yahtzee | Reading

I made these salt bread rolls today (pic), and they are very tasty, but I think I still like pretzel rolls better, even with the mess of having to boil them before baking. There isn't much I like better than a big old soft pretzel, so pretzel rolls are where it's at for me. The salt bread is good though - very buttery.

I also made rice this afternoon in preparation for making a crispy rice salad tomorrow. I am very intrigued by the idea of crispy rice salad, but I don't know if I will like it in actuality, even though I like all the components I plan to put in it. (I'd also be more confident if every recipe I look at didn't call for a different type of rice. I made basmati, for the record.) I guess I'll report back tomorrow and how it goes.

And it's been a full day of watching hockey, after a long night of watching hockey last night. It's been exciting, but so much more relaxing since my team isn't in it.

And finally, here is today's poem:

Why You Should Never Marry A Poet
by Heather Bell

Think about it - the way that credit cards, bougainvillea,
vacations, dictionaries, the road on the way to work will

all never be enough. The poet wishes
with her deepest bones
and writes that she wishes
she would have killed you

in the supermarket. She wonders why
she ever loved you in song.

She publishes book after book. Each line detailing
how your hair is ugly and monstrous in the morning. And how,
like moss, you cling to her
so piteously.

But you marry her anyway.
and she looks like a roar of snow
in white. You figure she will read a poem about you
that day in front of everyone: her throat

is, after all, a stamen
or matchstick.

But she is silent, says only the I DO's
and a few Bible verses.

The poet loves with a most violent
heart. What you have not known-
she has wanted to tell you the truth
all of these years,

but grew silent as an old lover does
at eighty. There is no way to say

how one loves the ache of your cracked lips,
the heavy belly of your tongue, the years she spent
feeling not loved,
but still loving. Think about it-

the poet is fearful of others knowing and finding your mouth.

She is frightened of you -
realizing you could have been
loved better or harder
or with real words.

***

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Stars vs Wild intermission

the_shoshanna

Someone may be selling exactly the backpack I want (they're checking if it's a women's style, and whether it's regular or long torso but frankly I'm on the edge of them, I can take either), at a very reasonable price!

But they're in Vancouver, and saying local pickup only. (Also this is on Facebook Marketplace, and I hate Facebook but oh well.)

musesfool

Does anyone know where I can get a Trinity Santos icon? [eta: icon acquired!]

*

Always need some Dorianne Laux during poetry month, so here's today's poem:

Prayer
by Dorianne Laux

Sweet Jesus, let her save you, let her take
your hands and hold them to her breasts,
slip the sandals from your feet, lay your body down
on sheets beaten clean against the fountain stones.
Let her rest her dark head on your chest,
let her tongue lift the hairs like a sword tip
parting the reeds, let her lips burnish
your neck, let your eyes be wet with pleasure.
Let her keep you from that other life, as a mother
keeps a child from the brick lip of a well,
though the rope and bucket shine and clang,
though the water's hidden silk and mystery call.
Let her patter soothe you and her passions
distract you, let her show you the light
storming the windows of her kitchen, peaches
in a wooden bowl, a square of blue cloth
she has sewn to her skirt to cover the tear.
What could be more holy than the curve of her back
as she sits, her hands opening a plum.
What could be more sacred than her eyes,
fierce and complicated as the truth, your life
rising behind them, your name on her lips.
Stay there, in her bare house, the black pots
hung from pegs, bread braided and glazed
on the table, a clay jug of violet wine.
There is the daily sacrament of rasp and chisel,
another chair to be made, shelves to be hewn
cleanly and even and carefully joined
to the sun-scrubbed walls, a sharp knife
for carving odd chunks of wood into small toys
for the children. Oh Jesus, close your eyes
and listen to it, the air is alive with bird calls
and bees, the dry rustle of palm leaves,
her distracted song as she washes her feet.
Let your death be quiet and ordinary.
Either life you choose will end in her arms

*

Current Mood: thoughtful

the_shoshanna

Geoff and I are leaving for the Channel Islands in a week and a half!

Whee! and also 😱

The Channel Islands were the runner-up for choice of destination last year, but we decided to go to Wales instead -- partly because we could do a supported hike there. But the hike turned out to be on the verge of too hard for us; apparently we are several years older than we were the last time we did one, which is just unfair. Anyway, this year we're just going to park ourselves in one place -- well, two places, ten days each on Jersey and Guernsey - and do day hikes out and back. Both islands seem to have good bus systems, so we should generally be able to take a bus to a starting point, hike for *mumble* hours, and catch another bus home. And we'll try to do a day trip to Herm, or maybe Sark, but Herm looks more appealing if we only go to one.

It's a little strange and stressful planning a trip entirely on our own! I mean, we had time on our own in Wales after we finished the supported hike, but we expected to be exhausted, so "eh, we'll just noodle around Aberystwyth and visit the National Library" was plenty of planning. Here, though, I keep trying to research specific hikes we could do, and getting overwhelmed by the confusing and incomplete way info is presented. Like, a site just gives a text list of walks, but I want to see them plotted on a map so I can tell where they are relative to where we're staying. An app tells how to get to the beginning of a hike by bus, but gives no information about what buses can get us home from the end. Another site shows walks on a map but says nothing about how to get to them, so I have to have the walking site, the island's bus route map (very schematic and abstract), and Google Maps open to try to cross-check bus routes and stop locations. After a while I just throw up my hands and hope that the tourist info places will have better info on site.

(Ahahahah, I initially typed "better" as "beer," and, well, yes please, that too.)

We have booked a couple of activities in advance. The seabed slopes very gradually away around the islands, so when the tide goes out it goes waaaaaaay out, and we have booked a three-hour guided walk across the exposed sea floor, which sounds amazing; and the next day we've booked a couple hours of guided sea kayaking around the coastline. Other than that, though, we're winging it!

Well, winging the day-to-day part. We have booked our hotels and our ferry tickets between Jersey and Guernsey in advance, because I don't feel comfortable trying to arrange things like that on the fly. And after our hotel snafu in Aberystwyth, I have made sure to directly contact each hotel with a plausible-sounding query ("we'll be arriving before our room is likely to be ready, would we be able to drop our luggage off?" is always a good one) that translates to "please confirm that you have actually received our reservation and planned for our arrival"! Yes, this wouldn't be a problem if I booked directly instead of going through Booking.com, but the fact is that many hotels don't have direct booking anymore; they outsource it all to third parties like B.c.

And of course there's the ongoing uncertainly about the world's supply of jet fuel. Will we be able to get home? Geoff keeps bringing this question up, and saying we ought to look into our options if there's a problem, but he doesn't come up with anything really actionable. Other than exploring UK-to-CA cruises? But I'm like, there is absolutely nothing we can do to affect the possibility of our being stranded for a bit; if British Airways cancels our flight it will be on them to find us an alternate means of travel; it will still be both faster and cheaper to wait for a new flight than to try to sail across; we are fortunate enough to have the ability to absorb an unexpected extra few nights in a hotel if necessary; sweetie, you are stressed about this and you're dealing with your stress by just venting it in my direction, please stop. I mean, yes, it's a stressful prospect (and I acknowledge that the whole goddamn world is a stressful prospect right now and "what if our vacation in a few days longer and more stressful than planned?" is completely a "diamond shoes gave me a blister" problem), but since there is absolutely nothing we can do I prefer not to spend nervous energy on it, thanks.

Anyway, on top of all that hiking, we want to visit some of the Neolithic passage tombs, and also some of the museums of the Nazi occupation. *shiver* And I plan to eat my own weight in seafood, although Geoff won't join me in that. And maybe we will even lounge about!

musesfool

It's been a few years since I posted some Shakespeare on his birthday, but I am tired so have one of the most famous poems in the Western canon:

Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
By William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

*

I was all excited that it's Thursday, thinking about how there'd be a new episode of The Pitt until I remembered, alas, that there will be no new episodes until next January. Sigh.

I keep meaning to post my thoughts here and not doing it, so in brief, my thoughts on the season 2 finale of The Pitt: ( spoilers )

I guess this sounds like I had a lot of complaints but I really loved this season - I just thought the writing fell down a little sometimes, for some characters.

*

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Get Him Back - Olivia Rodrigo

the_shoshanna

No, not that kind. The hard-to-find kind.

I carry a backpack rather than a shoulderbag, because I like to have my hands free and I don't like the way a shoulderbag can flop down in front of me when I bend forward. Also it's easier to carry a lot in a backpack, which is important for grocery shopping, day hiking, etc. For a decade or more, up until last summer, my everyday carry was a basic Jansport school-type backpack. But while we were in Wales I realized that a) the rain cover I'd put on it was useless (almost lost my passport to water damage, YIKES) and b) it was fraying dangerously thin. Which, after so many years, it was entitled to do! But that has sent me on A Quest.

I'd made do with that basic Jansport for years, but now that I'm exploring options, I have very particular requirements! And I can't find a pack that meets them, argh.

I want a 28- to 32-liter capacity, a proper hip belt, and a flat back so that I can put an iPad or a folder of papers in it, against my own back, without risking them getting bent. (In other words, not a curved-for-ventilation back like this one.) I very much want panel loading rather than top loading, which I find awkward and inconvenient, although I might settle for top loading if everything else were amazingly good. It's hard for me to imagine a really good pack without load lifter straps. And I'd love it to have shoulder straps styled after running vests, with lots of storage, although now we're getting into "I want sparkles on it!" territory.

On the spot in Wales, I bought a pack at a local Trespass store. Its hip belt was reasonably good, but had no storage pockets. It claimed a 30L capacity, but I think it lied; it felt more like 25. And when I bought it I wasn't thinking about the fact that the curved back was going to be a dealbreaker; I didn't have the iPad or a portfolio of papers with me and since it hadn't been an issue with the old Jansport, it didn't occur to me. So when we got home I offloaded it; tried unsuccessfully to sell it and ended up giving it to Geoff, who wants to give it a try.

To replace it, I bought a North Face Surge 2 off Poshmark. It claims a capacity of 32L, but while it has more capacity than the Trespass, it still doesn't feel like 32L. And it's relatively heavy, which isn't great for day hiking. It does have a flat back, but its hip belt, although it exists (and can tuck away when I'm just carrying a light load around town), is fairly minimal, doesn't transfer as much weight as a proper one would, and also has no storage pockets.

So I bought an REI Venturi 30 off Goodwill. It has much better capacity while weighing less, and a good hip belt. I think the torso may be a little short for me, but it's okay. However, the photos I scrutinized online before buying it still misled me; its back is curved. I've bought a storage clipboard to put the iPad and papers in, but it's still a bit of a kludge; it's an awkward thing to pack other things around, and it's a bit flimsy.

Meanwhile I've kept on surfing alllllll the dealer and review sites, looking for my perfect pack. For a while I thought I'd found it in the Osprey Tempest Velocity 30; I love Osprey packs in general (that's what I use as luggage), and this one was where I learned that running-vest-style shoulder straps are a thing and fell in love with the idea. I almost bought it -- but the fact that it's not only top loading but has a stupid little flap over the top, rather than a proper lid, killed it for me. (At least at list price; if I can find a used one going cheap, I might give it a try.)

Then I stumbled on what may actually be my unicorn! The Arc’teryx Aerios 30 looks absolutely amazing and I wants it, precious, I wants it nowwwwwwwwww.

It's discontinued, nobody has it in stock, and I can't find anybody selling a used one. Sigh.

ETA: I swear I didn't see any yesterday, but today there are a handful of them showing on eBay! ...but they are CA$400 and up, not counting any import duties or taxes because they're all coming from the US or Asia, and I'm certainly not paying that much for something I can't return, and possibly not for something I could, since I have a hard time imagining that even this pack is that good. I mean, I paid US$33 for the REI Venturi, and it's acceptable.

musesfool

Today's poem:

Pyrocumulus
by Arthur Sze

Peony shoots rise out of the earth;

at five a.m., walking up the ridge,

I mark how, in April, Orion's left arm

was an apex in the sky, and, by May,

only Venus flickered above the ridge

against the blue edge of sunrise.

In daylight, a pear tree explodes

with white blossoms—no black-

footed ferret slips across my path,

no boreal owl stirs on a branch.

At three a.m., dogs seethed and howled

when a black bear snagged a shriveled

apple off a branch; and, waking out

of a black pool, I glimpsed how

fire creates its own weather

in rising pyrocumulus. Reaching

the ditch, I drop the gate: it's time

for the downhill pipes to fill,

time for bamboo at the house

to suck up water, time to see sunlight

flare between leaves before

the scorching edge of afternoon.

***

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Mets vs Twins on tv

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

musesfool

I logged off yesterday around 4:30 and started the process of making whipped ganache, and as per usual, the amount of time it takes to get the temperature of the ganache down to 75°F is RIDICULOUS even when I put the bowl on the window sill with the window open (there is a screen) and a cold breeze coming in. I guess the one good part about how long it took was that I was able to make and eat dinner in the middle of it, so I didn't have to do the whole thing hungry. Then I loaded those dishes into the dishwasher and started separating eggs to make vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream. And got some yolk in with the whites so had to start over. And then cracked an egg and it was frozen, so unusable for my purposes.

I did eventually get 4 egg whites in a bowl with a cup of sugar and set it over the pot of simmering water so I could whisk it until it heated to 160°F because aside from my own fear of salmonella, the whole point here was to celebrate my pregnant co-worker so I absolutely needed to make sure everything was safe. It's always amazing to me how they double in size as you whisk and heat them and eventually they hit the temp, so I whipped them into stiff peaks (not by hand), which took about twice the amount of time it normally does (physics! always working against me!), but did eventually happen. All was well as I added in the butter, but then I added the vanilla bean paste (gotta have the specks!) and it curdled. So I had to reheat it to melting, chill it, and whip it while adding another 1/4 cup of butter, but it did eventually whip up beautifully. Both frostings piped like a dream, too, since they were not cold. Pics are here. And they were much appreciated by my co-workers! At the end of the day, when I went into the lunchroom to put the leftovers in the fridge, I found someone packing them up to take home. She was like, did you want them? And I was like, no, I was just going to put them in the fridge for tomorrow. I'm pretty sure she did not know I was the person who made them, but that's okay.

Work itself was fine - we spent most of our team meeting eating cupcakes while everyone else talked about their cats - but I was 3/4 of the way there this morning when I realized I'd left my ID badge in my old bag (I got a new bag for work recently, and used it for the first time today, and I think I like it. It is quite large but the strap is the perfect length for a large crossbody, imo), but thankfully they have guest ID cards so I was able to go about my day without interruption. I did make myself a note to remember my ID card next month when I go in. (well, unless there is a LIRR strike, but there probably won't be.)

***

Today's poem:

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

—Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love, 2002.

***

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: switching btwn the Mets and the hockey

pauraque

We are going out of town for spring break! I expect to be back on Sunday. 🏖️

pauraque

This is the first part of my book club notes on This All Come Back Now, an anthology of speculative fiction by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors. I was glad to see that the introduction included the editor's thoughts about each piece (something that has been lacking in some of the anthologies we've read). The editor says that Aboriginal authors of SF have have historically had more success publishing their work as literary fiction than in SF outlets, suggesting a disconnect between white and Indigenous understandings of what "speculative" looks like. They point out, for example, that a time travel story may look very different through a cultural lens that doesn't see time as entirely linear in the first place.

The editor also says that they solicited several stories for the collection from writers who had never written SF before. Perhaps it is unfair that my reaction was to brace myself; I'll strive to be open minded. (It was also pointed out in the discussion that the Indigenous population of Australia is pretty small, so the pool of potential authors may not have been as deep as the editor might have wished.)

Some group members were not thrilled to learn that the book includes some excerpts from novels. We've run into this before and it tends to frustrate our purpose as a discussion group because we end up having the same conversation over and over, which is just "this didn't feel complete... because it isn't complete." The first three pieces we read are actual short stories, though!

"Muyum, a Transgression" by Evelyn Araluen (2017)

( A ghost travels the ruins of the world, finding that what seemed dead can come back. )

"Clatter Tongue" by K.A. Ren Wyld (2020)

[Note: The book lists this story under the author's former name Karen Wyld.]

( A grieving girl literally vomits the detritus of colonization when she is threatened. )

"Closing Time" by Samuel Wagan Watson (2020)

( In the early days of covid, a man wanders aimlessly. )

jenab

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

musesfool

There was some good hockey over the weekend, though given some of the match-ups, I am rooting for teams I have never rooted for before. It's very disconcerting! I mean, some of it is just, I guess I hate this team less than that team (e.g., Pens vs Flyers, and I guess it's cool that Crosby is making what may be his final Cup run but ugh, Pittsburgh; otoh, the only thing the Flyers have going for them is Gritty, and that is not enough, considering everything else about them) or I hate this team so much more than I hate that team (I am rooting for Montreal, my friends. The Habs! I don't even know who I am anymore! But Ryan McDonagh notwithstanding, I do not like the Bolts at all). And as much as I'd like to see Kreider win (a hilarious rebuke to Drury and Dolan), I can't root for Joel Quenneville (and also Anaheim is not making a run).

In some cases, the choice is easy (I still have not forgiven the Kings for 2012 and I have a fondness for the Avs; I root for Dallas because of

angelgazing, and also because while I'd love to see Mats Zuccarello win a Cup, Bill Guerin can go fuck himself, as can VGK and Carter Hart, so Mammoth all the way, there - plus the ZAMMOTH (or the Mammboni, if you're nasty)).

Overall, I would like to see Buffalo win it all, and I enjoyed their game, but if it has to be a Canadian team, at this point, I would pick Montreal over Ottawa (disqualified due to Brady Tkachuk) or Edmonton (ugh, McDavid's vibes are rancid, imo). At least I like Martin St. Louis, and their kids seem fun and their game was also entertaining.

And as I said on bsky last night, Henrik Lundqvist looked like an ANGEL in his silver suit. He just gets more handsome every time I see him. *dreamy sigh*

Anyway!

Today's poem:

White Noise
by Alice Pettway

I ordered silence online,
from the makers

of that robot vacuum,
the one that terrifies cats.

They claim it will ricochet
through my life, siphoning

the mewling of the computer
in its dark cubby, the shiver

of leaves, even the snap of fish beaks
against coral, the air conditioner

accelerating endlessly
around its distant track.

I asked customer support
if there was an attachment

to suck the cacophony
out of my head. For this,

I said, I would pay extra,
whatever they asked, really.

No response came.
I lay on the rug. The machine

ran along my legs, the side
of my face. I imagined

as loudly as possible, waiting
for the indicator to switch on,

for the whir and pinch of suction.
The room is quiet now.

Even the stuffing in the couch
does not exhale beneath my weight.

*

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Piano Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 11 - Frederic Chopin

musesfool

I realize I never followed up on the vanilla cupcakes and they did stay moist for 4 days in an airtight container and didn't get that weird texture where you can tell they're going bad, nor did they dry out, so. A++ on the hot milk method. So I am making them today, as well as my favorite chocolate cupcake recipe (it is actually a cake recipe but it makes 40 mini cupcakes as written) and then tomorrow I will make whipped ganache for the vanilla and vanilla Swiss meringue buttercream for the chocolate, and bring them to work on Tuesday, since one of my attorneys is pregnant, and this is likely the last time she'll be in the office with us until the fall. She was all, "no need to make a fuss!" but my boss was like, "Cupakes? :D :D :D" so of course, I was also like, "Cupcakes! :D :D :D"

*

Today's poem:

Mother, Kitchen
By Ouyang Jianghe
(Translated from the Chinese by Austin Woerner )

Where the immemorial and the instant meet, opening and distance appear.
Through the opening: a door, crack of light.
Behind the door, a kitchen.

Where the knife rises and falls, clouds gather, disperse.
A lightspeed joining of life and death, cut
in two: halves of a sun, of slowness.

Halves of a turnip.
A mother in the kitchen, a lifetime of cuts.
A cabbage cut into mountains and rivers,
a fish, cut along its leaping curves,
laid on the table
still yearning for the pond.

Summer's tofu
cut into premonitions of snow.
A potato listens to the onion-counterpoint
of the knife, dropping petals at its strokes:
self and thing, halves of nothing
at the center of time.
Where gone and here meet, the knife rises, falls.

But this mother is not holding a knife.

What she has been given is not a knife
but a few fallen leaves.
The fish leaps over the blade from the sea
to the stars. The table is in the sky now,
the market has been crammed into the refrigerator,
and she cannot open cold time.

***

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Mets vs Cubs on tv

pauraque

In the decade between the original SimCity (1989) and The Sims (2000), Maxis released an interesting variety of life simulation games on different scales, many of which are now largely forgotten in the shadows of their two juggernaut cousins. Coming close on the heels of the macro-scale SimEarth: The Living Planet (1990), lead designer Will Wright zoomed way down into the weeds to bring us SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991).

popup describes ant castes over a map of an underground nest

While you can learn a lot about real life systems from many of the early Maxis games, SimAnt leans more educational than most. You'll learn how ants forage, communicate, build and defend the nest, and produce new queens to found more colonies. Then you'll apply your knowledge to defeat and eliminate enemy ants, spread across the back yard, and invade the house until the homeowner gives up and moves away. It's a good time!

( More on SimAnt [content warning: talking spiders] )

You can play SimAnt in your browser, though the performance is sluggish. Running it in DOSBox is a little better.

musesfool

Today's poem:

A Certain Kind of Eden
by Kay Ryan

It seems like you could, but you can't go back and pull
the roots and runners and replant.
It's all too deep for that.
You've overprized intention,
have mistaken any bent you're given
for control. You thought you chose
the bean and chose the soil.
You even thought you abandoned
one or two gardens. But those things
keep growing where we put them—
if we put them at all.
A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.
Even the one vine that tendrils out alone
in time turns on its own impulse,
twisting back down its upward course
a strong and then a stronger rope,
the greenest saddest strongest
kind of hope.

*

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: At the Beach, In Every Life - Gigi Perez

lizvogel

Two days ago, we were watching the water pour through the tunnel the muskrats have cut through the berm, and that we haven't gotten around to fixing like we should have. Yesterday it ceased to matter, because the flood waters topped the berm. Today at least was sunny and nice, so I could look out at the lake we now live on the shore of.

The house is on a small rise, so we're okay as long as it doesn't get any worse, but another couple inches and we'll have to seriously consider sandbagging the AC compressor. The sump pump's been running basically non-stop.

The most annoying thing is that the grass really needs to be mowed, and even the few parts that aren't underwater are far too soggy to do anything with.

Current Mood: there is no "wet" mood icon
Current Music: many, many, many crickets

musesfool

Just woke up from an unexpected 2 hour nap, so thoughts on The Pitt finale will have to wait. Here's today's poem:

Materials for a Gravestone Rubbing

I have long wanted to be starlight in spring
and the late snow that lingers there, coming down
at Harpers Ferry over the river or gathered
on a windowsill on third street in Brooklyn
when I was twenty-two — the potpourri
of sky the wind carries after a storm.
The gray darkening on a far ridge. If you are reading this
there is still a way. I can take your smooth palm in mine
and lead you toward a distant city and a night
when you were on the mountain and dreaming of the other world
and we can walk together past the pre-war homes
converted now to low-rent apartments for college students
or workers come in from long days on a road crew,
coveralls draped over the backs of kitchen chairs
and the light swaying just so. We can go on —
along the cracked sidewalks above the train tracks
that can't exist again even as the grasses come up between them
and look through a fog and a single pair of headlights
making definite beams in the material cold.
No moonlight to get netted up in on the surface of the water
no traffic at this hour just the scraps of paper blown
into gutters and the electric hum of streetlights,
a few voices, which almost walk like footfall down alleys
overgrown with briars and creeping vines, their crude
latticework against the brick and the exhale
of a bartender on a smoke break and the smoke
which still drifts. Now it must be all worn through
but then it was barely remarkable though I stop
to look back at the homes and at snow melt on roads
the flat glitter on the black road, the moiré pattern
yet to be captured by language — and for a minute believe
in something as my stepfather believed in the smell of fire
whenever he left in the middle of the night
and returned before dawn and spoke to no one, didn’t
wake anyone up. Sometimes I feel that alone,
that pure, as if looking back at myself
through the scrim of time and you are there
standing in our kitchen at this hour and I can almost
hear you and the first singing caught-up there in the back
of your throat. Lately I've stopped worrying about the end.
Each day my hand is smaller on your shoulders. New birds
still return and the hillsides green all around, the stars
have traveled over the horizon and in the blink
of an eye you are here — grape-vine charcoal in your hand;
little hyphen I have become.

--Matthew Wimberley

*

Current Mood: sleepy

pauraque

While collecting the necessary materials for my Le Guin reading project, I found she had a story which appeared only in the 1973 anthology Clarion III. This was a product of the 1972 Clarion Workshop, an annual six-week course for aspiring speculative fiction writers, taught by a rotating slate of guest instructors. Le Guin was a Clarion instructor that year, and while most of the instructors contributed essays on writing or on the workshop itself, she instead wrote a story.

Since I'd bothered to acquire the book, I figured I'd read the whole thing. But I took my time about it since Le Guin's story didn't seem important to the general arc of her career, though obviously it's significant that her stature had grown to the point where she was invited to teach. So although my reading of her work has progressed in the meantime to 1979 (and will continue from there if the person who currently has The Language of the Night checked out ever returns it to the library!!) we're going to take a short trip back to 1973 here.

Le Guin's story "The Ursula Major Construct; or, A Far Greater Horror Loomed" is a fictionalized version of an exercise she gave the students, using them as the characters and reimagining the whole thing as a SF experiment. I guess in reality she built a mobile out of found objects (the titular construct) and told the class to write about it. I'm sure her story was amusing to the people who were there, but out of context I found it impenetrable. (And hold that thought, because I'm gonna circle back to it.)

As for the student stories, I liked a handful of them, but most were either not to my taste, or seemed underdeveloped in some way, or were so steeped in 1970s gender politics and/or sophomoric "dirty joke" humor that the generation gap was too wide for me to cross. To be fair, these are student stories, but none of them sent me running to look for the authors' later work.

( discussion of selected works )

( full list of included works )

musesfool

Almost forgot to post!

Shoulders
by Naomi Shihab Nye

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.

We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

*

Current Mood: tired

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yahtzee

January 2014

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Page Summary

musesfool - how one loves the ache of your cracked lips
the_shoshanna - Do I know anyone in Vancouver?
musesfool - Either life you choose will end in her arms
the_shoshanna - I never said why I want a better backpack
musesfool - But thy eternal summer shall not fade
the_shoshanna - ISO a unicorn backpack
musesfool - fire creates its own weather
mark in dw_maintenance - Search maintenance
musesfool - a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes
pauraque - out of office
pauraque - This All Come Back Now, ed. Mykaela Saunders (2022) [part 1]
jenab - Rollercoaster weather
musesfool - they claim it will ricochet through my life
musesfool - halves of nothing at the center of time
pauraque - SimAnt: The Electronic Ant Colony (1991)
musesfool - the greenest saddest strongest kind of hope
lizvogel - Anybody got a spare ark?
musesfool - Lately I've stopped worrying about the end.
pauraque - Clarion III: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (1973)
musesfool - the rain will never stop falling

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