Ruby Street

Prepositions and position : Placing in place. Writing about placing, not place. Is here a place? Pronouns and position . " ... certain words of a sentence - prepositions, connectives, pronouns - belong up toward full consciousness, while strange and unused words appear only in subconscious. ... in dream the simple and familiar words like prepositions, connectives, etc. are not absent, in fact, noticeably present to show illogical absurdity, discontinuity, parody of sanity." Lorine Niedecker to Harriet Monroe

phew!

thrall

I went out for a brief walk this afternoon. It was raining, but not so hard you needed an umbrella (I hate umbrellas anyway). And so very strong, the smell of rain. I remember once reading out a poem of mine and having someone come up after the reading and note that I'd used the phrase 'the smell of rain'. I couldn't tell if he liked it or was simply taking the mickey (the latter, I suspect, as he was a very 'cool' poet and I am, manifestly, not). I wondered about the smell. To me it's always been obvious. But today I decided to go and find, and here , via the ABC and CSIRO, is some hard data. The common rain smell comes from a gas called petrichor. Apparently, volatiles evaporate from plants and are absorbed by rocks, concrete etc. When the rain hits the rock, the volatiles are released into the atmosphere. That's why I can particularly smell it wandering along concrete paths and past sandstone walls. If it's good enough for CSIRO, it's good eno...

In the Times Literary Supplement of November 3 2006, our favourite curmudgeon J.C., wishes to ban the use of the word 'limn' from reviewing pages, which is fair enough, and points out that the only two users of its opposite, dislimn, so far as he knows, have been John Buchan (eg from The Thirty-nine Steps - "The plump men's features seemed to dislimn, and form again") and Shakespeare. Well, it seems De Quincy also used the word, rather appropriately one would think, at least according to Speller's Diary which says that: -- 'Dislimn has nothing to do with removing arms or legs. It reverses "limn"-- which means to paint, delineate or describe. [Yikes, I can see a mini-essay on THAT word someday...]. Thus, "dislimn" means to obscure or efface. A secondary meaning is to vanish. The Bard has pride of place in using it. From Antony & Cleopatra , "Sometime we see a clowd that's Dragonish, A vapour sometime, like a Bear, or Lyo...