three fawns walked up to a guardrail

 

Three fawns were nibbling on a shrub in front of the Agnello house as I approached on my morning walk. Two were quite small and one was a little bigger. The guy from up the street stopped at the stop sign in his black Lincoln. The first little fawn pranced across the street and under the guardrail on the other side. The second small fawn followed pretty quickly. The third, bigger fawn took up the rear. When she got to the guardrail, she started under and realized she was perhaps too big to fit. She looked up to see that the guardrail would take some doing. Vacillate. She eventually bent down and slumped under the guardrail. It was a full body slump: legs and back, but it was more feasible than a jump over.

I am now reading A natural history of empty lots: field notes from urban edgelands, back alleys, and other wild places by Christopher Brown. The subtitle fits. He walks among and observes the supposedly empty places that teem with life, mostly wild. His observing is solace in tumultuous times.

National Brad Pitt Day

Last Sunday may have been a National Brad Pitt Day. Two reviews in the New York Times Book Review included references to the actor. 

https://www.cinemamoderne.com/en/films/details/thelma-louise/

Reviewer Dwight Garner included short summaries of some of the stories in his review of the story collection It Will Come Back to You by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead). "There's a piece about a jostling mother and daughter, and one about a Brad Pitt impersonator. 'Brad' is hired by the adult children of a woman in hospice who is in thrall to the actor. The kids worry that the impersonator will be a sleazeball, a rheumy Elvis type. The story takes a turn when he turns out to be young and achingly beautiful. Nunez is picking at the seams of life."

Garner closes his review with his typically intriguing and illustrative language. "In the lesser stories (none is a flameout), Nunez's descriptive register slips. But 'It Will Come Back to You' is a reminder that she's among the best we have. I'd rather read one of her books than almost anyone else's. Her headlights are on, even in midday."

Ginia Bellafante's review of The Face: A Cultural History by Fay Bound-Alberti (Grand Central) notes that Brad Pitt is one in the two percent of the population that are affected by prosopagnosia, or face blindness. The review is accompanied by the clickbait of a photo of the achingly beautiful Brad Pitt. That's all she said about Brad Pitt: just the "so does Brad Pitt" in parenthesis and the caption of the photo.

separated at birth: star axis to heaven

"As I climbed the steps through the mesa and into the pyramid, the window at the top of the staircase appeared to expand. I felt drawn up the tunnel, slowly toward the stars. The wind outside sounded like ocean surf, evoking visions of mariners with their sextants." -- Travis Diehl, on Star Axis, by Charles Ross, in eastern New Mexico, in the New York Times, July 26, 2026, Arts & Leisure, page 10-13, with glorious photographs by Brad Trone.

As I read this description of walking up into Star Axis, I could only think of The Ascent of the Blessed, by Hieronymus Bosch. The painting is now in the Palazzo Ducale in Venice and a detail of the painting, from a calendar given to me by Eva, hangs on my kitchen wall, always inspiring me onward.