Two good things

I've read recently, both from Salon. (Lefties of the world, subscribe. You have no one to irritate but the media conglomerates.)

Grace Paley says she does her best work in the bathtub. Oh, me too! And I was beginning to feel a bit crazy, but evidently it's the same crazy as Grace Paley, so that's okay.

And in the "there must be poem in here somewhere" category, this anecdote about one of the figures of history that fascinates me the most (along with Da Vinci and Joan of Arc and Thucydides) sent an instant bolt of writing energy through me. And unfortunately into the floor.

[Newton] wondered, too, about the transition between perception and reality: Was light created within your eyes, or outside them? "With this paradox in mind," Gleick writes, "Newton, experimental philosopher, slid a bodkin into his eye socket between eyeball and bone," and in the white circles he saw he sought to find the mysteries of light.

I might go digging after that one. And I might have to read the book being reviewed; a new James Gleick called simply Issac Newton. I liked Chaos, Gleick's book on Chaos theory, back in high school (to both date myself and confirm my status as queen of the nerds), and liked Faster more recently. The review quoted above is by Farhad Manjoo.