Playing with tumblr

summaminutiae.tumblr.com – my poor blog is one of St Benedict’s gyrovagues:

The fourth kind of monks are those called Gyrovagues.
These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province,
staying as guests in different monasteries
for three or four days at a time.
Always on the move, with no stability,
they indulge their own wills
and succumb to the allurements of gluttony,
and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites.
Of the miserable conduct of all such
it is better to be silent than to speak.

Why is my bookbag/ereader so heavy?

I found Calibre, a free ebook reader for ubuntu, so I’m in the ebook market now. My first ebook is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. His prose is as spare as the story’s blasted and bitter landscape but it’s also unexpectedly lively with a flair for the unusual but perfect word. I’ve considered how I would write the same story, and I find myself bringing out piles of words to make explicit what McCarthy tells slyly without words at all. Every paragraph of his is a poem.

My other current book, a real paper-and-ink book, is The Heart of Newman, a 1920s synthesis of Newman’s writings arranged by the Jesuit Erich Przywara. Newman’s works are vast and this provides an enjoyable path through them with unexpected delights around every corner.