Stuff

On my walk recently, I noticed a small pond. What, you may say? You didn't notice a POND in front of you before?

Well, no, I didn't. It's very small. More like standing water of some kind. But I was going past it a week or so ago and I heard this odd noise.
BOING
BOINGBOING
BERNK
It's difficult to convey. It sounds like defunct banjo strings are being plunked or someone is fooling with a synthesizer. Very very odd. Also the noise is LOUD. It sounds like the pond itself is boiling up. I don't think anyone could stand in front of it without laughing [of course I didn't notice it for weeks and weeks, but never mind me.].
They are male frogs, of course, voicing their love lament, their pitch for a mate. The lady frogs must be wearing earplugs.

Wookin' pa nub, know what I'm sayin'?

What does this all mean? Not one damn thing.

BOOKS I'VE READ OF LATE:

I am interested in Sylvia Plath, and Ronald Hayman's biography is pretty good, although I'd like to say one thing to him if he's around. Dude! Swampscott is not on Cape Cod! Check your facts, okay? Interesting here how SP stands behind her husband Ted Hughes on the cover. Gosh, is that ever fitting. She was crazy-crazy about him and put her head in the oven and killed herself because he cheated on her. Yikes. No man is worth that. Three stars.

The woman Hughes was having an affair with on that occasion? I read her biography too. She was Assia Wevill and the book is A LOVER OF UNREASON by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev. I found it spellbinding. Guess what? Six years after Sylvia did it, Assia did the same thing, gassed herself in the kitchen. A copycat suicide, it is called. This makes me really curious about Ted Hughes and I may have to read some books about him. Poet Laureate of England in his day, he said something like he wasn't going to try and find happiness with one woman; it was weakening and suffocating.

Well yowza and lah-dee-dah. Some people. Four stars.

And I also read

THE WOMEN by T. C. Boyle. It's about Frank Lloyd Wright and the women in his life. Another genius type like Ted Hughes who went through a few wives. This one was beautifully written by Boyle, whose work I have admired before, but in truth, I couldn't take the reverse chronology. I couldn't see the reason for telling the story back to front, end to beginning. It's clever, I suppose, but wearying. Oh no, now we're jumping back another ten years. Forget everything you knew.
I don't like that. Three stars.
Enjoying these wonderful June days, dear reader
love,
becky