Question Your Route

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Why take I5 home from Salem? Why take a freeway?

There are other great routes between Salem and Portland. This view is from a walk. We’d just used the ferry to cross the Willamette River. While waiting we watched a cement truck use the ferry for the same route. We also watched ospreys in their nest. Later we passed through hop fields, filbert tree groves, and a field of hemp, not marijuana according to the sign. This was a fine set of views.

Wheatland Ferry, Oregon

Reading: Keep Going

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Keep Going, from Austin Kleon, is about making things. It is an easy read for those of you interested in making things. Actually, those of you not interested in making things, in the art sense, may find it worth reading.

But that is not the point of this posting. You can see the summation below. (Easy for 10 chapters all of them titled.) This is something I started after my heart attack. How to get through a book? How to return to reading?

I started with Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. Read a chapter, make a summary. That process got me through the book. I don’t understand why this enables me to ready. But it does. I’ve continued. A two-page spread, fill it up with chapter numbers, some bits of summary follow. I’m reasonably sure I understand that I read.

This works for fiction and non-fiction books. But, Poetry? That does not seem to work. The collections, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Newspaper Blackout, and Queen of a Rainy Country, are three recent examples, are all so atomic that summaries would fall to individual poems.

So I must read without the crutch of summarizing. I hope I understand/

Notes from the book

Being Good

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Of favorite things encountered:

It doesn’t matter if it’s good right now, it just needs to exist.

Austin Kleon, https://austinkleon.com/2018/04/30/first-drafts/

So Keep Making things.