Friday, August 15, 2008

gathering..., brushing, nutting

...in shadows.

As I approach the Grove, I hear the solemn and deliberate sound of brushing, as two gardeners sweep the paths of the bracts of still green leaves, which have been blown to the ground by recent high winds.

A squirrel with a nut in its mouth has the self-satisfied expression of a man clenching a cigar between his lips.
Posted by Picasa

3 comments:

Lucy said...

I'm suffering twinges of envy for that new camera of yours!

Here a finial, usually of pottery and sometimes fancily shaped with many curlicues or even as a cavalier on horseback, is 'un epi de faitage'. I might take to photographing some.

The blog and diary discussion is interesting; I think perhaps blogs also have something of letters about them too, in that they are written with particular readers in mind, but that perceived readership is more general and more uncertain than letters ever usually are.

I've never been able to stick with the practice of keeping a regular journal, but find the responses to blog-writing keep me coming back to it. To some extent though, even before I received any comments or knew for sure anyone was reading it, there was something about the fact of publishing it that was compelling. I suppose public and celebrated figures always have half a mind that their diaries will be publishable and of interest, which must affect how they write them...

I'm inclined to concur with Mme de M. about leaving as little as possible, but there is perhaps a streak in most of us that likes to think we could leave something of ourselves behind and someone might even be interested.

Unknown said...

They probably don't compare to the twinges of envy which I feel for some of your photographs.
I sometimes think of my blog as a postcard to my friends. Responses do count, don't they? And one doesn't, as a rule, get responses from a diary. Perhaps that is why, to my surprise, my friend recently handed over a diary for me to read, as it happens, four years after she left off writing it. Perhaps I have succeeded in persuading her to take it up again.

Roderick Robinson said...

A blog's tone of voice is important. No sense of person and all you've got is reportage, while too much is self-indulgent. Underlying this is the need for facts, something new. As I said before, there is a limit - easily reached - as to how long readers are prepared to subsist on a diet of feelings and emotions.