This week was light on non-academic reading and heavy on trying to comport myself to the task of academic writing, which made for a smaller selection of perfect sentences for this newsletter. Such is the curse of the semester actually starting and entering the cadence of academia time.
One of the things I hate about academic reading is it tends to emphasize knowledge extraction over poetics; while I read and highlighted a lot of sentences this week whether the sentences were any good (or, more to the point, whether I could take the time to appreciate them) was another matter. This is partly why I set up this newsletter in the first place. Anyway, I'm working on it but this week was a bit light.
And with them, or after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer—the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks: each one a word spoken, how long ago, by the earth itself, in the immense solitude, the immenser community, of space.