David Reader 🐳📚🐦

#MountainMonday #Travel
#Arizona #Photography
A great place to spend a night after exploring the incredible scenery around the Vermilion Cliffs and the Pariah Plateau Wilderness.
Lees Ferry Lodge at Vermilion Cliffs.

WIDOW.
But she is armed for him and keeps her guard
In honestest defense.

(2/2)

MARIANA

… no legacy is so rich as honesty.

TheBard_ProblemPlays
#AllsWell_2026
III,5,11-12
William Shakespeare

Hunter's Point Park, Copper Harbor, Michigan.

•Quote: From Herman Melville's poem "The Æolian Harp At the Surf Inn", c. 1888; one of his Sea-Pieces poems, which were included in his collection John Marr and Other Sailors. Source: HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. First Printing, 2019, Library of America. • Artwork: "Moonlight at Sea; A Passing Squall" (no date). Watercolor on paper. Artist: Bancel La Farge Born: Neport, Rhode Island 1865. Died: Hamden, Connecticut, 1938. Source: Whitney Museum of American Art [fair use]

#MelvilleMonday

O the sailors—O the sails!
O the lost crews never heard of!
Well the harp of Ariel wails
Thoughts that tongue can tell no word of!

- Herman Melville, c. 1888

Moonlight at Sea; A Passing Squall
by Bancel La Farge (1865–1938)

— Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations

#MelvilleMonday

Difficult to look at. Imagine being there. CUTTING AWAY LOWER JAW. JAW COMING ABOARD. From Oceanic Melville 2025, field trip of the Melville Society meeting at Mystic Seaport. Learned so very much.

“…then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.”

#MelvilleMonday

Bw Photo. Gate Made of whale bones, a bay, mountains with snow on top

Think of the time when we ran up and down in our arbor, where the green vines grew over the great ribs of the stranded whale.

Mardi. I/XLV.

Happy #MelvilleMonday, dear friends!

STEWARD
Reads

I am Saint Jaques' pilgrim, thither gone.
…
My dearest master, your dear son, may hie.
Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far
His name with zealous fervour sanctify.
His taken labours bid him me forgive;

#AllsWell_2026
III,4,4ff
#TheBard_ProblemPlays

Ahoy, Shipmates & Friends!

Happy #MelvilleMonday ! 🐳🐳

“When a week had gone by, sailing steadily on, by day and by night, and nothing in sight but this selfsame sea, what wonder if disquieting thoughts at last entered our hearts?”

~ Mardi, C12

#MelvilleMonday

from The New Yorker

Happy #MelvilleMonday 🐳 !

James Joyce
Ulysses II,11,963 Sirens

„Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattle market, cocks, hens don't crow, snakes hissss. There's music everywhere.“

Heinrich Vogtherr d.Ä.
1490–1556
Holzschnitt

#MobyDick
#HermanMelville

Round the world…whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started…Were this world an endless plain…in pursuit…they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
#MelvilleMonday 🐳

A lake at night. Cows in the water, Trees, clouds, full moon

Still forgetful? Know you not my voice? Those little spirits in your eyes have seen me before. They mimic me now as they sport in their lakes. All the past a dim blank?

Mardi. 1/XLV

Happy #MelvilleMonday , dear friends!

“[…] whether some things that men think they do not know, are not for all that thoroughly comprehended by them; and yet, so to speak, though contained in themselves, are kept a secret from themselves? The idea of Death seems such a thing.”

(Pierre, Book XXI)

#MelvilleMonday 🐳

“Sweet, in opening spring, to trace upon the hill-side, otherwise gray and bare—to trace, I say, the oldest paths by their streaks of earliest green. Sweet, indeed, I can’t deny” — the piazza tales, Herman Melville #melvillemonday #naturesky #bloomsky #literature

About last night.

“The earth laughs in flowers.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

HELENA

O you leaden messengers,
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim; move the still-piecing air
That sings with piercing; do not touch my lord.

#TheBard_ProblemPlays
#AllsWell_2026
III,2,108-111
William Shakespeare

My #sundaysentence today: "If a spirit hovers, as some believe, for an hour or two over the cadaver it has abandoned, what banalities it is doomed to hear, while it waits in a despairing hope that some serious thought will be uttered, some expression which will lend dignity to the life it has left."

Looking down at the Golden Gate Bridge from the top of Twin Peaks. The orange color of the two towers is visible against the green background of the Marin County hills.

Golden Gate Bridge
San Francisco, CA

#TheBard_ProblemPlays All's Well That Ends Well continues on Mar. 9th-

The story is derived from the third day of Boccaccio’s Decameron, a day devoted to tales of lovers obliged to overcome seemingly impossible obstacles in order to achieve love’s happiness. Intro. #AllsWell_2026

“I find myself thinking of the imperceptible beat in which a word exists, between the articulation and the hearing.”

— Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat

#sundaysentence

I am no bird, and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will. - Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
#sundaysentence 📚💙

#sundaysentence #afarflunglife @scribnerbooks.bsky.social
#mlstedman
When you think of it, everyone’s life’s a prison—of days, sort of. The trick is to get comfortable in it, I reckon. Find your freedom inside whatever your prison is.

#SundaySentence

Because I reckon Jefferson was too small for a thirty-five-year-old bachelor, even a Harvard M.A. and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg with his hair already beginning to turn white . . . to eat ice cream and read poetry with a sixteen-year-old girl.

Faulkner
The Town

Fresco of Sappho holding writing equipment.

‘Glittering-Minded deathless Aphrodite,
I beg you, Zeus’s daughter, weaver of snares,
Don’t shatter my heart with fierce
Pain, goddess’ ~ Sappho for #InternationalWomensDay

Bluejay on young willow.

Good morning, my Bleeps.

Along the way