Fretmarks

I can't believe I didn't know anything about this blog. Its proprietor, "Pluvialis", just shyly told me of it, though apparently she has been linking to us for a while.

The title is a falconry term-- the marks made on a growing feather by stress or lack of food. But though Pluvialis does indeed deal with falconry (check out the sapphire and diamond hoods from the Emirates), you will also encounter everything from Martha Stewart as a "predator" to mushroom hunting, rock & roll, (good) TV, guns, and the covers of (very odd) WWll British military books by Penguin (one is titled "I knew your Soldier", by Eleanor "Bumpy" Stevenson-- as Pluvialis says, "They HAVE to be joking". You will learn of such obscure characters as one Bernard Acworth, a lunatic anti- evolutionist friend of C S Lewis who in 1929 wrote a book titled "The Bondage" with the thesis that (1) birds didn't migrate-- they blew on the wind; and that (2) so did airplanes, so international air travel was impossible. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up-- she has links.

Pluvialis is completing (or not-- I'll let her decide) her PhD at Cambridge University-- see the post with the visual of Fuseli's "Nightmare"-- is an active falconer, has written a soon- to be - released book full of good writing that I endorse (yes, she quotes me once or twice, and I will link when I get one), and can write gracefully about pop or high culture.


For some reason her post about the good cancelled series Firefly seemed worth a quote for a bit of her flavor:

"....I was a crewmember once. Not a spaceship crew: this was in Wales. And we didn’t deal in contraband. We didn’t smuggle in Marlborough Lights and fence them in pubs along the Tenby seafront. We were a bunch of oddballs; ex-marines, skate-punks, kleptomaniacs, rugby-players, literature graduates, biologists, and the sons of colonial farmers, all obsessed with falcons, stuck in a cold, wet hollow in the middle of nowhere. Wet rot and flystrike. It breeds strange behaviour, such kindly isolation."

Put her on your list!