Today and I are friends.

There is some kind of whispered magic going on today. I can smell it, but I can't taste it, like the flavorings in those fruit-waters Glaceau used to make (my favorite, Lemon-Cucumber, is long discontinued).

Like an egg, today's secrets are hidden beneath a bland exterior that is both stronger and weaker than it looks. And, my, are those insides nourishing.

I glow with the diffuse celebrations of tiny victories (like making the bed) and brilliant moments of beauty (like watching Reagan take his shirt off and do pull-ups).



I was worried I didn't have any old poems to post today that would fit my tone and mood (without requiring a ton of work), but then I found this one. It reminds me of my room in San Marocs, and how carefree and joyful the days I spent there were.

Courtship

I left your heart in san diego
then God fell in the sink
I listen to the sunset
and it tells me what to think
remind me not to wash this coat
before it starts to rain
and tell my mom to make that soup
then pour it down the drain

you go rolling in wild pastures
caught up in a great laugh
shake the trees and scold the moon
sayin' they watch you in the bath
I'll chase you round her silly world
and deeply through the night
but even if I catch you up
I can never do you right

bRAdburY

1.
I finished Fahrenheit 451 a few days ago and haven't posted about it yet. Maybe that's for the best; a couple extra days gives me more time to turn it over in my mind.

It was never assigned reading in school, so for many years the bulk of my understanding of the book was "it's about burning books". Some time during my year in Savannah I read an article about Ray Bradbury which discussed, among other things, his take on F451. That take being that to him the book is more about technology's effect on humans, not burning books. After doing my own sit-down with it, I have to say that I don't see how anyone could say it is about book burning.

The main lesson I took from Fahrenheit 451 was the value of giving your brain time to idle. It's something I need to remind myself to do every so often. I struggle to get so many things absorbed, so many things done. It's easy for me to lose sight of the benefits of slowing down and daydreaming. With a sketchbook or notebook near by, of course, but in releasing myself from obligation to them I allow my mind to make new connections and go new places.


2.
In middle school, I think, we watched a video one day that touched me deeply. It told the story of a class of school children living on some gray, gloomy, and perpetually overcast planet. Only one girl has ever been on Earth, and she is the only one who has seen sunshine and all the wonderful things it does. The plot unfolds around rumors that there is going to be a little bit of sun on this rain-soaked planet.

I didn't know until a week ago that the short film was based on Bradbury's short story All Summer in a Day (full story text).

Even better (for my nostalgia), the short is on YouTube in three parts.

The story is more nihilistic than the video. Today I wonder for the first time if there's a tiny sliver of Plato's Cave in the story.


3.
I love Ray Bradbury's writing style so much it makes me want to scream sometimes. The stories are great, and well adapted to film, but his wordsmithing is incredibly in line with my own quirk. What gives it so much life, to me, is the aspects of metaphor and imagery that can't be translated to visual media. I have a list of (children's) stories I'd like to adapt into comics/graphic novels, and while I'd love to honor Bradbury's work in that way, so much of what makes it special to me would be lost. I'll illustrate it, though. I'll illustrate the heck out of it. :)

A couple examples from All Summer:

The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.
...
It was a nest of octopi, clustering up great arms of flesh-like weed, wavering, flowering this brief spring...
...
A boom of thunder startled them and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumbled upon each other and ran.

So much love for that. Bradbury's writing is an inspiration. Because he writes the way I think, it gives me confidence that I have the potential to be a good and successful writer.


4.
In closing, some of my favorite Bradbury quotes. I don't agree with him on a lot of topics beyond life, philosophy, and the arts, but sometimes those are enough.

All that stuff that's collected up in my head -- poetry and mythology and comic strips and science fiction magazines -- comes out in my stories. So you get to a certain age and you're like a pomegranate, you just burst. And the ideas spill out.

Bonus points for the mention of a pomegranate there. :)

First you jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.

is growing on me.

A new find:

I have two rules in life - to hell with it, whatever it is, and get your work done

And my most favorite of all, words I try to live by:

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.

X.
That was fun. I should read more books so I can do it more often.

I'm going to do something scold-worthy, but Mr. Ray inspired me (guess how!), and I, personally, need it.

to hell with it (whatever it is)

.
looking over
creation
without
comprehension

.
when my face
was hidden,
insincere

.
screaming
screaming into
a favorite pillow

.
abruptly
shaken out of
deep meditation.

.
in the kitchen
waiting for tea
giving up

.
bawled through snot
and hot tears
against his chest

.
under my breath
a final
invisible
resolution

Aaaah.



(ooooo! ;D )

Three-Quarters View

Three down, one to go. Next week is my last chance to be in the classroom with my mom's students, teaching drawing. Usually I have thirty minutes, but today I only had 20 due to some sort of clerical error.

I'm slightly disappointed in today's experience because the kids didn't get to draw much. The lesson was on drawing heads and faces. The bulk of it was demonstrating four main points:

+ Circle for the skull
+ Angular line for the jaw
+ Equator of the circle for eyes/ears
+ Longitudinal line for nose-direction and symmetry

... then having each kid come up to the whiteboard and identify those things. They traced those key parts on an image projected onto up the board.

Another fun moment was having them feel the spherical shapes of their heads, and how the jawbone connects to the cranium under the ear. Other than the drawing on the board, they didn't get a chance to practice what I was trying to teach.

The rest of the day was a stressful disappointment, except for spending a few minutes with my dad. He's having cataract surgery tomorrow. I've talked to him more in the past 2 days than in the previous couple months. He's the silent type. :)

So some drawing:



And an old-ish poem. Appropriate because I wrote it on an early date with Reagan under the influence of Strongbow, and tonight we had Guinness with our Lilo and Stitch. And I'm sleepy.

Preparing for Sleep


We reach through the bottle and into the past
wagering how long the feeling will last.
Cold comes to batter the bones of my keep
but the soul is warm, the roots are deep.

I love the simplicity of it. Remind me to tell you about Bradbury tomorrow.

When it was time for urgency
I did not act accordingly
Now it's time to say goodnight
but still I'm here and still I write

Tomorrow is my next-to-last session with the drawing kids. After Reagan and I came home from our evening out, I didn't start putting together the pamphlet quickly enough (although I knew what my plan was), and now I'm more than an hour late for bed (though hardly tired).

HOT DAMN

Next week we'll do perspective! If I go Wednesday or Thursday, they'll have gingerbread houses to draw. Rock on.

Another good day, though not productive as I'd like it to be. Too much time spent daydreaming about possibilities outside my control.

The poem today's offering is based on was written in high school, and I was so incredibly proud of it. It was one of mine that made it into the school's literary magazine. I remember we had a hard time laying out that page because the poem is a diptych... or whatever poetry word there is for two columns of poem side by side.

Recall

She says, "Broken."
Then after a pause

asks me what
I remember.


She says, "Red,"
and waits

for me to say
if, behind my
veiled eyes,
I see the autumn
forest, or that
violated house
that used to be
a rosy home.


"Yes," I say,
noting the color
inside my eyelids.

... and more drawings. Today I did better at doodling in a bookstore cafe. Probably because I never want to spend money at Borders, but I'm always anxious to browse at B&N.

Racy, edgy, extreme, late night edition.

DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT DRAFT.

Newlywed

i.
So deeply wanting
this moment
--captured--
to go perfectly
on and on.

Take hold of this memory,
cast it into columns
and save it for
decades to come.


ii.
Home from the grocery store we begin working,
sharing the stove and the sink.
I hand you an open bottle of Guinness.
We pause twice--in tandem--to drink.

I at my chopping block, you at your oven,
ready our meals for the next week.
Between drying the spinach and baking potatoes,
sniffs and spoons of the dishes, we sneak.

Past midnight in the kitchen, tangling hands
as we stand hip to hip to stir the curry.
Soon we'll seal the food and scrub clean the counters
but I, for one, am in no hurry.

May I repeat "first draft"?

I'm still not sure what's going on within part 2. Or part one, for that matter. Mismatched shoes. I am childishly fond of having a meta section and a concrete details section. Drrrrrraaaafft!

--

Earlier today I got super lucky and accidentally bought The Muppets: A Green and Red Christmas album on mp3 for $0.99. I think the offer expired soon after that. I'm not usually one for Christmas music, but it's the MUPPETS.

I said I bought it "accidentally"... When Amazon says "Buy this with 1-Click!(r)", they are not kidding about the "one click" part. Learning experience!

--

Deciding the Next Decider: The 2008 Presidential Race in Rhyme. Need I say more?

Calvin Trillin (author) on The Daily Show and NPR.

--

Reagan and I hit a budget goal today, so we promptly went out and spent a bunch of money so we can hit that goal again next paycheck.

. . .

That amuses me. (And isn't really true.)

Observing the people in a grocery store after 10pm in the suburbs is fun, especially the couples. A lady and her man-friend who walked in behind us were joking around about one of them being a hooker and what different pay rates entitles the buyer to. "Seventy dollars for special requests" is a phrase that sticks out in my memory.

After coming home, Reagan and I talked for a while before even getting out of the car, then brought our bounty inside and spent a couple hours in the kitchen together, something that doesn't happen often enough. The poem is pretty accurate. I wrote bits and pieces in my head while washing the rice, then other bits and pieces while cleaning up the rice cooker. Sharing the kitchen--any kitchen--with him is the kind of memory most precious to me. I want to affix as many as I can as many ways as I can. Poetry is just one I hadn't gotten around to yet.

When it's really late and R and I are out of our room, it almost feels like we have the house to ourselves.

Twofer

Today started alright, if a bit late. I had the best intentions of making up for yesterday's epic headache with an early post, some writing, a good bout of drawing, and other productive things.

I ended up spending most of the day chasing my tail. But did do token amounts of writing and drawing.

Here's somethings for yesterday:

Tasteless

Living in a half-baked world
built of gingerbread,
a person only ever finds
an oven for a bed.

Hospitals are bakeries,
they have drives for dough;
when you loose your cookie head,
that is where to go.

Sugar, spice, molasses
make both girls and boys,
frosting is their clothing,
candies are their toys.

We're having Gramps for supper,
'cause Grandma was for tea,
and if you are not tasteful,
that's immortality!

Gingerbread is my traditional holiday treat, passed down from my mother. When I was a kid she had these parties where she would make a gingerbread house for each kid in the neighborhood. All the kids would come over to our house with bags of candy and we'd make a day of decorating them. Now she makes a gingerbread house for each student in her class, and in the good years I mail boxes of cookies to friends. I wrote a storytelling game about gingerbread men, too.



For today, I offer poetry and image combined into one. Pushed some digital paint around with my beloved Kojak for company.

Up out of habit

It's been a long day. It started early with a nice breakfast of eggs, toast, and tea with my husband, even though he's not feeling amazing.

Session four of talking to kids about drawing went pretty well. The mass of the class has been weeded down to six or so girls. While I'm sad that I failed to engage the ones who aren't showing up any more, short sessions mean that I have to give a targeted lesson, which has a narrow scope of interest. If you're not interested in learning anatomy, there's not much I can do.

Hm. Focus on the good things. To go along with the torso references I had printed in the handouts that I whipped up last night, I projected a few on the whiteboard and had a few of them step up and practice locating the skull, ribcage, and shoulder line of the references by tracing them on the whiteboard. There was also a cool moment of teaching how the collarbone indicates what someone's shoulders are doing.

The biggest struggle is getting them to find the sweet spot of sketching fast to achieve line control and drawing slow to achieve line accuracy.

I always feel like I'm drawing poorly around them. My demo drawings are usually done while I'm talking and also working fast because time is so limited. But I feel like they're awful and don't properly illustrate what I'm trying to convey. BLEH.

Got home, tried to restart my day by doing some reading that I hoped would turn into a nap. It didn't, but I found the passage of past continuous that I've been waiting for.

Waiting is the wrong word. It implies that I needed or expected it to happen, neither of which are true. Even if the whole book had passed without something like this particular scene occurring, I wouldn't count it as a waste of time. Shabtai's style is, without a doubt, an acquired taste. I'm glad I've acquired it, but even without me adapting to his rambling style, I would have seen the scene of Israel and his roommate's lady friend throwing a knife at the wooden board as beautiful. It is at risk of falling into my own personal trope of "every emotion leads to sex", and also does nothing to buck the trend of nobody in the book being both happy and faithful, but I still enjoyed it. After reading the passage once, I immediately thought "this needs to be a poem" and wrote down the concept and the page number on a sticky note.

Maybe I should have taken a stab at it then. I'm sure not in the mood now. But I give this rhyme some effort and time...

what moves?


Outside my window
small ones dwell
between the leaves
and in the well.

Sometimes they dance
while I do sleep;
more oft in dreams
I hear them weep.

They curse the caging
garden wall
each time winds bring
the wild's call.

I mourn with them:
I have roots, too,
but I can hide
from freedom's view.

There, I found the energy to double the size! And I avoided referring to the sky as blue! Twice the victory.

Between reading my book and reaching this point of stretching my brain, I discovered another season of CSI:NY on Netflix, sorted a couple thousand files, and eked out some pages of drawing in my sketchbook, including prelim doodles for one of those opportunities I've been considering.

This is not those doodles (but the bird in the upper right is one of my favorite things right now):



Oh, that reminds me to share this mind-blowing-ly bizarre music video.

Eeeek!

Today was very stressful. Except for that part where I was running errands alone for a few hours. That was only slightly stressful. (The errand-running wasn't stressful, my overall level of anxiety was just lower.)

I have zero confidence in the classroom. But I'm going back anyways, at least tomorrow. =\

In a strange way, if I had made up my mind on what to teach three hours earlier, or six hours earlier, or one hour earlier than I did, it would not have lowered my stress level. The only reason I'll be able to sleep is because I ran out of seconds to second guess.

Now look at photographs (scans) of the good old days...




And listen to music of the good old times...

Not exactly feel-good poetry today, but the music it was written to [youtube] makes me feel good, in a cathartic, melancholy kind of way. Don't watch the video. It's really creepy (huge eyes on real people) and is not at all what I imagine listening to the song.

The Longest Night

I think of the date we never took,
the time we never went to France.
The day was hot
but night came quickly;
the sun spied us sitting together
and could not set fast enough.
He pulled the warmth down into the sea.

You saw my sweater,
offered to hold it.
I wanted to be so immodest.
I wanted my shivers to draw you closer,
my sweater forgotten.
But I wrapped myself to stay warm.

It was the longest night.

I remember the cafe we dined in
and the story I told you there
Both were tinged with longing for the Old World.

The walls were painted with nostalgia
and I saw the matron
standing by the door
Lost in thought, lost in memories
lost memories.
Her hair looked like and exhausted sunrise,
the sunrise in my story.

I spun a tale about a place I'd never been
but we both longed for.
Your eyes, your smile
took us to the castles, courtyards, queens.
The danger, the intrigue,
the gardens with tame swans.

I said words
you gave them light.
Our soup grew cold.

It was the longest night.

*marks it as "revisit more"*

I can't ignore tomorrow

Great day of drawing today. It's about all I did for six or seven hours. The rest of my time was spent in a haze, trying to recover from the mental exertion of drawing for such a prolonged period of time. I'm sadly out of practice with the marathons.

Here's one page hot off the scanner:

A Public Service Announcement

When the world sends a message
it will use a postage stamp
and deliver through the mail,
unless you are a tramp
avoiding the whole system,
in which case it sends a fax.
But when the world sends a message
it's not important, so relax!

A few awkward lines directly from my period of demi-absurdism.

I wasn't even thinking that positive

Oddly enough, today ends on a note much more familiar than I have hummed in a week or more. (Drawing!)

On the topic of positive thinking (or not doing so intentionally, and still having things to smile about), two opportunities have come my way in the last two days. One is short term and you'll hear about that next week. One is longer term and more tentative. The latter involves trying my hand at screenprinting. Two exciting projects I don't want to jinx.

Here is a brief photo essay about the 30 hours I was gone. A few more in the Flickr set










In the interest of keeping things chronological, in this gap of time I wrote today's poem.

Foraging

Merlot in hand
I stumble
into the rain-soaked grove
guided in circles
by birdsong

I marvel
at fading remnants
of the citrus crop

when high heels
betray me
mud on flannel pants
chilly earth to skin
I abandon
my search for yesterday's
memories

I follow the rooster back
to pick up
where last night left off

Some commentary below




More here at Flickr

The above poem is a high context daydream based on reality. Odd relationship with linebreaks in this one. I wish I could end that one line with "yesterday" and somehow indicate the possessive right before "memories". Or is that trite? What keeps me from shortening it to merely "yesterday" is sentimental attachment to the context that inspired the poem.

Last of all, a good old fashioned scannie:

Nervous + tired = bad!

Early last week I talked to my mom about doing a drawing workshop for her class, then spent several hours writing an outline. I didn't hear back, so I reminded her a few days ago and she told me it had slipped her mind and she needed to clear it with her principal. Yesterday around 11pm my mom asks if I can come do my first session today or Thursday.

We start discussing the bigger and smaller questions I have about what to expect, and what schedules look like daily, weekly, and for the rest of the year. As I haven't been around 5th grade kids.... since I was in elementary school... I decide that I should use one session to acclimate myself, like leaving a new fish in the bag when you first put it in the aquarium so the water temperatures can equalize. Except me and 11 year olds.

As there's no school next week (they get a long Thanksgiving holiday!) it means two full weeks between the first session and the second. With each session only being 30 minutes, my expectations of retention are low.

Short story long, I decided to use both Wednesday and Thursday to make my impression. That left me with under 12 hours to prepare and made my classroom debut coincide with my projected bedtime. Hijinx ensue.

In reality it was more like, stress induced mood-swings ensued.

I spent much of the first 8 hours trying to calm down and concoct an elegant plan to both pitch my workshop to the class at large in the 10 minutes before their lunch break and fill the 30 minutes of time we'd have for chatting.

Needless to say, there have been few opportunities in my day to do my own drawing, polish up today's poem, or write tomorrow's hand out. Well, after some yoga and a shower, I will be drawing before going to school.

Despite how neurotic I feel right now, I think this project is going to be good for me over the next few weeks.



With poem posting, I wanted to start with revising the old stuff that had potential or posting stuff that induced painful laughter. But, again, today didn't go as planned, so here's some ars poetica I meant to post when my site was down. It probably needs a little more tweaking. It belongs to a hypothetical chapbook called "A Self-Aware Collection". This all happened before I learned about the term "ars poetica".


Sentience

I start blank
with no dimension
then a dot
and then a line
a paragraph
a rounded thought
then I expand
to take up time

But that is
my last performance
can't turn a phrase
save plane or face
no back up trick
no animation
a fritter of time
a filling of space

No annotations
lines and arrows
strings to make me
dance and sing
I lack allusions
uncolored, unshaded
Do I lose depth
with history?