Welcome! In the coming weeks and months I hope to make you cry, laugh, confess undying love, find causes, fill your hearts, enjoy your weekends and change your life with literature. Why not aim big, ay? I won't just be using my powers to request the cream of the new from publishers, but I'll be delving back into the murky depths of time, past all clichés like 'murky depths', to bring you the best of the oldies - the books you should have read but didn't because you were part ovum, part the corresponding male gamete (it seems weird to say sperm in a book review), or perhaps just a speck in the imagination of your grandparents.

“Just One Catch” is a soup-to-nuts chronicle of the life of Joseph Heller. It is by Tracy Daugherty, who should not be confused with Mr. Heller’s daughter.

He was called the "Mark Twain of Yiddish." The parallels are strong. Both were writers worked under a pseudonym (Aleichem's means "peace be on you," the Jewish way of saying "hello"). Both had financial downfalls while searching for a big score in industry.

War and Want

All along the sidewalks and street corners
   the scent of candles and incense scattered.
I had without really trying become lost
   as in a bazaar in Persia or a market
in a high Inca town, a sure breeze behind me,
   an irresistible desire to dip into spices,
to take in the breath of hulled dark rice,
   the low slung garlic and ears of corn.
There must be a secret path, a corridor earthen,
   hidden from the oblivious who happen by
in the tumult of their lives, precious every one,
   no greater or less than grain scattered on ground.
In the time of war and want my grandmother
   did not think twice about sweeping those into her hand,
like each one had a name, the name of a child
   that once she had heard crying and calling out.
I had come to know this from my mother who went
   with her to that market, picking grace
one grain at a time, an angel's tears bringing tidings
    of mercy, the promise of salvation,
counting each till there is a handful, a bridge
   across a riverbed gone dry, cracked and caked.
That every drop of rain may be accounted for somehow
   in the nodding acknowledgement of supper.
It must have been that way in every time
   of want and war, the counting of tears,
the travel down bazaars and markets ablaze
   with scents, color, spices and grain on the ground.

p.m.

Deliverance

I would wait at night
   for the roundness of it.
And as round as it was
   it would always arrive on time,
swaggering into the room
   and I would sweat
and whisper something
   from when I was just a child.
Alone in the darkened room,
   the blanket to my chin
because there was nothing else
   to hold onto, there should be
something, like the broken
   young man in his wheelchair
eyes bright with fear
   when I walked into his room.
Telling me over and over
   that he had to find his beads,
his beads for prayer,
   for when he contemplates his broken-ness
as when I dwelt over mine,
   the way its roundness surrounded,
rising from the edges of my bed,
   doubt, terror, and wonder
at its abiding cruelty, wholeness
   greater than mine engulfing me.
And now I wish I had my own beads
   to count and mark every moment
from here to there and further still
   that I may be delivered.

p.m.

Well, it's about 9:45 PM and there is a storm outside. This is the most active thunderstorm I have seen in years. I am fascinated by the lightning and thunder. I think Thunder is my favorite sound in the world... Something about it appeals to the primal side of me. The thunder is constant right now. No breaks in the rumbling - just accents in volume and sharpness. I saw lightning hit so close I could hear it while it was still flashing. The sky lights from all directions in iridescent hues of blues, greens, orange and violet as the lightning sears the clouds at different distances.

 I just finished this blue heron painting for a bird show at a local gallery for the Tamarack Wildlife Rehabilitation Center that a local woman runs near here. The Center takes in injured raptors and fixes them up and returns them to the wild. Sometimes they are saved but cannot be returned to the the wild and these birds are kept as education birds. They have saved eagles, hawks, owls, vultures and even geese and a few wild turkey. During the opening for the bird art show, the director will have education birds there and do demonstrations for all those who come to see the art show.

Just about everyone around here keeps a sharp eye out for large injured birds and they are quickly picked up and brought to the center. I have even seen a neighbor running around the field with a large fishing net trying to catch a red tail that had an injury. This is not an easy thing to do and you could get injured trying to save the bird but we all think it is important to do this. Raptors eat a large quantity of varmints and we don't like varmints on the farms.

They accept volunteers and my wife and I are going to talk to her about giving her some of our time to help. They always need help cleaning and feeding the birds.

This piece is 24"x 36" and is painted on raw luan plywood. I like working on the raw wood so the grain will show up and even the imperfections in the wood are things I like to show through. All the wood I paint on is salvaged wood that others throw out as waste. I hate seeing good wood wasted. I also like the idea of using what others throw away to make art. Beauty comes from looking at something differently. Art is about looking at things with a different eyes so it is a circle of creation for me. From waste comes something of worth to someone else. Just like those injured birds, things are savalgable if you just think about it before you throw it away.

My recent work is an investigation of line and natural movement. Line is not found in nature, line is an abstract concept created by our ancestors as a tool of visual communication. We can represent anything with lines. Many of us drew pictures when we were younger of the sun and used line to represent the light, we can show direction and movement, we create ideas and things not invented yet, we even use lines to make words for our brain to think about.

 I think line came from our mind as we looked at nature. We needed a way to represent what we saw in nature. Another circle that connects us and nature always, we can never truely escape nature, it keeps us alive because we are a product of that natural world.

Apology

I don't know how you can forgive me
   for not remembering everything I put you through.
In my travels through madness and delirium
   I must have been angry and senseless,
perhaps even denied you, or called out another name
   deep in the fever, poison for blood.
I know that gripped by pain, I was cruel, that cruelty
   would subsume pain, a deadly sin for escape.
Falling into the void over and over my shoulders
   had gone dead and I stopped reaching
once, twice, I don't know, but watched the chasm's walls
   rushing by, trying to find stories in crevices,
my stories, and all around was silent and red
   and black, beads of water blessed splashing,
tin can bells, for voices, what I would have traded
   for voices, Be still be still I am here just here.
In that bed I must have been angry. Cruel.
   Yet thru tears you forgave me.

p.m.

Renegade

I wonder often about that
   one renegade cell.
The one that was unique
   in its single-mindedness.
That one that split into two,
   then four, then eight, ad infinitum.
In its humble beginning,
   well see, that's it, was it ever humble?
Or did it seek instead to humble me,
   sent by God, or gods to remind me
that as a frail, intelligent creature
   I am measured with ease?

p.m.

EARLY one morning, 50 years ago today, while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.

I just got off the phone with my five-year-old niece who is watching Sweethearts (1938, Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy). It's a movie which I have never heard of, but am stimulated by as I watch it for the first time.  I just have to find the DVD.

The more I think about it, the more I become disgusted by the fact that Republican governors view music programs as unimportant and choose to cut them from state budgets across this country, even as researchers have established a link between music and intellect-and for your information, my choice of music is derived from European classical and American blues, so we can just Patriot that SCUD right there.

Having grown up in the Lutheran church, I remember the music I heard and I remember looking at the dates in which a particular piece of music was composed.  Some hymns in the Lutheran hymnal have music which was written as far back as the 10th Century, and even earlier.  This is despite the fact that the Lutheran church was established in the 16th Century. 

I was also exposed to music through my grandparents, who sang songs from the old Hit Parade.  I still remember a song about the big yellow Buick which had to be towed by a little red Ford.  My grandfather was a tenor sax player during the early years of jazz and my mother still sings in the church choir.

Many American kids are not as lucky as is my niece and I were.  They don't live in homes where music is valued and celebrated.  They are only exposed to that @!$%# they hear on American Idol.

That's just what the Republican Party wants-a stupid America, where people vote without thinking and resort to fear instead of reason.

According to E. Glenn Schellenberg's findings music lessons increase I.Q. and Science Daily's article on the subject from August 20, 2004 highlighted evidence that the study of music promotes brain development.

No wonder why Republican governors want to cut music programs in schools! 

I had learned how to sing at an early age and had always wanted to learn guitar, but my mother refused to let me do that until I had taken at least a year of piano, and now I know why.

Republicans know that the way they can get back into power is by promoting ignorance.  What better way to do that than by cutting music programs, because music forces you to think!

CNN aired a case in point on August 20, 2003 when they aired a report about a teacher whose students continued to ask her when they could make art.

The only art the Republican Party was interested in making at that time was all the murders they were committing in Iraq while they continued to scare the American voting public, and as per Led Zeppelin, their song remains the same. 

Conservatives have no interest in educating children, musically or otherwise.  They are only interested in owning all of the media outlets so that they can keep a child's brain buzzed for hours on end.

Oops, sorry!  They already own the media!

Debra, you've no idea how lucky you are to have a grandma who exposed you to Sweethearts!

The art world is populated by

little artist $hits

pampered young twits

and gold shod tits

sonorous art history wits

and famous formaldehyde gits,

They try to define art

and then the masses

think we're all asses,

The lesser class bites my ass

cause that is where I came from

what a con-none-Drum

painting and art

are like a fart

to them

smelly and windy

but they can remember the 'Lindy',

I am stuck here in the middle

what a piddle

of a place

denim and lace

a social disgrace

that wants to win

a part of

the rat race

by just making

some damn art!

I think I'll just paint you see

that's just me

it's in the bones

with overtones

that reek

and inside speak

of Lascaux

the ancient cave treat,

there are still,

in the mud floor there,

the marks of bare feet.

 It is with both Viscous Verbous Vituberance and Viscious Gar-gant-chewin' Damnation, that I come before you today, in the indicitive indignity of the loud and barker-rif-fick Oscar DOG-A-TUDE. Let us begin.

The out right pillaging of intelligence and wastefulness is written on the parking lots of America.

A tiny stub of a thing has been rabidly raped to its barest bones upon the asphalt of lecherous cheapness, lewd commercialism and a base and hollow dis-representation by the futurist culture, and of their bane and bland sameness in the promoting of any black electronic toy as the bestest and easiest form of communication. (re-chew that sentence slowly).

My, crowed, crowded and cowed mass minions, this is STILL, the bestest, the proudest and most versitile tool of communication, The chinese Emperor Yellow, NO. 2, graphite pencil.

 After the simian face mixed with moving lips, this was and still is the Pent-House Ultimate tool to, too, two, four and six communcate with.

Now look at her!

This tiny slip of a thing was found almost beaten to a pulp of wood. This sliver (or combined slivers, to get tech support on you), was once a part of a MIGHTY tree (or a smaller tree in a tree farm), and left her poor family to find her way into the Big City (really a small college town) and then to be used, abused and then thrown out onto the grocery store parking lot and then to be run over by swollen food carts and fell-loon-ious fattened feet is a onerous, oppressive and opulent with outragious disrespect attached thing to do to the tiny princess of NO. 2 graphite and wood. 

Shame faced shame, utter spit sputtering, dog butt wiping, DORK degrading shame to the dis-associative, mendacious monster who ministered discourtious disdain and undignified distaste for such a wonderous tool. A pompous Prig of pimpled wonder, a be-leached harridan or her hell born boar of a son, a contented-scious cock sure and bigoted anti-graphit-ite did this to this poor, innocent child and daughter of nature, music, art, science, industry and communication.

 A Modern-Future-Modernist I would think.

Or just a Plain OLD Stupidist! A POS for short.

(or a Punkest Of Sorts)

With this pointed and erudite tool in hand, a person of wonder could have written a novel, drawn a portrait that could surpass the Mona Lisa, draw up a diagram for a rocket to Mars onto a smudged napkin, helped a guy or girl get a date (where the hell are match packs when you need one), reminded someone to get milk and bread after work, gotten a person a job, added up a bill or a sale, mapped out a way to travel that was faster, written an inuagural address, won a battle, forged a business plan of action, written a great comedy or drama-soap opera-commercial or a better damn operating sysytem for these pain in the ass electronic communicators. (pencils with plugs baby, pencils with wires and plugs and bills attached).

 The pencil can even clean your ears, scratch your nose, tap your head to music, get the spinach out of your front teeth, be used as  a stiffer finger, poke an eye out, find those hard to reach places (yeah scratch yourself with your Blackberry), Give your hand more reachin' power under the couch, and would never leak in your shirt pocket or purse. (the biggie, no batteries needed).

and even non-smarties can use this tool, it has an eraser you know. With a dictionary, there is no finer spell check in the world.

The RAPE of the Pencil has gone on for far too long in my dog book. To throw away such a very cheap but precious object like this is to show a true disdain for Humanity.

What next, books strewn all over the side of the road?

Arms Aspread

I would like to sit under that acacia again,
   it still must be praying, arms aspread.
Or maybe it is there to invite people to pray,
   a chapel of living wood with many voices.
Thousands of leaves, each a throat speaking in the wind,
   there, I can hear them, each as humble as the next,
telling me there is much more here than I can hold,
   as in their flickering shadows around me
and in the fragrance of the sap and there
   in a nook an orchid plant, hair unbound.
But I suppose I envy its stillness, its journey
   measured by days of rain and sun and moon.
Rooted and always in contemplation, indifferent
   to creatures legged and walking or crawling about,
wondering where to go and forgetting
   where they have been and what they left behind.
And I think that I would like to take you there,
   someday, where I sat listening to voices,
praying to be near you because the voices told me
    that in my journey I will happen on you.

p.m.

I Let spiders walk on me.............................................-

talk on me

draw chalk on me,

I don't mind their creepy crawl

no, not at all

would you apall

my person 

a mountain tall,

I don't do that shiver shake

no lips that quake

for my sake

don't let

your heart ache,

These are just some little friends

when mind depends

on thoughts that wend

down darker bend,

I just like their pitter pat

tiny shoes that whap

on my skin they slap

sometimes

it ain't crap,

Light can be their tiny song

stuff don't go wrong

I stay strong

sharp as a prong,

They bring me their little pills

that ease some ills

without the chills

and stuff that kills,

tiny spiders walk on me

can't you see

Now let me be.

A poem for manic depressives everywhere.

By Caoimhghin O Croidheain

As the current world economic crisis deepens, the role and meaning of art in society changes as more and more people are dragged down by the weight of personal debt, unemployment and poverty. Galleries close and less people can afford to buy art creating a new awareness among artists of the fragility of the art market and the economic system behind it that creates an increasingly alienated and elitist exclusivism.

The beneficial effects of new radical-democratic global solidarity movements coming together to seek alternatives to this crisis in capitalist globalization may be to reinvigorate the long-standing, though weakened, connection between artists and the people (as opposed to the economic elites who have been the artists’ lifeblood in the past but who are now also in crisis).

While artists have depicted ordinary people since the Middle Ages, it was a past crisis that firmly established a mutually respectful relationship between the artist and the people. As Linda Nochlin writes in Realism: 

When I Open My Mouth

I can't open my mouth without wanting
   my lips to turn into a beak and my tongue a viper's.
Something about not having to use words,
   the tiresome ordering of vocabulary then conjugation.
What is more truthful? A caw, a hiss
   or your lover whispering in moonlight?
That poor crazy woman who on days of mania
   sat by her window screaming at the world.
I cannot hold a thought still at times, is this so,
   the curse of thought in search of beauty?
Of what can unfold, how a day can creep
   till it's done and exhaustion falls into night?
I do not think the ravens or vipers care
   much for those, they must already contain the world.
Here where I watch to find a word
   for every heartbeat and the fullness about it
and at the very center of its snap try to hold it
   motionless, aware, a frame in a spool, complete
till the light behind it leaves, or it leaves
   the light behind, trying to find narrative
that will explain and make precious the shadows cast,
   that these may approximate my wonder and confusion.
I am transfixed by the weaver at her loom, a potter,
   a painter, the sculptor, I envy their surrender,
at once moving and yet a heartbeat stunted,
   a frame exquisite of shadows detailed,
the light behind even, bright and just,
   wonder and confusion giving way to visions.
But, the thread for me frays, the clay is as I, paint
   and molded surfaces swallow my hands.
So I sit listening to my heart beat, and when I open
   my mouth imagine a beak and a viper's tongue.

p.m.

Precipice

It was like finally falling over the flank
   of the mountain's trail.
Bouncing like a rock upon every rough root
   of every tree brave enough to live
on the steep side of that mountain, a killer, mother
   of frozen nights, beasts and falling boulders.
There was no way of knowing, beforehand,
   how that would feel, the distance
between freedom and pain, the fear, paralysis, insomnia
   and then staring at the empty sky,
the sky in the morning, the sky at dusk, empty,
   blue and frigid like polar ice, so old.

There, you see, I could say it, how you
   had struck me dumb like unforgiving sky.
I would not have known how to kill
   the olden heart of me, to take the step
the back of my mind screams into my ears
   so loud that my shoulders tremble, ache.
I would not have known coming out
   of the empty sky on my sleepless journey.
This cruel dome that lines the end of my
   very sight, that horizon that I can almost,
almost touch, but not the sky, not the very
   top of my breath when one's breath runs out.

There has to be that step, you see,
   even as the corners of what I can see darken
as the edge of the killer mountain's trail
   crumbles beneath my shaking knees,
even as the the mountain's skin dissolves
   into gravel and dust and propels me
down to the mountain lake and the valley green
   by the virtue and the weight of my desire.

p.m.

Josephine Hart, an Irish-born novelist whose best-selling tale of erotic obsession, “Damage,” inspired the 1992 feature film of that name starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche, died on Thursday in London. Ms.

Oh god pity me… I am born damned … they say it is ego in me… I know it is the man in me … all I want is a man’s life … my damned oh my damned body… how can I escape it - I play woman woman woman… I cannot live or breathe I cannot make things
I cannot do things I am going crazy,
thank god for liquor.”
— Alice (‘Allie’) Bradley, pencilled in her college sketchpad/notebook, circa 1936

My face has a few wrinkles
Body parts have sagged
My skin tone in places limp as a rag
The color in my hair the result of a dye
Imperfections unveiled yet with you I'm not shy
You see me forever the young girl I was
When we met and locked eyes 
And knew it was love

Whether eighteen or eighty
In your eyes I remain
That beautiful woman whose devotion you claimed
With the touch of your hand and encouraging smiles
Together we've traveled down life's many aisles
And this one thing I know forever to be true
Through the years I have always been blessed to have you

Each morning with the lightening sky
A cardinal comes as if to spy
He perches on the window ledge
And peers upon my rumpled bed

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. He beckons me, “Rise.”
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Can’t he sense his demise?
Propped on my elbow, I level a glare
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Back at me he stares

His flaming beauty unsurpassed
Reflected in the sunlit glass
Black blazing eyes into me seer
Head cocked he shows no hint of fear

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Awake. Arise.”
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. “Open up your eyes.”
His message is clear. He will not be swayed
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Just go away!

Persistent as the summer rain
He pecks upon my windowpane
Determination in his stance
Posture conferring, “You don’t stand a chance!”

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. My unwelcomed guest
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Please give it a rest!
Silently I plead for one hour more
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. My pleas he ignores.

Obstinate he proves to be
As from slumbers depths he rouses me
I must concede defeat. He wins
I swear. I’m sure. I saw him grin!

No sooner do my feet touch floor
Then above the trees he dips and soars
No fool am I to celebrate retreat
For tomorrow we again shall meet

On a long hemp rope, tattered and frayed
A bucket hangs on constant display
Except for the times it descends down the well
Into darkened depths no light can dispel

With wooden crank to lower it down
Between moss covered walls below the ground
This bucket symbolic of dreams unfulfilled
Aspirations unrealized, lost sense of will

Empty of effort, weathered and cracked
It takes great strength to draw it back
Its heaviness comes not from what is within
But from the weight of grief surrounding the rim

To the bottom and back, the cycle repeats
From darkness to light ever the feat
Once more must be gathered the strength and desire
To dwell in the present with all that transpires

On a long hemp rope, tattered and frayed
A bucket hangs on constant display
In its worn weathered wood a flower does bloom
The start of a garden once lost in the gloom

It takes but one seed for a bouquet to grow
Each blossom a wish that gently unfolds
The bucket symbolic of life and of hope
Held securely by dreams to the end of a rope

This Is Awkward

I'd better make this quick because
   the awkward side of things is starting to kick me.
Not that I do, feel awkward, because that's like
   being the sandwich someone did not order,
because I'd eat pretty much anything,
   except a bagel slathered with disappointment
and that's saying a lot, because I'd eat one a week old
   but never the ones in plastic at the supermarket.
I'd even have one with unspeakable imperfections,
   like raisins, or onion chips burned to a crisp,
but never the ones in plastic, even if the label reads or-ga-nic
   or buck-wheat or dreaded five grr-ain,
my heart being my heart and not a ruminant stomach
   and so I like the recognizable stuff.
Which is what I was going on about, about
   awkward, that a moment becomes suddenly alien,
something like bacon in a martini, that's awkward,
   or green eggs and ham if you're over three.
That kind of thing that makes you wanna scratch your head,
   not that it hurts you, but may someone else.
I had always been the kid that got embarrassed
   by someone else's embarrassment, not the pile it on type.
Not at all, a guilt, genuine surprise or stifled laughter,
   that would be me, pushing gently away.
I'm afraid that it is not a kindness,
   more like acknowledgement, a sad one one at that,
that we have so close so soon without realizing it,
   but oh to afford a smile. Bacon? In a martini?

p.m.

New York City author Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story has won the twelfth annual Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize honoring fiction written in the humorous spirit of the prize's namesake, British author P. G. Wodehouse. Judge Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival—at which the prize was announced—called the novel "great literature" and "wild comedy."

Year-old trailer for the book is worth a chuckle.

Want to write a great book review? Two of the Guardian's top children's book reviewers, Philip Ardagh and Linda Buckley-Archer, share their expert tips to help you get started

Well today I had success after working in trial and error for the last three weeks. I successfully fired five Pieces of pottery primitive style. There was no fancy built electric Kiln, No potter's wheel. I didn't go down to the Hobby Lobby and pick out some pretty colored clay and temping material. NOPE!!!! Went back and I mean way back to the OLD SCHOOL. I based my potting on what I have found over the years and the different materials found in pottery shards. I did a little research and fired my first piece a few weeks ago and it came out with heat (stress)  and cooling fractures so back to the drawing board I went to see where I had gone wrong.

Then the first part of this week, I went by to see a music playing friend that is also interested in the Native American culture to show him my first clay pipe that I made complete with heat fractures. Well low and behold a few years back he had tinkered with doing some pottery in the same fashion as the Native American mound builders. He told me he messed with it for a while then gave it up to carve duck calls. Duck call are very popular in this area of Arkansas because we live right in the middle of one of the fly zones. We see a lot of duck hunters during the duck hunting season. So he decided to make duck calls because they were more profitable.

He was impressed with what I had done so far even though it wasn't perfect but he said that I had a good start and that my creativity was was way better than his. Then he told me he had found a book on making pottery the primitive way. We talked for a while and then he let me borrow the book. I was like a little boy on Christmas morning, I went strait way home, sat down and read the book that day. I learned a lot which took out the guess work and allow me to be more productive in my project. I am glad to say the clay after it is fired is hard as stone, and doesn't break down when it comes in contact with water.

My friend was well please when I showed him my new pieces today and his is going to help me promote them. So I will be adding the clay pottery line to my others products I am producing for my little company BINAC (Buffalo Island Native American Collectibles)

The items I fired successfully today were: 1.) A clay tee pipe about 3 inches tall and 3 1/2 inch base, stained in white and pale blue stripes. The stem is pine about 4 1/2 inches long.  2.) A natural colored clay pipe 3 inches tall which slants to about an inch at the bottom of the base. the pipe has a snake that coils around the pipe and the head stands out at the top of the pipe. The stem is made from river cane. 3.) A clay pipe 3 1/2 inches tall with human head effigy, ears are pierced two metal hopes are placed in each ear. The stem is made from river cane about 4 1/2 inches long, finger grip is made from wrapped jute string and is complete with red beads, duck feathers and cured squirrel's foot. The color is a stain made from medium reddish purple dew berries. 4.) A small clay bowl about 5 1/2 in diameter with a serpent's head in the front and a tail for the handle, color is a smoked gun barrel grey made from pecan smoke. 5.) four medium round beads stained with dew berries, dark purple and small human effigy necklace piece.

As I said earlier writing down my notes and reading the information that he gave me sure cut down on my trial and error so I would like to share with those of you who may be interested in trying this project at home some helpful hints that sure helped me.

1. Finding Clay: Clay can be found in most parts of the country, it comes in three basic colors reddish orange, grey and black or as we like to call it down south gumbo color. I harvested my clay when I was hand digging my garden spot. I live in an area that has all three colors very close by....lol. Once you have found your clay separate it into three different containers that can be sealed with a lid. This will help to keep it from drying completely out and becoming hard. Also you will want to pull any plant roots or small rocks out of the clay which will make it easier to work with when you want to start adding the temping material. Once you have your clay stored then it is time to find your temping material.

2. Temping Material: Temping Material is used to give more bonding power and allow the clay fire evenly. Several different materials can be used. Old pieces of broken pottery shards, Mussel shell, grass, medium ground tree bark, and very fine sand or ground gravel.

3. The mixture: We won't cover ounces or pounds here but it you wish to measure you can. I measure by the hand.

    9 parts (hand full) clay + 1 1/2 part fine sand mixed together using water to keep the clay soft then pat the mixture out on a flat rock or small square piece of plywood. Making a rectangle works really well, once you  have made the rectangle cut about a 20% cut out in the middle and add your temping material of ground up pottery shards or ground up mussel shell. You may even want to split and add both. Place the 20% you cut out back into the mixture and begin to knead it as you would bread dough. Keep working the clay mixture until it begins to have a plastic consistency. You may have to add small amounts of water, you do not want it to dry if will start to break apart as you work it. Make sure you work all the air bubbles out of the mixture. For added strength I cut green grass into small pieces and add it as I am kneading my clay. Once these steps are done you are ready to start your bowl, pipe or other pottery projects.

4. Tools you may need: Flat rock, small piece of plywood, exact'O knife (used for cutting and shaping clay), different size painting knives( these are used along with the small smooth rocks to fill in gaps and smooth your project), assorted sizes of smooth rocks along with different shapes ( these are used in the process of smoothing out any lumps or cracks in the finished project. In time you will build your tool assortments to meet most all of your needs.) staging molds ( these can be different sized wooden mixing bowls or you can carve your own staging molds from wood.

these are used to make the bases of the pots, bowls, or other pottery containers. And most importantly .......wait for it, not yet, ALL MOST THERE......HERE we goooooooooo......HANDS, yes you need hands to work the clay they are the tools that will put your heart and soul into your project. The stones and other tools will get you close but the final touch will be done by your own two hands.

5. Making your project: This is a basic starting point that will work with any project that you wish to start, whether it be a pipe or a bowl, drinking cup etc.  But let's look at making a small pot. How do we start? After you have worked the clay pinch off  a far amount of clay and shape into a disc about a 1/4 thick.  Place the disc into your staging mold and use the interior curve of your staging mold this will help you to shape your clay bowl or pot. When the base is formed take lumps of clay and roll them into noodles about 1/2 to 1 inch thick make sure you score the sides and along the edges with your exact'O knife. Coil the noodles on the top of the back and stack them on top of one another until you get the height and depth you desire this will construct the sides of your bowl or pot. Make sure you keep a bowl of water handy and wet the clay if it seems to be drying out. With each coil you attach you will want to smooth out the sides using an upward motion in the inside of the pot or bowl and you will want to us a downward motion when smoothing the outside of your project. Also very import to work out any air bubbles that might form in between the coils. Once you are complete let the clay dry until it is the consistency of leather before firing This will cut down on heat fractures.

6. Firing the clay: There are a couple of ways you can fire your pottery, lets look at the original Primitive Native American way first.

1. dig a shallow pit that is large enough to hold your project or projects. If you are making more than one make sure you make the pit big enough that the pottery does NOT let me repeat make sure the projects DO NOT touch each other. Then line the pit with rocks and place your projects on the inside . The next step is very important, this is where I failed so many times in the past. Build a SMALL preparation fire to warm the pots and rocks......This will keep the projects from heating to fast and causing stress fractures. once this step has been completed stack hardwood in a tee-pee style around the pottery and place fast burning kindling underneath the hardwood and set on fire. Allow this to burn down then bank the pottery with wet tree leaves or even Polk salad leaves work real well. This will allow the pottery not to cool to rapidly and prevent stress fracture from forming.

My way of firing: I use an old BBQ grill and place my projects on the very top rack and follow the preparation firing and then the hardwood.

Good luck everyone, hope to see some Primitive Native American pots , pipes, spoons, and other creative projects up on the Photo Friday's group soon. Wado and Peace. Knowlton's Rangers.

Along with its CreateSpace self-publishing platform and Penguin Group, Amazon once again will sponsor a prize for an unpublished or self-published novel.

Poet Traci Brimhall has appeared a number of times in our Recent Winners pages over the past few years. [...] We asked Brimhall, who is currently a doctoral candidate at Western Michigan University, a few questions about how she approaches contests and what advice she has for writers considering competitions

Skin

In an instant I knew I had reached her
   because her skin flushed angrily
even as my own dampened with beads of salt
   and bile gathering on my forehead.
This intelligence beyond our control warning
   of weakness, of blind resolve, helpless.

I have watched the mating dance of cuttlefish,
   painted skin after painted skin and another
and have wondered how I would appear,
   as my face changes color and pattern
when the barista hands me a latte when I asked
   for espresso, maybe a swirl pattern in foam
that suggests a question mark in Times Roman
   where my nose should be, pointed, incredulous.

What glorious colors would mark coitus
   sliding by in an order of motion, of pleasure?
Perhaps I could even fake it, as when chameleons
   fake background, anonymity in plain sight.

Because humans are the champions of skin,
   we have conquered the earth and reach for more
on the face of our skin, as ruthless and as graceful
   as our minds, yes, it's our skin that has conquered.
Porous, blessed with untold conduits of humor
   and brine, carrying our mother sea within
while crossing deserts of sand and ice, trapping
   or releasing fire in our gut to and from the winds,
carrying this native sense , flawed or blessed,
   across the continents, a plague, the end of all.

Our painted skins bearing the origins of war,
   of conquest, pleasure, pain, bearer of our mother sea.

p.m.

Short stories are one of fiction's most vital and necessary exports, though often they are not read with the frequency or fervor of longer novels. Stories are seen as gateway writing: get a story published in a venerable literary magazine, get a book deal. Publish a debut book of short stories, and a novel may not be far away. Many readers (and writers) still see novels as the great accomplishment, with stories as an appetizer. And no one will doubt that The Great Gatsby is a superior work of art to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Fitzgerald's primary gift to the world. But I'd still take one Fitzgerald short story over several other authors' full-length books to an island.

Blackbird, the online literary magazine of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond, has announced a new award for short fiction. Given in honor of late Richmond-born fiction writer Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto, a two-thousand-dollar prize will be given annually for a story submitted to the journal over the course of each year, specifically by an emerging writer.

I know how lucky I am. And I know Deborah and I are long overdue for another adjustment to our breadwinning arrangement. Sometimes I also wonder if a better husband would find someone else to get feedback from. I have plenty of friends who'd be happy to exchange work. But none of them is Deborah. For better or worse, she is still the reader I write for. So until she says no, I'll keep asking for her brutal, beautiful help.

At least 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born.

At some point in writing your novel, you have to start thinking about “chaptering,” the process of deciding exactly when and where your chapter breaks will go.    

Simon & Schuster has created a Facebook app called Book Battle, a literary version of hotornot.com. Users can vote on book covers, games, authors or characters, which will be presented in slide-show format.

Many of the best-loved works of western literature feature catastrophically unhappy marriages — and, more specifically, women who marry — or almost marry — the wrong man. Why do we love reading about badly-married ladies?

All From Love

All from a height the string tightens
   and tugs, pulling on the walls of my heart,
how its different to fly into clouds with wings
   yet wishing your bare feet on dewy grass
while tracing the flight of a cumulo-nimbus,
   this cloud I am in, formless and ghostly.
I am lost inside of it, not seeing the wind
   that has been stilled by jet engine roar.

All from a distance, your thighs aching from the climb,
   the valley and its life like a page to be read.
Spoken aloud because it is not enough to watch,
   that somehow your voice carries down the hill
to rush among the treetops, the tall grass,
   the low swirling swallows in the grain
rolling like ripples in a pond into streets
   into homes and the dinner tables waiting.

All from a depth, the stark deep night of a new moon
   giving birth to stars that fall out of the sky.
The throats of creatures unknown and imagined
   floating their calls of hunger and restlessness.
Lying on a warm car hood, wide eyed awake,
   as still as the North Star is unmoving,
hearing her breath and every word it might contain
   as easily as the pillow of her hand fits mine.

All from a past that will not stop at morning's door,
   reaching, as want and need, evermore
into the simple acts of living, turning a key,
   hearing the click of a bolt, opening a faucet.

All from love that arrived and never left,
   strings tugging, thighs aching, stars falling out of the sky.

p.m.

There's a special feeling I get when spring is in the air and my reawakened arty curiosity draws me into theatres, galleries and bookshops. That feeling is nausea. I felt it when I saw this week's edition of the London Review of Books. Twelve chaps and four lucky ladies have written in it. The previous edition had 11 men and three women. A fortnight before that there were 16 men and four women. But on 11 March there were 25 eunuchs and a perfectly rendered wooden Pinocchio puppet. Only joking, it was 15 men and four women. Get the picture?

The enchanting art of the living word

Mireya Castañeda

THE Primavera de Cuentos Festival, directed since 1990 by Mayra Navarro, a maestra par excellence in the art of oral narrative, is a sign of the end of the Cuban tropical winter.

The convening of this 6th Festival, from March 14 through 20, had a satisfactory response despite the world economic crisis, with the presence of eight narrators from five countries: Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Russia.

Naturally, there was a strong Cuban presence, with more than 54 oral narrators from various provinces (Havana, Matanzas, Sancti Spíritus, Camagüey, Las Tunas, Holguín and Guantánamo) on stage.

As is traditional, the principal venue was Havana’s Gran Teatro, plus other attractive venues in the historic quarter: the Teatro Center, the Rubén Martínez Villena Library in Plaza de Armas, Gaia Theater on Teniente Rey Street and La Modernia Poesía bookstore.

Today President Obama will visit the 9/11 memorial at NYC. This poem By Galway Kinnell was first published by the New Yorker Magazine on the first anniversary of that tragedy. I find it an epic and moving affirmation of humanity across all borders, religions and race. May all those who perished that sunny morning rest remembered.

How did the Don become the Don? A new prequel to “The Godfather” promises to explain the “unknown history” of how Vito Corleone rose to power in Depression-era New York.

The American Fiction Prize sponsored by New Rivers Press has pushed its deadline to June 1. Fiction writers have an additional month to submit a story of up to 7,500 words to be considered for the one-thousand-dollar prize and inclusion in an anthology, American Fiction: The Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, to be released in 2012 by the press.

The Pulitzer Prizes in letters have been announced, with two women writers snagging literary honors. U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan, praised for her "witty, rebellious and yet tender" verse, won for her collection The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press). The winner in fiction, Jennifer Egan was honored for the "big-hearted curiosity" of her novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (Knopf), which also recently won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Creativity is like sex. You fumble your way through, you get lost in it, you fall in love. Both are passionate, rhythmic, pleasurable, and flowing. Both can bear fruit. And both can rack your soul with vulnerability, bliss, fear and awkwardness. [...] Below, I’ve exposed some of their secret tips, methods, and techniques. After all, they just left them strewn across the web. I lovingly picked them up, adapted and played with them. Some are contradictory and some are in harmony. Dig in. Use the ones that entice your creativity the most. If you want more, link to the source for the original juice.

In a stunning turn of events, the current in-place government of the Corporate United States- The Obama administration decided to turn the tides on the American people on behalf of the U.S. Government.

Writing in bed is not just about convenience or comfort. I think there's a psychological advantage, too. If you write in bed in the early morning (as I do occasionally) you occupy an intriguing part of consciousness, somewhere between dreaming and wakefulness. Part of you is still in the shadowy cave of dream world; part of you is adjusting to the sharp brightness of reality. The mixture is fruitful and often suggestive.

children with autism spectrum disorders (the rate is in constant dispute, but some estimate that A.S.D. affects as many as 1 in 110 children), a stack of new books for and about autistic children is to be expected.

This year, several of the books look noticeably different, shedding the institutional feel of earlier takes on the subject. The mission remains, but the books look like the kinds of books children may actually want to read.

Playoffs

I suppose there's no breaking her spirit
   having grown among boys and men.
Three shirts and that championship cap
   carefully put on, tipped just so,
wishing all the luck she had in her to the play,
   her face somewhere in between wisdom and hope.
Not angry, not hurt, just gently moving
   her head side to side, mouthing words.
Somewhere there is the girl looking on
   at her brothers and their friends, wondering
what she would do instead, if she had
   those thighs, those shoulders, how her grace
would recede into a flat plane or a point,
   quietly still as the swirl of the play
would carry her, thighs and shoulders
   down towards the goal grunting gasping.
It was all too much, this thing of bodies colliding
   not for love but out of it.
Arms crossed on her chest now, thinking
   when to switch shirts, imagining the flight
to the goal, the chances given the time, how much
   more time, how much would be enough,
the corners of her lips tightening imagining
   her thighs and shoulders bursting with will,
carried away in the swirl of the play, a grunt,
   a groan, pleading, she changes shirts.

p.m.

Readers have always looked to novelists as reality experts, possessed of a superior experience of contemporary society, who could instruct the bewildered neophyte in the manners and morals of the new order of things. Infinite Jest, densely packed with worldly expertise, gave Wallace the reputation of a polymathic genius who not only had the measure of present-day America in all its oppressive confusion, but could give it moral shape and meaning.

This year, National Poetry Month brings an ambitious collaboration: a cross-country relay race of 54 poets contributing to one poem about America. The practice is known as renga, an ancient Japanese tradition of collaborative poetry in which one poet writes his or her lines then hands it off to the next.

Accusations against Greg Mortenson highlight how many authors in the genre take a relaxed approach to accuracy.

Blood Type your red bones here....

They start to shift on the day of change, my bones that is, it is strange this lunar cycle that ties me down, the hair on my arms and legs stand-up in anticipation of later growth. I itch on the outside and wiggle inside, my transformation starts like a spring rain with the quiet abandon of deep earthy nuance. Growth and change and danger course over me.

My great, warm light muse is coming right after sundown, into her most regal and primary form this evening, the full Goddess of my compunction will glide past me tonight, up there, just out of reach. She-Will-Light-My-Path-SO-BRIGHT RED! But for now I wait and wiggle with anticipation for those hours of wild abandon. There were more of us once. The Greeks even spoke of us in metaphor and myth. Our bloody swath was once long and wide but now we create little footpaths through history. We are alone in our festivities and that hurts the most. My howls are now just echos when once chorus was heard. I am never sure if my echos may really be an answering call so I l follow and find nothing but empty shadows.

I pace the day in little seasons of slight alteration, a muscle tick here, a faster reaction there, longer times staring at small movements. Eye sharp looks and finger snapping steps take me through the long streach of the day. I am a caged leopard of changing emotional spots, shadow striped and cornered every where I turn. I build hunger for singular conversion, the solitary metamorphosis, the ultimate reshaping of man and beast. I am the pattern and definition of 'waiting'.

The long shadow light that grows soon turns to a darker background fence for my dance with her tonight. I run straight for the trees to slide among the forest of cool shades. I smell the fresh musk of Earth, the older sister to my queen, she who revolves and who I resolve to know. It is silent planetary music that I hear in my ever increasing senses, I know this language well.

I make time with the change by growling in approval, it-is-time-to make my red song.......to her louder....

"The Use and Abuse of Literature," the latest book by the prolific Harvard literary scholar Marjorie Garber, is in part about this "centripetal movement" in artistic appreciation "from the edges to the center, from the outside to the inside, incorporating once disparaged genres and authors into respectable, canonical and even classic status." We've all seen the process applied to television and cinema and comic books (now called, in a Maileresque turn, "graphic novels"), but Garber reminds us that this tendency has existed throughout history, bringing biography and Renaissance drama (Garber's primary academic specialty) and even the novel itself in from the cold, along with private forms like letters and journals that never wished for such consideration. "What once wasn't literature," Garber writes, "is now at the heart of the canon."

SHEET-bed rains//////////

are fillin' my drains====

'Mother' nature

can you please explain

is it causing my sprains?

Whipping winds of wet stuff

that mainly fall on the plains

in Spain

are screamin' rough

and making my hair all tough

to comb,

Stutter stop storms

play havoc

with my important work norms

but wash the horses

so ya gotta love those forces,

I run on out

and work about

like a soaked lout

till stutter storms scream on in

I stand and shout

"Will you not let me be"

and the wind you see

it talks to me

and it says

"a rain drop can be as sharp as a pin, so you better go on in".

The first book written by Dublin's latest literary star had nothing to do with his home city at all. A sprawling state-of-the-nation saga, promisingly titled Your Granny Is a Hunger Striker, it languishes these days in his archive in the National Library, doomed to remain unread. "It's never been published and it never will be," Roddy Doyle says now, nearly 30 years after he wrote it. "Because it's utter @!$%#e. I sent it to every agent and publisher I could find – and either it wasn't coming back, or it was coming back unopened. There's nothing at all in it of the area I grew up in. It's absent."

(Chuckle.)

Shift light wind

fast tracks in

with a rushing spin

then grey stuff swims

and rain drops scatter

across the city

grey spun light

a sky spiders delight

as rain wets skin,

Rolling banks

of sky made tanks

crash across the sky

with thunderous applause

from the clouded crowd

boy it's loud

a storm is the cause

it did make me pause,

A window dotted

World gets spotted

with the cousin of the dew

it makes a real green view

and I stand there

and get wet.

To the Spring rains, fast, furious, quiet, short, grey, dark, light, showers, deluges and sprinkles.

We seek what they bring, sustenance.

The two-year-old Sunday Times Short Story Award, given by the U.K. weekend newspaper for a single story, goes this year to an American author. Anthony Doerr, who won the Story Prize in March for his second collection Memory Wall, took the thirty-thousand-pound prize (nearly fifty thousand dollars) for "The Deep," set in 1920s Detroit.

I originally wrote about the novelist Colson Whitehead over a year ago and, for some reason, that essay has been my most popular piece to date. I return once more to address the ever intriguing personality of this singular American writer.

I recently sat in a section of Citi Field above my current station, in a seat priced by the seller to conform to the current ineptitude of my beloved New York Mets. I brought along three freshly constructed sandwiches, chips and bottled water as penance to a financial status that normally precludes activities involving the purchase of tickets. Sharing the mini shopping bag with the food was a trade paperback version of John Henry Days, a novel by Colson Whitehead. The book has floated around the edges of my life too long, taken up in spurts in hospital waiting rooms or during extended visits to the can. I don’t spend too much time in hospitals, or in doing my business, so this story of a weekend in West Virginia occupies a calendar period stretched to silly putty proportions over a space/time pothole.

It’s embarrassing for someone like me to admit being stalled on a single piece of literature. I’ve managed Proust, Bellow, and Vidal, to say nothing of Pynchon, with little of the turbulence that constantly bounces this book in and out of focus. Granted, it’s a long story; nearly four hundred pages of fine type and just at the perceptible limit that I set for paperback reading, to an overall thickness between Belgian waffle and a standard Carnegie Deli corned beef on rye. I somehow managed to negotiate Vineland in hardcover, so nothing else should feel too impenetrable. Yet, this book remains an incomplete examination, so I brought it along to the doubleheader, knocking down a few chapters during the train ride in and chopping off pages at a time between innings of the first game and between plays in the second. Three more chapters shifted to port on the ride home, leading me nearer to conclusion; nearer in a relative sense, like walking in the direction of a sunset.

There’s nothing wrong, from a structural standpoint, with the book. It isn’t as spirited, or as linear, as Whitehead’s first novel, The Intuitionist, but more autobiographical in its portrayal of J., a freelance journalist in the midst of running a professional marathon of invitation-only promotional assignments. The lone black among a group of peers, J. engages his white colleagues at the level of overgrown frat boys who treat skin color as an accessory to the grander object of employing their collective intellect to ridicule the subjects of their articles. The brief flashback to the author’s actual internship at The Village Voice provides a poorly disguised aside, but adds a bit of winking fun for the knowing reader.

The writing is pure Whitehead, flamboyant and exact, the flow of words metered erratically enough to keep eyes moving toward the next line, with descriptions piled forward to serve as backfill in those rare dull moments allowed for the reader to reflect. Colson Whitehead writes for himself first, and for other writers next. His own racial makeup is a consistent theme, but presents an impression more of isolation than solidarity. It’s easy to see why. If we produced short bios of him and me, headed by our first names and last initials, and played a game of Pick the White Guy, Colson’s list would be chosen ninety percent of the time over mine. It’s his unique personal history that moves him to pursue societal issues of racism at the individual level in his writing; this man, that woman, those children. If nothing else, his work speaks to the people who raised themselves to a higher place, using every available measure in our society, save for the unrelenting badge of overpigmentation.

Perhaps I’ve hit on the problem. The point of reference is unique – a black man who has transcended color in his own mind, but fully expects to have to excuse the rest of us our predilections. The only person reminded of in terms of this inner perception would be Frederick Douglass, a young slave who knew he was smarter than his overseers, smarter even than his owners. Douglass escaped, changed his name, turned orator and author, and eventually settled first in Massachusetts with his wife, and later in western New York, taking a leadership role within the abolitionist movement. His communication skills belied the expectations of people of any color for any man of color, let alone one raised a southern slave, and patronage from the northern elite allowed access to levels of a New England society where the only other black faces belonged to servants, cooks and nannies. Picture a possible scenario, beginning with a brief setup:

Two elaborately dressed Boston matrons meet on a wide boulevard. The elements of greeting etiquette at once established, they engage in more typically womanish gossip.

First Woman

Have you heard? The Clarkson-Parks are holding a dinner reception for Frederick Douglass.

Second Woman

Douglas? Is he the new conductor for the symphony?

First Woman

No, dear, Douglass the abolitionist. My goodness, you don’t know of him?

Second Woman

I have no interest in politics. Why should I care?

First Woman

Well, for one thing, he’s a Negro gentleman.

Second Woman

(Sneering) Oh, how mah-velous … a darkie guest of honor.

First Woman

I’m told he’s very wise and well-spoken.

Second Woman

Oh, pooh. My husband’s valet Jackson is blacker than a parson’s cloak and speaks as well as I do. Why not hold a reception for him as well? It all seems a bit odd to me.

First Woman

Really, Missus Broadsocket, such a comparison is appalling. Certainly your valet is not held at the same level of esteem as Mister Douglass. He stands as a symbol for the potential of his entire race, to say nothing of his forceful and intelligent arguments against the institution of slavery.

Second Woman

If you feel so strongly about it, why not hold a reception for him yourself? I would happily accept your invitation to attend.

First Woman

I thought you weren’t interested in politics.

Second Woman

Oh, I’m not, not in the least. Still, I am interested in observing the faces of your household staff watching you moon over a colored man.

First Woman

(Icily) Really … well … good day, Missus Broadsocket.

The reception began in the grand salon of the Clarkson-Park townhouse. The guests were attended by three white men in evening coats, hired by the host to avoid any unseemly impression. The guest of honor, Frederick Douglass, wore his hair thrown to one side like a crashing wave, while his style of dress, buttoned up gray and piped in black satin, reflected the air of a man unaccustomed to Back Bay propriety and unimpressed by its practitioners.

Douglass never spoke unless spoken to, either at the reception or during the dinner following. He didn’t need to initiate conversations – they were served to him incessantly throughout the evening. What he did not start he finished, dominating the field in discussions whose subjects ranged from Charles Darwin to Dred Scott to the imminence of southern secession.

As the evening progressed, Douglass found his perfect foil in the form of one Denton Muybridge, a dandy on the cusp of middle age, a womanizer living comfortably under the umbrella of a well-funded annuity. His presence at such functions was meant to honor a storied family line, for which he represented the final chapter. Douglass appreciated the younger man’s taunting wit, aimed as it was mostly in the direction of those obtuse individuals who took up causes strictly for the refreshments provided.

At the end of the dinner, the men retired in a group to the library, led by Clarkson-Park, while Frederick Douglass lingered in the dining room, thanking his hostess for the wonderful meal.

Muybridge

(Craning over the gentlemen to his rear) Come along, Mister Douglass. These men are not comfortable leaving you alone with their wives.

Clarkson-Park

Damn you, Muybridge. Try to behave as a gentleman and spare us these embarrassing comments.

Muybridge

I had no intention to offend, Clarkson. I was merely trying to protect the honor of our dear Mister Douglass.

The men sat and stood and wandered the tall room, surrounded by the great volumes of bound western thought and enveloped by the smoke of a dozen lit cigars of Cuban filler wrapped in Connecticut leaf. The conversation remained focused throughout on the aftermath of legal emancipation and the spectre of chaos in the South.

Clarkson-Park

Mister Douglass, as a lawyer I am painfully aware that the body of Federal law is unable to address the legal inequities of individual states, especially as they would apply to Freedmen. An enforced emancipation is bound to engender strong reactions in the legislatures and the passing of onerous laws that differ from slavery only in name.

Douglass

Freedom itself is the great hurdle. Once a human is released from bondage, the opportunity to contribute and play a part in a better life will present itself, as surely as it presents itself to white citizens every day. The Constitution is inviolable to that point.

Muybridge

What of our own Freedmen, Mister Douglass? We have had them among us here for nearly a century, as I am certain a population exists with you in Rochester. Are they truly free, or is it merely one’s state of mind that makes it so?

Douglass

The state of one’s mind need not be permanently fixed by conditioning, but I acknowledge that the ability to adjust differs in all people. It is not a malady unique to the colored man. We are all slaves, in some manner, to our past.

Clarkson-Park

This is so. My father practiced law, as did his father. It was never a matter of choice for me. At the age of eight, I knew what I was to be. In that respect, freedom was denied.

Muybridge

Poor Clarkson, your dream of being a coachman snatched at so young an age. For my part, my family always owned ships in trade with Europe and Asia and, for a time, do please forgive me Mister Douglass, in Africa. I was to be the owner of a great fleet.

Douglass

What happened to change that?

Muybridge

A great storm off the Newfoundland coast. My parents were en route to London with my two sisters. I was judged too young for such a journey, so was left behind, orphaned and in trust to my father’s business interests. When I came of age, I sold off the entirety of it. That, my friends, is true freedom. And you, Mister Douglass, are from abolitionist stock?

Douglass

(Laughing) No, Mister Muybridge.

Clarkson-Park

Muybridge … must you always engage decent persons with such cheek? I’m sure our guest is not interested in parading his enslaved lineage for your pleasure.

Douglass

(Looking directly at Clarkson-Park) My father was a white man.

The room fell silent for a moment, even the floor clock, and the wisps of smoke held position in the air as the span of a second stretched uncomfortably around the group.

Muybridge

What a coincidence, so was mine. What about yours, Clarkson?

Clarkson-Park

May we please return to more serious subjects? Mister Douglass has travelled a great distance and his time should not be wasted on frivolities.

Muybridge

Of course, Clarkson, that was so rude of me. Here’s a question, Mister Douglass, if I may. When you escaped, what was the aspect most likely to give you away?

Douglass

During my escapes, for there were many attempted, it was always my appearance that threatened success. I understand your point, Mister Muybridge. Our racial characteristics do confound any hope for a smooth road to full acceptance. However, for every day that passes, that much longer grows the road to a truly democratic society. Gentlemen, this is Boston. This is the heart of our movement. I expect to be challenged in other places, even in Rochester. But, here is where the faith in our cause, our just cause, must be resolute. The enslavement of human beings cannot be justified for any reason, and especially one as shallow as the level of temporary discomfort its eradication may bring.

§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§§

That went a lot longer than planned. I’m not even sure whether it made any sense in respect to the subject of Colson Whitehead, American novelist. In the end, all that exists within the universe is the product of our own perception. For me, that includes the confident hope that I can flip over the final page of a certain novel and find my perception of the world has changed. Then, it’s on to the next Whitehead novel, Sag Harbor, Lord willing I should live so long.

Petit Danseur

You landed on the mark because your stride
    had measured that distance many times,
but I was startled, as earthbound as I am,
   as one who when caught in the rain looks up
at least once, wondering how clouds can be rivers
   of water separated by spaces, pauses of pure air.

Unblessed by the understanding in your bones,
   your sinewed stance and how it breaks
the space about it, that I worry over the flight
   of a drop of rain, changing its shape as it curls
like your turns in its choreography of fulfillment,
   its surrender to its heart's wish.

I don't know how you hold this surrender hidden,
   masked in the everyday trot to the deli,
the awful, it must be awful for you, amble
   up or down stairs, the sheer utility of that,
as the drop of rain labors its way to the sea,
   waiting to be rescued by the heat of the sun,
waiting, as you wait, for that moment of release
   when your heart's surrender becomes dance.

p.m.

Grey is the day that is washed away

without work or play

the day is grey,

Rain washes down today

grass grows green

and the day is not mean,

The earth turns to mud

it is not a dud

shoes end up with crude,

But the day never washes away

when there is work or play.

The Maiden and the Black Nazarene

Jerusalem could have looked like that
   in the ancient, turbulent era of empires.
Broken mendicants in the shadows of the temple,
   the smell of open sores hidden by dirty cloth,
heads bowed and sitting on stone,
   a bony arm and hand outstretched, still.
In the heat the desiccated roots, bark and leaves
   sold for medicine are as rough as beggar's palms.

I had heard of the maiden's ghost roaming
   past the hidden caves of the green mountain.
The clear water rising from their bottoms,
   on to feed brooks streaming down black rock
where women tie their just washed hair into braids,
   the perfume of botanicals tight about them,
the slap of wet laundry on smooth boulders,
   the grime of living washing away from bare feet.

The varnish on the Black Nazarene's feet
   faded to to reveal the grain of centuries old mahogany,
hand after hand caressing in prayer, in hope,
   black veils in a line and the murmuring 'neath,
the eternity of the yellow sun through the stained glass
   lighting the way for supplicants walking on knees,
the altar empty, no priest to acknowledge suffering,
   and again the murmuring, maddening.

The maiden had been set upon by bandits,
   ravaged then hurled down a ravine.
You would never guess it, the cool breeze light
   from the lake, running fingers through treetops.
Jasmine. Orchids and ylang-ylang wild,
   the heavy golden harvest fields shimmering
in the afternoon's quiet conversation with clouds,
   a train's stentorian horn calling from far away.

In the bay this morning they found another body
   face down, hands tied with bruises for skin.
If you look carefully at him, cradled by swells,
   you will see a perfect hole at the nape of his head.
The cathedral bells peel for Angelus and
   among the pews, murmurs again, again.
Out in the courtyard, starling's startled by a hawk's shadow
   rise as one with the host in the priest's hands.

Always, in beauty, there is the unworldly,
   like the coconut tree with branches on the forest's edge.
"A trick," the botanist had said, but two coconuts
   laid close enough to join as one with age
like a rainbow's refracted double between
    two sheets of rain, beauty nonetheless.
and I am wondering about the fruit of that tree,
   the coconut tree with branches, should I eat one?

Come the feast day of the Black Nazarene,
   a roiling mass of the poor will gather
and the Nazarene sail the swells of their backs,
   with the bruises and blood on purple robes,
the crown of thorns, the murmurs now loud
   as thunder rolling down the avenues, like fear,
and I have noticed, not that I am a meteorologist,
   that it has never rained for these people on this day.

In the village they have gathered under a monstrous moon,
   the peanuts have been harvested in their sweetness
and the sweetest, still moist of the earth, are shelled
   and laid in handfuls at a time into an olden mortar,
singing, singing for the harvest and the meter
   of the pounding pestle passed hand to hand
and in the distance the pestles's heartbeat
   echoes into the darkness of the maiden's ravine.

Always, there is the pall of candle smoke
   in the Nazarene's cathedral, ash, wax, stone,
the desiccated roots, bark and leaves of plants.
   the still outstretched hands of the poorest,
lining the borders of its walls, the noise
   and clamor on the street afront
that if you cross it, and its danger, come
   upon stands of flowers and fragrant food stalls.

The pounding pestle is incessant, and between each blow
   a maiden's hand forms the paste of peanuts,
in the blink of an eye, reaching, turning, and,
   just in time, withdraws as pestle head meets mortar surface.
The rhythm of it, the harvest song, the monstrous moon,
   the full throated call of the far-away train,
the rice wine poured as the sweet peanut paste forms,
   the scent of bread grilling over charcoal.

There is no rest for the Nazarene, save
   for the Sabbath of death, his face shrouded.
Purple. Purple as bruises, and still they come,
   walking on their knees to the altar,
lighting candles that sublime with prayers
   into the ceiling yellowing overhead,
the maiden's ghost wandering the green mountain
   among the women, their scented braids, laundry,
among faceless strangers with ravaging in their hearts,
   and the legend is,
should you wander in her forest in goodness,
    you shall taste sweet, if not, be haunted by Death, to death.

p.m.

When you take a photograph, you are composing a visual piece of information and communicating a thought, action, idea, mood or a bit of history.

As the composer, you are manipulating design elements like line, shape, space, distance, dimension, high lights, shades and shadows, colors and movement. You are doing this in a visually limiting frame, a rectangle called 'the picture plane'. So when you are composing a photo, think of your rectangle in thirds. The front or lowest third is the fore-ground, the middle of the third is called the mid-ground and the top of the photo is the back ground. Also think of thirds from left to right. The left third, the center third and the right third.

Looking at your subject matter with these thirds in mind can help you to create stronger compositions. You can even think further and consider the total as nine equal parts but that may be too much at one time so try the thirds method first.

Where do you place the subject, in the center? Most people will do this because the lens has a focal point for you to use. But sometimes the difference between a good composition and a great one is how you place the subject and the center is not always the best or most exciting way to compose the photo.

An image that is not centered can be more interesting because it makes the viewer more active. Since our eye goes to the center automatically in the rectangle, draw the viewers eye with an image that is off-centered. Use the size of the object and the size of the surrounding area to create a large and a small area. Do not make the image and the surrounding area the same size all the time. This creates a balance of size which may tend to be boring.

You want to lead your viewers eye around the whole photo, you want them to take in the whole of the image and not just the flower, face, or dog/cat/boat/rat (what ever). So look at leading lines to see how they will make the eye move. Look at darks and lights to see which you have more of. Watch where you place things near the edge of the picture plane.

Do you have something going off the edge? That is not always a bad thing, it can be used to create a sense of tension in the photo. It can even be the force of the whole photo.

How many objects do you want in the photo. Even number objects have balance, which you may want, odd numbers though may have more visual grab for the viewer and can create a nice visual difference.

Look where you are compared to the image you are taking. Are you above it (bird's eye view), on the same linear plane as the image or are you below it (ant's eye view). This can enhance or detract from your image. Standing above it you may make the viewer dominant and the object seem weaker. From below you make the image strong and it can seem larger and create a sense of dominance. using this can create a stronger impression on the viewer. It may get more 'eye grab'.

Composition and composing are things learned by doing. Take several photos of the same image from differnet positions and then evaluate which composition seems stronger, better and more interesting.

Remember, taking a photo and looking at a photo are both active so make the viewer more an active part by manipulating the composition.

Have fun and create more.

With local independent bookstores like A Different Light in the Castro and Modern Times in the Mission struggling to make ends meet, not to mention Borders' bankruptcy and the general panic of the book publishing industry in the face of the e-reader, it would seem that literary pursuits of all kinds are under attack in this digital age.

But literary journals — a long-tail publishing phenomenon before the Internet made other niche offerings accessible — are thriving.

In some sense, the answer to that question is, really, "Who cares?" Because actually reading the book—sitting down with it and curling up with it, beside a roaring fire or whatnot—seems, somehow, beside the point. Write More Good is an artifact as much as a piece of literature, the kind of thing you might find displayed on a table in the Ironical Kitsch section of Urban Outfitters, piled next to Awkward Family Photos and a picked-over array of Mr. T bobbleheads. The book's physicality—the fact that it exists in the first place—is itself part of the joke.

Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded annually to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers who are residents of the United States and Canada "on the basis of achievement and exceptional promise." Last year's awards averaged $36,857 each.

The last light of man's day closes in and I gain new sight again. The dreams stop and voices quiet down and I can think clearly now. The ruby hunger of stain creeps into my soul void body and I move with a grace that I had not eight hours ago. my bones tighten and my muscles stretch with the will of elasticity. My shoulders feel ready to push up the lid and take my repast from those who now weaken in the dark. The last light is my spark to haunt the dense dark folds of Mother Night. Her mantle covers all the world so I can hunt those daylight seekers who are soon soft weepers in my arms.

No moon can hold me still. I gather all my will and my darkest fortune sells me a new coin. Each night is like another lover born to sweep this body into action without soul and lifeless scorn. I seek to gain from them a spark of life that was most torn from me a long time ago when I was born.

I take my senses and make time stand still for them. They see with eyes that cover over soon with sleep. The kind that never ends and makes them part of quiet beds in stone gardens that show angels who weep atop their last repose. It is all that I can do for them I suppose.

I move out and over house and roof. I swing wide and look for those who shudder and weep in shadow. I am the lesson that the dark should be feared and that shade creates shades of men.

As Horace once said "Nunc est bibendum!", Now is the time to drink.

Light dies so that I will live again. Man sighs so that I can hear again, they expire so that I may feel again. Then I retire so that all can feel alive without fear once more. Tis nothing else, it is the cycle of our parasitic world.

I am only what you and yours have made me. I seek to show you every night the wisdom gained by sleeping all day with your voice and the sound of pain.

Smash and grab life

your askin' for strife,

Push and push and never pull

what a fool,

Always swimming up those streams

ends with screams,

Never bend with the wind

some where you probably sinned,

Life flight

life light and

air currents flow

wings just know

how to go

the course,

Winds do blow

and streams may slow

but life does know

how to grow,

Follow the path

and go with the flow.

In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I'd said it was, one of the greatest literary works of all time; b) but when he got to the ending – 981 pp. body copy, another 96 of small-print endnotes – did I think he was going to think it was worth it? No, I said, the ending's infuriating, and although the author denied it and I haven't made a study of the available papers, I still suspect it was to some extent an afterthought, a way of ducking out of a project that, without it, would maybe never have ended at all.

The author, James Jones, objected to the changes at the time, arguing in a letter to his editor at Scribner that "the things we change in this book for propriety's sake will in five years, or ten years, come in someone else's book anyway." But eventually he gave in to his publisher.

Sixty years later Mr. Jones's estate has made a deal to reissue a digital version of the book that restores those cuts. The book is still in print.

The Washington State–based literary journal Bellingham Review is offering an extension for submissions to its poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction contests. Having received fewer submissions than they have in the past, the journal opted to accept entries until April 15.

Stay

The water in the bowl had turned red
   (the hand of Christ passing over amphorae).
I was amazed, in my sickness, my fragility,
   the poison still in my humor, caustic,
punching a hole in my gut, I wish I could see
   the glassy membrane surface break
like when I cut my face shaving near the lips,
   the alarm in counting drops, how deep,
how deep does it go, the haunting idea of limits,
   how much does one have to give or lose?
Walking back to the sick bed, ungainly
   as a new born foal, the stumble of not knowing
and into the white sheets that have caught
   the ash fallen off my shrunken skin,
as wan as the afternoon sunlight was bright,
   looking at my toes and waiting for them to grey,
to darken, telling myself what to feel,
   the wonder of it all arriving, all together.
Thinking, if all of that leaves with me, I will sleep
   and if I stay, then there is more to lose or give.

p.m.

Boots (for Julia Roberts)

You've got 2 wear those boots
again
babe.
2 less things
2 take off
later.

p.m.

Among David Foster Wallace's papers at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin are three hundred-odd books from his personal library, most of them annotated, some heavily as if he were scribbling a dialogue with the author page by page. There are several of his undergraduate papers from Amherst; drafts of his fiction and non-fiction; research materials; syllabi; notes, tests and quizzes from classes he took, and from those he taught; fan correspondence and juvenilia. As others have found, it's entirely boggling for a longtime fan to read these things. I recently spent three days in there and have yet to cram my eyeballs all the way back in where they belong.
[...]
One surprise was the number of popular self-help books in the collection, and the care and attention with which he read and reread them. I mean stuff of the best-sellingest, Oprah-level cheesiness and la-la reputation was to be found in Wallace's library. Along with all the Wittgenstein, Husserl and Borges, he read John Bradshaw, Willard Beecher, Neil Fiore, Andrew Weil, M. Scott Peck and Alice Miller. Carefully.

Sid Holt, Chief Executive of the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), today announced the finalists for the 2011 National Magazine Awards. Known as the Ellies—for the Alexander Calder stabile "Elephant," a reproduction of which is given to each award winner—the National Magazine Awards will be presented on Monday, May 9, in New York City.

Just before National Poetry Month kicked off last week, word began to spread about a major new poetry prize out of Canada. The fifty-thousand-dollar Montreal International Poetry Prize, funded by an anonymous donor, isn't honoring a poet's lifetime achievement or a major new book, but a single poem.

Hey all you vine writers, do you sometimes need an excuse to write, gotta put some words down before you explode, can't go a day with out putting an article up but have nothing to really complain about? Well if you do say yes, or even maybe to any of these questions then you are ripe to become a rhyming rascal and we are looking for you!

The World Seen Through Poetry group is looking for new members who love words, word play and are looking to be creative and who want to share that creativity with others.

But wait, you never thought you had poetry in you, never thought creativity was "in your bones", always thought poetry was for sissies and girls, think poetry is a dead art form? WRONG!

Poetry is easier and simpler than you think, in fact your probably wrote some poetry when you were younger, Didn't You?

Words float your boat, rhymes make fun times, poetry makes you glow-ity. Then join the fun, glow-ity and float with us rhyming boatsters of rhyming words.

I'll even get you started, here is a list of rhyming words to get you brain juiced up with rhyme time, all you gotta do is provide a few words to create the poem, don't just gloam, write a poem!

boat, coat, emote, goat, gloat, moat, note, rote, tote, vote.

bling, ding, fling, king, ling, ming, ping, ring, sing, sling, thing, wing, zing.

blast, cast, fast, gassed, last, mast, past, sassed, vast.

So, leave a comment and or a poem and let us see what you got in your reason to rhyme. You will have fun, we will enjoy it all with you and you will help your writing skills tremendously with word play.

Today is a wonderful dark and dreay day

I will sit and read Alexandere Dumas and wait for you to play

the book I have appears

to be The Three Musketeers.

Don't wait, participate!

On the evidence of classroom discussion, the vast majority of my incoming students seem to have only read those three books. In fact, affirmative teaching – teaching to exams – often means these students also know the same five things about those three books. It doesn't make for a wide-ranging conversation.

By March 30, when Amazon began shipping The Pale King to customers, Little, Brown's attempt to control the book's rollout would look downright laughable. Still, the results were the same. Practically every media organ in America was scrambling to cover Wallace. And one sort of has to wonder: at what point did an unfinished manuscript by a writer of avant-garde commitments and Rogetian prolixity and high Heideggerian seriousness (and footnotes) become a genuine pop-cultural event?

I used the analogy of the knife drawer - we all know which is the sharpest knife in our kitchen and invariably reach for it, bypassing the duller blades.  Writers should reach for the sharpest words possible - precision, focus, tone are the writer's sharp blades.

Good tips in here.

His posthumous unfinished novel, "The Pale King" — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.

Mad Men, season 5, will debut in March 2012.
Hooray!

The finalists for the Man Booker International Prize have been announced, but if one nominee's wishes were honored, the shortlist would have to be clipped further. Best-selling author John le Carré has refused his nomination for the prize honoring achievement in fiction, saying simply that, while flattered by the recognition, he does not compete for literary awards.

People often ask the annual Booker judges: "How many books did you read?" With the International prize there is no answer other than "thousands", for the prize honours a lifelong achievement in writing, and is tested by the judges' lifelong achievement in reading. But if you must: how many have I read since we began? The answer is 200-ish. And I've enjoyed almost every one, because if I didn't I just moved on to something better. We'd agreed to test to strength: no matter that some of a writer's output is of lesser quality, as long as the heights are majestic.

Crafted in the deepest dark

a place where moonlight doesn't stray

where hours before the children played with spark

a bloody murder proceeds with great display,

Are the dogs ready to bark their dismay

do the alley cats want to arc

then it's best to just walk away,

A timeless monster stalking

endless victims walking

bloody cloth keeps cloating

till the break of day,

I went out walking after dark

after seing a grand new play

I crossed the road into the park

the end of a busy day

I went on in just for a lark

and did not know dismay,

He came right in to the deepest dark

a tie and stick pin ' my, how gay'

my teeth did make the bloody mark

that entered in the prey

and then I made his feet turn clay

a park after dark is no lark

they say,

Blood is chilling

and tooth filling

ending the life of another stray

remorse is fainting

and I keep painting

till the break of a new day

where the children will again play........

Zone 3 Press, housed at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, is accepting entries for a new book competition "open to anyone who can carve an artful exposition, drive a factual narrative, or strum a lyric sentence." One creative nonfiction manuscript will be selected for publication by the press, and the winning writer will receive one thousand dollars.

Former Washington Post reporters Bradley Graham and his wife Lissa Muscatine are purchasing the iconic upper Northwest bookstore, which has continued to turn a profit despite catastrophic change in the bookselling industry.

Assassin #2

There is nothing that will change,
nothing that can bend the spine of desire.
Nothing that is at stake save the object,
that is all there is.

I have held her shoulders gently down
and all the sweet secret places she's laid bare
but it was her gaze I wanted,
the shape of her own desires,
the arc of her brow, the true color of her irises,
how her eyelids felt, offering her lashes.

p.m.

What follows is a sampler of literary catastrophe. Don't run away. It's not as depressing as it sounds. One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.

This has been, in fact, one of the enduring "social" functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn't surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect.

The value of this magically convenient library book — otherwise known as an e-book — is the subject of a fresh and furious debate in the publishing world. For years, public libraries building their e-book collections have typically done so with the agreement from publishers that once a library buys an e-book, it can lend it out, one reader at a time, an unlimited number of times.

Last week, that agreement was upended by HarperCollins Publishers when it began enforcing new restrictions on its e-books, requiring that books be checked out only 26 times before they expire.

I understand the need to find a commercially viable business model, but this comes off as excessively limiting. Is there a reason a simple model can't be developed using data on how often libraries naturally replace print copies due to wear and loss?

Why would a novel be, in Chabon's parlance, "wrecked"? Authors, always sensitive creatures, might abandon a book in a fit of despair, as Stephenie Meyer initially did in 2008 with her "Twilight" spinoff "Midnight Sun," which she declared herself "too sad" to finish after 12 chapters leaked to the Internet. More dramatically, in 1925 Evelyn Waugh burned his unpublished first novel, "The Temple at Thatch," and attempted to drown himself in the sea after a friend gave it a bad review. (Stung by jellyfish, Waugh soon returned to shore.) More dramatically still, Nikolai Gogol died a mere 10 days after burning the manuscript of "Dead Souls II," for the second time.

Today I rarely read anything — book, magazine, newspaper — without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is — no exaggeration — possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.

Let's agree, shall we, to keep throwing around the inane term Great American Novel, and to never, ever utter the phrase Great American Novella. Let's agree not to remind California what it used to take for granted, that novellas, because of their length, can often be more handily adapted than novels into movies. Let us not remind New York what all the avid and demanding among us take for granted, that a volume of three novellas is more intriguing than one flabby novel

Long-form journalism is the only homegrown American literary form. I'm talking about the kind of journalism that, in an effort by writers to conceal how radically they're blurring the fact-fiction line, is innocently labeled "narrative nonfiction" in journalism schools and M.F.A. programs. Narrative nonfiction typically conforms to the artfully narrow standards of American fact checking (another indigenous art) while enjoying what Dwight Macdonald once called the "atmospheric license" of fiction. Some of the most beautiful and illuminating writing in all of American English is narrative nonfiction.