The Print, The Step

Two lines from #121 in Daryl Hine &: A Serial Poem

[…]

As if each moment were a monument

[…]

Not every happening qualifies as an event.
Two lines that bring to mind for me the subtle art of Jeff Hill who did the decorations and lettering for Peter Pauper Press's Cherry-Blossoms: Japanese Haiku Series III (1960)

I treasure the finesse of the block like elements of the houses or huts on the left. Some just over the window-like frame. Some overlapping red on black.

Such illustration is worthy to be called an event. It happens as if each monument were a moment.

And so for day 1904
29.02.2012

To See Anew

Alison Uttley
Grey Rabbit’s May Day

“Unwilling to steal ritual flowers, but unable to speak and explain their need, the animals leave gifts in exchange --- among them a Roman glass tear bottle, found by the mole in a tunnel and filled by the rabbit with fresh May dew. Initially bewildered, Miss Susan [the nearly blind women who tends the garden] finally rubs her eyes with that dew and finds that she can again see ‘the feathers of the birds, the petals of the flowers.’”

House and Garden
March 2000
p. 78
Also published under the title Little Grey Rabbit's May Day

And so for day 1903
28.02.2012

Versions of Form

These notes jump but it is still interesting to see how a transcription of a four-part relation is paired with musings about the thinker's limitations in regards to cross-modal sensory translations.

Nelson Goodman
Ways of Worldmaking
As meanings vanish in favor of certain relationships among terms, so facts vanish in favor of certain relationships among versions.
In proposing such a proportional analogy, does the logic of version and that of term dovetail?

meanings : term :: fact : version

comment:
Cross-modal Quotation
Goodman's sense of picture does not extend to dramatic tableaux via sculpture ∴ he cannot account well for sight-sound combos in performance art. His notion of containment equals enclosure and does not posit an encompassing frame that regulates reference in cross-modal structures.

picture can quote sound & vice versa —> replicas, inscriptions & utterances
Intriguing how my little comment reads via the contrast of "enclosure" and "frame" — almost as if I was channelling the notions of "term" and "version".

And so for day 1902
27.02.2012

Cross-stanza Sonorities

Walter de la Mare. Peacock Pie "The Cupboard"

I love the suggestiveness of rhyming "me" with "key". And I particularly am thrilled by how the rhyme is carried over the stanzas.

I know a little cupboard,
With a teeny tiny key,
And there's a jar of Lollypops
     For me, me, me.

[…]

I have a small fat grandmamma,
With a very slippery knee,
And she's Keeper of the Cupboard,
     With the key, key, key.
And thanks to the rhyme the image of the grandmamma as fat and small recedes with the prominence of the "very slippery knee".

And so for day 1901
26.02.2012

Beginning at the End

I remember playing the role of Rumplestiltskin in a school play back in grade one or grade two. The tune and lines of the little man's song have been with me since. "Rumplestiltskin, one two, three." I thought that this was the beginning of the song and the rest constantly escaped me. I retrieved the mimeographed script from a trunk and found that it was the end — no wonder I couldn't recall la suite!

Rumplestiltskin, little and old,
Rumplestiltskin, spinning gold
Can she guess the name for me
Rumplestiltskin, one two, three
I now note that the script was printed in a child's hand — good for memorization.

And the stage directions are in cursive.

And so for day 1900
25.02.2012

Caveats as Expansions

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade… on Paolo Virno by McKenzie Wark in its peroration opens up the field:

Here I would like to just mention some caveats. Firstly, it seems rather old fashioned to speak only of the human and not the multi-species muddle we actually exist in and as. And rather than language I would prefer to open up some other categories that define the human as indefinable, whether it be play (Huizinga), ornament (Jorn), or the passions (Fourier). Moreover in its lack of definition, the human might not be a unique species, but one of many that plays and is open to the world. That world might be less eternal and unchanging were Virno to think about natural history a bit more broadly than Chomsky naturalistic materialism of a universal grammar. The Anthropocene makes even nature historical and temporary.
I like the implicit form ("Yes but") that brings us into the domain of general semiosis. That raises the question not only of signification but also that of signifiance. Modes Reception. Modalities of Readership. What's on your radar?

And so for day 1899
24.02.2012

Alcorn's Tale of Miss Agnes B. and Ivy Lee

John Alcorn — last song on Haunted is a ballad of two women loved by the same sailor who in the course of the song comes and goes leaving our protagonists to their routines. It begins enchantingly …

Miss Agnes B. and Ivy Lee
They are two floors below
They eat Peek Freans and toast at tea
And watch their violets grow.
And the sailer having come and gone, the song ends …
Miss Agnes B. and Ivy Lee
They live two floors below
They look at pictures of the sea
And know they'll never go.
And aptly the song is called "Pictures of the Sea". The sailor is incidental.

And so for day 1898
23.02.2012

Hope Against Hopefully

This is perhaps my favourite entry in The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White.

Hopefully. This once-useful adverb meaning "with hope" has been distorted and is now widely used to mean "I hope" or "it is to be hoped." Such use is not merely wrong it is silly. To say, "Hopefully I'll leave on the noon plane" is to talk nonsense. Do you mean you'll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you'll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven't said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense.
We live in hope.

And so for day 1897
22.02.2012

Erudite Attributions of Quality

The Quotable Oscar Wilde by Sheridan Morley renders this with two instances of "very"

I have very simple tastes, I am always satisfied with the very best.
I have seen a similar sentiment attributed to Winston Churchill: "I am easily satisfied with the best."

Apparently the source for the Wilde text doesn't have the double (or any) "very". 1917, Oscar Wilde: An Idler’s Impression by Edgar Saltus, Quote Page 20, Brothers of the Book, Chicago. To wit: "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best."

I derive this information from the ever resourceful Quote Investigator (Garson O’Toole). http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/03/simplest-tastes/#note-4945-1 who also enlightens us on the matter of the reference to (not by) Churchill: "Winston Churchill was associated with a similar statement, but he did not say the words himself. Instead, the comment was reportedly made by the British statesman F. E. Smith who used it when describing Churchill’s tastes."

Our thanks for the very best of investigations. [And the opportunity to snidely correct those that would impute to the great Oscar the double "very" which so cheapens the sentiment not to mention the marks of taste.]

And so for day 1896
21.02.2012

BTW Lullabies

Reading Daryl Hine &: A Serial Poem I came across a passage that echoed in my mind with a reading of Gjertrud Schnackenberg Heavenly Questions.

First #60 from the Hine book

Immured in a single-occupancy cell,
Each day indistinguishable from the next,
& nearly inextinguishable, perplexed
How all manner of things shall nevertheless be well,
With a celibate selfish as a shellfish spell
[…]
I was the line "How all manner of things shall nevertheless be well" that put me in mind of Schanckenberg's poems and the shellfish reference added another piece of evidence to the perceived intertextual relation since she has a poem "Fusiturricula Lullaby". But it is the opening sequence of the book, "Archimedes Lullaby," that I quote here in the hope that you too will hear the reverberations.
A visit to the shores of lullabies,
Where Archimedes, counting grains of sand,
Is seated in his half-filled universe
And sorting out the grains of shape and size.
Above his head a water-ceiling sways,
Beneath his feet the ancient magma-flows
Of metamorphic, underneath plateaus
Are moving in slow motion, all in play,
And all is give-and-take, all comes and goes,
And hush now, all is well now, close your eyes
Like the magma-flows beneath tectonic plates, the line about hushing returns in variations: And close your eyes now, hush now, all is well (from "Fusiturricula Lullaby").

And so for day 1895
20.02.2012

seeing as apparent memories but occurring only as speaking

Leslie Scalapino
The Weatherman Turns Himself In

Spectacle floats location.
And in the mode of locating flotation here is a set transcribed with some lineation.
Landscape is event,
as if
one's action
were seen
outside one.
"Landscape is event, as if one's action were seen outside one."

which appears to me a simple version of what precedes
The visible construction of landscape inseparable from action, seeing as apparent memories but occurring only as speaking, is the 'viewer' observing only one's present mind.
The key of landscape as event turns the visible construction into this observation: "The viewer doesn't have the illusion of creating action."

And so for day 1894
19.02.2012

Cabbage Baggage

in the mode of bpNicol i came across this translation while in the dentist's chair and looking up at the television which featured a news feed which was accompanied by a screen scroll of closed captions while an anchor was reading out the news (on mute) and the effect was like one of the homophonic translations within the same language as opposed to homophonic translation across different languages

cole experts
for "coal exports" evident from the context.

And so for day 1893
18.02.2012

Craft Witnessed

Phoebe Wang is a consummate artist in the selections she makes in the construction of a poem's small and large features. Take for example some lines from "Custom Design" as published in a chapbook, Hanging Exhibitions from The Emergency Response Unit.

See what one word changes. "A childhood shared / with a cacophony of brothers and cousins, hungry for half, / a quarter, a sliver of adventure." are the lines in Hanging Exhibitions. The version published in Admission Requirements replaces "cacophony" with "riptide". "A childhood shared / with a riptide of brothers and cousins, hungry for half, / a quarter, a sliver of adventure." The second version pulls whereas the first merely resounds.

The final stanza's "practiced hand" is substituted by "emboldened hand" and the layout of the cascading lines is different — inversed.

          as if against a phantom wind until they crawl
     foolishly out of closets to obey the commands
of the eye, the line and the practiced hand.
as if against a phantom wind until they crawl
     foolishly out of closets to obey the commands
          of the eye, the line, and the emboldened hand.

I first twigged to Phoebe Wang's gift of precision when I heard her read "The Cartographer" where she evokes the young map maker:
I conjure you drawing in the margins
of your schoolbooks — spice caravans, camels, men made

of embroidery with black pepper beards. […]
The embroidery befits a marginal sketch and the colour of "black pepper" chafes against the cliche of "salt and pepper" and the enjambement not only over line but also over stanza signals implicitly the extent of the marginalia running away down the side of the page and away in imagination.

All because of a careful attention to detail. Important for any conjurer or map maker.

And so for day 1892
17.02.2012

Spreading the Joy: Map-o-Spread

Yolande Villemaire
La Vie en prose
Montreal: Les Herbes Rouges, 1980
p. 19-20

Il y a trois quarts d'heure d'attente au El Paradiso, mais comme on veut fêter ça en grande, on donne nos noms et on s'en va boire un pitcher de margarita au bar du restaurant japonais d'à côté. On revient juste à temps pour entendre appeler notre «party of three». Je commence à être pas mal saoule, mais on boit encore, à trois, deux litres de rosé Grenache, le moins cher. Ça me rappelle les déjeuners caramelo de mon enfance et j'essaie de le leur expliquer, sans grand succès. Ils en comprennent juste assez pour que j'aie droit à leurs premier pablums et shredded wheats subséquents, mais ils ne saisissent pas le rapport avec le vin. On enchaîne sur le map-o-spread au coconut pour finir ben cheap dans le [pb n="20"] beurre de peanut smoothy ou crunchy, vu qu'on revient au présent. Quand on était petits c'était pas si subtil.
A nice neat account of cross-cultural culinary exchanges.

And so for day 1891
16.02.2012

I could have danced all night…

Saw My Fair Lady the other evening. My viewing companion hated it but sat through it. He loved the hats. Nothing else.

I was intrigued by how Cukor makes the ensemble numbers into depictions of a vibrant social space.

Of course given some Movie Club discussions I was keen on observing the ending.

Does Eliza truly come back to Higgins?

In the final scene we see Higgins listening to a recording of Eliza when she first came to him seeking lessons. Eliza shut off the playback and intones in her own voice her reply to Higgins that is she washed her face and hands before she came. This is delivered in her voice as a flower girl and not in the lady-like strains that she acquired by training. In a sense, she is reclaiming an authentic voice — a voice that connected her to her father and her social circle. Do recall the ensemble numbers of street scenes: those with Eliza and those with her father. Also worth noting is that Eliza doesn't cross the threshold to enter the room where Higgins is listening to a recording (doing exactly what Eliza had earlier suggested he do if he had need to recall her presence). She is a liminal creature. It is important to note that although she is in the house, she has not traversed fully into his space.

Higgins's final line asking about his slippers is wondrously ambiguous. "Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?" He quickly hides behind his hat as if to mask a grin. The last time his slippers appeared in the film they were being hurled at his head. It was Eliza doing the hurling. The rapprochement between the characters is in delicate balance.

I discovered doing a little research that the question of endings also plagued productions of the play, Pygmalion. See http://www.syaross.org/writings/nonfiction/pygmalion.html

And so for day 1890
15.02.2012

Phenomenological Parsing

after Leslie Scalapino

observe experience

2 verbs
verb + noun
in one case there is a caesura between two equal injunctions; in the other, the object anneals any gap

And so for day 1889
14.02.2012

Promiscuous Circulation

The opening of this poem reminds me of the liaison element in a play by Sky Gilbert, The Dressing Gown which Rick Bébout sums up beautifully: "The title named its key prop, perhaps even prime character: a robe passed from one man to the next, central player in a series of tricks."

Here is Stephen J. Williams from Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones

the dear departed
     lovers that have gone

angels that once terrified us
     — threatening to bring death

so near as love —
     sometimes return.

these lost lovers,
     whose provenance and history

is harder than a coin
     passing hand to hand

through all the dull business
     of the commonwealth,

arrive at our aching arms
     unexpected.
There is more to the poem. See "the dear departed [lovers that have gone]"

And so for day 1888
13.02.2012

Saline Steam

Lee Cataldi gives us a Sapphic moment in the lyric "tears" — and by Sapphic we mean not only the content but also the manner…

your tears
are warm upon my face
would be
warmer on my thighs
your tears
the smoldering is from Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones.

And so for day 1887
12.02.2012

Flower Sacrifice

My favourite passage in The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo is an anecdote about the appreciation of flowers.

Flower stories are endless. We shall recount but one more. In the sixteenth-century the morning-glory was as yet a rare plant with us. Rikiu had an entire garden planted with it, which he cultivated with assiduous care. The fame of his convolvuli reached the ear of the Taiko, and he expressed a desire to see them, in consequence of which Rikiu invited him to a morning tea at his house. On the appointed day the Taiko walked through the garden, but nowhere could he see any vestige of the convulvus. The ground had been leveled and strewn with fine pebbles and sand. With sullen anger the despot entered the tea-room, but a sight waited him there which completely restored his humour. On the tokonoma, in a rare bronze of Sung workmanship, lay a single morning-glory — the queen of the whole garden!
I have fondly traded in paraphrases of this excellent story. However, it is only upon copying it out here that I realized that the generic "flower" of my tellings is actually species-specific. It adds a note of poignancy to realize that the morning-glory does not flourish as a cut flower. As Okakura continues: "In such instances we see the full significance of the Flower Sacrifice."

And so for day 1886
11.02.2012

Luck-trampled Clover

She's a difficult poet. Not because she is inaccessible. But because of the delight we take in examining the stitching dangerously makes us miss the hang of the garment. But not quite, we can and are expected to reread — the lyric or sequence is short enough to accommodate attention to both the fine detail and the overarching construction.

Who is she? What drives her art? Let's listen in to Phoebe Wang in an interview published in the Brockton Writers Series blog.

Essentially I’m a lyric landscape poet, if I really wanted to put labels on myself. I like to write about things as a distance, and I tend to have an abstract, impersonal view of the world. But I think the most thrilling poems come out when I feel like I’m being backed into a corner. When I finished this series, this experiment, I did see that the “ekphrastic” label didn’t really fit. I had been writing in a very personal way all along, but suffered from a kind of myopia. So now when I’m writing a poem about fog or about a long walk in the neighborhood, I’m conscious of it being a very internal, private poem and not something separate from my psyche. Conversely, the harder I tried to represent my family as who they really are, they more archetypal they became.

BWS 14.09.16: Phoebe Wang
https://brocktonwritersseries.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/bws-14-09-16-phoebe-wang/
And let us juxtapose that with a blurb by David O'Meara to Phoebe Wang's chapbook Occasional Emergencies
Phoebe Wang's ekphrastic poems remind me that art is not just an object to be viewed passively but is an interaction, worth climbing inside and inhabiting.
Here, dwell upon these for a while.
We build so one of us
     might levitate

"The Tower" after Louis Gréaud [I], Centre Pompidou
Occasional Emergencies
The parliament of voices no longer sovereign
rehearses its next course of action

builds consensus by semitones and minor intervals.

"Feedback Loop" after Janet Cardiff, The Forty-Part Motet Occasional Emergencies
This haiku-like kenning has been purloined as our title:
luck-trampled clover

from "Manhunt" after Charlotte Posenenske, Prototype for a Revolving Vane
Occasional Emergencies
The poem in part about school children's games becomes by its end a meditation on chance and the aleatory.
The bell collected us like a deck of cards
     face-up on the yard's blank baize.
See what I mean by difficult? Doesn't let you, dear reader, off the hook for your "connivence" as the French would say or simply complicity as the English might.

Take two lines (from "Guiding Lights" in Admission Requirements), precious in themselves by their working over a repetition to induce wave-action:
and waves worked toward the tideline
and the tideline aspired to its high water mark.
Which remembered stretch us into the mode of striving. Which reread in their context become so much more
as missed opportunities. My path swerves
around keeled dinghies, stroller tires, debris
of a bounteous season, when we made waves
and waves worked toward the tideline
and the tideline aspired to its high water mark.
Over the peaks and valleys — see it?
Someone's left the stovelight on.
Dear Poet, thank you for leaving lights on and guiding us.

And so for day 1885
10.02.2012

Fromage: Tasting Notes

Nancy's Cheese distributes little blurbs on small slips with the cheese you purchase. It's a way of educating our palate and making us more articulate in expressing our tastes.

This one for LE MAMIROLLE (Fromagerie Eco Délices, Plessisville, QC) caught my attention as one of the best in the fine art of combining description and direction with tantalizing suggestion.

If you are looking for a "stinky" cheese, Le Mamirolle is for you. This semi-firm washed rind is made from cow milk. Like most washed rind cheeses the aroma is quite pronounced but the actual flavour is more subdued. Le Mamirolle has a wonderful balance of fruity and meaty flavours. The rind is edible. The supple texture also makes it a great choice for grilled cheese sandwiches. Storage: parchment paper then plastic wrap.

www.nancyscheese.com
Oh, by the way, it is superb with pears.

And so for day 1884
09.02.2012

Mutabilities

Different lighting. Different forms of evanescence.

from "Moonlight"

Thus are moths
the cloth of dreams
from "Another Dawn"
Falling maple keys
so many doors to the windy mansion
and no one home
Roo Borson Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar

And so for day 1883
08.02.2012

Passing Show

Exhibit A
From Leslie Scalapino The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence

'Not perceiving impermanence' itself becomes an action, an intention.
Exhibit B
From "See also" listing from Wikipedia entry "mono no aware"
  • Lacrimae rerum
  • Memento mori
  • Mottainai
  • Nine Changes
  • Wabi-sabi
  • Ubi sunt
  • Weltschmerz
  • Sehnsucht
  • Saudade
Exhibit C
The conjunction of Exhibit A with Exhibit B.

And so for day 1882
07.02.2012

Rinse and Repeat

"Dear Living Person" John Russell in Blast Counterblast edited by Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke. (First appeared in Mute Feb 16, 2011)

It has a put down that functions by way of repetition.

In this context the curator is the key performer — as organiser, collector, cataloguer, archaeologist, manger and guardian. And for instance, Rancière is the philosopher par-excellence, as the philosopher of aesthetics-in-general and the generalised interdisciplinary. In a world where there are no categories, we are left to experiment with the senses. A meta-politics and framing of a common sensorium, rearticulating freedom and equality in relation to new relationships between thought and the sensory world, between bodies and the social distribution of bodies. Rancière is the writer of this position, an extra-institutional relational aesthetics. He's not very good, but then this is not a very good position. With the dissolution of genre he offers us a generalised reorganisation of senses in general in general in general in general.
In general, it works as polemic. Less so as persuasion.

And so for day 1881
06.02.2012

Delicate Tensility

Recalling the toughness of the body by invoking its frailties.

the incessant waves seize me, my hands
on my head in my hair, I don't forget how
fragile the brain is under the bone of the
cranium, how friable the bones beneath the
skin, tender the flesh, thin the nerves, the
veins.
Chantal Neveu A Spectacular Influence translated by Nathanaël.

I don't forget that every step is a falling.

And so for day 1880
05.02.2012

Appellation d'origine controlée

Waters Remembered begins with a catalogue of streams Taddle Creek, Garrison Creek, Burke Brook, Castle Frank Brook, etc. All buried watercourses in Toronto.

It is not quite an epic catalogue. Their mention is a lyric impulse to anchor the poem in place.

This beginning tying name to place suffers a displacement when it comes to portraits. The subject is not named by a kind of divergent ekphrasis. "Royal Street Diamond" begins as a description of a bronze bull created by Joe Fafard and poised outside the Mira Godard Gallery in Yorkville and then the poem turns to the speaker's companion, a friend "who is losing memory and language". The poem is full of details and apt anecdote that allow me to identify its subject. And I ponder why his name isn't invoked.

He points to the anatomically correct
scrotum dangling between the bull's sturdy
back legs, giggles, waves his hands and says

needs something … at his neck … He reaches
for words and finds them: a sign … waiting
for the girls!
We laugh and walk on past

high-end clothing shops. His words flow now
remembering his cousin's dairy barn smelling
of straw and shit, its din of bawling calves.
He was a professor of English and an admirer of pretty boys from way back. The creator of Stonyground, a very special farm garden on the Bruce.

But I understand the poet's reticence. This is not a poem for. It is a poem about.

But naming is important for the the full presence of the genius of the place to carry on. Our friend's name is Douglas (never Doug) Chambers. He has since that walk with Maureen Scott Harris lost more of his memories and has less of his exquisite mastery of language to work with. He still giggles on occasion.

Maureen Scott Harris Waters Remembered

And so for day 1879
04.02.2012

Craft, Cookery and the Good

Simon Hopkinson. Introduction to Roast Chicken and Other Stories

Good cooking, in the final analysis, depends on two things: common sense and good taste. It is also something that you naturally have to want to do well in the first place, as with any craft. It is a craft, after all, like anything that is produced with the hands and senses to put together an attractive and complete picture. By "picture," I do not mean "picturesque": good food is to be eaten because it tastes good and smells enticing.
Look at how the adjective circulates in the paragraph — like a fine soupçon of garlic — echoing like a chiasmus: good taste tastes good.

And so for day 1878
03.02.2012

Nodes, Lists, Pants

Leslie Scalapino "Footnoting" in The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence in her own abstract way supplies me with an epigraph to my indulging in

To produce this impermanence by iterating dissimilarities until they become something else—is the opposite movement of (converse of) obsession or imitation.
serves nicely as an epigraph to this selection of quotations from the catalogue for works by Kai Chan Rainbow Lakes with essays by Stuart Reid and Robin Metcalfe

Robin Metcalfe "Synaesthesia" leads us on an etymological run
The word 'node' derives from an Indo-European root, gen-, which means 'to compress into a ball.' It gives us the words, 'knit,' 'connect' and 'nettle,' and once named several plants of closely related genera, such as the ever-useful hemp, that were anciently employed as sources of fibre. The same root provides sailors with the words 'net' and 'lanyard,' the name of that peculiarly nautical accessory, the knotted cord sailors wear around their necks.
Stuart Reid has constructed his essay around the theme of lists. Down the side of Metcalfe's and Reid's essays are a set of lists of which this is the first:
1. Synonyms for pants
Drawers
Underwear
Trousers
Dungarees
Pedal Pushers
Capri Pants
Bell Bottoms
Knickers
Cords
Bloomers
Pantaloons
Slacks
Flares
I first encountered his work at a 2011 show at the Textile Museum of Canada. I like that now I can think of "node" and "list" as elements of the work and know that what is at work here is neither obsession nor imitation.

And so for day 1877
02.02.2012

Process and Progress

From the lyrics to Annie Lennox 'Primitive' (on the album Diva)

[…]

For time will catch us in both hands
To blow away like grains of sand
Ashes to ashes rust to dust
This is what becomes of us

[…]
One distinctly hears on the audio the "rust to dust" — a line providing a variation of "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust" phrase from the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer — which variation leads me to propose another: "ashes to ashes rush to dust".

And so for day 1876
01.02.2012