John Milton June: The best society, sometimes

For solitude sometimes is best society,
And short retirement urges sweet return.

(John Milton. Paradise Lost. Book VIII, 249-250.)

I have actually not had a great deal of solitude whatsoever lately, but I have been hustling my sweet ass from Hell to Kansas just about every day with this and that, and I do plan to try and take some alone time soon. Maybe just a drive and some photos or something. I’ve enjoyed my flurries of activity, but you can’t drift away from your center, and I find my center in stolen, quiet moments here and there. Got to capture me some of those.

Daily Batman: Sabado, Sabado, Sabado

via laurenmoran on the tumblr.

Sweet ride.

All Apologies, “I Want to Ride My …” edition

In the “keep it real” post, I was really snide about Lindsay Lohan’s looks and lifestyle. I apologize to Ms. Lohan’s good name and to the internet at large for putting negative energy out there so flippantly, especially toward a mark who is a pretty easy target. Low blow.

via “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger”. Ow!

I also apologize to you for not even once featuring Ann-Margret in the just-over-a-year the thought experiment has been kickin’ until this morning — total scandal!

Hope that shot up there begins to make up for it. Love can build a bridge, you know.

Teevee Time and Advice: Not today

via fyeahscrubs on the tumblr.

Keep that chin up and go get ‘em!

Goethe Month: Roman Holiday edition

Outtake of Audrey on a Vespa for Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953).

Though you’re a whole world, Rome, still,
without Love,
The world isn’t the world,
and Rome can’t be Rome.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Roman Elegies, 1789.)

Advice and Happy Wednesday!

I don’t have the time today to make it a true Wednesday Wednesday, but here’s a little Miss Addams in your life, both literal and reminiscent, and also some really cool wisdom from great sources about two simple, harmonious, earth-friendly pleasures for which we can thank each other: reading and bicycling.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. — Christopher Morley

It is curious that with the advent of the automobile and the airplane, the bicycle is still with us. Perhaps people like the world they can see from a bike, or the air they breathe when they’re out on a bike. Or they like the bicycle’s simplicity and the precision with which it is made. Or because they like the feeling of being able to hurtle through air one minute, and saunter through a park the next, without leaving behind clouds of choking exhaust, without leaving behind so much as a footstep. — Gurdon S. Leete

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. — Aldous Huxley

We read to know we are not alone. — C.S. Lewis

Schoolgirl IV Reading by x-Autopsie on deviantart.

I used to walk to school with my nose buried in a book. — Coolio