Showing posts with label Bookery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bookery. Show all posts

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Reader

The sky has never been a wall
it has no borders to speak of
it takes my troubles everywhere

It's true that light is rationed--
but it's abundant by my birthday
(though scant at Christmas)

So I can read a book all day,
All Day. In a cinnamon haze
my sweet, dusty feast

_

Thursday, December 01, 2016

"Arrival Times"

After three different emails with that ambiguous subject heading, K and I finally got together with our respective human offspring to go see Ted Chiang's stupendous, extraordinary, etc., etc. sci-fi short story turned movie Arrival.

It broke me. It's intensely emotional and threw me for a loop (haha). And the small blazes of happiness were because At worked out and shared the reveal way before it happened and my Nu pointed out in the first few minutes that "Come back to me" was used as a refrain. Before she lost interest in the movie and took a tiny snooze.

Speaking of which, it's the first movie in a long, long time that I didn't slip a nap into. I even napped during--please don't tell my kids--The Force Awakens.

Although they've known all about it for years.

_

Thursday, September 08, 2016

The Ladies Finger

Don't know how I first came across it, but I love this blogzine--irreverent, honest, charming, and pathbreaking. It seems to be written and produced in India, but it's a great read for anyone with transnational feminist sensibilities.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Wednesday, February 03, 2016

Monday, January 11, 2016

Monday, January 04, 2016

Resonance

The in-flight magazine 
reminded me of 
my own little comic

who likes the story of 
Carol Burnett tugging 
on her ear

_

Monday, December 28, 2015

New Book

Nu started writing 
(yet) another novel. 
The title makes me 

giggle 

every

time.




_

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Christmas Quartet

The kids gave me presents that blew me away.

Nu brought home a healthy recipe book (standard school issue parent present) in November when we had no holiday wrapping paper yet. She made this to wrap her present in:

At got me this because my RBG tee was fraying:


Nu gave me an extra present (because she loves me best of all!). It's a chocolate countdown calendar! (And she teamed it with a bag of chocolate she got her dad to buy for her.) 



And Nu kept her creativity going by making the puppies a play yard:


My four kids are simply the best.

_

Friday, December 18, 2015

The Beginning of the Alma Season...






Her family makes these ornaments,
and the awesome student 

(whom I've never had in class)
gave me one.
Aw!

I turned into an embarrassing 
blabbering mess of gratitude.
Gah.


_

Friday, November 06, 2015

Frieda

Sometime between ages 16 and 21…

First I fell in love with Ted Hughes. Then I fell in love with Sylvia Plath. Then I hated Ted Hughes,  while being mildly annoyed with Sylvia Plath. Then I took to raving against Hughes, and if you mentioned Plath's name would break down in angry tears. Then I pretended neither of them existed while reading their poetry secretly.

If that sounds exhausting,* how much more exhausting to be those intense, talented people, constantly under scrutiny and the pressure to perform.

Love Frieda Hughes' interview in which she talks about her parents. And I've come a long way from being that impressionable and emotional teenager who took everything personally, but still needed to hear this:
"To me, as a child, my father seemed to blame himself for almost everything. It was awful. A child does not want to see their parents suffer. Thousands of people all over the world every day split up, thousands of people have affairs. Not everyone kills themselves."
* Yes, it also sounds nerdy, but everyone knows that already.

_

Saturday, October 18, 2014

A Quiet Thanksgiving

Right now
the afternoon brightens
the dogs sleep
beside me

the last of the corn
and the best acorn squash
from the garden are
roasting from light to gold

The kids sleep one room away
done with every weekend activity
A stumbled home from a night shift
and also sleeps

I? I have something completely
unrelated to work to read
while the week's laundry
churns itself clean and dry

Sounds so ordinary
but this hasn't happened
in years. It is a returning
peace, to be thankful.

_

Friday, April 25, 2014

Addenda

(Everything I need... to do.
This weekend, I had better start
preparing the soil and compost
then re-shelve ALL the books.)

_

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Encircled

We drew a lot of circles in class today because of Martha Nussbaum and the Stoics.

But it reminded me of another Greek:
Euclid
(Vachel Lindsay)
Old Euclid drew a circle
On a sand-beach long ago.
He bounded and enclosed it
With angles thus and so.
His set of solemn greybeards
Nodded and argued much
Of arc and circumference,
Diameter and such.
A silent child stood by them
From morning until noon
Because they drew such charming
Round pictures of the moon. 

"I'm a weirdo/doofus/nerd/naif" (Part MXVIII)

I realized during my meditation this morning that my energy for contacting so many people yesterday (the "emotional labor" that St...