Welcome to Darien!

November 20, 2017      Mike Nichols
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Welcome to Darien! It’s an elegant and sophisticated theme that is designed to be distraction-free to keep your readers focused on your content.

Plus, Darien is very easy to use so you can spend your time writing rather than twiddling with settings to make it look right.

We have a number of literary forms and types of blog posts represented in this demo: essay, short story, poem, prose poem, audio, video and a “regular” blog post.

So just scroll down the page and check out what Darien can do for you!

Darien Benefits

November 20, 2017      Mike Nichols
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Darien has many great benefits for the user, making it among one of the most unique themes for writers available. These benefits include:

  • Designed for the optimal display of your content
  • Distraction free reading
  • Looks great on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops
  • Ten color presets with infinite color selection
  • Best basic search engine optimization (SEO) available
  • Training videos to help you every step of the way
  • Built on the robust WordPress platform and Thesis framework

Darien Features

November 20, 2017      Mike Nichols
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Great attention to detail and user-friendliness sets Darien apart from the competition. Here are just a few of its many features:

  • Enter content with easy to use editor
  • Add video, audio, images and a host of other items to your posts
  • Easy setup with no coding
  • Advanced formatting available such as dropcaps, pullquotes and checkmarks
  • Darien is under continual development
  • Automatic theme updates

Essay: A Piece of Chalk

November 20, 2017      G.K. Chesterton
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chalks in a variety of colorsI remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort and picked up a walking-stick, and put six very bright-colored chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen (which, along with the rest of the house, belonged to a very square and sensible old woman in a Sussex village), and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper.

She had a great deal; in fact, she had too much; and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper he must be wanting to tie up parcels; which was the last thing I wanted to do; indeed, it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity.

Hence she dwelt very much on the varying qualities of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least; and that from my point of view, therefore, it was a question, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw she offered to overwhelm me with note-paper.

[click to continue…]

Blog Post: At Sunrise Everything Is Luminous But Not Clear

November 20, 2017      Mike Nichols
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magical sunrise with treeThere are very few things the human mind can encompass that have no beginning or end. Eternity, perhaps the transcendent and numinous, perhaps love. Even then, there is more mystery than comprehension.

But blogs are not eternal; indeed, they are the most mortal of the mortal, the mayflies of the internet. There is the inevitable first post, and just as inevitably, there is a last post. And since 95% of all blogs are abandoned, there are a lot of last posts. I imagine more blogs end with a whimper than with a bang, just trailing off.

What makes this blog different? Its purpose is to be an online commonplace book, wunderkammer, and a home for the occasional essay. And I’ve been doing these things for years, just offline. Now they are transferred online.

How successful in fulfilling these purposes will this blog be? How long-lasting? That gets us back to the title quotation, “At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear,” taken from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. Everything looks good when you first start, but sags with entropy and finally collapses into a bag of skin on the floor.

It all depends on whether I take that extra step to post the quotations and wonders I encounter. I readily admit it’s much easier to do so in my database program. So if this blog peters out, it will be due to laziness or the effects at attempted multitasking of a brain built for one task at a time.

Poem: Absences

November 20, 2017      Donald Justice
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It’s snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .
So much has fallen.
And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers
abounding.

Short Story: Miss Pettigrew’s Funeral

November 20, 2017      T.R. Pearson
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white roseMiss Myra Angelique Pettigrew was the closest the little town of Neely had to aristocracy. Beautiful and mysterious, she passed through life unmarried and grew more mysterious by the day. At the age of about 80 she climbed the water tower with her pet chimpanzee and casually jumped off.

Momma wore the same black dress she had seen Grandmomma Yount off in and the same little round hat with feathers and a half-veil and she carried with her a big shiny black pocketbook with gold clasps that had nothing in it but one of Daddy’s handkerchiefs. Daddy wore his lightweight navy suit and his reversible vest blue side out and Momma selected for him a striped burgundy tie that she said highlighted and enhanced the natural flush in Daddy’s cheeks and accordingly Daddy selected for himself a pair of burgundy socks as a fitting complement but Momma put them back into the drawer for him and brought out some navy ones instead. I wore my green suit, which was at the time my only suit, and my shortsleeve white shirt with the inkstain in the bottom of the pocket and my green speckled necktie along with my green socks that were not exactly the same color as each other and my black oxford shoes which I did not put on until right when I had to since they tended to lay my toes all together in a kind of bouquet. So I stood on my heels in the living room while Daddy went to the kitchen and passed his hand over all the burners and Momma crouched in front of the vanity mirror and pinned Rhode Island to her dressfront. Then we were out the door and down the steps to the sidewalk and Mr. and Mrs. Phillip J. King [next door neighbors], who had been waiting for us on their front porch, put her dog Itty Bit into the house and joined up with us as we went by.

[click to continue…]

Prose Poem: Lost Things

November 20, 2017      Lydia Davis
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They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a certain ring, one a certain button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not there to someone else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am.