Month: July 2016

General

3 Day 3 Quote Challenge – Day 2

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Thanks again to Paul – wwwpalfitness for nominating me. 🙂

Three quotes for three days

And once again, I will simply invite those who visit this post to participate in the challenge if they would find it interesting to do so.

When I decided to take on this quote challenge, I knew that I wanted to focus on poetry in looking for quotes to feature. That led me to my own collection of poetry books and gave me a chance to revisit some old favorites. One of the books I pulled off the shelf was The New Naked Poetry, an anthology published in 1976 which features some fine poets. Two of them, Peter Everwine and Philip Levine, were actually professors of mine when I attended college at California State University, Fresno many years ago. My original intent had been to include some quotes from their work. But then I noticed something. Of the 26 poets included in this anthology, only three are women. Now that may have something to do with the focus on naked poetry which is loosely defined as poetry without adornment – no formal structure, no rhyme, etc. But I suspect it may also have something to do with the time period in which the volume was published. In any case, I decided to include one quote from each of the three women for this post.

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General

Some Days Are Like That

Some Days

Well, yesterday I had another day of not feeling so well followed by a night of not sleeping so well. Today I do feel much better but very, very tired. By today, I had hoped to be finished up with the three day, three quote challenge as well as having a new piece of short fiction to post. There’s always tomorrow. As they say.

Since I know I’ll get sucked into the DNC coverage tonight, I’m going to stop worrying about trying to get caught up more here until tomorrow morning. See you all in the new morning!

 

General

3 Day 3 Quote Challenge – Day 1

Roethke

Thanks to Paul – wwwpalfitness for nominating me. 🙂

Here are the rules that I copied:
Three quotes for three days

Three nominees each day(no repetition)

Thank the person who nominated you.

Inform the nominees.

Since I think some of my contacts have previously participated in this challenge (or one similar) and am unsure if some of the others would like to, I am going to depart from the nominees rule and simply invite those who visit this post to participate in the challenge if they would find it interesting to do so.

Today I am featuring quotes from the poetry of Theodore Roethke, specifically his poem Meditations of an Old Woman. You can read more about him here.

1. How can I rest in my days of slowness?
I’ve become a strange piece of flesh,
Nervous and cold, bird-furtive, whiskery,
With a cheek soft as a hound’s ear.
What’s left is light as a seed;
I need an old crone’s knowing.

2. In my grandmother’s inner eye,
So she told me when I was little,
A bird always kept singing.
She was a serious woman.

3. I see a shape, lighted with love,
Light as a petal falling upon stone.
From the folds of my skin, I sing,
The air still, the ground alive,
The earth itself a tune.

 

 

General

You Know You’re Feeling Better When…

Early this week, I knew I’d be somewhat busy with family activities and had planned to get back to blogging again on Thursday. Well, things did not go as planned. I developed chills mid-morning on Thursday along with a loss of appetite.Then woke up with a sore throat on Friday to go with the chills and no desire for food. I think I ate three total bites of some leftover pasta on Friday. Yesterday was an improvement but still not great. So basically, I did nothing but lay in bed, watch TV and periodically check into Facebook for those three days. Today?

You know you’re feeling better when you wake up hungry and actually feel like taking a shower.

You know you’re feeling better when Mimi dog lies peacefully on the sofa after a leisurely walk to the park instead of looking mournful after being hustled around the block by her ailing mom.

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General, Photo Art

Still Life

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I ran across an article not too long ago that talked about people who are happier living alone. These are not people who hate other people. They have close friendships. They even have intimate, sometimes romantic, relationships. But at the end of the day, they prefer to go home to their own little corner of the world, to embrace solitude. I am one of those people.

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Photo Art

Women in Art I

One of the things I like to do when visiting museums, galleries and other places where art is on display is to take photos of art pieces where women are the primary subjects. I find it interesting to see how different artists have portrayed women. These images are all of paintings and posters at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach, FL. I cropped them to remove frames and other extraneous details so that the focus is on the women. It’s always interesting to note how most of the earlier art pieces were created by men and to ask ourselves how the male perspective has served to shape our vision of women in art. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way but more as another observation about the patriarchal nature of our history and culture.

Absinthe Robette by Henri Privat-Livemont – 1896

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Fiction, Short Stories

Once Upon a Train…

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The train slowly gathered speed as it pulled away from the station. The sound of the wheels rattling against the tracks was something she found soothing. It established a kind of rhythm that, at least momentarily, drew her thoughts away from what she was leaving behind. From what had happened there.

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Nonfiction

Flower Child

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My original concept for this self-portrait was more of a hippy-dippy-let-your-inner-child-free-to-romp thing. Then this last week happened. More young black men gunned down by police for no apparent reason, police officers falling victim to sniper fire in Dallas, the ongoing BLM protests amid hyperbolic and untrue rhetoric about their “violent” motives, the over-aggressive police reaction to protesters across the country. And I haven’t even touched on other news. With all this going on, I wasn’t even sure if I had a voice anymore or, if I did, what I wanted to say. Then last night I was thinking about an article I’d read that compared what is happening in our country today to what was happening in 1968. I decided to go ahead and do this self-portrait with less of a staged costume effect and with a different focus in the narrative.

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General, Photo Art

Attitude!

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When I was child, I remember having a great deal of freedom. I don’t mean that just in the sense of being able to spend a lot of time reading or wandering through the woods across the road from our house. I also mean it in the sense that being a girl was only one minor aspect of my existence and experience rather than being the thing that defined me as an individual.

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