[For information about this photo, called “Weeki Wachee Spring, Florida,”
see the Note at the bottom of this post.]
From whiskey river:
Adrift
Let my dreams while I’m wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I’m in.
(William Stafford [source])
I mentioned a “contest” of sorts in my post the other day about the New York Writers Coalition’s June 12 event: write 3,000 words on that one day, they said, and you could enter a drawing. Winner of the drawing would receive a free consultation with author Jennifer Belle. But I added:
…other than this email [from a NYWC publicist], I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.
Now I’ve got some of those details (thanks, Adaeze!):
Note: New registrations do not take effect automatically, but are human-moderated. This means you should expect a time lag before being able to do much of anything at the site. Do not wait until June 12 to register!
If I learn anything else about the rules, or The Day itself, or Jennifer Belle, or… oh, hell: if I learn anything else about anything vaguely relevant, I’ll post the information here at RAMH. In the meantime, if you feel ready to take the challenge, hie thee to the NYWC discussion board and sign up.
From whiskey river:
A Remedy for Insomnia
Not sheep coming down the hills,
not cracks on the ceiling —
count the ones you loved,
the former tenants of dreams
who would keep you awake,
once meant the world to you,
rocked you in their arms,
those who loved you…
You will fall asleep, by dawn, in tears.
(Vera Pavlova, If There Is Something To Desire [source])
From that site’s archive (whiskey river’s commonplace book):
Too Easy: to Write of Miracles
Too easy: to write of miracles, dreams where the famous give
mysterious utterance to silent truth;
to confuse snow with the stars,
simulate a star’s fantastic wisdom.Easy like the willow to lament,
rant in trampled roads where pools
are red with sorrowful fires, and sullen rain
drips from the willows’ ornamental leaves;
or die in words and angrily turn
to pace like ghosts about the walls of war.But difficult when, innocent and cold,
day, a bird over a hill, flies in
— resolving anguish to a strange perspective,
a scene within a marble; returning
the brilliant shower of coloured dreams to dust,
a smell of fireworks lingering by canals
on autumn evenings — difficult to write
of the real image, real hand, the heartDream a Little Dream of Me
of day or autumn beating steadily:
to speak of human gestures, clarify
all the context of a simple phrase
— the hour, the shadow, the fire,
the loaf on a bare table.Dream a Little Dream of MeHard, under the honest sun, to weigh
a word until it balances with love —
burden of happiness on fearful shoulders;
in the ease of daylight to discover
what measure has its music, and achieve
the unhaunted country of the final poem.
(Denise Levertov, Sicily, 1948 [source])
You may remember from a few months ago that Moonrat, that charmingly impetuous rodent, instigated an early “Take 2” of the Write Your A** Off Day which I myself pretty much ripped off last year, from the New York Writers Coalition.
As expected, the official 2010 version of Write Your A** Off Day will occur somewhat later. I’ve recently heard from a Coalition publicity official, who tells me that this year’s date is set for June 12. As before, if you will be in the New York City area on that date, the Coalition has all sorts of activities planned for you.
But my correspondent also tells me that they’ve put an additional twist on this year’s commitment to devote a day to your writing:
We’ve created the challenge of writing 3,000 words (about 10 pages) in one day, and we know you can do it!… In addition, everyone who completes the challenge and writes 3,000 words on June 12 will have the chance to enter a drawing to win a free private phone consultation about your writing project with Jennifer Belle!
Three thousand words in one day. You can do that, right?
(True, NaNoWriMo demands only an average of one thousand words a day. But this is a Saturday! Still a month away! Plenty of time to outline what you’re going to write, stock up on food and beverages, purchase tickets to send family members out of town…!)
Now, one caveat: other than this email, I haven’t seen any official confirmation of this 3K-word challenge — like details about how the drawing will work — particularly for out-of-town writers. I’ll see if I can learn more.
In the meantime, what say? Give it a try? Launch yourself into a summer of big writing with one big day?
[Image: ‘A Little Family History,’ by B. Kliban]
From whiskey river:
Moment
A person wakes from sleep
and does not know for a time
who she is, who he is.This happens in a lifetime
once or twice.
It has happened to you, no doubt.Some in that moment
panic,
some sigh with pleasure.How each kind later envies the other,
who must so love their lives.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
…and:
We don’t have to hate ourselves for our own vulnerability. We don’t have to hate ourselves for what life has done to us. We don’t have to hate ourselves because hurt or loss or longing has gotten to us. Our desires will always be with us in some form, keeping us firmly attached to a world that will hurt us. We must come to love ourselves, love our life, in its vulnerability, in its impermanence, not in spite of all its flaws, but because of them. Because the vulnerability, the changes, the flaws make us who we are.
(Barry Magid)
…and (italicized portion):
Making art and viewing art are different at their core. The sane human being is satisfied that the best he/she can do at any given moment is the best he/she can do at any given moment. […] Such sanity is, unfortunately, rare. Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker) so enormously much about yourself, then making art that matters to you would be impossible. To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product; the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping that artwork. The viewers’ concerns are not your concerns (although it’s dangerously easy to adopt their attitudes.) Their job is whatever it is: to be moved by art, to be entertained by it, to make a killing off it, whatever. Your job is to learn to work on your work.
(David Bayles [source])
The scene: a suburban home in North Florida, USA. Family gathering for Kentucky Derby viewing: gambols and gambles. Much food and beverage being prepared and consumed. He has just returned to house after walking Pooch. Everyone but She is in the living room, talking, laughing, watching TV.
He: [entering kitchen, where He knows She must be] We had a productive walk— What?
She stands before open pantry, laughing madly, pulling things from shelves and dropping them on floor.
She: I can’t find my baking soda!
He: [mentally running through menu items, not remembering any which involve baking soda] Your, uh, baking so—
She: Yes! Baking soda! I can’t find it!
She shuts pantry door, which immediately springs back open because of heap of boxes, cans, and canisters on floor.
He: What do you need baking soda f—?
She: [reaching back into pantry, emerging with familiar dull-yellow box; running around to front of stove, and still bursting sporadically into demented giggles] I need it for the fire!
He: Er, the fire—?
She: Yes! [yanks open oven door] The fire! The potholder fire!
She points, needlessly now, to a flaming mass of thick furry dark-blue fabric on bottom of oven. The oven is filled with smoke, and also with a pan of oven-broiled sandwiches for the Derby Day crowd. She dumps half the box of baking soda on the erstwhile potholder, and shuts the oven door.
She: I dropped a potholder in the oven.
He: Yes, I noticed. But the—
She: I knew baking soda would put it out safely.
He: But the, uh, the pan—
She: [leaning back against counter, sipping at mint juleps] You should never use water on an oven fire.
From whiskey river:
Life continuously refuses to show us the plot. The desire to give it shape, and by shape, meaning, is so great anything will do. But Orwell would have us stand against all the “smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” I am struck by how difficult it is to get back to something we knew to be true once we have been converted, forced by circumstances, or simply denied and turned away from it, to whatever lonely mess we have managed to make since. It is as though the experience of unhappiness is more valid than that of joy. We all know the experience of wanting something badly, only to have it disappear as we approach it. Rarely do we look at the wanting self. My shadowless shadow. We don’t cope with much grace, neither the grace of civility, nor the grace of physical being, nor the grace of the spirit. There is at bottom no real distinction between them anyway. Perhaps I am too often absent from my own being.
(Terrance Keenan [source, including the first three sentences])
…and:
Self-Portrait
Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter
half my day passes. One day it will be half a century.
I live in strange cities and sometimes talk
with strangers about matters strange to me.
I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich.
I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain.
The fourth has no name.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand
the great philosophers – but usually catch just
scraps of their precious thoughts.
I like to take long walks on Paris streets
and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy,
anger, desire; to trace a silver coin
passing from hand to hand as it slowly
loses its round shape (the emperor’s profile is erased).
Beside me trees expressing nothing
but a green, indifferent perfection.
Black birds pace the fields,
waiting patiently like Spanish widows.
I’m no longer young, but someone else is always older.
I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist,
and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses
dissolve like cumuli on sunny days.
Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me
and irony suddenly vanishes.
I love gazing at my wife’s face.
Every Sunday I call my father.
Every other week I meet with friends,
thus proving my fidelity.
My country freed itself from one evil. I wish
another liberation would follow.
Could I help in this? I don’t know.
I’m truly not a child of the ocean,
as Antonio Machado wrote about himself,
but a child of air, mint and cello
and not all the ways of the high world
cross paths with the life that — so far —
belongs to me.
(Adam Zagajewski; translated by Clare Cavanagh [source])
[Image above from The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, which observes:
“I guess if you don’t just go grab a seat you may never get one.”]
From whiskey river:
The swarm of words
and little stories
are just to loosen you
from where you are stuck.
(Shitou Xiqian)
…and:
O, how incomprehensible everything was, and actually sad, although it was also beautiful. One knew nothing. One lived and ran about the earth and rode through forests, and certain things looked so challenging and promising and nostalgic: a star in the evening, a blue harebell, a reed-green pond, the eye of a person or cow. And sometimes it seemed that something never seen yet long desired was about to happen, that a veil would drop from it all; but then it passed, nothing happened, the riddle remained unsolved, the secret spell unbroken, and in the end one grew old and looked cunning… or wise… And still one knew nothing perhaps, was still waiting and listening.
(Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund [source])
I’ve been trying to come up with something… different to do for this blog’s second anniversary. And then along comes Google, with its wacky “Search Stories Video Creator” for YouTube.
The Video Creator’s first page gives you up to six search boxes, into which you enter search terms — presumably forming some sort of “story arc.” (There’s also a seventh box on the form; this is used to create a “last slide,” as you will see.) For each search, you also choose whether you want to search the Web in general (the usual Google search), Google Images, Google Maps, blogs, news, Google Products, or Google Books. And then, when you’ve made those selections, you select a canned soundtrack from among numerous genres and styles.
And when you’ve done all the above, the system creates a YouTube video of your search(es) results.
It’s… it’s weird. Also kinda cool. And/Or disconcerting. Best of all, it gave me something… different to do for the blog’s second anniversary.
What I did was choose six posts from the last two years, published roughly every few months. From each of those six, I pulled key words or phrases for my search terms. I can’t say that the selection is entirely random: I wanted it to be sorta-kinda representative of the way RAMH has evolved (assuming “evolution” describes what’s happened here). And yet I also didn’t want to select “greatest hits,” “my favorite posts,” or any such thing. (You’ll find, for example, that none of the six was a What’s in a Song post, although a couple other series are represented.)
Here are the six posts I chose:
Below is the “Running After My Hat” entry in the Search Stories pile o’ stories. I decided to call it “in pursuit of headgear”:
Thank you to RAMH readers, both the lurking and the commenting sorts (especially the latter!), and thank you beyond measure to the bloggers whose sites I visit regularly, and from whose words — every day — I draw inspiration.
_______________
Note: The image at the top of this post, “Breezy,” is a scratchboard illustration from the fairy tale commonly called “The Goose Girl.” (Caption: “Curdkin has been tormenting the main character, so she calls out ‘Wind, wind, blow today, carry Curdkin’s cap away!’, and it does.”) It is by Tanaudel, on Flickr. You can read “The Goose Girl” here, on Project Gutenberg. (That version of the story includes a striking print of the same scene; it is by one Jennie Harbour, an Art Deco-style illustrator about whom little seems to be known.)
[Hat tip to the pseudonymous Jordan Baker of Dealing in Subterfuges for alerting me to this Google/YouTube Video Creator thing.]
Update, 2010-04-26: The Teacher Tracks blog recently posted an entry on five ways which teachers can use the Google Search Stories thingum as an educational tool. It included a link to a (Google-produced) “love story” using a beefed-up version of the publicly available tool:
(Apparently this was used in a Super Bowl ad this year. Darn. I missed that, didn’t I?)
[Image: “Looking Up the Yosemite Valley,” by Alfred Bierstadt.
For more information, see the Haggin Museum site.]
Note: Here for Poetry Friday (hosted today at the impossibly appealing Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast)? Never before been here on a Friday? Just plain confused by what’s going on in this post? You might want to read about my “whiskey river Fridays” series, at its own “About” page.
From whiskey river:
Thursday
I have had my dream — like others —
and it has come to nothing, so that
I remain now carelessly
with feet planted on the ground
and look up at the sky —
feeling my clothes about me,
the weight of my body in my shoes,
the rim of my hat, air passing in and out
at my nose — and decide to dream no more.
(William Carlos Williams [source])
…and, likewise (although whiskey river omits the first stanza):
A Blessing of Angels
May the Angels in their beauty bless you.
May they turn toward you streams of blessing.May the Angel of Awakening stir your heart
to come alive to the eternal within you,
to all the invitations that quietly surround you.May the Angel of Healing turn your wounds
into sources of refreshment.May the Angel of Imagination enable you
to stand on the true thresholds,
at ease with your ambivalence
and drawn in new directions
through the glow of your contradictions.May the Angel of Compassion open your eyes
to the unseen suffering around you.May the Angel of Wildness disturb the places
where your life is domesticated and safe,
take you to the territories of true otherness
where all that is awkward in you
can fall into its own rhythm.May the Angel of Eros introduce you
to the beauty of your senses
to celebrate your inheritance
as a temple of the holy spirit.May the Angel of Justice disturb you
to take the side of the poor and the wronged.May the Angel of Encouragement confirm you
in worth and self-respect,
that you may live with the dignity
that presides in your soul.May the Angel of Death arrive only
when your life is complete
and you have brought every given gift
to the threshold where its infinity can shine.May all the Angels be your sheltering
and joyful guardians.
(John O’Donohue [source])
