Garlands

Poet Alastair Reid arranged unusual words into “garlands,” rings that end where they began:

What is a Tingle-Airey?

A tingle-airey is a hand organ, usually played on the street by the turning of a handle, and often decorated with mother-of-pearl or piddock shells.

What are Piddocks?

Piddocks are little mollusks which bore holes in rocks and wood, or in the breastsummers of buildings.

What is a Breastsummer?

A breastsummer is a great beam supporting the weight of a wall, and sometimes of a gazebo above.

What is a Gazebo?

Continue reading: Futility Closet

Savage : The Making of Modern Dogs in British Hong Kong

China Books Review: Savage is a brief history of Hong Kong’s most beloved — or is it reviled? — inhabitants: dogs. Catherine Chan, a historian at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, examines how dogs shaped work, play and politics from the territory’s colonial period (1842 to 1997) through the COVID-19 pandemic.

Time and Again

A short story by Breece D’J Pancake.

Mr Weeks called me out again tonight, and I look back down the hall of my house. I left the kitchen light burning. This is an empty old house since the old lady died. When Mr Weeks doesn’t call, I write everybody I know about my boy. Some of my letters always come back, and the folks who write back say nobody knows where he got off to. I can’t help but think he might come home at night when I am gone, so I let the kitchen light burn and go on out the door.

The cold air is the same, and the snow pellets my cap, sifts under my collar. I hear my hogs come grunting from their shed, thinking I have come to feed them. I ought to feed them better than that awful slop, but I can’t until I know my boy is safe. I told him not to go and look, that the hogs just squeal because I never kill them. They always squeal when they are happy, but he went and looked. Then he ran off someplace.

I brush the snow from my road plow’s windshield and climb in. The vinyl seats are cold, but I like them. They are smooth and easy cleaned. The lug wrench is where it has always been beside my seat. I heft it, put it back. I start the salt spreader, lower my shear, and head out to clean the mountain road.

The snow piles in a wall against the berm. No cars move. They are stranded at the side, and as I plow past them, a line falls in behind me, but they always drop back. They don’t know how long it takes the salt to work. They are common fools. They rush round in such weather and end up dead. They never sit still and wait for the salt to work.

I think I am getting too old to do this anymore. I wish I could rest and watch my hogs get old and die. When the last one is close to dying, I will feed him his best meal and leave the gate open. But that will most likely not happen, because I know this stretch of Route 60 from Ansted to Gauley, and I do a good job. Mr Weeks always brags on what a good job I do, and when I meet the other truck plowing the uphill side of this road, I will honk. That will be Mr Weeks coming up from Gauley. I think how I never met Mr Weeks in my life but in a snowplow. Sometimes I look out to Sewel Mountain and see snow coming, then I call Mr Weeks. But we are not friends. We don’t come around each other at all. I don’t even know if he’s got family.

I pass the rest stop at Hawks Nest, and a new batch of fools line up behind me, but pretty soon I am alone again. As I plow down the grade toward Chimney Corners, my lights are the only ones on the road, and the snow takes up the yellow spinning of my dome light and the white curves of my headlights. I smile at the pretties they make, but I am tired and wish I was home. I worry about the hogs. I should have given them more slop, but when the first one dies, the others will eat him quick enough.

I make the big turn at Chimney Corners and see a hitchhiker standing there. His front is clean, and he looks half frozen, so I stop to let him in.

Read more: Biblioklept

A Field of Finches Without Sight Still Singing

A poem by Grace Cavaliere, former poet laureate of Maryland.

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Do You Remember Library Checkout Cards and Stamps?

 

Only fellow Olds may recognize this epic souvenir I got at the New York Public Library…

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— Aiyana White (@aiyanaewhite.bsky.social) August 11, 2026 at 9:58 PM

TEXAS

 by David Berman

Along the inner stream I found a hive split open.

I was deep in the country, where they said

I would find swollen dogs and trees covered in dust.

I found a house with windows and a door.

Once a man stumbled into the barn with a fresh axe wound.

I let him clean it out with vodka, then he pulled out

a red gun and told me he was gonna put me in the ground.

The sound made a hundred crows rise out of the field.

I remember sleeping by the pond,

waking up to see crumbled bees on the lips of a brown dog

standing over me.

I just lay there

trying to measure the diameter of its eyes.

I used to think I went there for the everchanging scenery,

or for the way the days just pass away.

They had told me Texas sat on the land,

harvests and oil, ten dimes to the dollar,

one star,

but those aren’t the things I saw.

I couldn’t walk an unbroken line there.

The window sill was a frame,

the state was a house,

and the doormat was on fire.

First published in Caliban #8, 1990 

Biblioklept

Twain Town, U.S.A.

Samuel Clemens is everywhere in Hannibal, Missouri, but is the story the town tells about its favorite son grounded in reality or myth? (read the entire article here)

Hannibal is a company town, and the local industry is Mark Twain. Just about every location associated with his childhood has been developed into a potential source of revenue. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home, filled with memorabilia, is bordered by a whitewashed fence like the one made famous in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom, a mischief-maker whose antics range from wickedly ingenious to borderline sociopathic, tricks his friends into doing a tedious chore for him by pretending it’s fun. There’s the Mark Twain Cave—where Clemens himself played as a child and which inspired the one where Tom is trapped for three days along with Becky, his sweetheart—now electrically lit and accessible to visitors on an hour-long guided tour. The list goes on: the Mark Twain Casino, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor & Emporium, Clemens General Store, and more. Even a bottled-water vending machine bears a quote from Twain: “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”

Twain is a complex figure: A child of slave owners, he married into an abolitionist family and ultimately wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of American literature, with a deeply antiracist message. At the same time, the book has been criticized and even banned for its frequent use of the n-word and perceived racial stereotyping. The runaway success of Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is Huck’s companion, shows that interest in Twain remains high even as contemporary readers increasingly acknowledge the ways in which his books inadequately represent the experience of Black people. “Part of the continuing fascination with Mark Twain is that he combines in his person both the best and the worst of our national culture,” Ron Chernow, the author of a new Twain biography, has said.

But you wouldn’t know it in Hannibal, where the perfume of manufactured nostalgia hangs heavy in the air. 

There Will Come Soft Rains

Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story is taken from a poem by Sarah Teasdale published at the end of World War I and the beginning of the influenza pandemic of 1918. It chronicles a lone automated home that by chance survived the destruction of Allendale California in a nuclear attack. Daily routines continue with robots attending to household chores and meal preparation, acknowledging their former residents and masters though they mistake their presence for silhouettes burnt on to the walls by the atomic blast.

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The Men Are Weeping In The Gym

I read a brief reference to this poem about the effects of toxic masculinity on our culture in an article in the Guardian today and decided to read it. It left me feeling disquieted.

Andrew McMillan is professor of contemporary writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

 

Yesteryear

Caro Claire Burke’s new novel has received a lot of buzz. The  reviews describe it as a story about a successful tradwife influencer with millions of followers who suddenly finds herself thrown into living the 1880s life she has been promoting so vigorously online. Natalie lives on a farm with her perfect husband and children and creates an online rural bliss lifestyle that is the envy of many (although there are a few detractors who see her as a handmaiden to a conservative right agenda). Her successful cottagecore brand resonates with women who are feeling the pressure of modern life. It has also made her family wealthy. But when the curtain behind the online idyll is lifted we learn that tradwifedom is not as effortless nor as perfect as Natalie makes it seem. 

Then, without explanation, Natalie wakes up one morning living on an actual 1880s frontier farm and having a passel of kids, a brutish husband and suddenly cooking every meal from scratch loses its allure.

It was a good summer read but if you’re looking for depth you won’t find it here. It strains belief and the characters are all as unreal as Natalie’s perfect online life.