let's all disguise ourselves as stinging caterpillars

while having Odysseus, Michalina Janoszanka, & Anish Kapoor on the brain

Dostoevsky left all these gorgeous little sketches scattered throughout his manuscript drafts.

he was really good, actually?

shakespeare in its original Russian, complete w/tea stains from the great man’s lips to yours

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tiny lists

trips I’d like to go on

• to Brazil, so I can tell a bunch of these ultrablack-patched velvet ants that “you’re Anish Kapoor, and you’re Anish Kapoor, and YOU’RE Anish Kapoor…”¹

• to Iceland, to toss pufflings off a cliff (it’s for their own good)

short stories i recently read & enjoyed

• Not Schmitty by

  John Warner
  - homoerotic & sad & bro. bro. my dude. & ofc it’s even also a Cask of Amontillado² homage

• Break It Down by Lydia Davis³ - calculating the incalculable of love & grief (wildly different from & yet reminding me of C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed)

  • (I really vibe with Lydia Davis, she utterly feels of my people⁴)

other books the surprisingly good Dungeon Crawler Carl series reminds me of

• The Martian

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

• Battle of the Linguist Mages

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Michalina Janoszanka, Zima (Winter), ca. 1920s – Source

i just wanna drown in Michalina Janoszanka’s dreaminess (painted layer by layer on the back of a pane of glass)

and looping back to our chorus again — I still don’t know how to write about what matters. I don’t know how to carry it. There aren’t enough newly discovered species of frog in the world to hold our fear and grief. I spend all my time reading elegies nowadays. But. Some, though. And every frog discovery helps a bit.

That’s a baby hummingbird disguised as a toxic caterpillar. Vertebrates disguising themselves as insects are pretty rare, and these babbies even move their heads around to mimic stinging caterpillar body language, too!

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I’ve had Odysseus on the brain lately, after reading An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn.

Here’s a neat bit I picked up from Mendelsohn’s book - remember when Odysseus tricks the Cyclops by saying his name is Nobody, so that when the Cyclops calls for help he says Nobody is hurting him and therefore help never comes? Sure, of course, famous tidbit, cool pun, nice trick. But! Turns out there’s more to it!

Nobody in Greek is Οὖτις, which apparently⁵ sounds like a slurred version of Odysseus - so sort of his name, but also not. And ofc Odysseus is at that stage both himself & also a nobody trying to reclaim his identity. But also, when the others ask who’s hurting the Cyclops, they use μή τίς (is nobody (μή τίς) hurting you?) - which is pronounced like mêtis, a Greek term meaning a tricky intelligence. And yes, he is being hurt by the tricky intelligence of Odysseus. layers upon layers, more of the good sort of drowning.

ps presumably Epic: The Musical is old news to everyone but me? but just in case, wow, go listen to it (there’s a spotify playlist version, too). so speaking of drowning, “You know I’m afraid of the water.”

pps Tennyson’s Ulysses has been one of my favorite poems for decades (“some work of noble note may yet done, not unbecoming men who strove with gods” & yes I did first discover the poem via Heinlein because I’m v. v. cultured), but I only recently encountered Cavafy’s Ithaka as a perfect pairing to go with it. Not sure which is the meat and which the wine. (Bullshit. Ithaka is good, but it’s no Ulysses.)

I’m really looking forward to Mendelsohn’s 92NY talk on his new Odyssey translation on April 10, one of the few events i actually intend to make it out for - say hi if you’ll be there

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1. sometimes I really do wander over to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and just hang out naming the carp

2. always a joy to reread. “For the love of God, Montresor!”

3. on mixed metaphors: “Whenever I read this kind of thing, it tells me the writer is not sensitive to the full value of the idea of comparison.” and god, how she learned! “She copied out lines of Beckett to understand how the sentences functioned, and tacked them to the wall.”

4. “I have stayed up till the early hours of the morning poring over old phone books; or following genealogical lines back hundreds of years; or reading a book about what lies under a certain French city; or comparing early maps of Manhattan as I search for a particular farmhouse. These adventures become as gripping as a good novel.”

5. look, I only studied Latin, not Greek. And even that, only for a year back in 6th grade. And I can barely pronounce many English words I’ve read but never heard spoken aloud as is. So I’ll take the professor’s word for it.