More specifically concerning: animals
fructify
30 June 2008, around 1.33.
The family cow ate some noxious weeds and fell and was butchered. The neighbor’s dog ate five of the youngest chicks and was thereafter executed. One chicken wandered into the latrine and drowned. Ten chicks mysteriously died in their box. For the anniversary of a death in the family, they slaughtered a sheep, slitting its […]
Crambe repetita (27)
19 April 2013, around 10.00.
Fanny Burney, Journals and Letters.
menagerie
15 May 2023, around 4.45.
A poet who writes in Romansch arrives for a day; we all listen to him read with his Dutch translator. The two of them sound like strange birds, chippering and swooping. I don’t need to understand a word to know I like the poems a lot. —Martha Cooley (Guesswork, ch. 11) I was reading along […]
fabulous
9 June 2025, around 8.52.
Extract from fol. 13r of the Ashmole Bestiary, Bodleian Library MS. Ashmole 1511, CC-BY-NC 4.0. …it is true that I long syth haue redde and herde that the beste clerkes ben not the wysest men. —Reynard the Fox (Caxton trans.) I’ve had to give up on one of the translations of the Pancatantra that I’ve […]
roaring
29 September 2025, around 16.06.
The other day while reading my daily quota of Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, I encountered the entry on Rorarius, and I spent a few minutes rolling that name around, batting it to and fro, and making nonsense of it. The main draw of the entry, I should mention, is the discussion of whether animals […]