The Glass-Bottom Blog

1. Paul Muldoon, "White Shoulders": My heart is heavy. For I saw Fionnuala, "The Gem of the Roe," "The Flower o...

It is a good day to post a few instances of " the squelch complete " -- these are from Frank Kermode's grumpy review of some b...

I am sorry to have had to discover Dennis O'Driscoll through the obituaries , but this sort of thing happens oftener than one would like...

It has been exceedingly long since the last post -- instead I have been tumbling , partly because this doesn't require one to write! -- ...

Another picture to file under ouroboros-like hawks (via Izabella Laba ; see previous instances here and here ):

Sorry about the silence, I have been whelmed in deeper gulphs than formerly... (3. and 4. below are from today's feed; they reminded me...

I have been thinking about Sir Thomas Browne lately. This has to do with stumbling upon a remark in Edmund Gosse's book, quoted in Ly...

Owls in flight are strangely photogenic (see also ): Here is Uncle 1 , "as looney as ever" -- i.e., Yeats, introducing a bo...

1. A crash blossom (via Austen ; cannot find article online): "Great white attacks seal off Carpinteria" -- this is the relevan...

It has been long enough since the last post that I've been asked whether I've given up blogging. I certainly don't mean to; I h...

An ouroboros? (From the excellent Fairy-wren tumblr -- see also .) This week has been unpleasantly stressful -- partly a matter of bad...

More parallel passages (gannet picture via Calista ). 1. Pasternak, " September " (trans. Lowell): The moment the sun rise...

Quoted out of context, for good use of short sentences -- Michael Wood in his essay on Yeats and violence (he is writing about this ): Th...

I just discovered that Francis Spufford had written a " Letter to Wystan Auden " (pastiching L. to L. Byron ). I guess I knew abou...

Philip Roth, famously, at the close of Sabbath's Theater : And he couldn' t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? ...

Mostly a roundup of things tumbl'd . 1. Advice for Japanese tourists in Scotland : Not all the advice in the Insider's Guide to ...

I have a nagging sense that I'm missing an important link; but I should post these while I still have them open: 1. I am intrigued by ...

Regular readers will know of my fondness for these things. (It is the sort of thing I find easy to memorize, too; for instance, I will no...

Prehistoric turtles, squashed in rapturous embrace (via Calista ) Notably, "Their nearest living relatives are probably the pig-n...

Came upon one of these lately:  Here is Browne on the genre of picture (he is discussing the curvature of dolphins ): And thus ...

Back after a very pleasant trip to NYC and Princeton -- my spirits survived my body's weak attempts to depress them with a cold. Highlig...

Sorry about the nonexistent blogging lately; I have been slightly more active on tumblr , but a combination of post-thesis work and l...

1. T.S. Eliot ordering cheese ( full passage here , incl. arguably juicier bits, quoted from the excellent Eliot chapter in The Pound Era...

On the dietary habits of the Romantic poets (really, just read the entire thing ): Wordsworth paid scant attention to gustatory matters [....

Robert Graves -- whose work I hadn't thought about in years, and never, except for Goodbye to All That , took seriously -- has been forc...