bad in countless ways, but good in only one

(Aristotle on the golden mean: "Men are bad in countless ways, but good in only one")

Epigonoi

. . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron.

And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

And he is gluing together the chariot's rail.

Upstairs the children are watching Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends, wrapped in their duvets, mint-green dressing gowns. This is Thebes, war has just been declared. We're talking about the oil-drips in the parking space. I'm excited, I think a white sail is twinkling over in the rail sidings, it approaches very fast, or is it a black sail?

SPRING BECKONS YOU

This is a car-park, loaded with primulas.

The population is basically straight primroses (Primula vulgaris)but with a high frequency of the less commmon forms. Thus you get local splashes of plants where the outer petals might be not primrose-yellow but white, or red-winy
(sometimes neat and more often a bit washed-out).

Also, you can find a few primroses where instead of the flower-stems arising separately from the base they spring from a central scape. Maximum nine or ten flowers, arranged like spokes.

There's a few scaped+red plants, too. It's really hard to accept these as primroses. Perhaps there's been some genetic incursion from another source.

In the middle of all this is a cowslip bank (Primula veris), and here you can see the common hybrid P. veris x vulgaris, sometimes known as "false oxlip". The one below is surrounded by normal-looking cowslips (is P. veris always the mother, I wonder?) The flowers look basically primrosy, but a bit smaller and with a dash more egg-yolk - more of them, too. They emerge from a fine tall scape, but there's no rotational symmetry. Instead, they bunch together and face the same way, all rubbernecking sunwards.

What do you get if you have a cowslip mum and red-primrose dad? Well, a sort of muddy fawn; the parental stains suffuse each other, like watercolours. The stem system is bits-and-pieces, but this plant still manages to look good.

Brief Hist - more

Kai Nieminen l'avare Racing Club v Independiente

Updates today, eliminating paltry errors and adding paltry notes. Also isometric tests, backup procedures, making the tea and intranet kiosks (stuff for which I get paid and carry leave over).

You are a human being and a bad one. But I like
the white of your shirt, without a tie, because

the car-parks are solid today, cables piss money
and it was as you expected, born in a lounge.

Brief History / poems

So this has become a literary Blog, of sorts. The literary material, if that's what you want, is all in the Brief History, which I now have links to, over there on the right....

Currently ongoing: Åsne Seierstad (Afghanistan), Wolfram von Eschenbach (plus Chretien/Peredur), addendum to Wordsworth ("terraqueous" Black Comb), G Greer (age), Yeats (Blood and the Moon). Temporarily crashed: K Boye, R S Thomas, Ashbery. Here's what I might write about soon: The Dice Man, The Old Curiosity Shop, The History Man, On the terrace (P-A Renoir).

Now I also remember that Alan Halsey's "DANGER or DANCER" is possibly a memory of a poem by Charles Tomlinson, so I want to put that into my article (disturbing experience; I actually felt excited about opening AH's book again, and I now disagreed with one of the main things I'd said about it). And when I asked him the supine of confiteor the fool didn't know. - yes, I wanted to write something about that, too. Aphex Twin Ernest Chausson Alec Broers Una Baines Pathclear saxifrage brown moss primula scape. Trees crash down, drinks disappear. Just how long can I spend at Wolfram's Joflanze, when all this is happening? Yet it's during these long stays, if ever, that I sometimes learn something worth saying...

If you want to comment on any of what's there then tell me in the email and we'll move the discussion to here.

The poems are on the right, too. There's something new flooding at the moment - which is why this blog is healthily sparse.