Exploding Poohsticks

From the May Mid-South District (of the Unitarian Universalist Association) newsletter (should've posted this last week, but note that it takes place every Saturday, in Atlanta):

Atlanta Area Mobile Library Project Update

Join us Saturday, May 19 at Plaza Fiesta to celebrate the official launch of the Mobile Library - Fiesta de Libros! The library project had its soft opening April 14 and has been received with great enthusiasm and appreciation by the children and their parents. We are very proud of this UU project and we want to celebrate the launch with our UU community. The celebration will be from 1:00pm to 2:00pm in front of the playground by the food court. We will have musical entertainment, community speakers, including Rev. David, and a Ribbon Cutting ceremony. Bring the family and friends, celebrate with us and enjoy all that Plaza Fiesta has to offer!

The goal of the mobile library project "Fiesta de Libros" is to expose children to age-appropriate bilingual literature at Plaza Fiesta (a Latino mall off of Buford Highway). The idea of the program is to create a library-type setting where the children will be encouraged to browse the book selection, sit down and read, take a book home or exchange one of their own books for a new book. Fiesta de Libros will be set up every Saturday from 1pm to 5pm at Plaza Fiesta.

If you are interested in supporting this project, there are three ways in which you can help:

1) Donate books - Bring books for children up to the age of 12 written in Spanish, English or both languages.

2) Sign up to be a Saturday volunteer - You, your family, friends, or organization can sign up for one of the Saturday shifts to staff the library. The shifts will be from 12:30pm to 3:00pm and 3:00pm to 5:30pm.

3) Join a committee - Join one of the five committees to help administer the program.

Please contact Laura Murvartian at Laura_Murvartian@Bellsouth.net or 770-841-9672 for further information or to sign up as a volunteer.

My tribe: we set up libraries and "smuggle" books. Onward!

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/17612.html.

Don't worry about the "professional" feeling -- you may never have it. I haven't after all these years. That is, if the feeling of something new, fresh, difficult, and strange which comes to you with each story is the mark of the amateur spirit, then I still have the amateur spirit. The excitement comes from what's still to be learned at least as much from what's been struggled with before or partway, for the time being perhaps, mastered.

-- quoted in Eudora Welty: A Biography by Suzanne Marrs (p. 251)

[Side ramble: in this book, and in Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters; Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence (ed. Emily Herring Wilson), there is a lot about women coping with the care of aging parents. I am witnessing friends and clients coping with being those parents or children. I find myself praying about it: be it 1952 or 2012, the solutions are rarely easy and too seldom acceptable to all involved, and sometimes the conversations veer into comfortless territory.

Two more books on my kitchen counter: This is Not the Life I Ordered (found on sale at a Franklin Covey store some years ago) and Crucial Conversations (mentioned by Havi Brooks in a recent post that has already done me some good). I can only handle a few pages a time from either book, but y'know, a little bit at a time can add up to good things.]

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/17218.html.

I spent part of my Friday evening with two books by Laurel Snyder, Good night, laila tov and Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher.

"Laila tov" ("good night" in Hebrew) is a phrase that instantly takes me back to Tel Aviv. There are also a pet cat and a pet dog, which those of you who have read my other reports may remember tends to mean automatic points with me. [/unapologetic sap] In Baxter, a woman rabbi saves the day. (I am also inordinately amused that the book carries a blurb by Lemony Snicket.)

Also, at Snyder's blog: her unpublishable tribute to Maurice Sendak

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/357738.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

There be so many roses to see in Nashville right now. I've glimpsed people photographing themselves with the gigantic roses in front of the Frist Center. ( more roses behind the cut )

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/17106.html.

I borrowed Dave Horowitz's Five Little Gefiltes from the library yesterday. It is totally, utterly silly.

And then I went to the store today and picked up a jar of horseradish and a jar of gefilte fish. :-)

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/357539.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Via tudorpot:

Rule 1 - Post the rules
Rule 1b - Ignore the rules (I concur with the pot on this one)
Rule 2- Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post and then make 11 new ones.
Rule 3- Tag 11 people and link them to your post.
Rule 4- Let them know you’ve tagged them! ( If you wanna play, go for it.


1) Do you comb or brush your hair? Brush. And today I painted the silver and bleached parts blue.

2) What are you most fussy/perfectionist about in your home? Taking out the garbage and recycling.

3) What's your dream vacation? Francophone city with good public transportation.

4) Have you discovered anything because of fandom? Lots, including BPAL and TV Tropes (aka Big Freaking Timehoover, Beware of) and Japanese romantic symbolism and what the heck aunty_marion is talking about when she tweets about Herman.

5) What's your favorite domestic thing to do? Sleep like a cat. (Cooking is a distant second.)

6) Do you remember the pairing that got you into fandom? At this point it's a jumble of Will/Bran (The Dark is Rising), Draco/Neville, and
Snape/Lupin.

7) What's the oddest compliment you've ever received? The ones where I suspect the speaker mistook me for someone else. (e.g., some other Asian chick who plays the piano)

8) What are your favorite non-fandom websites to visit? fluentself.com, www.habitblog.com, talkabouttennis.com

9) What's your favorite scent/perfume to wear - candle to burn? To wear: Guerlain's Mitsouko and L'Instant Magie, and BPAL's Danube and Nanny Ashtoreth. (Not coincidentally, these are scents that both partners and strangers have enthusiastically expressed appreciation of.) I generally go for lavender, gardenia, or citrus-based candles.


10) Coffee/tea - black, with milk, sugar? Black. Except for tea in Chinese restaurants, where I tend to add sugar out of sheer habit, and Greek/Turkish coffee, which I request with sugar out of sheer self-preservation.

11) Are you looking forward to summer? Lemme get through this week first. *glares at the pile-up*

And you, my friends?

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/357158.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

From a New York Times report of protests in Moscow (emphasis mine):

An encampment in a Moscow park ... is modeled on Occupy Wall Street. ... On Thursday, the police detained eight young women in pig costumes. A cow appeared over the weekend, evidently to protest Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization.

Olga Romanova, a longtime opposition activist, said she had given up trying to explain the situation in letters to her husband, who is in prison.

"I started to write, 'There's a wedding taking place here right now, and now a cow has come,' " Ms. Romanova said. "Then I understood that I have to cross it all out because he'll think that I've gone crazy with grief or something is happening with me. How will they explain to Putin? There was a wedding. A cow came. How will they explain that?"

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/16653.html.

In Paris through 19 May: TeZukA, "a fusion of comic strip and contemporary dance" honoring the creator of Astro Boy.

http://intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/11/in-paris-honoring-the-god-of-manga-in-dance/

ETA: also in Paris (through 21 May), a large (400 works!) Art Spiegelman show at Centre Pompidou. And in yesterday's NYT op-ed section, Spiegelman is among the contributors of illustrations paying tribute to Sendak.

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/356980.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

I'm in the thick of reviewing a client's responses to copyedits, a process that has included some muttering under my breath at Microsoft Word (which I get along with for the most part, but there have been a couple of spots where a random style seems to have suddenly imposed itself -- on random phrases, of course -- and that is Not Okay).

That said, it is so nice being able to deal with all the slicing, deleting, and repositioning by merely tapping and scrolling and clicking (and swearing). Here's another look at Miss Welty at work, as described by Suzanne Marrs:

By the time she was at work on Delta Wedding in 1945, Eudora had become an ardent revisor, using a method she would ever afterward follow--typing a draft chapter, spreading it out on the bed, or on the dining room table downstairs, cutting paragraphs, or even sentences, out of a page and attaching them with straight pins in new locations, before preparing a new typescript and starting the process again.

And here's Eudora writing to Bill Maxwell in 1953, after reading a draft of one of his stories:

I do see from this how elegant rubber cement is. I'm so used to writing with a pincushion that I don't know if I can learn other ways or not, but I did go right down and buy a bottle of Carter's. The smell stimulates the mind and brings up dreams of efficiency. Long ago when my stories were short (I wish they were back) I used to use ordinary paste and put the story together in one long strip, that could be seen as a whole and at a glance -- helpful and realistic. When the stories got too long for the room I took them up on the bed or table & pinned and that's when my worst stories were like patchwork quilts, you could almost read them in any direction. No man would be bemused like that, but Emmy [Maxwell's wife] will understand -- and on the whole I like pins. The Ponder Heart was in straight pins, hat pins, corsage pins, and needles, and when I got through typing it out I had more pins than I started with. (So it's economical.)

What There Is To Say We Have Said (Houghton, 2011)

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/16319.html.

It's brit_columbia's birthday! and she has asked for FAKE ficlets. There are already some fun offerings from her other admirers at her journal.

As part of the celebration, I decided to see if there was any part of part 5 of "Not as Dumb" that was postable. This has not been beta'd, and I reserve the right to determine this doesn't belong in the story after all (in which case, Brit, you can think of this as an blue cheese tartlet illicitly snuck out of the bakery kitchen for you that then didn't end up on the official menu...).

Anyway, happy birthday, Brit! May there be less stress and more time to write/graze/chill in the year ahead!

---
( The next morning, when Ryo woke up... )

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/356778.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

So far, so good. The Beautiful Young Man occupied himself at the dining room table while I dozed...



...and Abby (as usual) made sure nobody would leave the room without her noticing:



There are three new pieces up at unFold: "Lickety-split," "The Season So Long," and "Tacky."

The bibliography is sort of updated (still some gaps).

My book (and also 140 and Counting) has been added to Operation eBook Drop (i.e., it is being made available free of charge to deployed soldiers).

Here's a bit from the Eudora Welty biography I've been reading, by Suzanne Marrs:

In her upstairs bedroom at the Pinehurst Street house, when she had no eight-to-five job, she established a pattern that would typify her writing career, devoting most mornings and early afternoons to composing, taking time off for reading and gardening, perhaps, but often not changing from her nightgown until she had reached a stopping point in a story. She had positioned her typing table so that she did not directly face the windows overlooking the large front yard, but so that she might look over her shoulder when she needed a glimpse of the outside world.

(I'll likely continue quoting from this and What There Is To Say... over the next couple of weeks. The books have been good company the past few days.)

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/15973.html.

[Subject line from Sandra Simonds's Red Wand, which a friend introduced me to yesterday.]

How is it May already? And yet, of course it is May already. Yesterday was apparently clear-the-decks day for a number of literary editors -- by midnight, I'd been notified that three pieces will appear in unFold's Garden Show and received rejections from three markets. (I also hit "send" on a submission a few hours before the reading window closed, go me!)

My book is still on Amazon UK's Top 100 list for Asian American poetry, and it's received a number of thoughtful (and, thankfully, positive!) reviews from readers I haven't (yet) met. In reverse order of appearance:

Christine Klocek-Lim
David Allan Barker
Renee Emerson
Heather Kamins
Kristine Ong Muslim

My own purchases included:

* Kristine Ong Muslim, We Bury the Landscape
* John Brehm, Help is on the Way (I'm almost done with this one; it's largely set in NYC and Japan; its major themes include the messiness of life as a aging, non-superstar poet, and the untimely death of his nephew in spite of Brehm's donation of part of his liver...)
* Lisa Dordal, Commemoration (pre-order)
* Dick Barnes, A Word Like Fire

As part of the big, beautiful and bountiful Couplets tour, I was involved with (or featured in) the following:

April 30: videos of me reading some poems at the Nashville Public Library

April 20: ysabetwordsmith on Revision in Science Fiction Poetry (hosted at this here blog)

April 16: first and final draft of "Proportions," at Heather Kamins's blog

April 13: haiga: a powder brush, at Joanne Merriam's blog

April 10: poems by Christina Nguyen (guest post at this here blog)

April 4: Couplets Blog Tour: Carol Berg Hosts Peg Duthie (at Ophelia Unraveling)

April 1: Kristine Ong Muslim on Arlene Ang's "Living Without Water" (guest post at this here blog)

Also:

7x20 tweeted a piece on April 6

Rose Lemberg mentions that The Moment of Change has already received a very positive review. (The anthology will be released later this month.)

And now I'm going to head offline for the rest of the week. Wishing you all sustenance and sweetness (if desired, in the measures you desire):



This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/15870.html.

poetree Challenge #7: Pick a thing or two that sums up how you're doing today, this week, in general, and write about it in etheree format (see the link for details on the form).

Pain
simmers
underneath
the must-be-dones
but I've finally
learned something about space --
about true mathematics
and necessary selfishness.
The pain will be answered soon enough;
I've done enough today to go to bed.

---

Earlier this month, I received a pendant as my reward for the start of a poem, prompt and prize both created by stillnotbored. (click on the images to enlarge)





(Coincidentally, Flickr decided to greet me in Mandarin this time. The pendant features the Yangtze River.)

This month's contest (open to anyone except her partner and previous winners, natch) is here.

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/15574.html.

Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them.

- G. K. Chesterton

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/15305.html.

Kindness

I think kass introduced me to this poem? Anyway, last night I started reading Geneen Roth's Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations about Food and Money. It opens with Roth and other friends finding out that they've been swindled out of their savings by Madoff.

After hanging up the phone, I still couldn't move. I felt as if a bomb had crashed through my chest and left me in pieces, but my body was still intact. A hummingbird whizzed by. Then I thought of a poem that I'd once read by Naomi Shihab Nye called "Kindness." I couldn't recall any of the lines, but I remembered the word sorrow, and I remembered something about losing what you saved and that kindness was prominent, was, in this poem, the outcome of devastation.

Kindness.

I said the word to the stove, the walls, the refrigerator. The sound it made, the feeling of it in my mouth, made me want to cry.

Suddenly, I didn't want to do anything but read that poem.

... The doorbell rang. Kim.

She was standing there, in black velvet shirt and jeans, looking dazed and grief-stricken. The first thing she said was, "I need to find that 'Kindness' poem. Do you have it?"

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/15024.html.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/armed-and-glamorous/?hpw

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/356393.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

[Via kass, snottygrrl, and others. And also my damn ears: I woke up at 3 a.m. in part because a couple of people next door were shouting at each other, which was not cool, but it happened to be good timing, since I was due for my next dose of bacteria-be-gone (said bacteria still making things teechy in my right ear, among other areas. Grumpy kitten iz grumpy).]

Anyway, here's what other people have been reading. (Thank you all - I remain very grateful. To borrow what they say on airplanes, you have so many choices about what (else) to read, so I am honored whenever you choose to spend your time with my words.)

1. "No Life Save When the Swords Clash" / Haru wo Daiteita / 7,885 words / 874 hits

2. "Not as Dumb" (and not yet complete, sigh) / FAKE / 19,638 words / 624 hits

3. "Hidden Intelligence" / Lord Peter Wimsey / drabble / 597 hits

4. "The Ties that Do Not Bind" / FAKE / 2,303 words / 472 hits

5. "The Second One Is Love" / RPF - tennis / 10,297 words / 455 hits

6. "The Cafeteria's Got Everything" / Dar Williams's "Alleluia" / 1,871 words / 434 hits

7. "Someone Who Understood" / Lord Peter Wimsey & Vorkosigan saga / drabble / 415 hits

8. "Everything Necessary to Procure" / RPF - 18th and 19th century politics / 332 words / 413 hits

9. "Running, They Never Run from It Away" / Lord Peter Wimsey & Vorkosigan saga / 181 words / 398 hits

10. "Holding One's Own" / Vorkosigan saga & The Dark is Rising / 359 words / 392 hits

http://archiveofourown.org/users/ribbons

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/356155.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Today, my guest from the Couplets blog tour is Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith):

Revision in Science Fiction Poetry


I've been writing science fiction poetry for many years. You can read some of it in my book Prismatica: Science Fiction Poetry Spanning the Spectrum. One effect of that much practice is that I've come to compose poetry very fast -- so fast that most revisions happen before I even write out the poem. Slowing down the process so that I can show the changes will roughly triple the time it takes to write. Once in a while, though, I make revisions after a poem has been written down, usually based on outside input. I'll share a few examples of these.

( Resolutions... )

---

You can read more about and by Elizabeth Barrette at her website, PenUltimate Productions, including about her two other books (From Nature's Patient Hands and Composing Magic and Plunge Magazine, a new publication dedicated to queer women genre literature.


Couplets: A multi-author poetry blog tour

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/14444.html.

http://immigrationjustice.blogs.uua.org/education/smuggle-a-banned-book-to-ga/

Arizona outlawed "ethnic studies" courses in public schools and removed nearly 100 books that were used as texts or supplemental reading in these courses from classrooms in Tucson. We cheered the efforts of Tony Diaz, the so-called "librotraficante" who smuggled nearly 1,000 copies of these books in a caravan from Houston to Tucson, setting up "underground libraries" to house the books and make them widely available to children and adults.

(The post details the plan: UUs attending this year's General Assembly are being asked to bring one of the banned books with them to the convention; the books will be on display during the week and then donated to the underground library system. The HUUmanists homepage includes instructions (last paragraph under "What's New") on how to contribute to the project even if one isn't attending GA.

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/14122.html.

Though I was always waked for eclipses, and indeed carried to the window as an infant in arms and shown Halley's Comet in my sleep, and though I'd been taught at our diningroom table about the solar system and knew the earth revolved around the sun, and our moon around us, I never found out the moon didn't come up in the west until I was a writer and Herschel Brickell, the literary critic, told me after I misplaced it in a story. He said valuable words to me about my new profession: "Always be sure you get your moon in the right part of the sky."

- Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/13978.html.