The girls return to publishing a weekly email newsletter after three weeks of not publishing a weekly email newsletter <3
To-do list:
Follow us on Twitter, follow the Washington Review of Books on Twitter and subscribe to their newsletter, and let us know what fun fall activities you’re planning 🍂🍂🍂
Links (Tweets):
Links (Not Tweets):
Absolutely crazy read about the chronic illness online community??
Food:
On Saturday Sarah went over to her best friend’s house for dinner and they made something really weird! This is what it was: cucumber and garlic cooked in butter with cream, salmon, dill, lemon juice, and lemon zest served over rice. It was actually really yummy. Cooked cucumber is sort of like if zucchini were less fibrous.
Music:
Clare has been compiling a worship playlist for her sixth grade class of religion students. You can listen here. [Goes incredibly hard. –Sarah]
Sarah is listening to The National’s new single.
Poem:
The Beauty of Things
To feel and speak the astonishing beauty of things—earth, stone and water,
Beast, man and woman, sun, moon and stars—
The blood-shot beauty of human nature, its thoughts, frenzies and passions,
And unhuman nature its towering reality—
For man’s half dream; man, you might say, is nature dreaming, but rock
And water and sky are constant—to feel
Greatly, to understand greatly, and express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.
Robinson Jeffers, from Hungerfield and Other Poems, 1951
[After what seemed like a long time of feeling trodden on and abused by poetry on the whole, as if it was always peevish and annoyed with me, I think I have begun to feel like it likes me again, and I can let go of my ill will toward almost anyone so long as I feel liked. The book that this poem is in is good. It begins with an epic of sorts, about a man named Hungerfield who kills death. But there is a sadness to it … Can’t you just feel Christ trying to make himself known to the author? Anyway, the book was supposed to be a gift from a beloved for my birthday. I found it in a secondhand bookstore while I was on the phone with him, and he said he would buy it for me. But for me to accept the gift, I would have to send him my Venmo handle, and I simply don’t think I should be having any interactions with people toward whom I feel tenderness over Venmo. I think, instead, I just want to be made to laugh. —C]
What we’re reading:
Clare is back to her old bad habit of sleeping with half a dozen books in her bed. She is reading that one book of poems, Hungerfield by Robinson Jeffers, another book about Joan of Arc, the Bible, The Long Valley by John Steinbeck, and a curious little children's book by Randall Jarrell called The Bat-Poet. She has felt for a long while that contemporary children’s books are more or less bankrupt, and don’t inspire wonder, so when she finds one she likes she buys it. Another book in this small collection of hers is called The Bed Book, a little volume of rhyme and whimsy by Sylvia Plath. She keeps these for any children that God might grant her, though she is feeling cynical about all of that lately, but that’s not topical.
Sarah’s small group was canceled tonight and she hopes to use the time to finish reading On the Incarnation. She’s been buying too many books and does not know which to read next.
Exhortations:
Pray the Psalms!
Request for approval:
Is this okay?