Our Best Writers Challenge And Discomfit Us
Every book you read, you read not with your eyes but with your world — with the totality of who and what you are, your eyes lensed with a lifetime of impressions and relationships and experiences you alone have had. No two readers ever read the same book. Each book holds in its margins infinite space for every possible reader to fill with the entirety of their being — that endless, ecstatic dialogue between reader and writer that we call literature. We engage in the dialogue for many different reasons — we read to touch into the exquisite interconnectedness of things, as Virginia Woolf did; to acquire superhuman powers, as Galileo did; to map the route to our dreams, as Jane Goodall did; to solace, empower, and transform ourselves, as Rebecca Solnit knows we do; to understand ourselves and each other better, as Alain de Botton knows we must — but we always emerge with our worlds clarified and magnified by the worlds we have visited.
Tiny turtle pooed ‘pure plastic’ for six days after rescue from Sydney beach
Healthy women can also benefit from spending time gardening
A pilot randomized controlled trial of group-based indoor gardening and art activities demonstrates therapeutic benefits to healthy women. PLOS One. Published: July 6, 2022
“A pilot randomized controlled trial of group-based indoor gardening and art activities demonstrates therapeutic benefits to healthy women. There is mounting anecdotal and empirical evidence that gardening and art-making afford therapeutic benefits. This randomly controlled pilot study tested the hypothesis that participation in group-based indoor gardening or art-making activities for one hour twice a week for four weeks would provide quantifiably different therapeutic benefits to a population of healthy women ages 26–49…
Engaging in both gardening and art-making activities resulted in apparent therapeutic improvements for self-reported total mood disturbance, depression symptomatology, and perceived stress with different effect sizes following eight one-hour treatment sessions. Gardening also resulted in improvements for indications of trait anxiety. Based on time-course evidence, dosage responses were observed for total mood disturbance, perceived stress, and depression symptomatology for both gardening and art-making….When taken together, group-based gardening or art-making can provide quantitatively measurable improvements in healthy women’s psychosocial health status that imply potentially important public health benefits…”
17 of the most beautiful bathrooms on Pinterest
For The Washington Post Magazine, Carlo Rotella with “How a 23-Year-Old Phenom Named Kingfish Became the Future of the Blues.”
Days at the Races
Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped. —Groucho Marx
Away they go, with their outlandish names,
saddled with human baggage, desperate wagers— enough to make a thoroughbred go lame,
be it a strapping colt or spry old stager.
Away they go, with Monday in the lead,
and Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday gaining speed. Friday and Saturday, poor things, are off the bridle, while Sunday, bless its heart, is simply idle.
Some like to be there—tremble at the crack
of every whip, eat dust, bathe in the lather
and feel the press of flesh. Me? I would rather keep my distance, make my bets off-track.
Each week I pony up a little dough,
although I seldom win, or place, or even show.
Dictionary of Omissions
The chief shortcoming of the Dictionary is, paradoxically, that it is so good that one wishes it were larger.
—Modern Language Review
The atlas of my sunken continents,
the empty bowl I used to keep my fish in, the shoebox of expired pawn tickets,
and this, my Dictionary of Omissions.
Words I’d withheld like an obsessive hoarder have been arrayed in alphabetic order
by some unsparing lexicographer.
Forever at a loss, I now refer
to brave objections that I should have made, to simple kindnesses never extended, conclusions left obscenely open-ended, heartrending breaks faintheartedly delayed. The supplements arrive, set after set— perpetual addenda of regret.
