This came from the single thought of rain as "a sky in mourning," and extended to the recent Hartford incident where 78 year-old Angel Torres was struck by racing cars and left there by the passersby.
Nature
The day of trees,
arms reaching
for a sky in mourning
(a strange anomaly
and yet…)
Rubberneckers
watching
liquid life spread red
moistening the black
sealed earth
It is a day
of drawing
breath from spillage
without the spilling of
a tear
Bumper crop of grapes this year, and I’ve allowed them full access to the peach trees which are due to be cut down since they’re way out of hand and that’s my fault for not tending them properly the last couple of years. But this year’s crop may go to jelly and juice instead of wine.
Then there’s the garden flowers, the poppies are the first ones to bloom. these are not very big, and they cannot be picked for bouquets since they rarely bloom longer than for the day before their petals, shiny and bright as the buttercup’s, fall quickly.
Did the gardening before the day turned humid. Now’s the time to read, learn, and write.
I swore I wouldn’t but I indeed have sent one of my latest short stories out to select literary journals (select here meaning open reading time and sign up and click rather than print out, besides the "know your market" that always applies).
It’s really more a matter of keeping active as a writer, earning the right to say "I’m a writer" whilst crossing fingers in hope that no one asks exactly where you’ve been published–at which point you can say "I’m an author" and smile smugly.
At the Hypertext 2008 workshop, I mentioned that I’ve not been published except for a few poems and there was comment that I indeed have been published, referring to the weblogs that I produce. But while it’s true that that is "publishing," it’s not what I mean when I say that my intent is to be published. After five years of weblogging and many more of producing three different magazines in which my work was included both in fiction, non-fiction, and editorial comment, I don’t consider anything but the two poems accepted by a legit online publisher as truly being published.
Yeah, I know, anal right? But there’s a line we each draw personally for ourselves though we may stretch it a bit for fellow writers in what we call "being published." For me, that line is someone else’s acceptance for publication. Clear, simple, and for me, the validation that I seek.
Went to check the Tunxis site to see what’s available for a Fall semester class and whose friendly face pops up? (I love the ‘full screen’ display version of my Mac!)
But this reminded me that at Media Play Steve’s been publishing the lovely artwork of Carianne Mack along with his poetry that tells an ongoing story yet matches the daily painting that Carianne has produced.
Now would be a good time to play catchup since one of these artists is on a vacation away from artist tools.
(UPDATED: Now I feel even worse. It was unbelievably delicious. I actually ended up with enough for two. I ate it all.)
I am a bad person.
El esposo is at a retirement dinner. I am sauteing shrimp and escargot in garlic butter and herbs for myself.
Finally got back into reading after a busy couple of weeks and while I do love Gay’s story and writing style, I’m wondering if this is just a tad overdone:
He fell silent, watching her. He didn’t want to tell her that what she did for a living was part of the problem. Cora worked in a hospital in Little Rock, in the wing where patients were sent to die. It was Cora’s job to help them, and he guessed she was good at it, they all died, but he didn’t want any help from a professional. An aura of death hung about her like a plague. The smell of dying folks had soaked into her clothes, her lungs were saturated from breathing the last breaths of too many men, when she got up to cross the floor the unquiet dead she’d helped ferry across the Styx struggled up and followed obediently after her. She moved always encumbered by a legion of the invisible dead. (p. 19)
There are five phrases emphasizing that (he felt that) Cora carried the dead she helped around with her. It’s as if Gay couldn’t decide which description the most eloquent and couldn’t pare them down further than these five. There’s also the almost cliche’d use of "across the Styx" that maybe he liked too much to drop as it is simply another way of saying "dying."
On this, his last day of work, I salute Bill Gates for combining his creative self with his business acumen to have developed an empire.
Some of us just ain’t got it though. I just let two customers walk out with their framing without paying but with a promise to do so because I wasn’t ready with the sales slips end of it and told them I’d give them a call with the amount and send them the invoice.
Someday I’ll learn that the project isn’t finished with the cardboard corners and plastic bag.
I realize that we get unsolicited snail mail that requires a quick look at the envelope and if it’s from Wilmington Delaware it gets tossed automatically. I know that you can’t watch TV without commercials or read a newspaper without ads. But these folks are using an acceptable medium and are paying for the space, to sell their wares in exchange for payment to support the venue.
Spammers have not made that contract.
I am strongly against capital punishment and torture, but I’m beginning to soften and believe that caning could be an appropriate punishment for both email and weblog spamming.
I wonder why we think it’s all right to pay a college basketball coach $8 million for a five year contract when the real job of the college (UConn) is education:
Auriemma Signs 5-Year Deal With UConn
Contract Worth $8 Million
Am I missing something…or are the academic powers that be?
Hoping that my dear friend Nancy stopping by tomorrow will have time for lunch, I’m planning on stirfry with jumbo shrimp and shitake mushrooms since it’s quick and easy.
Love this start to the season of fresh vegies and grillwork. Can’t wait to pick plump tomatoes and fresh basil and dill. Every year around this time–that being too late to plant now–I remember that I should have put in onions and carrots and Chinese cabbage and okra and all the good things I used to farm on nearly a half acre of tilled garden soil.
The tomatoes are the size of quarters, there’s a bell pepper that’s about half grown, and the habaneros are blossoming though the plants are still small.
What I’d really like now though are the snow peas.
I wonder if I’m the only one who grimaced at the full screen slideshow display where ‘complexity’ was spelled without benefit of an e or i.
It’s difficult to proofread your own work, and it often takes readers or a workshop session to find the flaws, but there are some among us who just spot them in all forms of printed matter–hardcover books that go through many editing sessions. My friend Chris once magic marked her way through a newspaper till it grew heavy with red highlights.
But spelling and punctuation and grammar errors are just a small portion of an editing position. Experience and knowledge through reading, reading, and more reading
will eventually improve everyone’s abilities to proofread and get down
to more serious mental editing of their own work. But it does make me
wonder if there’s a slight chance that the personality trait of
nitpicky is a part of it as well. Copyediting is one thing though; taking it further to include continuity, story detail, timeline, tense, etc. is truly an art.
There are those that spot the inconsistencies in film narrative–details such as wristwatches suddenly appearing in what should be a single event, yet was shot on different days.
Language and use of standard story elements of plot and theme and narrative structure are complicated areas that may seem easy to define yet as we all know, are more difficult to assess within a story either while writing (yes, throw away those outlines folks, unless it’s an historical novel) or reading.
Then there are those who have become dependent upon software devices such as Spellcheck…
Here’s downtown Pittsburgh from my room on the 9th floor of the Omni William Penn Hotel:
I sat in that courtyard watching people and the activity and what it produced is a story. There were about twenty teenagers skateboarding off a ramp one early afternoon; there were pigeons flying in flocks or pecking around for food, seeds tossed by an old woman from a brown paper bag. One pigeon sat in a tree where a boy’s shoe was wedged inextricably between trunk and branch. A shabby-suited man sat on the granite bench, expressionless, staring out at it all.
Hypertext will tie this moment together, the branches of the individual characters combining to come to this single event. And Storyspace is going to help me tell it.
The seamstress Ivy
mends the broken pot
with fancy stitches of
embroidered green
binding clay and
life together in
the night, one feathered leave
at a time.
I’m still dreaming in the afterglow of hypertextual commingling and will return to the down-to-earth (?) world of printed fiction sometime today.
Between William Gay and Geoff Chaucer (he’s not around to argue the familiarity) I’ve got some good reading ahead, though I need to find a better version of Chaucer to get into the language as much as the verse.
With the news of the loss of a revolutionary comedian: George Carlin, dead at age 71.
I’ve admired him since the days he was allowed to safely perform on the Ed Sullivan show.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology