1) Baby kale salad, part of today's nutritious breakfast.
2) Alas, The Book of the Courtier has been momentarily cast aside in favor of Daphne Fielding's Emerald & Nancy: Lady Cunard and her Daughter, a recent discovery at ye Bryttle Bykke Shoppe. Having enjoyed Fielding's memoir Mercury Presides years ago, I was interested to read this (Nancy Cunard has interested me since I was first given her biography in college), and I must say, none of the other books about her ever made me want to read her poetry, but this one does. I wasn't expecting to find it full of Quotable Quotes, but it is. So brace yourself, Millicent . . .
2a) "Another particular friend was Tommy Earp, a rich and eccentric young Yorkshireman with a red face, close-cropped hair and an original manner of speech. He too occasionally indulged in verse and one of his poems, dedicated to a boy briefly encountered during a night out in Paris [emphasis mine], opened with the lines:
O golden head that, if the truth be told,
Is golden only for the sake of gold."
2a.1) All the more interested as a flaxen-haired man was sitting not far from me on the bus, and his hair was clearly not "golden only for the sake of gold" but because sometimes even clouds can't obscure the sun.
2b) "At night they bathed naked in the Adriatic."
2c) But I was hammered over the head with this bit from a letter George Moore wrote to Nancy: "Many years ago a poet said to me, and his words have often been with me: 'If you got out and amuse yourself when you can't write, your art and life will waste to nothingness'. An artist's live in this is like an acrobat's, he must exercise his craft daily, when inspiration is by him and when it is afar. He must not wait for inspiration, he must contniue to call it down to him always and at last it will answer him; I should have said be always with him. His counsel did not go unheeded."
2d) Of course remembering Ruth Draper's "The Italian Lesson:" "I expect we'll find this is full of quotations."
3) Wow, Hahvahd finally has a president I know personally.