Exploding Poohsticks

My church ordained an army chaplain this past Sunday. Our congregation president -- a distinguished lawyer in his early 60s -- tends to choke up with emotion during such rituals, which in turn gets me going. And sure enough, at these words...

As a military chaplain, you will be called to ensure and uphold the free exercise of religion as stated in the first amendment, and to nurture the living, care for the wounded, and honor the dead.

---

The previous Sunday, a friend saw me pause midway down the stairs to the lower parking lot.

"What on earth are you doing?" she asked.

"Look," I said, pointing to the flowers hiding behind the steps.

---

One of the first sopranos in the chamber choir works as a physical therapist. During coffee hour, she tutored the senior minister on using crutches.

Also during coffee hour, a toddler wearing a large pink flower on her head was playing "Do you see me?" with her mom, in the sanctuary. The girl is barely as tall as the pews, so whenever I looked up from my crocheting, what I mostly saw was the pink flower zipping along the top edge of the pews.

That alone would have been delightful, but then the girl decided to clamber up the stairs to the social hall, happily and speedily. It was clear that this was a first when the mother shrieked to her husband, "Look!" And the husband looked up from the programs he'd been sorting, and then exclaimed, "Holy crap!" :-)



This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/3530.html.

From CERN October 24, 2011

The subject line comes from an article in the January 3 New York Times on the many languages (59!) represented in the collections of the libraries in Queens, NY.

(I confess that I'm picturing little old Chinese ladies shlepping those suitcasefuls of romances back and forth and grinning to myself. After my mom retired, she discovered the joys of staying up late to watch just one more episode of some cheesy Chinese soap opera. I'm glad that she had time for that.)

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/3170.html.

Yesterday, I met a colleague for lunch at AM@FM, at Nashville's Farmers' Market. The service was fine and the price was right (I had a LivingSocial voucher), but the only dish I would go back for is the roasted brussels sprouts (they had a nice wasabi kick to them). It looks like there are lots of other new eateries at the Market, though; I should treat myself to some walks there this spring.

After lunch, we stopped by Shreeji's, a source of international goodies. I picked up garlic, a bag of cumin, a bag of cardamom pods, a bag of mung beans, a bag of raw almonds, and a bag of fried peas:



It was disconcerting to see the groceries going into this bag:



(I worked for Borders for five years.)

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From today's lunchtime reading (can't find the permalink: it's a January 12 entry at Roger Mooking's blog):

Roger Mooking: Are there any specific dishes on your menu that express your personality?

Jeff Van Geest: I think the pizza. We do a Neapolitan style pizza, which I think is a really approachable food but we take it really seriously, working out the recipe and working out the technique so that it is a really perfect product. It's caring about the details but not being too pretentious about it and still approachable.

RM: So is that kinda who you are?

JVG: Haha yah.

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/2656.html.

Drinking a cup of Dark Magic decaf before heading to chamber choir warmup, and rereading Ross Gay's Overheard, which includes the lines...

. . . I was slow to look at him
because I've learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It's a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light . . .

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/2538.html.

Via [Bad username: samhenderson.livejournal.com]: Jim C. Hines attempts the poses of women on fantasy novel covers. *obligatory beverage v. monitor warning here*

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/349347.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Seen all over the friendslists:

From everyone: Pick up the book nearest to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence there describes your sex life in 2012.

And the Magic 8-- 1990 edition of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook says:

Grind.

Well, then. *tries to maintain solemn face* *LOL*

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/349014.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/ancient-pornographic-artifact-discovered-by-the-thames

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0111/How-Nicolas-Steno-changed-the-way-we-see-the-world-literally

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[Via salinea]

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First, thanks to everyone who weighed in (privately and via comments) on the advice vs. help tangle I was mulling over in my last post. Much food for thought.

Today, my mind's dwelling on some of the people I grew up with, and some of the people I spend time with now. In a nutshell: I am spooked by the things I didn't know, and dazzled by how much there is to learn.

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/348095.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Over the past month, I've glimpsed tense exchanges in threads hither and thither in reaction to comments perceived as unsolicited advice. (I'm trying to phrase that observation carefully, because at times, there seemed to be different paradigms for both "unsolicited" and "advice" among the parties involved.) So this caught my eye yesterday:

http://www.fluentself.com/blog/stuff/advice-giving-mode-vs-helper-mouse-mode

(For what it's worth, I'm still pondering it. Because while Havi's post spells out for emotional semi-literates like me why advice raises people's hackles, I need to process for myself my resistance to the helper mouse alternatives. [I know some of it is because of past encounters with emotional vampires and my ongoing cagematch with overcommitment, such that directly asking "How can I help you?" seems to me tantamount to unbuttoning my collar and saying, "Here, guzzle away." I also have a fair amount of baggage from people who asked "How can I help?" and then didn't help [because the things I asked for were apparently too inconvenient or unglamorous or whatever] -- which is to say, I don't want to do that to other people in turn, so I no longer make blanket offers of assistance. [Doesn't mean I think myself too good for scut work; it just means I've become careful about what I promise, because it's a really awful feeling when one can't deliver.]

...In short, I'll need to poke past the examples to figure out what could work for me, when someone has my ear and is waiting for an engaged, non-condescending response. [Honestly, there are times when I wish all y'all lived just a neighborhood or two away. I tend to do better when I can resort to hugs and ice cream sandwiches instead of talking.])

* * *

Still cursing my clogged lungs, but I did do a fair amount of cooking at the start of this week. For Christmas dinner, I prepared oyster-beansprout pancakes, sea scallops with cauliflower two ways, and cider mulled with rum. For Boxing Day brunch, I made shakshouka, and for dinner, couscous. The upside to not being well enough to sing in lessons & carols on Christmas Eve was being free to join friends for homemade pizza.

* * *

After reading the recent NYT piece on Ezra Jack Keats, I borrowed a bunch of his books from the library. There is so much to see in Dreams -- I especially like the spreads that show the different goings-on in Robert's apartment building, through its windows, and how Keats's choice to vary from spread to spread how many windows are shown.

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/347684.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Let her have time, and silence,
enough paper to make mistakes and go on.

(Cross-quoted at Vary the Line, which I am tugging out of hibernation bit by bit as I resume some semblance of writing and revising. Other recent posts there:

photos of Shakespeare and Company, and a bit of Yeats in French

Monika Transformer's purchase of piano literature for the left hand)

Also updated the front page of my website, in lieu of enclosing Christmas letters to my relatives and non-journal-reading friends. ;-) Need to do more work with the internal pages, but that won't happen (as with many other things) until after Epiphany. (On the upside, I just purchased two signature editions [On Cloud 285 and Common Symptoms...] with my Folded Word royalties, which goes to show that even the little pieces can lead to rewards. *cheshire grin*)

Also, from Brad Leithauser's review of Sondheim's latest:

...his care and punctiliousness are steadily inspiring. Here he is discussing a rhyme from Follies:

"I had a similar moment when I paired 'soul-stirring' and 'bolstering.' The rhyme is not perfect, of course -- the equal accents on 'soul' and 'stir' don't quite match the heavy accent on 'bol' and the lighter one on 'ster,' but I tried to mask that by leaping the melody up on each '-ing' to distract the ear."

In fact, I can't imagine how serious craftsmen in any field wouldn't find both books inspiring. The quilt maker fussing over which shade of red to employ as a highlight; the cook experimenting on how most appetizingly to glaze a plate of scallops; the automobile designer sketching a streamlined new speedometer -- all such people should experience a sense of kinship when reading Sondheim debating whether, when seeking a rhyme, he might fairly use "wood" rather than "woods":

"What justification was there to use 'wood' here (and in the 'Finale') and 'woods' everywhere else? I finally hit on an explanation: 'wood' sounded statelier and therefore suited a lyric sung by someone outside the action."

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http://mechaieh.livejournal.com/235227.html

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At LJ, katieandrew presents a lovely recording of my drabble "Mistletoe." (With festive cover art by jkivela, too!) *squee*

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/346914.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Suzy Menkes, about A Master of Embroidery Remembered:

Mr. Lesage’s grandchildren also spoke, describing vacations in Corsica, where their nocturnal grandfather would play with their computer games half the night and then sweep them off on a boat in the morning.

. . .

Mr. Lesage deeply appreciated the poetic essence of his work, saying "embroidery was the love of writing your dreams with a needle, with a pearl with anything that could enchant and bring tenderly to life a décor, an ambiance, a souvenir."

Those words were at the heart of Mr. Lesage's work. But the secret of his creative longevity was to embrace the new, as well as establishing profound relationships with designers, working in their individual cultures.

Laurel Graeber, Homage to a Picture-Book Rebel (on Ezra Jack Keats).

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/346668.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

From http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/09/movies/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-with-gary-oldman-review.html:

Guinness’s turn is the Torah; Mr. Oldman’s the Talmud.

(I also love that Dargis compares John Hurt's face to late Auden.)

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/346413.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

[Subject line from Leonard Cohen's Suzanne. There's a guy singing in one of the tavernas below, and for a while, it sounded like he was covering "Suzanne" in Greek.]

Updated albums:

CERN

Athens, part 1

[more on Athens TK]

Larnaca, day 2

Larnaca, day 3

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/346055.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

Harry Potter working as a videographer in Istanbul, according to Vania King and Slava Shvedova:

Vania: Afterwards, we had a little present for one of the video guys from the DDF shoot. When we shot the filming at the Blue Mosque, I noticed he had a scar on his forehead that looked like the shape of a lightning bolt. I told him he looked like Harry Potter and when I asked how he got it, Slava said he got attacked by Lord Voldemort. He played on with it and we had a good laugh about it (we had a lot of laughs on that trip!) so Slava went to the kid's shop and bought a pair of plastic glasses with a mustache and eyebrows. She removed the brows and mustache and taped the nose bridge (to repair his broken glasses) and we hunted down an object we could pass as a wand. After dismissing several ideas, we decided on a breadstick. We tried to find the video guy in the evening yesterday (Slava actually went all the way back to the hotel to get the glasses) but he was MIA yesterday so we gave him the gift today. Slava broke two breadsticks and two were eaten by an unknown culprit so I had to run back and get more before we finally were able to present him with his gift.

Slava: It was funny! I put the photos on Facebook and [T]witter and my website so you can see our friend Harry if you want to.

http://www.wtatennis.com/blog/20111028/vania-slavas-istanbul-blog-friday_2257191_2498017

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/345831.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.

I'm in Larnaca! (Which I have finally learned to spell, eight months after this trip was initially discussed.) At some point I'll settle down (or crash into the need for more sleep), but at the moment, it's just too thrilling to be less than 1000 feet from the Mediterranean Sea:

( a photo, and links to more )
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In other news, I am a contributor to the latest language carnival, on signs.

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From Florence Teets's She's Going Abroad, chapter 5 ("Sleeping"):

Any traveler will agree that having a room with bath, in a grand hotel, with a maid to press frocks, and a boy to run errands, is a comfort at the end of a long day's sightseeing, but no experienced adventurer would allow the lack of these amenities to spoil her enjoyment of climbing an Alp, looking at a Mediterranean sunset, or hearing a Vienna symphony. ... If you want to see the world and not the inside of hotels, if you want a clean room but can manage without a private bath, Europe has thousands of middle-class, average hotels, small but adequate inns and taverns. Indeed, the intermediate hotel is advised for the woman traveling alone, for the young woman interested in meeting young men, for the less particular woman whose purse is limited but whose curiosity in life is always growing.

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From geneva 20-22 oct 2011

photo diary, Geneva (with some glimpses of Ferney-Voltaire)

On deck: the Ferney-Voltaire market (or, why I suddenly found myself wondering if I would need to hitchhike to Geneva).

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From paris day 1

On Monday, 7x20 published a very short poem about hockey by me.

On Tuesday, I sketched out some new poems while on the plane.

On Wednesday, Prime Number Magazine No. 13 went live, with one of my photos on the cover.

Also on Wednesday: I landed in Paris. Photo diary here.

The highlight of the evening was participating in Simchat Torah at Kehilat Gesher. I'll write more about that in a separate entry...

This entry was originally posted at http://bronze-ribbons.dreamwidth.org/344839.html. I see comments at DW, IJ, and LJ (when notifications are working, anyway), but not on feeds.