And This Beside

I had recently read about Piccadilly notebooks while I was browsing the web trying to satisfy my notebook fixation.  They are basically Moleskine notebooks in design, at less than half the price.  (Here is a review from Black Cover, entitled "Proving Moleskine is Just a Style: The Piccadilly Notebook".)  They are available at Borders bookstores.  Today, I dropped by the local Borders and picked up three of them:  Two small (3.5 x 5.5 in.) notebooks and a large (7.25 x 10 in.) one.  The notebooks with blue labels in the photo are ruled, soft-cover notebooks, while the one with a yellow label is a graph, hard-cover notebook.  It also comes in a style with blank pages, but I did not see those on the bookshelf that I was browsing.  A medium size is also available, which is the same size as the medium Moleskine.

A copy of Philip Hoare's "Leviathan, or The Whale" was in my mailbox today.  Hoorah!  This event warrants a mini-celebration because I have been looking high and low for a copy of this book.  You see, US bookstores don't seem to be aware that this book exists, or at least US bookstores in my neck of the woods.  I tried.  I tried my favorite used books store, I tried Barnes & Noble, I tried Borders;  for the latter two I tried both brick and mortar and online stores.  Zip.  The salesmen who helped me at B&N and at the used books store were stumped (and from my experience with them, these guys were usually knowledgeable about books).  When they finally resorted to checking their respective book databases, even their computers denied the book's existence, gasp!  So finally, I tried a regional independent bookstore and saw to my relief that it had Hoare's book listed, so I promptly ordered it.  Heh, but guess what?  The book was being shipped from the UK!  Gah!  But it finally made it, I now have among my feet-high pile of books to read, all the way from Ashford, Middlesex, Hoare's "Leviathan".

I read Alison Flood's recent article about the BBC's current Poetry Season where she was campaigning against Kipling being UK's favorite poet (again).  She reveals that Gerard Manley Hopkins is her favorite poet, and her favorite poem Hopkins's "Spring and Fall".  Naturally, after reading Flood's heartfelt endorsement, I followed the link to the poem.  Reading as a treasure hunt.

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

This airplane window was so scratched up and dirty, my camera couldn't auto-focus past it.  Another thing to note about this photo is that prominent brown patch out on the wing which indicates a peeled surface.  It would seem that this aircraft has been in the service long.  So as I was sitting there, on this particular ride, staring at the brown spot, the thought which came to mind while I was also puzzling about the aircraft material that the peeled surface revealed was how much passengers really weighed in the scheme of the airline industry's scale of risks and benefits.  I succeeded in disturbing myself.

If worm holes existed, shadows on the wall would be them. This comes
from the realization that shadows on the wall on a bright, breezy
summer day are potent stimuli for the mind which in turn sends a
momentary, paralyzing current through the body. They evoke so much of
the past, not so much in terms of actual memories, but in a sensation
of the past. It is a wonderful trick of the mind, more so considering
that the silently swaying shadows don't last very long, can be gently
wiped away by a determined passing cloud. Everything, in one fleeting
moment.

Or some of them, anyway.  There were also fighter jets taking off and landing that day (no kidding), but everytime I saw them my camera was in my bag.  Those things are tiny compared to the commercial planes, but they have fire coming out of their tails.

       

This is a very small portion of a continuous video showing at the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life.  I remember the video had its own ocean sound effects, but the microphone instead picked up the sounds of the hall's visitors.  The hall was like a cave with very good acoustics, so sounds easily echoed.