about library collections, and made available for discovery on the web. The program is expected to expand to more libraries and connect to more library resources in the future.

 “People use Google to search the web billions of times every day,” said Skip Prichard, OCLC President and CEO. “OCLC and Google are working to ensure that the rich collections of libraries are part of their everyday search for knowledge and information. This new program offers a direct link from Google Search results to books held in libraries near them. It’s a significant step forward to bring local library collections closer to people through a simple search.” These links to library catalogs can be found in several different displays of Google Search results for specific books, including under “Get” or “Borrow” the book options in the knowledge panel, or within Google Books previews.

 More than 500 million records representing 3 billion items held in libraries have been added to the WorldCat database since its inception since 1971. Libraries cooperatively contribute, enhance, and share bibliographic data through WorldCat, connecting people to cultural and scholarly resources in libraries worldwide…. ” More about OCLC’s web visibility program is on the website at oc.lc/visibilit

 

How Many Billionaires Are There, Anyway? NYT

 

This single mother sold Wall Street a stake in her home for $60,000, joining thousands of Americans who are cashing in on soaring home prices Business Insider. What could go wrong?

 

In praise of Jorts the Cat, unlikely labor leaderFast Company

 

The Age of Houseplants Culture Study

The Legend of the Music Tree Smithsonian

Antidote du Jour (via):

“Queen Elizabeth II Almost Ran Me Over”: 100 Stranger-Than-Fiction Real Life Stories That Sound Made Up But Are Supposedly 100% Legit

Vice: “One year ago this month, Apple unveiled the AirTag, a shiny, half-dollar-sized coin with a speaker, Bluetooth antenna, and battery inside, which helps users keep track of their missing items. Attach an AirTag to your purse, keys, wallet, or even your car, and if you lose it, the device will ping every nearby Apple product with Bluetooth turned on to triangulate its location. Those devices send its location back to you on a map, showing where the AirTag has been and its current location.  Police records reviewed by Motherboard show that, as security experts immediately predicted when the product launched, this technology has been used as a tool to stalk and harass women…”

See also Tom’s Guide – It’s time to take Apple AirTags off the market

The New York Times: “Text spam is on the rise. The latest version involves scammers sending messages to you seemingly from your own phone number. Here’s what to do…Only recently has mobile phone fraud shifted more toward texting, experts said. Spam texts from all sorts of phone numbers — and not just your own — are on the rise. In March, 11.6 billion scam messages were sent on American wireless networks, up 30 percent from February. That outpaced robocalls, which rose 20 percent in the same period, according to an analysis by Teltech, which makes anti-spam tools for phones…”

Did You Receive a Text Message From Yourself? You’re Not Alone. - The New York Times

Watch what happens when police pull over a driverless car in San Francisco MarketWatch 

It Took Us Less Than 24 Hours to Order an Endangered Tiger on Facebook Vice