Nature Writing Reading

 Hey, all,

I have been reading a lovely tome every morning for several months. I sometimes stop at one of its brief entries, and I sometimes read two or three. I found it quite randomly, perusing the shelves at a local treasure--the Rhino Booksellers about a mile and a quarter from our home in The Nations, here in Nashville. Rhino's does have some social media identities, and a (single page) website, but seriously, the only way to "get" Rhino is to visit it. Make sure you have plenty of time.

I had been looking for anything by Tristen Gooley, having read and thoroughly enjoyed his Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs. That accounts for my being so investigative of the nature section; but though I didn't find any Gooley, my explorations proved to my advantage when I discovered this hardcover edition of The Oxford Book of Nature Writing. It had been marked down from 11 to 10 dollars, the 11 on its liner page lined through with pencil and the 10 entered (in the same handwriting) in pencil beneath it. Whoopee! 

So I opened the book and read its brief introduction by editor Richard Maybey, a celebrated nature writer in his own right, and scanned the first few pages. They include several paragraphs from Aesop, and nearly two pages from Aristotle, 344BC. I flipped through and saw brief writings by folks like Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, GM Hopkins, along with many from authors unknown to me. The final writing is from Primo Levi in 1985. The book is arranged in chapters, each roughly identifying with one of seven historical periods chronologically.

But I digress. Imagine that. 

Anyway, when I read these passages, I sometimes find myself reading aloud, because the language, oh, the language. The varied voices, some in translation, come alive in the reading, so so vividly and with such detail. I recorded a few of them to see if they sound as delicious as they read, and I think one could make that argument. Here's a just under 6 minute reading of one of them, credits at the end. I'm slowly creating a collection of them, and though they may sound better read by a digital voice in Speechify or another speech to text app, they are so much fun to read aloud that I'm going to share one here. I highly recommend this little book!

Nature Writing Reading 5

The Oxford Book of Nature Writing

The (first) ice storm of 2026

 ...and I hope it's the last. 

Wow, it was, and remains an impressive, visually stunning evidence of Nature's anger. I know, that's anthropomorphism at its worst, but there ya go.

Gonna post my images so far here, if for no other reason than that I haven't blogged in a minute. 

It was, and remains, a challenge for many fellow humans. In the great scheme of things, with my dearest human recuperating from major (~5 hours long) intestinal repair surgery January 8, the storm hit us 6 days ago with a couple inches of snow, which in Nashville is plenty 'nuff to cripple the city for a bit, followed by a major ice storm with "freezing rain" and an ice build-up that was the 2 punch in the old 1-2 knockout. Power was lost to hundreds of thousands just in our Metro area, and somehow we were spared that, here in our little one decade old tall and skinny home in The Nations, just west of downtown and filling up over the past decade with people and more overpriced homes. Not that I'm complaining--you know, equity.

Yes, I'm the king of the run-on sentence. Hello.

Early on, we did our little community bit by my venturing out into the icy streets to bring a young friend back to power and warmth, along with her spunky, a little freaked-out kitty, Luigi. Lee Ann was about in shape to go back to work anyway, starting part-time and now working up to almost full, though her business, Tinwings, took the income hit with virtually every other small business, cancelling the week's pickup orders and deliveries and limiting hours for walk-in market customers. She's back at work now, and our extended family member, an employee of that food gem as well as a dear friend, is joining her to cook for the market so people who can get out can choose delicious, made from scratch, original food, cooked with love and the highest possible standards of cuisine. 

I'm back painting, playing some mandolin, walking the dog, keeping house, playing Legacy of Thieves, and, well, blogging. I have had some fun sailing my 22 foot Loonetta boat in Second Life, and I'm continuing to make sure the neighborhood has access to information from the Card Campaign for Democracy, papering the occasional utility pole with the current or favorite card of my printing, and leaving them in public spaces for citizens. This is a small thing, but it's better than an old man doing nothing. Consider it for your own extra hobby. You too can be a pamphleteer--if it's good enough for Thomas Paine...

I will be offline Friday to support the General Strike in support of Milwaukee Americans and against the vicious despotism of the Trump Clown Circus. Yes, it's gotten deadly. His masked thugs are executing  people in the streets, and if you don't think it will come to your town eventually if unchecked, you are literally dead wrong.

Click to view my developing photo and video album:

Lots of Work on scottmerrick.me

 Hi, It's 2026 and I gave up on Wix's decision to eliminate pop-up tool-tips on images, a former accessibility feature they eliminated without prior notice, as far as a quick search yields somewhere this past Fall. I just stumbled upon it one day, while innocently adding a new painting to my https://scottmerrickart.wixsite.com/myart website. WTF?

Wix is an Israeli site offering free or low-cost html5 tools for website creation, and no, I don't care that it is sometimes considered "unprofessional" to utilize it for its purpose. I, without shame, do not consider my passion for making art "professional." The tool-tip feature was reportedly eliminated when the EU dropped a previously required html design requirement. There ya go.

I originally designed the site over a year ago to share my graphic art, mostly acrylic paintings, with others, mainly because my artwork is not a "professional" endeavor. It's a pursuit of interpreting the mundane in light of its sublimity. 

So there. That's what I have today. And I think it serves my purpose for it.

All that said, I am considering an effort to clear paintings that currently live in a rack out of my home studio at Chez Merrique in The Nations neighborhood of Nashville by promoting a "sweepstakes" that will get some paintings into homes and businesses. You can see some of them at my wife's superstar catering business, Tinwings, in our neighborhood, but if you visit the art site by clicking the link up top or by simply typing "scottmerrick.me" in your web browser, and you identify a painting you like that is noted as "available" in the painting's description, use the same site's "Contact" feature to let me know if you want to make an offer or just come pick it up gratis. I'm not planning to ship at this time to the free folks, but otherwise I will either get it to you, if local, or you can drop by and it'll be on our front porch. That clear out effort has not yet begun and readers of me bloggy can get a jump on the throngs that will participate. Heh.

Just sayin'.

Seeeeee ya... Keep your head down and hold on to your hope. I still have a little faith we can avoid our once truly great nation's complete descent into authoritarianism. See Cards for Democracy Project's site for how you can do a little to help without placing yourself in harms way, at least for now.

Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan

 Happy Boxing Day. Your 2025 present is the video (embedded here or watch on YouTube), recommended by John Prine in direct quotation by Tom Piazza in his book, Living in the Present with John Prine. I highly recommend the read and hope you will consider purchasing it at your local intelligent book store or online as you will. You are welcome.

Oh! Virtual Learning! The Book!

Hello, and may this day find you well and safe, two iffy constructs in these dark days for American government and public safety. But that's neither here nor there (although it may feel like everywhere).

I stumbled across this in my Dropbox whilst looking for an ancient song I had written in the mid 1970s. It is from Sharebook, a feature that appears no longer to be available at blogspot.com for bloggers to archive their work, and it begins with a post from May 7, 2007 and ends with one at February 21, 2012. The blog went on for a few posts, and featured a revival announcement in August, 2023. That last is, though, the last. The revival never was followed up upon, and will not likely be.

Still, this little online book, spreading across some 277 pages of .pdf file, is fun to explore, at least for me. Many of its links got lost in the process of publication and a cursory click-thru demonstrates that many of the links that survived take one to a polite "page not found" message.

During Oh! Second Life!'s publication online, I was teaching young kids about technologyin independent then public schools whilst helping my wife to raise our own two kids, and Second Life for education was my primary creative side hustle. My involvement with virtual worlds for learning spread and grew over decades, until upon my May, 2022 retirement I audibly brushed together my hands and for reasons I can understand better than I can explain, I turned my back on the teaching world. I will herein say that I was so done with the reshaping of schools into businesses, and the data-driven administration of them (just how accurate was that data, beginning with standardized testing results?),  that I was, like, outta there, and for good--for my own, if for no one else's.

So. There you are. Pretty much the sum total of my educational experience over 5 years of the nearly two decades of what people called Leadership in that field. I made friends, and many of those were from other geolocations--Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Japan. Once we loosely organized, we were always just on the "about to be" side of the Bell Curve of Adoption. It may be that those still involved will always be, and will pass, in turn, their own fascination and dedication to its newbies, who will one day do the same. It may be that the experiences within virtual worlds are simply so unfathomable to the unitiated that they will never be of real use to the powers that shape "the education system." Who knows?

What I know is that these engaging fascinations, with their promising and unfulfilled possibilities, are archived palpably in the blog, which is still available on Google's blogger.com platform (possibly useful if one wants to pursue a lost link) and shared here for as long as my Dropbox footprint evades the inevitable and eradicating winds of time. 

Stay well. Stay safe. 

Be Good and Have Fun.