Honey from the comb

I don’t know if I’ll get to write an original post today or not. But I want to alert my regular readers to some terrific essays that have appeared elsewhere in the last day or two.

At Creek Running North, Chris writes about Comfort Food:

This raw, empty feeling; this gnawing void in my gut I find so compelling: it’s just like Mom used to make.

Elck meanwhile describes a dinner of dangerous ideas:

The party was held in a large, book-lined apartment on the Upper West Side belonging to M.K.’s uncle. There were twelve people present, and all of them were very interesting. Most of the guests were people I was meeting for the first time. From the moment I stepped into the building, until the moment I left (some three-and-a-half hours later), I did not speak one single word.

Dale just wrote what may be the perfect blog post.

I walk by exhausted rhododendrons. Pick a brown shrunken flower-corpse. To my surprise it is supple and responds to my fingers. Not dead, not stiff. Nothing can be quite dead today. Worn, fragile, faint, loved to gasping by the overbearing sun, but not dead.

And Paula has turned out another post that is more than an essay, it’s a visual and intellectual treat. She describes working in a small factory making silicon chips back in 1973:

It was a fascinating place and I had a fascinating job. There were long, tubular furnaces into which I had to slide trays of silicon wafers, thin and perfect as communion hosts, to imbue them with boron and phosphorous and turn them into semiconductors. Then there was the little plexiglass hood, bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a coffin, under which I scoured the wafers with a waterpik-like sand jet. It seemed far too delicate an operation for its name: sandblasting. The radio played Killing Me Softly over and over that summer. To this day the song reminds me of sandblasting silicon wafers — the hiss of sand on silicon, the slowly burnishing surfaces.

Finally, be sure to stop over to The Middlewesterner for Saturday’s Poem: this week, one of the most interesting poems about angels since Rafael Albertí.

Surrounded by such riches – as all of us are every day in this world, whether we know it or not – why should I ever write more than words of praise?

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