Serendipity ~ Library Edition

Weeding again. I guess people don’t read anthologies as much as they used to. Maybe they didn’t ever read them much. We have a lot of them in the library that are sitting on the shelves collecting dust. Good ones, too. Some very odd ones. Like fiction about farm communities in the Mid-West. We are [...]

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Serendipity ~ Milton, Dante & Oscar Wilde

Last week at work, I was filling some of our displays at the library and as usual I got a little sidetracked looking at the books. You’d think I’d be jaded by now, but no. I can’t remember what book I was looking at, but I remembered that Meljean Brook wrote the first in her [...]

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100 days 100 sonnets

Here’s a little challenge for myself. A few months ago, I spent some time going through the Shakespeare section of our library, replacing some of our books that no one has checked out because they didn’t want to sneeze the whole time they were reading them. I came across Helen Vendler’s book The Art of [...]

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Serendipity ~ Vegan Version

Yesterday I was at work when I witnessed a conversation that made me happy for about an hour. One of our very sweet, volunteers who is in her late sixties/early seventies came to the desk and said, “I heard this book was Fantastic.” She paused. Looked at her piece of paper and said, “Vegan Cupcakes [...]

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Serendipity ~ I couldn’t sleep last night

I’ve been meaning to post this little poem for a few days now. Since I didn’t sleep much last night, I thought it was appropriate:
The pillow hot
On both sides,
The second candle
Dying, the ravens
Crying. Haven’t
Slept all night. Too late
To dream of sleep…
How unbearably white
The blind on the white window.
Good morning, morning!
[...]

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serendipty: defend your poetry

The great thing about weeding books in the library (or shelf-reading) is that you stumble across some really interesting things. My latest find – Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s A Precocious Autobiography. Yevtushenko was an outspoken poet during the Kruschev Thaw. From the pictures in the autobiography, he looks like he must have given quite theatrical readings to [...]

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Fun For Writers

Six words. Your life. Go. That’s the assignment over at litpark. I came across this fun site for writers when I was over at Backstory. Susan Henderson is the mastermind behind litpark and every week she asks a question that is a jumping off point for writing and posts an author interview. I’ll definitely be [...]

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On Reading

I was browsing through the W.W. Norton catalog and I saw that they are reprinting a book called On Reading by the photographer Andre Kertesz. We had the original version in our library so I had to check it out. It is a wonderful little book with photographs of people from all over the world [...]

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serendipty Russian version, part 2

In my weeding, I came across this slim volume on writing poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky called How Are Verses Made? When I opened the book at random, I found this quote that I liked:
I walk along, waving my arms and mumbling almost wordlessly, now shortening my steps so as not to interrupt my mumbling, now [...]

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serendipity – Russian version, part 1

I have been weeding the Russian Literature collection in our library. Poor Russian authors! No one is reading them. I think I might join the Russian Authors challenge just to give them a boost. Well despite all the dust and despair, I did come across a few things that I thought were interesting. The first [...]

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