Beautiful day yesterday, walked part of the loop. Photos, note & map: walkmap
Format: Status
Today I found out that you can’t tell the difference between red & ruby elf caps without a microscope. Thanks to another iNaturalist user.
#SilentSunday
Read: Trespasses by Louise Kennedy ★★★★ 📚
Northern Ireland 1975 Cushla young RC teacher starts an affair with a Married Protestant Lawyer & gets mixed up with a mixed family of a pupil. Spent the whole book tensed against the expected end.
While in Dublin:
They walked up Grafton Street. Buskers were playing guitars, huddles of youths standing about watching them.
Something was wrong. She looked up and down the street and didn’t know what it was until she was in the doorway of Switzers, sliding her handbag off her shoulder and holding it open. Michael laughed. You’re not in Kansas any more, he said.
I remember in the 70s my aunt on a visit to Glasgow going up to the security guard in M&S & opening her handbag.
Read: Sandwich by Catherine Newman ★★★ 📚
3 Generation family holiday week on Cape Cod. A mix of comedy & more serious matters. Some LOL. Most of the serious was around termination & miscarriage. A bit of holocaust history added it seemed, to me, too much for the book to carry.
Read: Hagstone by Sinéad Gleeson ★★★ 📚
Last summer there was a rogue patch of phosphorescence at Cloughkeel beach, a psychedelic wreath. Tonight, in the dark swell there is only the sound of a lone whale, and Danu above. How lonely to be always reaching out for someone who isn’t there.
An artist living on the island she was born on. Lots of intriguing ideas: the descriptions of her art work; a weird sound that not everyone hears; a colony of women who have left the world; a local lover; a dead whale & a visiting film star. Not all quite tied up.
Although I’ve mostly managed to keep noting things, I’d stopped microcasting them. Though I might start again, just to please myself.
Someone told me that her friend was having a chatbot write her husband a poem for their anniversary, which made me wonder if the husband desired a polished product or an expression from the heart. In Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac, the big-nosed title character ghostwrites love letters for his friend to the Roxanne both of them love. She comes to realise it’s the author of the letters she really loves. What happens when you realise the true love who touched your heart is’nt even human? Accepting it as your Al lover seems to be one answer.
I enjoyed the comparison of ai with Cyrano, and the rest of the article was striking.
After quite a few dull and breezy days sunset over the Clyde was lovely & quiet yesterday.
Read: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller ★★★ 📚
This little bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small cutthroat making quiet rings in the black water of a pool. This little bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small cutthroat making quiet rings in the black water of a pool.
Post apocalyptic, few survivors left, mostly killing each other. The main character loves fishing & the outdoors, handy skills to have except all the trout died too. The descriptions of what is left & what has been lost are poetic. Mixed with adventure, murderous action & brutality in a fractured storyline without much punctuation, not in a bad way.