Tim Watson

VERSEDLE Test your literary knowledge with Versedle!

yesterday I hesitated between Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop but found—write it!—I had lost my memory of many of the lines of "One Art". Today's Versedle (spoiler ahead!) supplied the first three stanzas. It really is a poem that hits differently each decade.

[watching with auto generated subtitles] "the concept of throneness" ... hmmm, you may be on to something there

bsky.app/profile/blog...

i must have been on bluesky too much yesterday because this post made me say "not a lot of badgers in the house of lords" when i saw it just now, even though this is a serious bot account not set up for subtweeting

Eruption Information Eruptive activity at the summit of Kīlauea, within Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, has been intermittent since an eruption began on December 23, 2024.

USGS information page about the eruption

YouTube video by USGS [V1cam] Kīlauea volcano, Hawaii (west Halemaʻumaʻu crater)

livestream of lava fountains hundreds of feet high

bizarre and distressing today to keep seeing posts about UNL axing its earth sciences department next to awestruck posts about the ongoing eruption of Kīlauea volcano in Hawai'i to show how much people care about and want to understand earth sciences

Tony Harrison Poet Tony Harrison reads and talks about six of his poems.

though it's possible that I (mis)remember the way Hughes read "luckily for us" with a "z" sound at the end because of the impact that Tony Harrison's poem "Them and [uz]" had on me a few years later, with its barbed reflection on multiple Englishes and the tyranny of Received Pronunciation.

For instance, I forgot Sylvia Plath was on the album, but I remembered Hughes, ugh.

Various - POETRY 1900 TO 1965 View credits, reviews, tracks and shop for the 1967 Vinyl release of "POETRY 1900 TO 1965" on Discogs.

Uncanny how almost 50 years later I can still hear Hughes' deadpan delivery of that last line in his Yorkshire accent when I've forgotten so many more important things

Also, because it was on a poetry album that my dad brought home from work when I was a kid, I hear the last lines of DH Lawrence's "The Hummingbird," read by Ted Hughes:

Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the telescope of time,
Luckily for us.

To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Drake meme: top panel disgusted by "white is the Pantone color of the year"; bottom panel loving "Norwegian chef"

bluesky the last 24 hours

rhythm is gonna get you ... tenure? Ms. Estefan was a member of the Board of Trustees of my university in the 2000s and thus approved tenure and promotion decisions for faculty, including mine

A portion of a map of Florida showing Gainesville divided in half between two largely rural Florida state house districts.

Florida is gerrymandered all the way down. Gainesville, maybe the most Democratic of all FL metro areas, is literally split in half in the Florida state house and is also split between two largely rural state senate districts. Here's the map of FL house districts 22 (in red) and 21 (in yellow).

Ugh, had not seen that. So no linear park linking Overtown and downtown again (however tenuously), but our public college is giving away land for the Trump "Library", also steps away from where I took this photo (not that anybody's going to walk there either).

Connecting Miami: I-395 Underdeck and Heritage Trail Connecting Miami: I-395 Underdeck and Heritage Trail (the Underdeck), is a planned public landscape that weaves below the elevated I-395 highway viaducts, creating a 33-acre urban open space and stree...

This is steps away (not that anybody would be walking) from where the construction of I-95 decimated the historic Black neighborhood of Overtown. The "signature bridge" project includes a linear park underneath the highway ("the Underdeck") that allegedly "will reunite the urban fabric of Overtown".

both areas still have some pedestrian-friendly blocks, for sure. A new linear park, The Underline, is trying to link neighborhoods and downtown with a walking/biking trail.

Ironically, I encountered this truck-skyscraper-highway wall on the way back from a walking tour of art deco architecture in South Beach, one of the only parts of Miami where the built environment is mostly still at the scale of the human being on foot.

my mega-yacht and I feel blessed to live here every single day, Andy.

The downtown Miami skyline: 7 blue-glass concrete skyscrapers as viewed from a highway dominated by trucks, with a massive crane from a highway construction project glimpsed on the right hand side. A clear blue sky with a hint of the setting sun behind the skyscrapers.

If you wanted an illustration of a contemporary American city and its obliteration of everything at the scale of the pedestrian, here is the downtown Miami skyline as viewed from the I-395 highway as it passes the grotesque construction site of the so-called Signature Bridge.

A laptop on a table in a classroom with no people visible in it, with about 10 long tables set up with socially distanced chairs at each end. The screen shows the laptop camera's view of the same empty classroom.

Deleting old photos, came across this memento of Fall 2020, a first-year writing course that began with half the students masked, chairs 6 feet apart, the other half online, and finished this way, with me alone in the classroom, tapping End Meeting For All. An end that was the start of a new era.

Also in 2013, Rob Nixon's book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor opens with a critique of Summers' monstrous 1991 World Bank memo: "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable ... Countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted."

surely it can't be a coincidence that Arsenal fan Zohran Mamdani is elected NYC mayor and now the team is having their best season in twenty years?

Hew Locke's stunning artwork "For Those in Peril on the Sea" (2011), hanging (literally) in the Perez Art Museum Miami. A collection of several dozen model boats of many different designs and colors are suspended from the ceiling of a large gallery space, all heading away from the waterfront which is just about visible through the gallery window.

A mere 200 yards away from the grotesque celebration of the Spanish Navy's conquest of America, inside the Pérez Art Museum Miami across the park, is Hew Locke's amazing piece "For Those in Peril on the Sea," a collection of water craft representing the labor and the losses of ocean passages.

A black plaque with gold lettering attached to a slab of white concrete. The plaque reads, "SPANISH NAVY PLAZA | PLAZA DE LA MARINA ESPANOLA | 1991 | Dedicated to the discovery of America by the Spanish Navy. 17th Century Anchor from Spanish Armada. | Designed by Jose Feito, FAIA".

A 15-feet-tall anchor on top of a white concrete plaza shaped a bit like a boat, with green grass, a glimpse of water, and several large skyscrapers of the downtown Miami shoreline behind it.

Today I learned that a downtown Miami park has a large monument "dedicated to the discovery of America by the Spanish Navy". It's 2025! The "discovery of America"?! WTF, Miami!

(This park was completely rebuilt and renovated about 12 years ago when the PAMM art museum was built there).

Hello does anyone want to fund my one woman startup to make sure 25 tech bros don't blot out the sun

This year, to save me from tears,

I'll give it to someone special (special)

But you can walk along the Flitch Way nearby, a beautiful path created from a disused railway line, to centuries-old Hatfield Forest a mile away, for hundreds of acres of still beautiful countryside (punctuated by the roar of Ryanair jets overhead every 2 minutes, however).

Oh yes. There's a massive complex of flats and shops right next to the train station. Start Hill, the tiny village Cxcx grew up in, is a few hundred yards from London's 3rd major airport, and I mostly associate it with the petrol station just off the M11 motorway roundabout.