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A micro story.
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Skipper, Barbie’s sister
Skipper counts as a Barbie.
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Featuring 3 Gals’ Take on Rats
Enough said. I remain enamored of the word commensal, but rats are synanthropes. They are kleptoparasites. They are pests. They are vectors and direct zoonotic carriers.
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Post Metric
Do metrics matter?
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A post about rats to expand your vocabulary
A post about musophobia, from which I have, since, recovered.
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Ten Minutes
In retrospect, we spoiled her.
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Vignettes
I’m happy to say the nights haven’t felt too large in a long long time.
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New shoes (100 word story)
It’s ok to need love.
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Not to write
Let me see . . .
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An unfinished letter helps
Beginning of some fiction.
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To my son.
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A Space to Write
What turned out to be a premonition.
Starting some fiction.
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A woman in an attic
Part one of some fiction.
Super Mario, Zelda, Star Fox + more
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Because
The way the words are ordered are up to me. They don’t have to be in lanes. They don’t have to go forward.
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Love
If we only meet On the other side If our link’s forged Strong Here Then, I shall do that careful work. (Because forever is something else.)
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Shift and Change
Something happened last year. I looked to give updates to the person in charge, but since it was me I didn’t give them. I looked out the window instead, except the blinds were drawn. Now, I can’t control the blinds. They control themselves. And, everyone can see into my office because the walls are glass. […]
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A Sermon
An Abecedarian sequence (mostly) inspired by Emmet Fox and the prologue in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette.
Originally posted on O at the Edges:
“Hunger is Hunger” is among the Day Twenty-nine offerings of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project (9 poets have agreed to write 30 poems apiece in 30 days, to raise funds for Tupelo Press, a non-profit literary publisher). Many thanks to the 1874: First Impressionist Exhibition blog who sponsored and provided…
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“Hunger is Hunger”
An Abecedarian Sequence (mostly).
I painted at home today. I ordered a collapsible easel on Amazon yesterday on overnight. I set up in the utility room. I painted over most of the second canvas from class. I left only the teapot. I got the first layer on today. I like how it’s already textured since I’m painting over. I […]
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Patient Zero
(An abecedarian sequence mostly).
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A question
I have been learning to paint in oils. It is still not finished. Class is over for the summer. Will I paint at home?
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A wooden Apple
I am taking a beginning oil painting class at the Smithsonian. The first night I painted a wooden apple.
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unfolding
I open slowly and shut fast. I shut like I drop my clothes on the floor after struggling out of them. Shutting makes me small, makes me see small, makes me feel small, makes you feel small. It is a black edge dripping with the stench of dread. Unfolding hurts. I cranked open that opening […]
To cut away the background and even lop off an arm, I contrast my self against the white space that I am not because, really, I am everything I am not. These ties are so intricate they form and unform as I move through space and time. These ties keep me animated and tethered at […]
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a burial shroud
A Burial Shroud | 3 deaths in 3 days made me reflect on Mortality | Making this was Cathartic | Hope & Faith |
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a funeral
The featured image is “The premature burial” by Antoine Wiertz (1806-1865) painted in 1854. This poem, written approximately in elegiac couplet, was inspired by a memory inspired by the first stanza of lyrics in Hozier’s “Take Me To Church.”
The Subject Rainbows galore. They infiltrated my neural network this week. The Method It’s not an abecedarian sequence but like it. Treating the rainbow like a mosaic or visual found poetry, I found instances of each color in photographs I already had. There are different textures (you can see) and magnifications (not as clear to […]
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Creative Blogger Award
Millie Thom from Bringing History to Life nominated me for the Creative Blogger Award and I accept it. I am currently reading Millie’s book Shadow of the Raven, a story of historical fiction set in 9th century England. I cannot wait to finish and pick her brain about bringing such distant history to life. […]
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A corporate exodus
The young scrambled, refusing to leave until the System shut down. Five, four, three, two . . . Even Then some refused exit (not on principle but Bewilderment), shutting themselves in, Typing one last thing. Others wandered, imminent, Displaced, seeking water, hot or cold, all Gone, seeking basics, disconnected, carted, done. Trying to pull back […]
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Peggy Olson
Dylan Matthews of Vox writes that Peggy Olson’s story lines in Mad Men were always about work and queries why her ending was about romance. His generalization about the arc of the Peggy storyline was disputed by commenters. Liz Kuehn Hager countered that “The basis of Peggy’s storyline was always the struggle balancing work and […]
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duration & disorder
The other day, it was overcast and I could not see my shadow as I ran. I had not been able to see my shadow in life much in the past days either, I thought. I am my feelings, I am my thoughts, when I am in that way. I trip all over myself without […]
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Uphill
I went running today in the late afternoon. I usually am not outside at this time of day. The light was great. My run is short and most of it is going up and down hills. It was wonderfully fun. Seeing my shadow reminds me I exist like others do. It reminds me that […]
When the Sopranos premiered, I was 20, not fist pumping in the dark media room of my large house in Greenwich. My gaze was deadlocked on this man of violence. I knew men of violence kinda secondhand kinda not. Genetics is weird. When my sister sees things she hears music. When I hear music I […]
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Shadow Series No. 2
The first in the series gives some background on what I’m trying to do. When I run, the three parts of me interact very loudly. These are photographs taken by me and edited with Enlight and WordSwag. They are a two dimensional way to capture one second of my three parts loudly interacting.
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Awakenings (or food problems)
In your food there is a heavy draught drugging horse. The others chitter chatter spoon it up. Danger in eggs and potatoes in broth. Circle The bowl looking for flesh. Wary. I watch. Do they eat with impunity? The gut recoils. Only dry pasta for me. No room to Hide in subsistence living. Water please, […]
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Mash Up: Billy Joel & GGM
Billy Joel’s song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was released in the Fall of 1989. I was 10 years old and did not get it. It had to do with history. Teachers liked it. A couple decades later, on a nostalgic whim, I bought in on iTunes. It was so much better, musically, than I […]
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Dimensions
As a child, I lived a one-dimensional life. I could not tell the difference between what was me and what was reality, often mistaking one for the other. It was very confusing. It pitted me against the outside world. I had to be always alert to the ever changing landscapes, certain that the living code […]
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elegy no. 2
The me clothed in cheap rat cotton (to breathe the skin) Walks stiff inside voluminously talking. Squinting, straining, blinking. “Sit yourself down, girl, please,” She’d say. “Knock me down,” I’d plead inside. Give Me a heavy draught so I’ll be like swimming in An ocean instead of splashing in a Bathtub.
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The insolence of Spring
Alaska’s blinding cold devolves evenly forging golden hues, insolence. January knows long might, night’s occupancy, pulse’s questions. Rest, solitude. Quiet rivers steal torrents. Unearthed valiance wields (e)xoneration, yellow zinnias. This is an Abecedarian sequence built around the word Alaska. The featured image is a photograph of a flower (not a zinnia) taken by me and […]
I read something by Rumi once: “Don’t be satisfied with stories . . . How things have gone for others . . . Unfold your own.” Live life without an outside reference. In Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert writes that she found God inside herself as herself. Aristotle says consciousness is the process […]
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Unfinished
Where ability does not meet art drowns Something . Lungs burst to live on land, to have Grown something good, a hard green grassy ground to Roll around in. For her to uninhabit Me, is all I ask. As well as why she’s Moved back in. She takes the water and the Food and sleep and […]
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Love as Melancholia
I recently watched The Paradise, a BBC series based on Emile Zola’s novel about a department store in the late 1880’s. It is delightful, all two seasons of it before it was cancelled. There are so many things I could write about it: its cinematography, its characters, the dialogue. The moments when the heroine, a […]
I’ve been struggling with creativity lately. Something is blocking not the ideas but the execution. Self-doubt. I wrote a poem about index cards last month. One of its lines: when the index cards come out my unease loses a little bit of its doubt Last week I wrote about art (poetry). For the 17 years […]
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A Weird Fairytale
I got a new app Color Splash and I made these. The woman is the “Seer,” a character in a graphic novelesque something I have brewing in the mind. She is the fourth character, the first supporting, to be created. I’ve not written a word. It is all heavily edited photography using Perfect 365, Word […]
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Nature in the Blue Ridge Mountains
Last week we went to Asheville, a little city in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We took the kids to the Western North Carolina Nature Center to see black bears, coyotes, wolves and cougars. There are other animals too, but my son is specially interested in large predators. The featured image is the flower I thought […]
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Poetry Cheat Sheet
I am not a poet, but I was convinced last year that writing poetry was good writerly exercise. Cross-training, if you will. Writing poetry in prescribed verse can range from an exciting adventure in wordsmithing to a creative puzzle relaxing your mind before you float off to sleep at night. Words have meaning. Words have sounds. […]
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The first lesson
A proverb is a “simple and concrete saying, popularly known and repeated, that expresses a truth based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity.” Proverbs are handed down generation to generation. The study of proverbs is called paremiology. Otis Elevator’s friend recently sent me the featured image and the following proverb to accompany […]
I am on vacation visiting elderly and near elderly relatives. I have been listening intently to their manner of speech. It is delightful and familiar while also strange. I overheard the following snippet during lunch today and did the ink sketches (my first) after lunch while they were resting. My 84 year old relative […]
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A Corpus Sunrise
Tales from the WagginMaster inspired another oil pastel with his beautiful photographs of a sunrise in my once hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas.
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Otis Elevator (Guest Post)
One of the victims of my elevator fainting act read my post. He responded: I love your article. And, now I remember why I hate elevators. He then went on to recount, via text, a relationship he has with an elevator named Otis. I asked him whether I could post it on 1874. He agreed […]
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Triumph
This is a picture of my son when he was two. He had run away up the hill and returned triumphantly with this rock. I love that I was the audience for his triumphant procession home. Triumph means victory but it also means the procession of a victorious general into Rome. He must have […]
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Double Elevators
These are the elevators in the garage of the building where I work. They service three garage floors. They can be impossibly slow sometimes, like today. Though, I did not mind as it gave me time to photograph them. The 11 story building where I work is serviced by 2 elevator banks with 6 elevators […]
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The outside limit
Today, I looked for a photograph that drew me to the outside limits of an object – its edges. There’s something about architectural edges, the edges of a building, that is severe and at the same time uplifting. My soul snaps to attention in vague recognition of something straight and eternal in me. I took […]
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Through the glass
This is one of the first pictures I posted on my personal Instagram account. It was taken a couple of years ago. It is the view from one of our kitchen windows. Spring time seems so far away right now but this state of flowering-ness is really just around the corner.
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To keep carefully
Something we keep carefully is something we treasure. Something we keep carefully has meaning. Meaning is something that is not naturally directly expressed. Meaning is on the inside of something, maybe even hidden. This is just an old tree with ivy growing on it. This tree is planted on a parcel of land somewhere in […]
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A buffalo in snow
I paint an animal and motion for the first time. When I was shaping its snout, I felt my own head transform into a buffalo head. Just for one second. The creative process is weird. The pastel is based on a photograph by Ian Nichols of a buffalo in Yellowstone Park posted by Nat Geo […]
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Pastel of a Sunrise in Bangalore
One of my favorite bloggers, Stock Research 52, posted another inspiring photograph of a sunrise in his home of Bangalore, India earlier in March. I tried to paint it in pastels last week.
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An Unbroken View
Today, we were to “capture a sweeping panorama of an entire” something. A wide ranging unbroken view. I thought of our trip to Glasgow in 2008. It was the first time I had ever tried photography in earnest. My husband was at a conference and I went on the conference tour to a nearby castle. […]
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I observe something small
This was the best I could do today: observe something small. This tree stands on 8th Street. I was straining to observe something new on my well worn path and I saw tiny buds on the limbs of this tree. They were pink! Even though it was back down to the 30s today, Spring cannot […]
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The moment is now
Today, we think about fleeting moments and capturing motion to convey the fleetingness of time.
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Translating Architectural Elements
Photo 101 asked us to translate architectural elements into black and white. I walked one block to the Museum of American History and National Portrait Gallery, past the Hotel Monaco and the Le Droit Building, through the middle of the Museum and its fantastic oasis of an atrium, to Calvary Baptist Church and back. Two […]
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Playing With Light: Metro Scenes
The Photo 101 weekend edition asked us to play with light. I read the Fundamentals of Light and bought a couple of the suggested apps for iPhones. SlowShutter gives your iPhone camera some level of digital single-lens reflex camera functionality, including manual settings for aperture, shutter speed and light sensitivity. The photographic term “exposure” is the “amount of light captured […]
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Blue Vaquero
I took this picture last week. It is called “Vaquero,” Spanish for “cowboy.” It was modeled in 1980 and cast in 1990 by the Texan-born artist Luis Jiménez. It is made out of acrylic urethane, fiberglass and steel armature. It stands on the north side entrance of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and National […]
Photo 101 has helped me understand colors a little bit more; to know things I only knew in theory before. I am growing into the name of the blog. The Impressionists were also known as the painters of light since they preferred painting outside and catching the light as opposed to sketching outside and painting […]
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Uncertainty & a Moody Heroine
I have issues with the telephone. It feels very intrusive to me. I have tried different ring tones on my work line, including a man saying “Are you there?” I thought a human voice would help. It did not help. When today’s Photo 101 prompt suggested: “Intrigue us with uncertainty,” I knew I wasn’t advanced […]
I am learning so much in Photo 101. Today, I focused on light. Then, I played (a lot) with the saturation to draw warmth with light. Not color warmth but actual temperature type heat. Really blue skies, really green grass, reminds me of the tropics and of heat. Today’s sun was brilliant and un-obscured and […]
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Moments in the Natural World
When my feet hit the ground in the mornings, the first thing I do is change my infant daughter’s diaper. Her stand is right in front of the nursery window that looks out on the back yard. This winter we would sometimes see deer. Now, Spring is coming. This blue-hued bird sauntered across our line […]
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Massive Wind Turbines
I never remember where I have been. The first time I went to Europe, I was 15. I do not know exactly where I stayed. It was an hour train ride, maybe two hour train ride away from Paris. My sense is it was south or east but not north or west. It is like […]
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Connection: Our Neighborhoods
Earlier today, I found myself in a neighborhood I do not frequent. I remember around eight years ago, I was shopping for a condo in the same neighborhood and my realtor delicately told me that one street over she would not feel safe getting out of the car. I could see no parking garages near […]
Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon. – Emily Dickinson I read this the other day for the first time. A big part of my life was explained in this short sentence! I am new to writing prose, writing poetry, painting with pastels, drawing and making mosaics. In […]
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A Solitude Deep in the Woods
Our little fairy tale cottage is surrounded by about thirty trees on half an acre. Almost all the window views are of trees. This is a view from our bedroom. It was taken yesterday right before it really started snowing. I feel like the leaves were reaching out to touch me. One […]
Exhibition 1874 