All right, at last, I'll post something: (full disclosure: I just sent Glenn Reynolds a very mundane e-mail, but I'm terrified lest, in some chance drunkeness or other neurological affliction, he be fool enough to link to us.)

First, courtesy of John Derbyshire is a really wonderful and very un-PC sample of the poetry of Bertans de Born. Excerpt (trans. Ezra Pound):

And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills all my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace,
His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing.

Here's a good and quite correct opinion from John J. Miller on why one ought to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe before The Magician's Nephew. It contains some very good advice from Lewis on approaching literature, which I had not run across before:

He believed that readers should try to share a poet's consciousness rather than study it. "I look with his eyes, not at him," wrote Lewis. "The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says 'look at that' and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him." Lewis put the matter more succinctly in a letter toward the end of his life: "An author doesn't necessarily understand the meaning of his own story better than anyone else."

That has certainly been my experience with poetry (which shall never be reproduced here). I the author am the last person who had any clue what I was writing. The effects I intended were either unnoticeable or appalling; any real inspiration was only noticed by myself months later. Any lover of classical music is quite aware of this. The interiors of Handel, Mozart, Schumann, Wagner, Debussy, &c are not psyches to which I want any priveleged access. But the works which were somehow born of them are the best we humans can boast of.

I think I enjoy landscape photography so much because it combines the delight of boasting with the virtue of promoting a genius not one's own. It doesn't create; it just points a finger in skillful fashion. If you agree, check out Jim Wark's pictures at Airphoto.
His gallery is endless, with brilliant shots of the entire American West, as well as industrial, geological and meteorological subjects.

Finally, if you have anything to spare, consider donating to relief for the Kashmir earthquakes. The relief efforts really seem to be hard up, and surely the people are truly desperate. I know the Katrina folks have it rough, but most of them have rooves and food by now. The Kashmiris are facing cold, unpleasant death, soon. Those of us who have bivouaced in high country know that exposed nights in the mountains are no joke. Imaging sleeping on the ground in the above photograph. Please help.