For those of us made with Dewey decimal brains and card catalogue hands books are shelved from left to right top to bottom end of story full stop but books have ever been in different shapes and sizes so what to do if you're a librarian with limited space who would prefer that nobody touch a book or misshelve or mislay or fail to return part of the collection you can put them in special collections with limited hours and restricted access and hand out cotton gloves and forbid pen and ink and the cracking of spines which you can justify for manuscripts and books of a certain age but for the rest there are the stacks usually open access and always jam packed for such spaces books have been shelved in a variety of ways all on shelves of the same height with larger books slid in spines up shelf marks face up to the front but in earlier times books were shelved by size largest and tallest on the bottom shortest and smallest on the top b...

It seems traffic cameras are a drag everywhere in Russia when you've speeded or run a red light you get a letter of happiness in the mail reminding you you've sinned I don't know what they are called here but $365 is quite a toll and must surely evoke more than happiness for those who are used to making those signature California rolling stops and never got used to being ticketed or towed there must be some enjoying the cameras and the chance to change other people's behaviour but I haven't met them not even one perhaps I will one day but in the meantime puzzle over the the psychology of elastic band snaps and salivating dogs and the great battery of stimulus and response to which we are treated in the course of a walk or a jaunt somewhere Kant whether you can go there or even if you can't is slumbering not yet stirred or wakened from the terrors of men who are laws unto themselves I wonder about the race of devils ...

You said it was an omen when a cardinal crossed my path or when a groundhog paused to look when I spoke hello a word of greeting that every living thing knows and answers to and responds with a pause and a breathing mark like some scholar reading Greek with a diacritic signalling him to roughen his tone for his master ten thousand thousand generations since anybody even spoke like that or conspired to resurrect the greasy whispers of Jim Morrison or one's fellow inmates from the cave once having surfaced to the light.

The city mover beat me to the chicory this evening maybe if I had passed by earlier I could have caught a glimpse of them but they will rise Phoenix like from the close cropped pile of grass and weed and present their brash and uneven beauty once again before the need for carpet and trimming loops of magic made by subterranean rug weavers is once again mandated and duly executed by the city crew in the burnt orange cabs of their ride along mowers browning the backs of their hands and letting the heat weather beat their faces to match the cabs and fulfill some unspoken contract between landscaping and maintenance and the gods of Chance Fortune as ever favouring the bold there will be other routs of the mover before the Summer is done and more rain hopefully if I can contain the fear of thunderheads building and more returns of visible biodiversity Nature never surrenders unconditionally but like a lover choosing her battl...