JUST AN ORANGE

if you were an alley violinist

and they threw you money

from three windows

and the first note contained

a nickel and said:

when you play, we dance and

sing, signed

a very poor family

and the second one contained

a dime and said:

i like your playing very much,

signed

a sick old lady

and the last one contained

a dollar and said:

beat it,

would you:

stand there and play?

beat it?

walk away playing your fiddle?

I LOVE this photoblog, Portes et Fenetres (which is French for Doors and Windows). I stumbled across it while looking for pictures of France. It is dedicated to photographs of interesting and lovely (you guessed it) doors and windows. Most of them are found in France, but there are pictures from all over Europe and a few from New York.

Really, really lovely.

It makes you wonder, where do one of those doors take you? Don’t you want to find out?

I want to be
        famous
so I can be
        humble
about being
        famous.

What good is my
        humility
when I am
        stuck
in this
        obscurity?

~ by David Budbill

We all need a little humor in our lives. Learning how to correctly punctuate may just be the icing on the cake. This book is so funny, I laugh out-loud whenever I read it. (Yes, I have read it multiple times). And if you ever needed help, as many people do, with a semi-colon or colon or any other punctuation mark, this book is for you. Also, Lynne Truss is British. Which pretty much seals the deal right there. I am seriously considering handing this book out as a gift. You know - wedding or baby showers, birthdays, Christmas, housewarming occasions. I think correct punctuation is important: you should, too.

I came across this little gem while browsing through the bookstore on my birthday. The Blizzard Voices is by former poet laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser. Like Out of the Dust, this is a narrative told through poems. Unlike Out of the Dust, these stories are true accounts of a blizzard that ripped through the Great Plains for a few days in January 1888.

In the introduction, Ted Kooser says “The poems that follow are isolated voices heard in that blinding snowstorm we know as the passage of time. When the Alberta Clipper, roaring out of the north, rips apart a straw stack, only the frozen center remains and each of these memories is like that center, stripped of digression, picked clean of equivocation. What is left are the core narratives, spare and cold. Each clings to a concrete and specific detail, for memory works like that.”

The poems are titled either A Woman’s Voice or A Man’s Voice depending on the narrator of the event. Simply told are the tragedies next to the miracles that took place during that winter storm. It’s haunting in it’s brevity, but also in the reality that these things really happened. If you are looking for poetry that is accessible, this book would be a good place to start. But be prepared. When you have finished, you will sit and think for awhile about the fragility of life.

These poems were performed as a play by the Lincoln, Nebraska, Community Playhouse.

I think that we would understand and remember more of the past if it could be presented in such eloquent but simple ways. The base of this history are the true experiences of men and women who lived this event and told about it. Ted Kooser has taken those stories and shaped them for us.

the FRIDAY POLITIC ~ because one can’t be transcendent all the time

I haven’t really followed the presidential campaign, because sometimes you need a break. I have listened a little about China’s crackdown in Tibet. China, where the Olympics will be held this Summer. The Olympics being one of few events on the world stage where the competition is (usually) healthy and on some level, boundaries of culture, race, ethnicity, etc., are overcome for a least a little while.

So. Here is China stomping brutally and fatally all over a people and their culture, then getting ready to turn around and welcome the rest of the world to its doorstep. Watch carefully to see them wipe off their boots before they reach the door.

I’ve been wondering, should we protest these Olympics? I understand that there are complexities in the Geo-political relationships around the world, and that things have to be measured and situations and consequences taken into account. And maybe avoiding the Olympics is the wrong thing to do, because we need to connect with the Chinese people, themselves, and this is an opportunity to do that.

That may be the best way to get the government to change. The pressure needs to be exerted on the inside as well. You can’t isolate all of those people from the rest of the world, and expect that one day they will realize they’d like more freedom, if they can never see it.

This is what I have a problem with: Our country probably won’t even have a serious discussion about these Olympics. Not because of any other issue, except this one: We’re too concerned with our economic relationship with China to put it in jeopardy. So, we’ll just not worry too much about Tibet.

I don’t have a problem taking economics into account. And there is a good argument that China is becoming more open out of economic necessity, which has other results. I just wish money were not the first compelling reason to do or not do whatever it is. Alas, in so many things, the bottom line is the motivation.

At the end of last summer I found myself overcome by the towering tidal wave of The Twilight series. Coming out of nowhere, suddenly everyone I knew had the books in hand. I read through the three books in a period of weeks, inundated by vampires, werewolves and Bella Swan. I was intrigued. I posted a little bit about them. And then had a nice little email exchange with Kathryn about their merits.

Entertaining narrative, interesting idea, a few issues with some things, was what we said. Ultimately, said Kathryn, not literature. I emailed back a lament. Does anybody write literature anymore?

It was about that time that my sister was passing a book around our family that had nothing to do with vampires and the like. So, I read Out of the Dust, and I had an answer. Yes, someone still writes literature. And this someone was Karen Hesse.

Out of Dust is the story of 14 year-old Billie Jo, growing up in the Oklahoma Dust bowl. The book is written in free verse, so every story inside the story is a poem. Billie Jo’s life is not easy. But I loved reading about it. My sister said she felt like she was covered in dust as she read through the pages.

Writing in free verse requires more succinctness and containment compared to regular prose. But free verse poetry also allows for great expression and it is a perfect fit for a story about a time that was sparse, often bleak and limited. And still, there is light that sometimes shines through the dry and dusty, cracked earth.