Field guide

am finding about lsing in Rebcca Solnit's Field Guide to Getting Lost quite wonderful... especially the writing about the desert, and about love... something about her heritage and family, and the import of self from that reminds me strongly of Daniel Mendelson's book about the Lost, and the place in Poland he went back to discover his family

am at present, having read in this great small book about "shul" and traces, on the part of the guide about Isaak Dinesen and must find and read "The Young Man with the Carnation" about blue, and the blues and must tell my friend Maggie Nelson about that part in case she doesn't know it... in her bleuets book she writes about blue, like William Gass's book about Blue

reminds me of his book on Reading Rilke, and all the various translations of Rilke -- when I was writing about Paula Modersohn-Becker for the London Review of Books and wanted to quote a Rilke poem about her (Requiem for a Friend) I finally used  my former colleague Burton Pike's translation, about her as standing there lbeholding the ripe fruit and saying "this is" ... how important it is to be able to say about something: "this is" -- how do we get to do that?