I have a great list of books on ancient and medieval botany now. Still haven't tracked down the "Rhizotomikon" of Crateuas. If anyone has a copy handy...

Working on my idea of a scholarly article, trying to trace back the sources of Gamoneda's Libro de los venenos in Ancient botanical history. Dioscorides and Kratevas. What I find pleasurable is how far afield this is taking me from my normal channels of information. It didn't help me that Gamoneda spelled Kratevas when the more normal spelling is "Crateuas." That wasted at least three hours of search time. The good news is that there is a specialist on the history of botany at the Spencer research library in Kansas.

Of course, none of this research has anything to do with Gamoneda's book, which is deliberately misleading in such respects. I just have to go back and see what he is making up and what he actually found.

My c.v. has filed a complaint with my blog, alleging that I haven't been paying enough attention to my career. I feel that the academic c.v. and the blog are monststers competing with each other to be fed.

Adjective of the day: "cooleridgean."

***

Julia's been writing a lot of poems. She is eight now, by the way, so her writing is getting even more sophisticated. She's reading 100 pages a day of Harry Potter 5.

I get so tired of everything being about AMERICAN poetry. Berryman vs. Berrigan. Neither is a poet much read outside the U.S. The battle-lines in Spain are drawn in a different place--the neo-realists vs. those who think poetry has philosophical implications.

Accent marks are back on my other blog. They inserted some language into my template that fixed the embarrassing problem. Now I just have to write some poems to put there.

I did the quiz again, changing a few answers. I was still "Drew Gardner." I changed a few more times, and became "Jordan Davis." I couldn't get the quiz to say that I resembled "Jonathan Mayhew" no matter what I did.

Ron's response to Brian today.

I did the blogging quiz. It said "Congratulations, you are Drew Gardner."

***

I've got to get rid of all those qualifying adverbs in the article I just wrote. I woke up first thing and know I had too many "fairly," "arguably," "quite," etc...

Brian's on fire. Free Space Comix as the anti-Silliman? I despise Lowell myself. I think he is probably a very important writer to whom I am temperamentally allergic. But Lowell is the very antithesis of quietudeness. A nice note from Robert Kelly on Brian's comments.

I keep waiting for Silliman's response.

I've always wanted to publish in Diacritics. Now is my chance, as I frantically try to finish this article on Valente's translations of Paul Celan by the end of the week. Thus: very little blogging.

Blogging disaster. All my diacritical marks have been turned into question marks. The Spanish blog "poesía con nombres propios" is completely defaced. I am considering defecting to another host.

Maybe that should be "The Inessential Mayhew."

Here's a good name for my next book, "The Essential Mayhew."

I'm back, with jet lag. I woke up at 4 a.m. and just started working. Our roof started leaking in our absence. My poems in Spanish were a big hit with some of the Spanish poets. They want me to publish a book there. Whether it will actually happen is open to doubt.

This new blogger software is weird.