Check out this interactive map of Banned Books Week events. In my neighborhood, St. Thomas University is sponsoring a display of banned books and an online trivia challenge.
Then wrap the body,
as if it were a perfumed gift,
in pieces of silk
held together with invisible threads
like a kite, weighing no more
than a handful of crushed chrysanthemums.
Light enough to float in the wind.
You want the effect
of koi moving through water. Ikebana, Cathy Song
Banned Books Week starts today. We’ll note efforts to censor books in public schools and libraries all this week; the American Library Association has a list of the 10 Most Challenged Books of 2006, which includes the story of two male penguins raising an orphan (this is apparently “anti-family”; better to let them be eaten by sea lions) and two books by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, “The Bluest Eye” and “Beloved”. Why not make the censors squirm and read one or two of these dangerous tomes this week?
I’ve got a box of business cards that are two phone numbers and several job titles out of date; honestly, I don’t know why employers give boxes of cards to people who seldom encounter the outside world. But rather than toss them out, I decided to work them into a project; inspired by Hugh MacLeod’s wondrous business-card cartoons, and under the art direction of Jack and Peter, I’ve launched “2×3 Theater.” Our little production company anticipates releasing a little short monthly or so, as inspiration (or the green monster) strikes.
I’ve added my story Summer Reading to the Stories page of this site; it seems that Somewhat.org has left the building, and with it some wonderful little gems (as well as a couple stories of mine). They aren’t even available in the Wayback Machine. More about “Summer Reading” here.
Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,
yellow as a hill of daffodils,
yellow as dandelions by the highway,
yellow as butter and egg yolks,
yellow as a school bus stopping you,
yellow as a slicker in a downpour.
Here are a few more things you ought to take a look at:
SketchCrawl: an interactive, world-wide sketchpad event is planned every few months. The next one is in November, so get your pencils sharpened and watercolors dampened.
The Guerilla Poetics Project: a nicely transgressive idea–beautifully printed poetry broadsides slipped into unsuspecting bookshops and libraries.
NPR : Scientist Measures an Overlooked Greenhouse Gas: methane is a nasty enough thing in itself, and it points to the growing effects of climate change in northern lakes and wetlands; but at the same time, limnologist Katey Walter has an infectious delight in the stuff, and has some great stories about setting it alight.
My latest story to see the light of day is Among the Moabites, an odd little tale about pest control, published at Cherry Bleeds.
This one was actually written over a year and a half ago, and has been gathering . . . feedback . . . from a few editors before Cherry Bleeds picked it up. Among my favorite comments:
While amusing, I’m afraid that I simply didn’t understand the point of this story.
We do tend to like darker stories, but this was a bit nasty for my taste . . .
And those are probably valid objections. I’m not sure that there’s much of a point to understand–I don’t really understand it myself–and it is peopled by unpleasant creatures.
I think of it as a companion piece of sorts to two other stories that I wrote at about the same time: The Oologist’s Cabinet, published this summer in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and Ichthyology, published in JMWW. And I can’t say as I understand those, either, and find them to be a bit nasty (or maybe, as The Baltimore City Paper opined of “Ichthyology”, “brutal and eloquently told, a brilliant carnage of a story”; that’s nicer than “nasty”, no?).
I might as well get into the game that Daily Koss, Maud Newton, Edward Champion, and most recently Andrew Sullivan started: here’s a link to a posting at another project of mine, DailyDickinson.com, that flooded my poor little Emily Dickinson blog with twice the traffic that this site ever sees and about a hundred times the traffic drawn by the Belle of Amherst. It’s not really much of a posting–just a response to a review in Scientific American that did a name-check of Miss Dickinson as a good example of morbid shyness that might today be medicated–but the magic of the internet and links from the tops in the blogosphere certainly drove the traffic.
Most of the people who visited during the course of the frenzy will not, of course, ever come back. Though DailyDickinson does have a small (as in “can be counted easily without taking off socks”) and international (U.S., U.K., Japan, and Korea show up often in the logs) readership, it’s sort of a niche market and not intended to be especially large. Each day there’s a Dickinson poem illustrated by a photograph, and when something Dickinsonian shows up in the news or appears on my Internet radar, there will be a comment or two. It was really an excuse to write a “Google gadget” to display an RSS feed in a tabbed interface–complete geekery.
Still, to be tapped by some of the big names on the ‘net (the Daily Koss link was actually a week earlier than the paroxetine post, as a resource for an ongoing series of “Literature for Kossacks”) is kind of a thrill; at the very least, it makes looking at the referrer logs more fun than usual.
Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow’r,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow’r,
Thou bonie gem.
O woe to small things that Robbie Burns encountered! Whither floure or mousie, he’d come tramp-tramping along, compose some sweet, sad lyrics that tied your fate to that of mankind, and then crush you lifeless. “I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union” indeed! To wee things, he was no different from the rapacious murderers of a rollicking border ballad . . .
Contrary to appearances, Granddad is actually bringing his kayak toward the boy on the rock; his kayak was missing a critical component: without a keel, it was very good at going in circles, somewhat OK at going backwards, and not very effective at all in going forward.
Hurrah! One of my favorite photoblogs, incidence, is back with new content from Togo. I can only imagine the logistical hurdles that had to be leaped to get these wonderful black and white images to the world (though we’re given a hint that falciparum malaria was involved . . . ick . . .).
Happy travels, Madeleine L’Engle. What precocious child of the ’60s and ’70s wasn’t shaped by your wonder-filled adventures? I still sometimes think of tesseracts and moebius strips while I’m falling asleep.
Not really a megalith, of course; the precariously situated rock was probably dropped on the granite island in the middle of North Pond by the glacier that scooped out the lake 25,000-odd years ago.
One of our favorite activities at Granddad’s house is taking his kayaks out on North Pond, a lake surrounded by Woodstock and Greenwood. I’ve always been intrigued by a rock in the middle of the lake, a hunk of granite dropped there by the glacier that scooped out the pond; we paddled out to stand on it and look at the smooth, clear water. The Holga came along, since I can’t imagine dropping it in the pond would do it much harm . . .
The Farmhouse Murders: a very compelling piece of reporting by Jon Tevlin and Brian Peterson that follows the events leading up to and following from a terrible night in the small town of Waseca. This is the kind of reporting that should remind us why print journalism still matters in the age of video blogs and instant news: the pace is slower and more deliberate, the background is deep, the story has time to seep into the reader’s mind.
Places in a farmhouse murder: a photo gallery to accompany the story above. The photo of the police tape flapping in the wind, taken by staff photographer Brian Peterson, is especially evocative. It looks like an image from Capote’s “In Cold Blood”.
Davey Dance Blog – 28: and on the other end of the spectrum . . . if you’re feeling blue, this little gem on Vimeo will clear you right up.
InfraWeegee from Alec Soth: a series of infrared photographs by Weegee of people in theaters: eerie and nostalgic at once.
Sketchpad Warrior: the blog of an artist who captures the daily lives of soldiers in Iraq with pencil and brush; fascinating and compelling work.
To Choose at Pudding House : a poem set to watercolors set to music; which side are you on?
There may be pink with white or white with rose
Or there may be white with rose and pink with mauve
Or even there may be white with yellow and yellow with blue
Or even if even it is rose with white and blue
And so there is no yellow there but by accident. Gertrude Stein, From Stanzas in Meditation: Stanza XIII
