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.

"The Author of Acacia Seeds And Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics", Ursula K. Le Guin (in The Unreal and the Real)

Encountered while reading Hugo Reinert's journal article "About A Stone: Some Notes on Geologic Conviviality."

I am a sucker for any prose related to Mysteries Of Rocks, but also: as a rule I try to avoid using more than two commas in a sentence unless I'm listing things. This is not because lots of commas are wrong; lots of commas are just hard to do well and I'm risk averse. Le Guin, of course, does not miss.

Theirs is a reedy, mid-Atlantic accent, pebble-smooth, stripped of any traces of its geographic or cultural origin.

"Lament of the Rogue Geoengineer", Justin Pickard

There was lastly the incident of the owl, which had a separate place in their opinion of him, since it involved death, a phenomenon to which children react variously.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré

(One could do worse for grad school procrastination than suddenly getting into John le Carré.)