I can't read about people hiking the Appalachian Trail without thinking of Gov. Mark Sanford. Did anyone see today's Google Doodle featuring a Langston Hughes poem?

1956! That beats me by quite a bit! You know Mother's burned down; but they rebuilt, thank goodness.

Lyrical Ballads may be the only book in literary history for which the Preface is arguably more famous and influential than the rest of the book. My professor assigned the Preface and made reading the poems optional.

LOL--actually some Jewish friends of mine figured out quickly why January 1 was a feast day. It was changed in 1960, and we traddie sorts who prefer to believe the last fifty years didn't happen still celebrate it as the Feast of the Circumcision. So we get to explain that one to our kids at an early age. I think the loss of the traditional Catholic earthiness was an impoverishment. Great Girl was very taken in Vienna by a painting of the bare-breasted Virgin squirting milk into the Holy Infant's mouth. Try putting a copy of that up in your suburban American parish church.

Finished Henry James' The Princess Casamassima this week. Very good if minor James. Started Leaves of Grass, which, in keeping with my theme of Confessing I've Never Read Important Literature, I will confess I've never read, except for the bits everyone has read ("I Hear America Singing" and etc.). Also I had not realized the existence of a fiery debate over which of the many many versions of the book is the True Authentic Leaves of Grass. I'm reading Whitman's final version. Sorry I haven't been able lately to participate (or even read) the threads.

:D Our family moved to Austin in 1975. My Mom says that even then people were complaining bitterly about how Austin was being overbuilt and overrun by out-of-towners, and how the "old" Austin had been ruined. Ah, Armadillo World Headquarters, where art thou?

Warm thoughts to our Yankee friends caught in this storm! It was actually a little guilt-inducing yesterday to go out in the first warm, mild day we've had in a long time. Great Girl sent me the link below, which I forward for your reading pleasure and challenge: W. H. Auden's syllabus for one of his college courses. They sure don't make undergraduates the way they used to. http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/w-h-auden-syllabus-college-courses-piece-cake-blog-entry-1.1639980

I'm going to count last week's The Quiet American for the Far East, as it's set in Vietnam during the First Indochina War. Still reading Henry James, with now and then a J. F. Powers short story for intermission. Dh suggests people consider reading Austin's Sense and Sensibilia.

Since we're all laughing at rules and making thread drift into an olympic sport anyway, here à propos of nothing except possibly math (no parsnips) is an item that recently came in Great Girl's e-mail from her university. This is from the campus police's "Best of" incident reports from 2014: Public Intoxication: A [campus] Police Officer observed a student, who was under the age of 21, fall to the ground near the officer's feet as the student entered the dormitory. The student produced a ticket stub when asked for identification. The student stated he was drunk but could still do calculus. The officer asked the student what 1 divided by "X" as "X" approaches infinity equaled and the student correctly answered "0".... Apparently, the student was too intoxicated to handle lesser math as he originally stated he had consumed a shot and two drinks of "mystery punch" but then counted the drink tally as 5 shots and 4 drinks of the punch. The student tried to bargain with the officer and offered a home cooked meal for his release. When the officers declined, the student demanded more calculus problems before expelling some of the alcohol from his system on a table. -------- Oh yes, books. Still on The Princess Casamassima, having been slowed by dh's extended absence and Great Girl's first week of classes. Honestly I think she's making up for being homeschooled; I'm packing her nice lunches and buying her school supplies. But now everyone is back and settled and if only I can hide from Wee Girl (who is reading to herself lately!), I can fit in more reading time.

I enjoyed Northanger Abbey most of all her books, too, and had the added advantage of reading it for the first time after having read several of Mrs Radcliffe's gothics. Oh the hilarity.

After a little Faulkner, James seems choppy. Drinks at Jane's!!!

For the record, I went back and colonialized my spelling of "marvel[l]ous." Since people seem to have noticed the error. ;) I blame Greene and James.

Finished Graham Greene's The Quiet American. I had stopped reading Greene in annoyance after The Honorary Consul; but The Quiet American redeemed him for now. Then I started Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquarian, but suddenly realized "Wait--I could be reading more Henry James!" and so have switched to The Princess Casamassima, which is surprisingly accessible for James. Almost Dickens-esque, if Dickens had written beautiful, sentimentalism-free sentences and known how to get to the point. Some Jamesian description: ------------------ “Well, I enjoy beautiful ’ealth,†said the young lady; “every one thinks I’m twenty.†She spoke with a certain artless pride in her bigness and her bloom, and as if, to show her development, she would have taken off her jacket or let you feel her upper arm. She was very handsome, with a shining, bold, good-natured eye, a fine, free, facial oval, an abundance of brown hair, and a smile which showed the whiteness of her teeth. Her head was set upon a fair, strong neck, and her tall young figure was rich in feminine curves. Her gloves, covering her wrists insufficiently, showed the redness of those parts, in the interstices of the numerous silver bracelets that encircled them, and Miss Pynsent made the observation that her hands were not more delicate than her feet. She was not graceful, and even the little dressmaker, whose preference for distinguished forms never deserted her, indulged in the mental reflection that she was common, for all her magnificence; but there was something about her indescribably fresh, successful and satisfying. She was, to her blunt, expanded finger-tips, a daughter of London, of the crowded streets and hustling traffic of the great city; she had drawn her health and strength from its dingy courts and foggy thoroughfares, and peopled its parks and squares and crescents with her ambitions; it had entered into her blood and her bone, the sound of her voice and the carriage of her head; she understood it by instinct and loved it with passion; she represented its immense vulgarities and curiosities, its brutality and its knowingness, its good-nature and its impudence, and might have figured, in an allegorical procession, as a kind of glorified townswoman, a nymph of the wilderness of Middlesex, a flower of the accumulated parishes, the genius of urban civilisation, the muse of cockneyism. --------------- Isn't that marvelous? [edited to un-Britishize spelling]

Since Marilynne Robinson has been mentioned, I'll throw in that she wrote an article for this week's NYRB on Edgar Allen Poe. I look forward to reading it if I am allowed to stop reading Clyde Robert Bulla to Wee Girl.

Now shouldn't Dante have provided the answer to your first question? Why do we persist in the things that will just make us unhappy? ;)

I am very confused, ladies. I was very sure it was Kate Bush that sang "Wuthering Heights." Has senility come so soon? ETA: Ah--Wikipedia says they both sang it.

Jennifer! Get plenty of rest and be well soon. And thanks for your enlightening input on Chinese and Japanese writing.

Shukriyya and Jane, not only are the zentangle drawing and cedar waxwing photo beautiful, but there is a strange likeness between them. I am seeing zentangly birds.

Last night I finished A Texas Cowboy: or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony--Taken from Real Life by Charles Siringo. Siringo had a fascinating life; he was born in 1855 in Matagorda County, Texas, on the peninsula around Matagorda Bay--basically a two-mile wide sandbar, where as a child he watched Union and Confederate ships firing at each other from either beach over the houses of the settlement, and his impoverished family helped themselves from wrecked ships (they ate their mush-and-milk from very nice china off of a Spanish merchant). Siringo was a cowboy, a businessman, a detective with the Pinkerton Agency, and a writer. He survived the Great Storm of 1875 which washed away the Gulf town of Indianola with half its inhabitants (and which would be better remembered if it hadn't been dwarfed by the 1900 Galveston Flood). He is locally famous for his involvement in the pursuit of Billy the Kid and of William Bonney's's friend, Pat Coughlin, and for his biography of Bonney. He is famous domestically for having accused (in another book) my great-great-grandfather of unscrupulous behavior toward him. Having posted an earlier excerpt with Siringo's account of his own sharp practices, I will let the BAWers draw their own conclusions as to who was in the wrong. Here's another helpful excerpt from A Texas Cowboy: ---------------- We rented a large log house in the lower end of town and went to living like white folks. We had no money, but we struck two of the merchants who gave us an unlimited credit until we could make a raise. Our greatest expense was feeding the horses corn which cost five cents a pound and hay, two cents a pound. The grub we ate wasn't very expensive as we stole all of our meat, and shared with our honest neighbors who thought it a great sin to kill other people's cattle. You see "Bob" and I still clung to the old Texas style which is, never kill one of your own beeves when you can get somebody else's. --Charles Siringo, A Texas Cowboy ------------------ Note: Great-great-grandad wasn't a Texan. A good and quick read, and available for free on-line. Now I've begun Graham Greene's The Quiet American, for a change of pace.

An extended excerpt from my current book, Charles Siringo's autobiography A Texas Cowboy (1886): -------------------- I wanted the boat, but how to get her I did not know. I finally studied up a scheme: Mr. Collier wanted to buy a horse in case he sold the boat, so I began talking horse trade. Nothing but a gentle animal would suit he said. I then described one to him and asked how much he would take to-boot if the pony proved to be as I represented? "Ten dollars" said he; "she pops" continued I. So I started over to Cashe's creek to trade Horace Yeamans out of an old crippled pony that he couldn't get rid of. He was a nice looking horse and apparently as sound as a dollar; but on trotting him around a short while he would become suddenly lame in both of his front legs. Before starting to Cashe's creek next morning Mr. Collier told me to try and get the horse there that night as, in case we made the trade, he and Mr. Murphy would start next morning on a pleasure trip to Columbia, a town forty miles east. I assured him that I would be back by dark. You see, that was a point gained, making the trade after dark. I succeeded in making the trade with Horace; he gave me "old gray" as he called him and fourteen dollars in money for my interest in three different brands of cattle. He afterwards sold the cattle for enough to buy a whole herd of crippled ponies. I rode back to Grimes' ranch very slowly so as not to cause old gray to become lame. I arrived there about sundown, but remained out in the brush until after dark. Mr. Collier, on being notified of my arrival, came out, lantern in hand, bringing his friend Murphy along to do the judging for him. He confessed that he was a very poor judge of a spanish pony, not having been long in America. He was from "Hengland." After examining old gray all over they both pronounced him a model of beauty—an honor to the mustang race. You see, he was hog fat, not having been used for so long. The trade was sealed that night and next morning Mr. Collier and Murphy, who already had a pony of his own, started on their forty mile journey. When within five miles of Elliott's ferry on the Colorado river, which was fifteen miles from [Columbia,] Grimes' old gray gave out entirely, so that poor Collier had to hoof it to the ferry where he secured another horse. Now kind reader you no doubt think that a shabby trick. If so, all I can say is "such is life in the far west." -------------------

I'm on it. ;) Jane, if you're keeping up with The Golden Legend, you see that today is St. Anthony Abbot. Here's a painting of one of his temptations, at the Met (the painting, not the temptation) by a pile of gold left by Satan in the road: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Anthony_Abbot_Tempted_by_a_Heap_of_Gold#/image/File:%27Saint_Anthony_Abbot_Tempted_by_a_Heap_of_Gold,_,Tempera_on_panel_painting_by_the_Master_of_the_Osservanza_Triptych,_ca._1435,_Metropolitan_Museum_of_Art.jpg You notice that there is no pile of gold in the painting. It was originally done with gold leaf, which some sacrilegious soul, in an act of obvious irony and sad confirmation of the doctrine of Original Sin, scraped off, leaving St. Anthony appearing to be tempted by a hapless and undevilish rabbit. For a further literary connection, Jacobus de Voragine cribbed from St. Athanasius' Life of St. Anthony, an early Christian writing prominently mentioned in St. Augustine's Confessions.

Yesterday I got to the discard store just as dozens of art books and Texas history books were being set out. It was irresistible. The Texas loot, which should go nicely with the Siringo currently underway: Texas Tears and Texas Sunshine: Voices of Frontier Women (this was urged on me by an older gentleman as necessary reading for a Texas woman bringing up daughters) J. Frank Dobie, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (wanted a copy of this for a while) Dobie again, I'll Tell You a Tale Roy Bedichek, Adventures with a Texas Naturalist J. Evetts Haley, Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State, or Recollections of Old Texas Days (1900) John Henry Faulk, Fear on Trial (folklorist and friend of Dobie; helped bring about the end of the Hollywood blacklist--it's worth reading the Wikipedia article on Faulk) I picked up many art books too, many of them old Pelicans. It's strange living in an era when so many people are switching to electronic reading that one can reliably get lovely discarded books for a dollar or less. I wonder how long the bounty will last.

Finished Nikolay Platonov, The Foundation Pit. Jane, or anyone else picking it up, I would definitely recommend the NYRB edition, which has extensive notes which I found very necessary. What to read now, what to read. I think I am in the mood for Charles Siringo.

Chandler/Meerson. I keep an eye out for the NYRB logo (and red cloth binding on the spine for children's books). It's almost a guarantee of a book worth reading.

Having finished Of Human Bondage, which did not disappoint, and having located The Foundation Pit as a result of determined picking up of the house, I am now continuing the latter, a Soviet-era novel by Andrei Platonov. Jane, this is for you, to tempt you--the opening paragraph: -------------------- On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life, Voshchev was made redundant from the small machine factory where he obtained the means for his own existence. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from production on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.