Tea leaves

Wordless Wednesday

2012-01-18T12:35:00.000-05:00

you're it!

2012-01-17T16:24:00.000-05:00

Kim tagged me. She also said that I'm not allowed to say "consider yourself tagged if you're reading this," but I'm a disobedient soul. So, consider yourself tagged.

1. Who is your favorite Disney villain? The crocodile in Peter Pan. (When you hear me humming "Never Smile at a Crocodile," you know I'm bored out of my mind.)
2. What one fear do you wish you could overcome? I'm very, very, very much afraid of confrontations, which has led to being very, very, very much taken-for-granted.

3. What's your dessert at your last meal? Spicy, heavily-likkered-up fruitcake.
4. If you had the chance now, would you date your high school crush? No.
5. If cost were no object, where would you build your dream home? Monterey, California, overlooking the sea.
6. Any sound can wake you up in the morning --- what is it? A recording of Gabriel Faure's "Sicilienne" from Pelléas et Mélisande. (Listen here...)
7. What is your dream pet? Marlo, the cat I lost in 1992.
8. You can commit any crime and get away with it. What would it be? Unilaterally appealing Citizens United. Corporations are not people.
9. Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Jo March. I know it's a cliche, but there it is.
10. You have your own knitting store. What is it called? I don't feel clever today, but I would want to use Emily Dickinson's poem, "Autumn - overlooked my knitting" as a theme, somehow.

Autumn — overlooked my Knitting –
Dyes — said He — have I –
Could disparage a Flamingo –
Show Me them — said I –

Cochineal — I chose — for deeming
It resemble Thee –
And the little Border — Dusker –
For resembling Me –

11. Eleven questions, or an even dozen? Ten, one for each finger.

geekery, and close, but not quite there

2011-12-09T15:34:00.000-05:00

My latest fit of geekery, first. I bought a new e-reader, the Barnes & Noble simple touch Nook. I love it. The e-ink is amazingly clear, especially when I change the font (oh, love!) to get rid of pesky serifs. All of the books on my old Sony transferred over perfectly. And, I get to read anything I like for an hour at the BN cafe, free! (I started the new biography of Catherine the Great. I may have to acquire it. BN knows what it's doing with free samples - stirring up book lust in yet another format.)

What do I love about e-readers? Everything. What do I do with them that others might think was rather geekish? I transcend time. Totally. Like this -- reading "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on the e-reader while listening to the play, which I've downloaded to my iPod Nano, while taking notes on the play... with a fountain pen, in a Moleskine notebook.

As for "not quite there," let me show you a little bit of knitting. The yarn is not quite that colorway: it's called Bordeaux, and it's an alpaca mix from Moose Manor Hand Paints. The pattern is a lacy cowl. It does not quite make it - the stitch pattern obscures the colorway, which obscures the stitch pattern. As I was about to bind it off last night, I realized... nope. It's been frogged, and re-born as a cowl with some eyelets, but more solid areas than not. Much better. I'll show you when it's done.

Coming soon: my total obsession with A Discovery of Witches, which was the first book I bought for the Nook. In the meantime, you can read what Penny wrote about it.

very pink indeed

2011-11-28T16:43:00.000-05:00

I present a sock, Vanilla strawberry, #1 of a pair in Petunia Pig Pink. It's part of a series of socks I have been knitting, which I'm calling Vanilla whatever on Ravelry. Suddenly, I want to do nothing but knit socks.

I knitted these in less than 5 weeks, a personal record. They are called, of course, Vanilla blueberry.

What's the pattern, you ask? Oh, just something I whipped up, called 56 stitches (or fewer, if the yarn is thicker) on size zero needles with a ribbed cuff and eye-of-partridge heel. In other words, vanilla socks.

Before I settled on vanilla, though, I knit these, which by no stretch can be called vanilla anything. Blame Penny. She gave me a truly ~~garish~~ colorful skein of yarn a couple of years ago. It didn't suit monochromatic Penny and she couldn't figure out why she'd bought it. I thought I'd make a cowl, but then I realized that it would give me nightmares to have something so ... colorful ... so close to my face, and besides, I'm pretty monochromatic myself. Ergo, socks. These. Yikes.

Anyway. I went to Rhinebeck last month and had a truly excellent time. One whole day was spent in a spindle class with Abby Franquemont. After years of correspondence, on-line and on-paper, Anna and I finally met by taking the class together. She brought along a Navajo spindle that had been confounding her. Within 1/2 hour, Anna was making amazing, fine singles when I wasn't interrupting her with hugs.

Sunday, I shopped (oy) and met up with the Tsarina, whose Glomerata sock on Knitty is but a taste of the re-launch of the Tsock empire. Betty of Moose Manor Hand Paints was there with her gorgeous, saturated Delphinium, as well as her other amazing colorways. Marcy was selling and demonstrating her support spindles. So many people, so much talent, so many colors... Rhinebeck was like being inside a whirling kaleidoscope that smelled like sheep. Fortunately, I like the smell of sheep.

And Sandi Wiseheart was in my dream... and I can prove it. Click over, scroll down, and you'll see a picture of me with Rachel and Jennifer. Yes, a picture. Truly a rarity...

To be continued...

In honor of "talk like a pirate" day, I present ....

2011-09-19T00:50:00.001-04:00

Roger McGuinn singing "Jolly Roger." We saw him in concert, for the third time, Saturday night, and (as always) he really enjoyed singing about the day he became a scurvy buccaneer! Since today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, I decided to share the joy --

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (or, mmmmmmmmm.... pie!)

2011-09-18T22:39:00.002-04:00

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Flavia, the 11-year-old narrator of this delicious book, speaks as if she were the offspring of Nancy Mitford, Morticia Addams, and Edward Gorey. She is an expert chemist, with poisons her specialty, and she lives in a so-British-that-you-forget-your-own-nationality town... oh, it's too delightful. Don't miss this one!

View all my reviews

Busy as a ------>

2011-09-17T15:31:00.000-04:00

I've been busy, small-scale.

This is an absolute sweetie - a custom-made spindle by Ed at Tilt-a-Whorl, with some pollen-yellow BFL. The spindle weighs 10 grams, comes in at a whopping 6 1/2 inches, and spins so fast I have to draft double-speed.

Not that all of my projects are teeny right now, only this one. Oh, and the one on a teeny Turkish spindle. And a sock on size zero needles.

For this sock, I decided to teach myself Magic Loop knitting for socks, since Nearly Everyone loves the technique. It took me 10 minutes to learn, and 15 minutes to realize that I'm not Nearly Everyone. I loathe it. All that yanking! Back to two-circs for me, with DPNs for the heel flap and gusset. However, one of my goals for this knitting year had been "Learn Magic Loop." Cross that one off! Now to learn how to Navajo ply on a spindle...

Pay it forward = a family value

2011-09-15T15:10:00.000-04:00

I have been alternating between seething and trembling because of the Republicans and Tea Party people who are calling Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" (or the equivalent), and because the people who shouted "Yeah!" when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul, "Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" were not rebuked by any of the candidates on that stage.

Whatever happened to the concept of Pay It Forward?
For that matter, whatever happened to the concept of caring for society's elders?
Isn't that a family value?

Noam Chomsky has an answer that makes me sad, but seems true. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Social Security is based on a principle. It’s based on the principle that you care about other people. You care whether the widow across town, a disabled widow, is going to be able to have food to eat. And that’s a notion you have to drive out of people’s heads. The idea of solidarity, sympathy, mutual support, that’s doctrinally dangerous. The preferred doctrines are just care about yourself, don’t care about anyone else. That’s a very good way to trap and control people. And the very idea that we’re in it together, that we care about each other, that we have responsibility for one another, that’s sort of frightening to those who want a society which is dominated by power, authority, wealth, in which people are passive and obedient.

How I Killed Pluto

2011-09-14T13:57:00.000-04:00

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mike Brown is a fluent storyteller and a scrupulous scientist, whose insistence on a high standard of proof led to him nearly losing the credit for one of his discoveries. Who would think such skulduggery exists in the community of astronomers?

As a boy, Brown discovered his passion for planets when he noticed two moving, night after night, through the constellation Orion. "It's always hard not to feel that in some ways, for me at least, maybe the early astrologers were right: Perhaps my fate actually was determined by the position of the planets at the moment of my birth."

As he recounts the discovery of Pluto, and his own role in the wildly unpopular decision to decertify it as a planet, he describes his exploration of the cosmic ocean, wherein asteroids are "schools of minnows swimming among a pod of whales. Planets were the whales of the solar system." When the Kuiper Belt was discovered, he says, "Pluto and the Kuiper Belt were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea."

The boy's interest in celestial motion grew into the man's quest to discover new objects in the relatively-unexplored area beyond Pluto. His tools ranged from an archive of photos from older telescopes that had imaged wide swaths of sky to the newest digital technology in telescopes and data manipulation. The wider images were more likely to include artifacts from the process of creating glass plates, while the precision of digital imagery was offset by the relatively small expanse of sky that could fit in one image.

His first discovery, named Quaoar, was "a big icy nail in the coffin of Pluto as a planet." Only slightly smaller than Pluto, the chunk of icy methane was bound to be the first of many objects that would be larger than Pluto. Along the course of his discoveries he found Sedna (named for an Inuit goddess of the sea), Haumea (Hawaiian goddess of childbirth), Xena (with her satellite, Gabrielle!), and many other intriguing objects that began to fill in some of the creation story of the solar system.

He also found the aforementioned skulduggery: an Italian astronomer, who cyber-stalked his use of telescopes while he was tracking Xena, and tried to claim credit for the discovery, earning Keith Olbermann's dreaded soubriquet, "Worst Person in the World." The committee in charge of the naming conventions for new objects in the solar system were not always happy with the names he chose. (Personally, I wish that some of his working names could have been kept. It would have been delightful to know that an object named Easterbunny hopped through the heavens.)

What is a planet? Must it be spherical? A certain size? A stint of teaching geology gave Brown a glimpse into the problems that exist in other disciplines. What is a continent? A big, coherent piece of land? How big? (In fact, he learned, some Europeans do not consider Australia a continent, Argentina teaches that North and South America are one continent, and New Zealand is on its own continental plate...)

Ultimately, Pluto, "everyone's favorite runt planet," was reclassified (along with newcomers Xena and Ceres) as a "dwarf planet." Brown calls the new rules "a slew of unscientific clutter," but agrees with the decision that continues to make Pluto lovers unhappy.

One day in 2004, he took time out from staring at large computer screens and looking for new and distant objects to look at a smaller screen: a sonogram of his daughter. "Hey," he said, "It looks like the Venera lander pictures of the surface of Venus." "You're insane," replied his wife.

"That night," he writes, "as the clock struck twelve, my five-year bet [with a colleague] came to an end. I lost the bet, but I didn't feel so bad. Instead of seeing the end of the solar system, I saw that everything was just beginning."

I loved every page of this book and recommend it to anyone who has ever looked at the night sky.

View all my reviews

Frogging, tinking, and who knows what else

2011-08-19T12:51:00.003-04:00

I just turned sixty. A child of the sixties turning sixty isn't a big story, unless - it's your own story. How was my birthday, you ask? Well, let's see. I managed to screw up one knitting project, then I managed to screw up another knitting project, then I went to Spinning Guild and spun some lovely soft green stuff on my new Sworl by Jesh.

That part was a Win. But I had to leave Guild early because it was hot and stuffy in the barn, and because the scent of soaps or something was causing my lungs to implode. I got home and discovered that our house had been invaded by ants....

Today is lovely, however. I have decided that the half-baked attempts at fixing one of the knitting disasters Would Not Do. So I've taken over the kitchen table and frogged ten rows (over 300 stitches each). (Frogging = rip it, rip it.) Now I'm tinking one row. (Tinking = one stitch at a time.) The stitch count will be right, and I'll do what I should have done, what I really ought to know I should do by now: I'm going to own my knitting.

Owning my knitting = knowing what works for me, and what utterly doesn't. In this case, a certain way of making two stitches into one just is not in my hands. So this time, when I start the edging, I will use another way. It won't be a Centered Double Decrease, but it'll work, and it will be pretty.

Tinking can be tedious, especially when it's 300 stitches. But - look at that yarn! It's a KnitPicks colourway called Gingerbread House. Can you see the gumdrops scattered amongst the gingerbread? Cherry, grape, lemon, orange, lime... each colour pure and sweet and satisfying. Tinking gives me the opportunity to appreciate the colors, the texture, and the fact that I'm no longer fearful about making mistakes when I knit.

Here's another picture of the gumdrops. The pattern I'm using is called Ruffle My Feathers - a tailored shawlette with just a bit of fancy at the edge. I'm going to love this when it starts to get cooler and I'm wrapped in wool and alpaca, with just a hint of fancy.

At sixty, it's time that I owned my life. That means frogging and tinking, making decisions based on my actual self, reading and expressing and creating and loving and using my energies in the life I have now toward the goals I set now. Regrets... yes, I have regrets. I regret having given up the viola when I was 16. But - I live 5 miles from a store that sells and rents fine stringed instruments. I can pick up a viola and see if my hands still want to play it, if I choose. I have one promising novel in the works (in a drawer). I can take it out of the drawer and devote an hour each day to it, if I choose.

Last time I wrote, I was in the throes of the Tour de Fleece. This is what I spun on the pansies Lollipop spindle. It's just enough for a bookmark or two.

This is the Thai spice, 200 yards of DK gorgeousness. It may become cabled wristwarmers, or a hat. We'll see. I'm very happy with it.

One more thing. The Tsarina of Tsocks has ~~designed a monster~~ created the most astonishing pair of tsocks ever. Hint: five people knit it at a time, and it gets steeked. A lot. (Steek = taking a scissor to your knitting on purpose.) Go look at Fronkenshteek and prepare to laugh...

The Damsel Monique goes to her first ball

2011-07-09T14:57:00.000-04:00

Progress in the Tour de Fleece: winding the first two plying balls. Here's one.

When I went to Toys 'R' Us to buy the pink rubber balls to ply with, the teen-aged boy who tried to help me had no idea what a "pink rubber ball" was. It took him longer to find them in the store than it took me to wind them into plying balls.

I feel old.

slugs and snails and love-darts

2011-07-08T12:13:00.000-04:00

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which I reviewed here, inspired me to learn more about the tiny creatures. Now that we are going to be building a home in the woods, I hope that I'll find some snails out there, buzz-sawing their way through the forest floor...

The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane by David George Gordon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Now I know...

--what a wild snail eating sounds like: "... a cross between a bastard file and a chainsaw - like something out of Evil Dead II."

-- Some snails have elaborate mating rituals that involve kissing.

-- Speculation about Cupid's arrows in Greek mythology being inspired by the "love darts" that snails shoot into each other if they go the male/female route instead of using their hermaphroditic prowess.

-- that Darwin observed another scientist's experiment in which a sickly snail and its healthy partner were placed in an ill-provided garden. The healthy snail crawled away, over a wall, into a better garden. 24 hours later, it "returned and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall."

-- That David George Gordon is one of the best nature writers ever.

Did you read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating? Read this next. Really.

View all my reviews

sunshine, a lollipop, and pansies...

2011-07-07T14:24:00.000-04:00

... all in one picture...

A slight detour from the Thai Spice. This is a Gourmet Lollipop spindle, hand-painted with pansies, a mere .5 oz., and matching fluffy stuff to spin. Collecting lovely, light spindles has become an obsession. The spindles themselves make me happy.

A Jane Austen Education.

2011-07-06T16:39:00.001-04:00

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Take one intellectual graduate student, force him to read Emma, add one professor whose technique is styled as "stripping the paint off our brains," and mix in some Austen plot synopses. What do you get? In this case, you get a quasi-memoir-cum-appreciation of Jane Austen's major novels that (I believe) would make Austen wince and Oprah applaud.

Bleah.

View all my reviews

Tour de fleece 2011

2011-07-02T16:38:00.000-04:00

For this year's tour, I am spinning for Team Russian Underpants and Team Suck Less. My goal: to spin 2 ounces of a combination fiber (Polworth, Falkland, Jacob, Shetland, and Wensleydale) in a colorway called Thai Spice Market into DK weight, and to like it enough to give it away without being embarassed.

The spindle is a Greensleeves Damsel Monique. She spins long and true, a Blessed Damozel indeed.

The fiber is from All for Love of Yarn.

Visit me on Ravelry and wish me luck!

a perfect combination

2011-06-25T15:28:00.000-04:00

Maddy Prior and "Dives and Lazarus." Enjoy!

it followed me home, ma, can I keep it?

2011-06-16T16:41:00.000-04:00

A book jumped into my tote bag in Borders the other day. There's no other way to explain how I almost walked out of the store without paying for it.

Yes, I'd grabbed it from its table, yes, I'd perused it and written it down as a "must read" in my Moleskine, yes, it's purple, and yes, anything that elaborates on "a year of magical reading" has to be a good thing.

I found it in my tote bag after I went back to the cafe to find it; I'm a good cafe citizen, and always put my books away. Clearly, this book needed a home...mine. It certainly won't be lonely there.

An interview on the author's blog, Nina Sankovich's Read All Day, includes this advice:

There is no need to read from The Western Canon. Find what you like to read, sit down and indulge yourself, and the rewards will come.

Yes!

Today, by the way, is Bloomsday. Have you read Ulysses? I haven't. In fact, I don't even want to. Once upon a time, I thought I had to read certain books in order to be truly literate. I'm no longer under that delusion.

So what am I reading now? All of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. I'm absolutely glutting on them, and enjoying every moment. (One kept me company at a medical appointment the other day, and I appreciated being in Charlaine Harris's hot Louisiana instead of that waiting room. It was so cold in that waiting room ... by the end of three hours, I was wrapped in 4 blankets and still shivering, but I also was in Louisiana. That is the magic of reading!

everything emptying into white

2011-06-11T21:12:00.005-04:00

Did you knit in public today? I did, while sitting in the friendly
cafe at Barnes & Noble, listening to Glazunov through headphones
attached to my lime-green Nano. I completed nearly two repeats of
Falling Water between the beginning of spring and the Baccanalian end
of autumn-- appropriate for the grape-harvest purples-and-green
colourway. This pattern + this colorway = knitting intoxication.

**longer boats are coming**

I shall be sorry to give up this scarf, but I have to, since I'm
knitting it as a sample for Moose Manor Handpaints. The pattern has
given me the confidence to tackle a more intricate lace. It includes
yarn-overs before, after, and between purls and knits, left- and
right-facing decreases, and other little maneuvers that always had
intimidated me.

Actually, that's one of the reasons I chose it: to stretch a little as
a knitter. My retirement has been all about elasticity. Some of the
new maneuvers are tiny, like learning to spin on a tiny Kuchulu
Jenkins spindle. Other stretches are long, like getting myself out of
the house to meet with friends old and new.

**everything emptying into white**

The latest stretch is huge: my husband and I have purchased a slice of
land high on a hillside, so high you barely can see the main road
below. The land is thick with trees, much of them protected. They may
not be cut down. Not that we want to - we will only clear enough for
the house that my husband and the architect designed, and a small area
for ourselves. If all goes well, the house will be ready next spring.

Yes, this is a big stretch, more so for me than for my husband,
because I never, ever imagined leaving our tiny house, never mind
building another. He is the visionary, and I have been - I'm not sure
what I've been, but I shall lace up my sneakers and keep up. It's a
good thing.

Another good thing: the book What Should I Do With My Life by Po
Bronson. My friend Rachel lent me her copy and said it would change
how I think. She was right. Unlike self-help books, this is a peek
into the lives of people who have made changes that succeeded or
failed, or failed to make changes, and therefore stalled. These are
real people, and I see myself in them all. (Like everyone, I contain
multitudes. I also live one-half mile from Walt Whitman's birthplace.
Handy, that.). Thank you, Rachel.

**on the road to find out**

Today's soundtrack has been "Tea for the Tillerman" by Cat Stevens. It
may not be a roadmap, but one could do worse than dreaming of a house
built from barley rice with a protective red-legged chicken.

Never forget

2011-05-01T18:16:00.000-04:00

Remember.

gobsmacked and proud

2011-03-11T15:05:00.000-05:00

Sandi Wiseheart featured my little piece of handspun yarn on her blog.

And the card I sent.

And what I wrote.

Namaste, Sandi.

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford

2011-03-01T12:27:00.001-05:00

The Blessing by Nancy Mitford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Witty and wicked and just a tad dated (in the sense of some extreme political incorrectness), The Blessing is Mitford's take on the cultural chasm between France and England after WWII. English flower Grace marries Charles-Edouard, French aristocrat, and raises their son Sigi alone in the English countryside until he comes home after the war in seven years. They move to France, along with Sigi's unhappy Nanny, whose first experience with French cuisine leaves her horrified - "Funny-looking bread, here, too, all crust and holes. I don't know how you'd make a nice bit of damp toast with that" - and yearning for "a nice floury potato."

Once in Paris, Charles-Edouard's old passions flower, including his relationship with long-time lover Albertine, whose gift of spinning aromatic, sensual tales while telling fortunes has kept their once-torrid, now "sentimental" relationship (with the occasional afternoon tryst) alive. Charles-Edouard's affairs, which Grace's French friends encourage her to accept as entertainments no more important than his material collections, prove more than she can endure when she walks into a room on a mansion tour and finds her husband in bed with one of his pretty, young collectibles.

Before that, however, she meets dozens of unforgettable characters, from the French man who thinks English country life is personified in Wuthering Heights, to the insufferable, hectoring American, Hector Dexter, whose marriage to Grace's school friend Caroline forces her to tolerate his take on the British (who have become "frivolous" about homosexuals whom, he believes are all Communists), and American men, none of whom are "pederasts," since they are all full of "strong and lustful, but clean desire."

(Charles-Edouard is chastised by Albertine when he says that he sees "goodness" shining in the eyes of Americans. "That's not goodness," she says, "that's contact lenses.")

Grace takes Sigi and Nanny back to England and meets up with her ex-fiance Hughie, whose affair with Albertine has been thwarted, and who is ready to settle down and marry Grace. She also meets and flirts with the idea of marrying a charismatic, mad director, whose ghoulish, blonde retinue takes a dislike to Grace and vanishes when he decides to stage a version of a political play that features a snarling dog, an old man who sleeps with a pot of gold under his bed, and his son who is married to a Fascist. She fantasizes a marriage to him being like Charles and Mary Lamb, or Jane and Thomas Carlyle "without the liver attacks."

this does not come to pass...

Certain characters maintain their sense and sensibility with humor and pragmatism. Grace's father, Sir Conrad, muses that the English think that French silver is dirty because it does not shine like English silver, not realizing that English and French silver are totally different alloys. Albertine is charmed when Sigi loves her gift of a kaleidoscope so much he wants to sleep with it: "But this child is his father over again... The moment he sees something pretty he wants to take it to bed with him." Tante Regine charms her English hosts by praising Woolworth's and Yardley perfumes.

And Sigi? One of the great comedic monsters, whose preternatural cunning and powers of observation are thwarted ... just ... by the common sense of a nameless French official, precisely the sort of character keeps civilization humming behind the cultural circuses.

Some critics have said this is not A-list Mitford. Maybe not, but it delighted me. Highly, highly recommended!

View all my reviews

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado

2011-02-19T16:40:00.000-05:00

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Fascinating!

How very different Cairo was during and after WW2, before the military and Nasser. It was cosmopolitan, a cultural olio, a beautiful mashup of the old and the new, Jew and Muslim, scented with rosewater and apricots - at least, in the experience of Lucette Lagnado, filtered through the story of her elegant father. I began to read this book right before the recent uprising in Cairo, and it added a layer to my understanding of how many changes have occurred, as well as how some forces (i.e., the Muslim Brotherhood, and the role of the military) have long been powerful undercurrents in shaping Cairene culture.

This book is about Lucette Lagnado's childhood in Cairo, the family's exile to France and then to the United States, and her own layers of acculturation that had to be added to and peeled away for her to understand her boulevardier father. It added immeasurably to my own understanding of recent middle-eastern history, and the different outlook that history produced for Sephardic vs. Ashkenazi Jews, something I have longed to explore.

Lagnado's writing is as sensual and immediate when she describes feeding delicacies to her Cairene cat as when she tells of the misery of being stateless after the Jews were expelled from Egypt in the 1950s. She comes to see her literary but exhausted mother through new eyes as the family is forced to adjust to American expectations of the role of women, and takes us through the medical care that cured her childhood Hodgkin's disease - quite a different type of care than the overnight vigil at Jewish holy spots in Cairo that had preceded the disease's remission years before, but still old-world, as her father feeds her olives to give her strength through the radiation treatments. We see how her sister and brothers adapt to the new world, and how her father's elegance is reduced as he sells ties on the Brooklyn subway line.

This is a delicious book, multi-layered and fragrant as any of the pastries once enjoyed in Cairene cafes. Highly, highly recommended!!

View all my reviews

I write like... what?? Uh oh.

2011-02-17T15:33:00.000-05:00

The Gender Genie analyzed this blog entry of mine - Spinning in a Barn - and said that I write like a man.

Should I be worried?

Words: 759

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 886
Male Score: 1110
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Analysis
Feminine Keywords						Masculine Keywords
[with]	3	x	52	=	156	[around]	0	x	42	=	0
[if]	2	x	47	=	94	[what]	2	x	35	=	70
[not]	13	x	27	=	351	[more]	3	x	34	=	102
[where]	0	x	18	=	0	[are]	8	x	28	=	224
[be]	4	x	17	=	68	[as]	6	x	23	=	138
[when]	1	x	17	=	17	[who]	1	x	19	=	19
[your]	3	x	17	=	51	[below]	0	x	8	=	0
[her]	0	x	9	=	0	[is]	10	x	8	=	80
[we]	1	x	8	=	8	[these]	0	x	8	=	0
[should]	0	x	7	=	0	[the]	21	x	7	=	147
[she]	0	x	6	=	0	[a]	28	x	6	=	168
[and]	22	x	4	=	88	[at]	4	x	6	=	24
[me]	8	x	4	=	32	[it]	15	x	6	=	90
[myself]	3	x	4	=	12	[many]	3	x	6	=	18
[hers]	0	x	3	=	0	[said]	0	x	5	=	0
[was]	9	x	1	=	9	[above]	0	x	4	=	0
						[to]	15	x	2	=	30

Tikkun Olam, 15 yards at a time

2011-02-16T13:58:00.001-05:00

I spun this for Sandi Wiseheart’s Prayer Flag project.

The day I read about the project, I received a Golding Le Fleur spindle (purpleheart wood) cushioned in fiber. The spindle is a mandala, and the fiber had enough bits of red and orange to pluck out and spin on their own.

Sandi asked if we would like a particular blessing attached to our yarn. Yes, I would: tikkun olam, “heal the world.”

From the website for the magazine, Tikkun:
We in the Tikkun Community use the word “spiritual” to include all those whose deepest values lead them to challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism that has led people into a frantic search for money and power and away from a life that places love, kindness, generosity, peace, nonviolence, social justice, awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation, thanksgiving, humility and joy at the center of our lives.

Kind-of a big job for 15 yards of handspun, but - you never know.

because sometimes you just need a cream puff

2011-02-07T18:59:00.001-05:00

This afternoon, before I went to the supermarket, I stopped at Barnes & Noble for tea and an hour of letter-writing. The woman in back of me on the line for the tea was sighing loudly and frequently - very frequently - and tapping her fingers on the counter. I'm in no hurry, I thought. "You can go ahead of me," I said. She did.

She ordered a single cream puff - a particular cream puff, the one in the back of the case - on a larger plate, please, not that tiny plate. The cream will get on the table if I cut into the cream puff on that tiny plate. No, I don't have a membership card. No, I don't want coffee...

I know what you're thinking, because I know what I was thinking until the moment she turned to me and said that she rarely even eats cream puffs, but today - today she really needed one.

"Sometimes you need a cream puff," I agreed.

Then she told me that her father had just died. Her mother was in a rehab facility, and would now have to come live with her. "My life just changed completely," she said. Her house was full of casseroles and other well-meaning food from well-meaning people, but her house was also full of those people -- and what she really needed was a bit of space and peace and one cream puff.

I'm glad she knew that one simple thing , and I'm glad I let her go ahead of me. It was a simple enough mitzvah. Most mitzvahs are.

Just because I love it so, here's another view of my spun-up Abby Batt on a niddy-noddy.

And -- If you don't regularly visit Sandi Wiseheart's blog, Wiseheart knits, visit today. She has learned to admire the way the snow makes wigs for the bare trees, and has a photo of a snow angel that her dog made. You will smile. Promise.

a woman's heart

2011-02-04T12:55:00.000-05:00

Today is Go Red For Women Day, a national day to raise awareness of the most lethal killer of women in the United States.

I won't throw statistics at you.
I won't tell you what to wear.

However, I will tell you that I learned last year that I am a survivor: I have congestive heart failure. It does not "run in my family." The symptoms blended with my asthma, so I never believed that one of the underlying causes of my fatigue and breathing difficulty could lie outside of my lungs - this despite the efforts and suggestions of my very capable pulmonologist. It took a frightening incident and a hospital stay to make me comply and get the tests I needed.

The diagnosis frightened me. It should frighten anyone. It also motivated me.

Now I keep my weight down, I take my meds, I watch my sodium intake, and I see my cardiologist regularly. I feel better. I'll be a survivor longer.

If you read only one web page today, please read this one. Or this one.
And please take it seriously.

Brigid Poetry Festival

2011-02-01T22:51:00.000-05:00

My contribution to the Sixth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival is from Eating in the Underworld, by Rachel Zucker.

Persephone by
Dante Gabriel
Rossetti

Note [Hades to Persephone]

   Spin to breathe.
   Only the still world passing
   as you flee reminds you to
   fill and empty lungs
   when you have forgotten
   how to blink.

Here's another...
And here are some more...

ch-ch-changes

2011-01-27T23:14:00.000-05:00

This

is now this.

This

is becoming this.

Happy new year!

Wait - it's the end of January. Where have I been?

I've been adjusting - to being retired, and to so many things. So, so many.Change is a bitch.

I almost decided to abandon the blog altogether because - well - it wasn't quite the dividing line between two parts of my life, as I always thought it was.

However...

Here I am, here I'll stay.

To that which I have left behind, let me say adieu. I hope you are well, I hope you are happy, and I want you to know that being out of that particular gravitational force is the one thing about retirement that is a total win.

So what's new? Well, I have a different spinning wheel now. Gidget has moved to her new home, and I have a new friend, pictured above - a Louet Victoria whose name is Maud. She's as camera-shy as I am, so you may only catch glimpses of her, but she is a joy to have around. Trust me on that.

To be continued. Really.

Reverb 10, again

2010-12-04T15:04:00.000-05:00

Reverb 10 for December 3 – Moment.Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).(Author: Ali Edwards)

The day: 15 September, my first time at a meeting of the Long Island Spinning Guild. Meetings are held in an historic barn in Smithtown with unpolished wooden floors that feel soft, somehow, as if cushioned by all of the memories layered on them. The large room, filled with people (mostly women) of all ages, with wheels of all types, was a little dizzying for me to take in at first, introvert that I am, so I sat with my friends, settled in with my Bee wheel (Gidget), and listened to all of the humming from her, from other wheels, from voices. The colors of all the fibers being spun contrasted with the drab floor and vibrated against the hand-knit, hand-woven, hand-crafted things most of the people were wearing, from scarves and hats to sweaters, vests, jackets, and socks that were showcased on busy, treadling feet.

December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year? (Author: Jeffrey Davis)

One of the wonders of this year was the ease and rightness I felt as I really focused on learning to spin. Buying the wheel helped, but I have found more wonder and awe while using my (ever-growing collection of) spindles (it's becoming a sickness, people). Friends have given me freshly-cleaned fleece from sheep that they own, and bright-hued bits of silk; I have spun batts and fibers in colors I never before would have considered beautiful - orange, for example, or cotton-candy pink. Working with these colors while spinning and knitting has opened a window back to a part of myself that hasn't been open since the sixties: the sense that colors do not, can not clash, they only can enhance and beautify each other. As a not-primarily-visual person, this re-opening has been, truly, awesome.

reverb 10

2010-12-02T20:45:00.000-05:00

Reverb 10 encourages us to "Reflect on this year and manifest what's next" by providing writing prompts for each day of the last month of the year. I first read about it on PoMoGolightly's blog, and it intrigued me - not enough to start it on time, of course, but enough to give it a try.

December 1 One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? (Author: Gwen Bell)

My word for 2010 has to be "endurance." It was a year to be endured. It was, I knew, the last year of my brilliant career as a librarian, and the nine months of 2010 that I managed to hang on were some of the most difficult of all. I had health issues, diagnoses that will affect the rest of my life, possibly shorten it, and will definitely change the amount of energy I have to life it. Both of my lovely in-laws died, one unexpectedly (although it was clear he would not live much longer) and one in the brutal clutches of dementia. Etc. It was, truly, one damned thing after another.

For 2011, then, my word has to be "regeneration." I have to re-grow a Self out of what's left. I have a lot: husband, friends, family, knitting, reading, spinning, writing, and undiminished curiosity. Let's see what I can do.

December 2 Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
(Author: Leo Babauta)

The things I do that don't contribute to writing also don't contribute to knitting, spinning, reading, and all of the other things that define me. I fret a lot, I second-guess myself, and I stall if I don't think I have perfect conditions to do what I want to do. These three things are personality traits and habits. I can't help my wiring (much), but I certainly can try to become more mindful of the THUDS when these things (literally) kick in. Even becoming mindful enough to say OW! would be helpful!

The Mind's Eye

2010-11-08T11:09:00.000-05:00

The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a little less in love with this book than with his others - maybe I was uncomfortable with the immediacy of his own vision loss, since that hits closer to home than many of his other case studies? I don't know. I was fascinated, of course, with many of his patients, especially the ones who discussed stereo vs. mono vision, and the blind patients who disagreed with each other about whether they still used visual cues to navigate the world.

View all my reviews

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

2010-11-06T14:44:00.000-04:00

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wonderful, beautiful, quiet, contemplative, exciting, all small-scale and manageable, both for the author, whose snail arrived in her life during the early time of her convalescence from a debilitating illness, and the reader, who will focus and fall in love.

When did I fall in love with the snail? When it was so delighted by a slice of portobello mushroom that it slept with it, so that it could wake, nibble, and fall asleep again, perfectly content.

When did I fall in love with the book? Immediately on reading the first page and leafing through to see the soft-yet-accurate drawings of the snail.

I fell so in love with this author, this book, and this snail that I bought the ePub version after I returned the book to the library.

View all my reviews

Dona Nobis Pacem

2010-11-04T00:04:00.002-04:00

spinning in a barn; or, nobody doesn't like Sara Lee

2010-10-08T14:43:00.001-04:00

One of the promises I made to myself and my friends was that I would spin in a barn once I retired. Well, I checked that off my to-do-when-I-retire list last month, when I became a member of the Spinning Study Group of Long Island, which spins in a barn every month.

Two things had been holding me back. One: Wednesday night meetings would have been a huge energy drain if I had to function on Thursdays. Two: I was not sure I was, really, a spinner.

My spinning friends have disabused me of that doubt, as have my own hands. I can spin. Sometimes, I can make singles that even I recognize as not-bad. More important, though, is the sense of knowing that my eager hands and a spindle (or Gidget) + fiber = yarn, and that my days feel incomplete if I have not followed that equation for, at least, a little while.

My current spinning challenge is an Abby Batt, very pink, very sophisticated in its composition. I started to spin it on a Greensleeves Damsel Monique, a lady of balance and beauty that I can trust to spin long and true while I handle the fibre and coax it to become thread.

Abby Batts are a challenge to me because they are so sophisticated. Merino and BFL are easy. All of the fibers are the same length and consistency, and I can draft away with ease. But Abby Batts throw surprises at you: a tad more silk, perhaps, or more alpaca than merino in the bit you're drafting. You have to be mindful of the fiber in your hand. That's not a bad thing, being mindful of a blend of softness, but without a spindle as reliable as a Damsel (or a Golding, or a Bosworth featherweight), I would not be able to focus as well.

This pink is telling me that it wants to be a lacy cowl or a smoke ring. I hope I can finish it by winter.
(The pink is hard for me to photograph - you can't see the white silky strands....)

Spinning in a barn was a pleasure -- so many people, so many wheels and spindles! So many people I know from the Panera group, or Ravelry forums. And such a sense that there's so much to learn about spinning and myself in a larger social setting than I usually brave.

Now, for Sara Lee. It's not really about Sara Lee. It's about this:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog! -- Emily Dickinson

Yes, I retired last month. I can't tell you, yet, what I feel about being retired, so let me tell you, instead, about what I ate on my last day at work.

For morning break, my dear friend K brought in two of the coffee cakes I love, filled and/or studded with nuts, fruit, and cheese. I ate a piece (cheese and fruit), drank a cup of Darjeeling tea, and spindled pink Abby Batt while we all talked. It was awkward - endings are awkward -- but the cake and company were good.

I did not eat lunch. By 3:00, the must-be-endured Last Break/Last Cake/Last Whatever began. Some of my own wishes (i.e., no fuss) were respected, so there was no fancy banner, no bunch of balloons, and no camera. (Yes, my loathing of being photographed is pathological. Deal with it.)

There was, however, a cake. One glance at it and I almost laughed out loud because it was so, so obviously not for me. No, it didn't overtly say anything inappropriate like "congratulations on winning the islandwide bowling trophy." No, but its implied message was clear: "Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out," spelled out in whipped cream and strawberries. Not literally spelled out, let me again assure you, but it might as well have been: I hate strawberry shortcake.

I hate whipped cream. And my friends know it.

Whomever chose this cake chose it for himself, for his own celebration of getting that damned annoying crone the hell off of his staff. I cut the cake and handed him his piece myself, and he enjoyed it.

I'm glad. Really. Life is too short to begrudge anyone the cake he loves best.

this post is brought to you by the letter S

2010-09-01T22:09:00.001-04:00

I'm so glad it's September. I even like writing the word "September." That sinuous S, the "ember" that calls to mind a fireplace, the first hints of orange and yellow foliage. The first Step towards true autumn.

Being a phish victim really threw me. I lost access to my e-mail for a couple of days, which meant I lost access to friends. Even when I got back in, I had lost my address book. I also lost access to my Facebook account for a week, which not only cut me off from friends, but also from my farm.

Farmville may not be your cup of tea. It probably wouldn't be mine, either, if it didn't give me the chance to create what therapists always recommend: a safe place. I have a little glade with gentle stags peeking out from between the trees, I have a lighthouse, I have a Zen garden, I have a library...

It's peaceful, and it makes me happy. I hated being separated from it, especially now that I'm about to separate from the life I've led for 32 years as a librarian.

In the last couple of weeks, I've read a few books - Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, three of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (oh please, "True Blood" writers, do not let Eric die...), and Saturday by Ian McEwan. I'll get around to reviewing Packing for Mars on GoodReads, and I'll share, but in the meantime -- if you are planning to read it, be forewarned and give yourself more time than you think you'll need. Some pages took 10 minutes because they were so.damned.funny.

I've also spun, lots, both spindle and wheel, and I've gotten much more secure. In fact, at this point, I'd call myself a spinner. Not a good spinner, but a spinner none-the-less. Photos will follow, sometime in the next week or two.

Will I post more as a retiree? I hope so... In the meantime, I have one week to go. It's a surreal feeling, sort-of like something receding as I watch, or fading even while I'm in the midst. (Or, in a mist. Take your pick.) It's something I want to track, definitely in my journal, and also here.

spammed or phished or hacked or whatever

2010-08-23T11:05:00.000-04:00

(sigh)

I am not stuck in England, I was not mugged... please disregard e-mails that were sent from my account... thanks!

done, and done

2010-08-17T14:28:00.002-04:00

No, not the blog, although one might think so, since my posts have been so infrequent . My career. Buh-bye. New York State offered an incentive I couldn't refuse, and I didn't. I'll be over and done, 10-4 good buddy, on 10 September, at least in this incarnation of a career.

I was dithering until last Tuesday, when my therapist provided me with clarity, and a mantra. Should I leave now, should I wait until November, blah blah blah... and she said, "Teabird, you're done." She's right. (She doesn't really call me Teabird.) I'm done.

I.Am.Done. I.Am.Done. I.Am.Done. I.Am.Done.

Done is good. A job well and truly done is good. Time now to breathe, and move on.

What have I been doing? Reading, some. I've read the first two Sookie Stackhouse novels on my eReader, and I'm listening to Saturday by Ewan McEwan. I bought the e-book of Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon, the new biography of Emily Dickinson, and started to read it today.

Writing, some. Mostly letters, some rather tardy. My friend Stoneview inspired me to join Postcrossing, which I did today, and my friend Madame Purl inspired me to take up crewel embroidery, which I shall as soon as I get the design I've been ~~drooling after~~ considering on eBay for a month.

Spinning, some. I've spun another big hank of the Teddy Bear roving and more of the AbbyBatt, and almost finished the shawl I was knitting when last I mentioned knitting.

Spending, some. I've just ordered a tiny inkle loom from here, and I'm looking forward to some loomtime with Penny (not to mention scritch 'n' snuggle time with Shadow Ninja).

Fretting, some. That's my nature.

And - beginning to see possibilities for adventure, learning, growth, facetime with friends, and maybe even productive uses of precious time. Just beginning. I don't want to jinx anything.

Over to you. Are you retired? Are you going to retire soon? What does "retire" mean to you? I really want to know.

Oh, by the way: this spindle was designed for me by Yorkieslave, whose purse puppies have become an obsession (and a growing collection). This one depicts a fossil, in amber, one of my favourite things. Amber is wonderful for a spindle, for jewelry, and for an object of contemplation. It's also good for a reminder of what not to be...

p.s. - this post is for Carrie, who prodded me to write it... go over and wish her a belated happy birthday!

Rufus and other delights

2010-07-30T15:01:00.000-04:00

Was it only 3 weeks ago when we saw Rufus Wainwright in concert? Between Stuff Happening, insufferable heat, Big Decisions to be made, and everything else eddying around, I have totally lost track of time.

Yes, 3 weeks ago, we saw Rufus in concert in the Hamptons on a hot, muggy night in an old, rather scruffy theatre. He sang many songs from his new CD, some older songs from older CDs, a few songs with his father, Loudon Wainwright III, and then two really old songs by Hector Berlioz from the song cycle Les Nuits d'Été.

Rather ruefully, he said he'd sung the entire Berlioz cycle a few years ago and gotten such horrible reviews that he dug back into the music, determined to master it. I was happy with what I heard, but I can understand how purists might have been upset with Wainwright's lack of distance from the lyrics, or the lack of classical consistency in his voice. I was happy because he inhabited the song as surely as his father inhabited "The Swimming Song" and others he sang about the death of his own father.

Let me share the two songs with you. The first is Rufus, the second is Loudon. Enjoy!

Here is the English translation of Gautier's poem:

Open your closed eyelid
Which is gently brushed by a virginal dream!
I am the ghost of the rose
That you wore last night at the ball.
You took me when I was still sprinkled with pearls
Of silvery tears from the watering-can,
And, among the sparkling festivities,
You carried me the entire night.

O you, who caused my death:
Without the power to chase it away,
You will be visited every night by my ghost,
Which will dance at your bedside.
But fear nothing; I demand
Neither Mass nor De Profundis;
This mild perfume is my soul,
And I've come from Paradise.

My destiny is worthy of envy;
And to have a fate so fine,
More than one would give his life
For on your breast I have my tomb,
And on the alabaster where I rest,
A poet with a kiss
Wrote: "Here lies a rose,
Of which all kings may be jealous."

a little obsessed

2010-07-15T22:02:00.000-04:00

AbbyBatt on Golden Snitch spindle from Yorkieslave.

Green fluff on Bossie spindle.

White fluff on a Spindle by Ray.

Actual words will resume one of these days --

plain Kate

2010-07-11T00:05:00.002-04:00

You are called plain Kate,
And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation.

The Taming of the Shrew, 2. 1

Kates don't get much more plain than this. Curst? I'll let you know. I'm about to try plying for the first time, since I've now got two bobbins' worth of the lovely Louet Northern Lights spun up. I have ordered a Lazy Kate, but it has not arrived, so I decided to improvise.

(Doesn't my Bee have a built-in Kate? you ask. Well yes, but I lost it...Don't even ask how one loses something that is built-in. Please.)

It almost makes me wish I wasn't a puppet **

2010-07-02T15:49:00.006-04:00

I'm here. I am - overwhelmed - so today I'll just say that I've been knitting and spinning.

I finished the Lacy Baktus shawlette in time to wear it to the wake for my father-in-law.

I started a Gaenor shawlette in a beautiful deep plum variegated fingering, just a few days ago.

I began to spin delicious Louet Northern Lights in the Teddy Bear colourway on Gidget, and we are doing very, very well. (This stuff spins itself. It's amazing.)

I've started to photograph some of my spindles - you can browse them here, if you like. Many more are coming. Many. I've been a complete hog about spindles.

My favourites are the smaller ones - 1 oz. or less - but I know the heavier will come in handy when I begin to ply up some of the spindled singles.

I've decided to participate in the 2010 Tour de Fleece as a member of Team Russian Underpants. (Um, Russian Underpants? Let the Tsarina explain.) My goal: spin every day.

And isn't my Ravatar fetching in her TDF lampshade? Thank you, Lisa!

** As for the title of this post - That's just one of the delicious lines from Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg. There's no way to put it into context without giving away part of the wicked funny part of the plot, so you'll just have to trust me. I'll get around to reviewing it, as well as her Bee Season, and anything else I've read. Really, I will.

my goats on Farmville are scaring me

2010-06-12T15:44:00.000-04:00

Friday fill-ins

2010-06-11T14:02:00.001-04:00

1. A foot rub feels great.

2. The solution (often) is first thought, if only I could learn to trust it.

3. I can fall asleep so easily during the day. Naps are my friends.

4. How about those Yankees?!

5. Learning, always learning is something I highly recommend!

6. Imagine The Dalai Lama. Just that.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to a Loudon Wainwright concert, tomorrow my plans include starting a new shawlette and blocking the Lacy Baktus, and Sunday, I want to read, write, and knit (but none of the above at the beach...)

Cloud Tea Monkeys by Mal Peet & Elspeth Graham

2010-06-07T10:10:00.000-04:00

Cloud Tea Monkeys by Mal Peet

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One day, a little girl's mother becomes too ill to pick tea on the cruel Overseer's plantation. Without the money, she will be too poor to see a doctor, but little Tashi is too small to take her place amongst the tea bushes. What can Tashi do? What will become of them?

Tashi has befriended the wild monkeys who are hated by the workers and Overseer, who daily beats a tin pot to drive them away. She is so upset that she shares both her lunch and her fears with the largest male, Rajah. She is dismayed when the monkeys take her precious basket and disappear into the mountains, so dismayed that she falls into an exhausted sleep amongst the youngest animals.

She awakens when the basket is returned, filled with leaves "the color of emeralds and spangled with tiny droplets of water so the basket seem(s) full of green light." The Royal Tea Taster, whose mustache is "like a spread of showy wings," is so delighted by the little girl's basket of cloud tea that he gives her a silk pouch with enough gold coins for the doctor her mother needs.

Each year thereafter, Tashi and her mother fill the basket with delicious fruit for the monkeys, and each year the monkeys fill the basket with "the magical green glow of cloud tea."

Even without my lifelong enchantment with tea and its tales, I would have loved this book for its sensitive, gentle, witty prose, its drawings and coloured illustrations, and its aura of antiquity. According to the authors' note, "Cloud Tea Monkeys is set in the past, but you can still buy 'monkey-picked tea,' though whether or not it is really picked by monkeys is another story again..."

The reading level of this children's book is listed as Kindergarten to fourth grade, but I think it would be a shame if the elders amongst us passed it by.

View all my reviews >>

Sunday at Panera; or, teabird sighs

2010-05-31T12:18:00.000-04:00

We had a small group yesterday - only 5 of us. We all were knitting. Then, I decided not to knit.

I had only been not-knitting for a few minutes when a lovely woman came over, started at me as I was not-knitting, and asked, "Is that a loom?"

because all I've been writing lately is letters........

2010-05-27T19:58:00.000-04:00

Dear Penny,

The guy who filled the vending machine at work put the animal crackers behind three packages of pretzel goldfish. He never does that. I'm so bummed. A little package of animal crackers = my afternoon break sometimes, with tea (of course) and a little knitting. Now what?

(No, don't tell me to buy a bag at the supermarket and bring a portion to work with me. I already do that with yogurt and cereals. It isn't the same with the animal crackers.)

(Clearly, Penny, I can mope about anything.)

It's been odd that none of the women at work has commented on the lacy Baktus I've been working on. Usually, anything any of us knit or crochet is oohed and aahed at. I was beginning to get a complex. But yesterday, I was wearing a lavendar sweater, and the Baktus looked so pretty against it that they noticed, and said the design is cute. (It is.)

I told them about the Ishbel-like shawlettes and how I've been chided for doubting my ability to knit one. (You're not the only one who chided me...) The Muggles thought it was funny that I feel as if there's a hierarchy of projects - like, I can knit this but I can't knit that - which made me realize that all crafts look uniformly impenetrable to a Muggle. That's exactly the mirror-image to the mindset I have to develop -- all projects are uniformly penetrable. I should do a sampler.

Anyway, I just bought the shawlette pattern Gaenor and two skeins of mulberry-raspberry variegated yarn, and I'll start it this weekend. (Baktus is almost done.) Gaenor has the same basic construction as Baktus plus a lace edging, so it'll be the transitional piece of knitting to Ishbel.

Did I tell you that I got my copy of Respect the Spindle? I only had time to leaf through it, but - I happened to read two paragraphs about leaders, and I realized what I've been doing wrong to get so many breaks after I've wound-on. Leave a longer leader, says Abby. I tried it. PRESTO. Magic.

And speaking of cross-stitch, I've been reading Monica Ferris's needlework mysteries, and I decided I need to do one of her cross-stitch patterns - The Han Phoenix. It's been awhile since I really wanted to do counted cross-stitch - probably a good thing, since I couldn't have seen well enough to do it before the cataract surgeries! Isn't that a beautiful pattern? There's a piece of silk in the book (Thai Die) with a similar embroidery - I trust the little cross-stitch wouldn't cause as much mayhem as it did in Excelsior...

Time to watch the last episode of "Fast-Forward" and get ready for work tomorrow... Give Shadow a couple of under-the-chin scritches for me, yes?

love,

teabird

Thai Die - Monica Ferris

2010-05-27T13:30:00.000-04:00

Thai Die by Monica Ferris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This outing by Betsy Devonshire gets an extra star because I really, really enjoyed the scene in which the Monday group watches a woman at her spinning wheel, spinning straight from the angora bunny in her lap! A spinning wheel and a bunny - what's not to love?

I've already copied out the cross-stitch pattern for a phoenix, which may become my next cross-stitch pattern, and made notes about silk.

As always, good escape reading!

View all my reviews >>

Happy 91st birthday, Pete Seeger!

2010-05-03T13:24:00.003-04:00

OH, HAD I A GOLDEN THREAD

Oh, had I a golden Thread
And needle so fine
I've weave a magic strand
Of rainbow design
Of rainbow design.

In it I'd weave the bravery
Of women giving birth,
In it I would weave the innocence
Of children over all the earth,
Children of all earth.

Far over the waters
I'd reach my magic band
Through foreign cities,
To every single land,
To every land.

Show my brothers and sisters
My rainbow design,
Bind up this sorry world
With hand and heart and mind,
Hand and heart and mind.

Far over the waters
I'd reach my magic band
To every human being
So they would understand,
So they'd understand.

Words and music by Pete Seeger (1958)
(c) 1959 by Stormking Music Inc.

Music - that's how the light gets in

2010-04-29T13:26:00.008-04:00

We went to a concert Sunday night, in the wind and the rain and the unfamiliar roads upstate. It's been tough around here for a few weeks, what with family and health and jobs and distractions small and large. I had bought these tickets months ago, and I had looked forward to the concert even if I had nothing much else to look forward to ever since. Even with the wind and the rain and the unfamiliar roads, the concert was - transcendent. The bill: John Sebastian and Roger McGuinn.

Alas for John Sebastian, his voice has gone completely unmusical, turning into a bluesy, growly, unmelodic thing. I was startled and dismayed. Even though I'd read about it, I wasn't expecting such deterioration of the sweet, gentle voice I had loved in his Lovin' Spoonful days.

Funny though: John Sebastian's performance, his musicianship, his presence is as sweet and easy and funny as it ever was. The truly startling thing, to me, was that I'd never realized what a splendid guitarist he is: versatile, flexible, and perfectly suited to his songs. "Darlin' be home soon," he sings, "I couldn't bear to wait an extra minute of you dawdle," and you know that both the raspy voice and his guitar are telling the truth. He plays a mean harmonica (several, actually). Alas, no autoharp Sunday night. Maybe another time.

We went to a concert last year where Roger McGuinn was the only performer. That night, we sat first-row center, and I was utterly absorbed in the music and the wizardry of two hands, one guitar, and a symphony of tones being produced by one person. Sunday night, we were a few rows back, but it didn't matter.

Roger McGuinn has been one of my rock idols from "Turn, turn, turn" on. I've been downloading songs from his Folk Den project for years. ("The Great Selkie" and "Waltzing Matilda" are so, so beautiful!) Sunday night, he did some Byrds songs, showing how folk music and musicians influenced them, and he did many folk songs, including "Wild Mountain Thyme." And, of course, "Eight Miles High."

I first heard his solo performance on NPR while I was driving to a wedding. Fortunately, it wasn't my own wedding, because I pulled into a parking lot, listened, and then just sat for awhile in utter, total awe. (I was Quite Late.) You can listen here, but it doesn't compare to being in the room, 30 feet away, hearing the song as if for the first time, with a bit of Ravi Shankar thrown in, and some Coltrane, and some Segovia added to the unforgettable counter-melody and McGuinn's sweet voice.

At the end of the concert, John Sebastian joined Roger McGuinn for a few songs. Sebastian's harmonicas soared and chugged and chortled along with McGuinn's guitar and vocals. These men have known each other for decades. Their music, very different, blends and defines the best of the folk and rock and folk-rock creativity of the sixties.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
(from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem.")

Why the verse by Leonard Cohen? Because right now, in my life, music is "how the light gets in." And I am so, so grateful.

Song of Two Worlds - Alan Lightman

2010-04-11T00:01:00.003-04:00

Welcome, visitors! Today's offering on the National Poetry Month blog tour, hosted by Serena of Savvy Verse and Wit, is a review of a new book of poetry, Song of Two Worlds by Alan Lightman.

Lightman, a novelist, scientist, and poet, has used all of his creative skills and insights to tell the story of a poet who has begun to awaken from a long, dark night of the soul, the aftermath (perhaps) of a personal disaster that slammed him into a senseless stupor. When the story begins and he awakens, he is hungry for food, light, sensation, and proof that he is not still dreaming.

I dreamed of my uncle Zafir/weighing the sand on the beach.

He rises and picks up his dry pen.

Awake- What are these quick shots of warmth, Fractals of forests That wind through my limbs? . . .
Now I grow large, now I grow small, as the waves of sensation break over my shore.

The reader learns that the poet is living with one companion, old Abbas, in a deserted home on the poet's ancestral lands in Islamic north Africa. His musings are interrupted by the earthy Abbas, who eats, belches, prays, and says "your mind is as tight as a sheep's ass." True, that : the old man knows how much control the poet will have to relinquish to face the trauma that shut him down.

The poet's thoughts meander as he tries to understand how his world, presumably unchanged and in control before - before what? - has broken down.

He embarks on an inner pilgrimage, guided by figures who broke through the ignorance of their times by testing the physical world. (Newton: You kept a notebook of questions, / The dip of your quill in an ink of oak galls. )

He reflects on the times when he disappeared into his own studies without sleep, without food, / In a feast of ideas, books, conversation... Singing my verses, the test tubes and flames... intent on being chemist or poet.

As he muses, other thoughts begin to float by as galaxies of ghost ships / adrift on an infinite sea, changing the medium of his immersion from poetry and theory to memories of people he once knew.

He thinks of his dead mother, who sang, smelled of jasmine, and forgave money I squandered, / my fidgeting poetry ... Wedding a foreigner, / Children she never knew.

I am the sea that rolls over you, she sings. I am the green and your comfort, Say yes, then say yes, then say yes.

The muse of mutable life, Darwin, inspires another step, another stroke through the newly-loving sea. You grasped the role of survival and change .. you showed that / order can grow from disorder, / and purpose from aimlessness.

Even Einstein appears and fastens the poet on the truth of flow and change. Were you stunned / when you found that the hardness of time / was illusion? ... What is the nature of movement? / I'm answered: you return to the center.

The reader is given the facts piecemeal, almost grudgingly, until his prayers (let my psyche be thy temple) are unanswered. This is not a world of action reaction / But each action questioned forever / where lust defeats virtue. Married to a French woman with turquoise eyes, he once had two children, once had uprooted himself to live in her world, and then had abandoned his family and her world to return to his own, alone.

Would his marriage have survived had he stayed? Much as he believes that he had been too much the alien, the outsider, he is forced to release the illusory narrative that had shielded him from his transgression until it no longer could hold.

Can I give up myself
To this desert of night?
Witness again what I've done
And not done?

Does he have a choice? No. He has to give it up.

Always the need to wear strangling shoes, Wedged in a house without gardens, Cold river, my blessed two children and wife/ Could it have been?
The land that despised me...
Longing for orange groves and sand,
For the primorse and aloe, for saffron tajine...
Then my escape, flagrant abandonment.
Shame. It's all here, I can certify.

When Abbas dies, the poet truly is lone, completely alone, with nothing left to him but a wasteland of questions, and the oud player's wife, returned, calling for her husband in the empty night.

Whom can I love who will not pass for nothing, When all pass to nothing, along with this song?

The poet knows his fate.

As I read this poem, I copied pages of Lightman's phrases into my notebook. (This probably is obvious, from the number of them that I used in this review! See below - ) The narrator enacts, as we do, patterns as ancient as the stars, counterpoints between cold space and warm flesh.

Read this book for its story, its questions, the exhilarating parallels between the vast and the minute, or the glory of Lightman's language. But do read it.

Be sure to follow the blog tour. Next up: Monniblog will highlight British Columbia, Canada poets and poetry, and Ernie Wormwood will talk about driving Lucille Clifton, who did not drive.

Here is a sampling of the phrases I copied --

-- journey of questions, I paddle my oar in the stars --
iambic geometer
-- plays like the moan of a sad jazzing horn
-- this thimble the earth --
folded gray clog of a brain --
I pour tea in the dry drum of a mouth

Never forget

2010-04-11T00:01:00.002-04:00

Remember.

Remember.

Remember.

Remember.

say hi to the new girl on the block

2010-04-05T01:23:00.008-04:00

You can always count on Hornbill to be the first on the scene when something new arrives.

A carton was delivered a few weeks ago, and Hornbill tried to figure out what could be inside. He gave up, finally, and asked me to explain.

It's my new spinning wheel, I told him. She comes from Spinolution. They call her the Bee.

Isn't she cute? She folds up nice and small, just the way we like things in our little nest.

Here's a peek at our getting-to-know-each-other bobbin.

We're going to need some time to get to know each other. But this I do know --

her name is ...

Gidget!

National Poetry Month blog tour

2010-04-02T13:33:00.005-04:00

Serena, from Savvy Verse and Wit, is hosting a 30-day blog tour for National Poetry Month. Click the image to read more, and to follow along as book bloggers review, discuss, write, and interview to celebrate poetry.

And -- Be sure to visit me on April 12, when I'll be contributing a review of Alan Lightman's new book of poetry, Song of Two Worlds.

because I need to hear it today

2010-03-23T16:33:00.001-04:00

"Hope and love" - Jane Hirshfield

2010-03-20T23:35:00.002-04:00

Hope and Love

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one –
not knowing even
that was what he did –
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

The Lives of the Heart

In our study

2010-03-19T14:12:00.003-04:00

In Our Study is a new book discussion forum that was started by Beverly (PoMoGolightly) and Amy (KnitThink).

We love books, and we’re excited to explore in greater depth the books we love. In Our Study was created as a virtual reading group, as a place to share texts and to learn from each other.
We decided that a worthwhile approach would be to read books about the writers of our beloved books, as well as to gather information about the cultural context of the books.

How could I resist?

The first study project focuses on Anne Frank and her diary, and we'll begin by reading and discussing Francine Prose's Anne Frank: the Book, the Life, the Afterlife.

Since I bought this book as soon as it hit the shelf at Borders, I really could not resist the opportunity to join the discussion. Lisa (Knitted and Purled) joined as well. The first discussion will begin on Sunday, the 21^st. Please come over and join the discussion!

Dona nobis pacem

2010-03-17T00:01:00.001-04:00

Come visit me
(and my globe)
today
at the Peace Globe Gallery!

excavating

2010-03-15T10:39:00.008-04:00

Resolved :

I am only allowed to start a new knitting project if I am also working on an unfinished object.

This weekend, I dug this up from the bottom of a very pretty, and very neglected knitting bag. I started it in 2007. I brought it to knitting group yesterday, so my resolution is out there. It took awhile for me to figure out what configuration of feather-and-fan I had done, but then I just sailed away on it.

Years ago, the KnitPicks colourway was called "fly fishing." Now, the closest colourway they have is called is called "lily pad multi," but the greens have morphed into olive, and the brownish bits are gone.

I like the brownish bits, and I don't think of the colourway as "fly fishing." Now I think of it as "John Muir," thanks to my dear and lovely friend Caitlin, from Crescent Knits, who introduced me to the glory of his writings. The colourway takes me into a thick pine forest, with fragrant pine needles underfoot that muffle my footsteps, and invoke an ancient silence. When I look up, I can see the sky, blue and clear.

It makes me happy to knit this scarf.

I will finish it in 2010.

we must not be speechless

2010-03-13T18:35:00.005-05:00

I just read this on the Huffington Post.
I am - speechless.

From the Texas Freedom Network's live-blog of the board hearing: Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.

Texas Freedom Network's commentary: We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.

Crossing Washington Square - Joanne Rendell

2010-03-13T01:31:00.002-05:00

Crossing Washington Square by Joanne Rendell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A hoot! Really well-written, funny, with digs at academe, and three love stories, including the awkward relationship between two very different but similarly-vulnerable women.

The premise of the novel highlights one of my soapbox issues: intellectual snobbery, especially at the expense of scholars (and ordinary folks) who take popular culture seriously. Rachel is a young scholar whose unexpected bestseller on popular women's fiction has earned her an invitation to teach at a prestigious Manhattan college. (Think Camille Paglia, younger and cuter, and definitely less frenetic.) Diana is a Plath scholar whose disdain for Rachel's specialty extends to Rachel herself.

Throw in celebrity twins, a Dylan Thomas-Ted Hughes womanizer, a trip to London, and truly-evocative descriptions of interiors (apartments, an airplane, an academic conference room) that utterly remove the distance between reader and story, and you have a very enjoyable read, indeed!

(My only regret? Alas, Rachel's book is not, ahem, in print. I'm sure I'd love it.)

View all my reviews >>

Louisa May Alcott, the woman behind Little Women

2010-03-10T22:29:00.003-05:00

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If American Bloomsbury was the appetizer, then this book is the meal. Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, was a true American original: a deplorably-bad writer and a sensational orator who travelled the country speaking about Transcendentalism in-between living in disastrous utopian communities that were based more on philosophy than the mere, mortal details of farming and human nature.

Louisa's life flowed from that childhood, both the joyous (loving Henry David Thoreau) and the horrific (near-starvation and grisly poverty). Her talent for writing potboilers saved her and her family from the ruinous debts that had been incurred by Bronson's inability to provide for his family. However, not until she acceded to her family and editor's desire for her to write for children did she find the voice that would bring her unimaginable wealth and fame.

Harriet Riesen's book is nicely done - factual without droning, and admiring without doting. I greatly enjoyed the details of Louisa's trips overseas, partly because the writing is so wonderful, and partly because (warning: subjectivity ahead) it made me happy to know that Louisa had been happy.

(Note to Riesen's editor: Daisy and Demi were Meg's children, not Jo's. Ah well.)

(Note to self: next time, don't be so hasty to judge a book....)

The elegance of the hedgehog - Muriel Barbery

2010-03-10T10:03:00.003-05:00

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Elegance, from Webster's Online:A quality of refined gracefulness and good taste.

A hedgehog is elegant. Its spiny defenses are attached securely; they do not shoot in all directions to injure at random. Each spine is a dull camouflage, not garish or multicoloured like the feathers of a tropical parrot or the scales of a tropical fish. Predators and passers-by trot past apace.

Both Madame Michel and Paloma, the narrators of this novel, are hedgehogs in a ritzy Paris apartment building. Madame Michel, the concierge, appears to be a drab, slightly slow sterotype, a disguise that she has perfected over the years since her husband died. To the residents, she is a plodding prole: a presence to be summoned and directed, nothing more. To her diary, she reveals all: her autodidact past and her desperate need to hide a sensibility that encompasses Purcell to Tom Clancy. She needs to survive, and she writes of her need in prose that ranges from literary and witty to heartbreaking.

Paloma, a brilliant 12-year-old existentialist, studies manga, writes witty and erudite diaries, and plans to commit a flamboyant suicide when she reaches 13. Part sophisticate, part little girl, she writes a good deal about irritants (including her noisy older sister whose expensive schooling seems to be quite, quite pointless) and moments of grace, which, she hopes, might form an anodyne to her bleak world-view.

Were it not for a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, these lives might have progressed (or detonated) according to their carefully-constructed camouflage. Ozu realizes quickly that each is not as she appears. The below-the-stairs drab is teased out by a reference to Anna Karenina, and the little girl soon finds that the concierge shares her own refined and cynical sensibility.

Since the stories of all three characters play out through the two diaries, I was happy to have listened to the audiobook. The two narrators capture the intelligence, wit, blindness, and grace behind characters who might have seemed too unappealing to follow long enough for a reader to glimpse, truly see, even though Ms. Barbery's writing is smooth and compassionate and - elegant.

How I long to read French well enough to read Barbery in the original!)

If I decide to re-learn French when I retire, my goal shall be to return to the Hedgehog. Even if I don't, I know I'll reread this book, slowly, spine of book (or glowing reader) in hand, teasing out the true spine of each character.

View all my reviews >>

Friday fill-ins

2010-02-26T16:17:00.005-05:00

1. A cup of tea can mean the difference between misery and comfort.

2. Crammed bookcases make a place feel like home.

3. Everything has its beauty... um, no, I don't agree. Sorry.

4. Just imagining the taste of strawberries makes me happy. And hungry.

5. Art makes me think about the first, ancient, human artists and feel awed by them.

6. LOL I just noticed I forgot (... don't go there....not at my age ... )

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to Bill Maher's Real Time, tomorrow my plans include a concert by Ray Davies (please please please don't snow anymore), and Sunday, I want to get out of the house and knit with peeps.

what I think is true

2010-02-22T15:43:00.008-05:00

I belong to a forum on Ravelry, Weekly Writers Wordshop, where we are trying to inspire each other and ourselves by writing to a weekly theme. Needless to say, the group just started, and I'm already a week behind. However -

Last week, the theme was "new beginnings." My first thought was, "insanity=doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results." It's one of those sayings that makes us all nod and smile, ruefully, and think about the areas of our own lives where we think we are stuck.

Today, though, I have a different perspective. Call it defensive, if you like, but I wonder whether maybe, just maybe, we sometimes repeat the same things over and over because we failed to understand them the first time.

Maybe moving forward is another name for running away.

Maybe by new beginnings, we avoid looking at where we are, and where we have been.

Maybe we are repeating the same things over and over because they are right. I have thought about and said some things for decades, and I can say I've gotten nowhere - not because I think that what I say is wrong, but because some of the people I speak with don't listen. Will I ever change my mind about peace? Abortion? Human rights? Bread and roses? I hope not. Do I have a reasonable expectation of getting a different response? No. (Do I hope that I listen to the beliefs of others with openness and curiosity? I do hope so. And really, that's all I want, too.)

I wonder about the concept of new beginnings in the absence of new and attainable goals.

I wonder about respecting the desire to dig deep rather than spring ahead.

I wonder what "new beginnings" means to those who are repeating a mantra or praying a rosary or feeling the wind carry prayers from Tibetan prayer wheels.

Perhaps focusing on gratitude, close observation, a new focus on compassion, and tikkun olam will be my changes, my new beginnings towards goals that I think are eternal.

"They also serve who only stand and wait."

Friday fill-ins

2010-02-19T11:52:00.010-05:00

1. Johnny Weir is a nice name, but I don't know who he is.

2. I haven't seen much of the 2010 Olympics except for the curling. I love curling because it's so very very odd, and because I wish those people would come and sweep my house!

3. And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud eased.

4. Play a game of Candyland if you get an urge, and have all the appropriate candy handy!

5. Having sweet dreams (see #4).

6. What does it take to tell a child that you love her sneakers? A little boy was wearing the cutest sneakers the other day at Barnes and Noble, and he and his father had fun taking turns telling me things about the colour orange.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to listening to "Famous Blue Raincoat" while driving home, tomorrow my plans include a trip to the post office to mail some goodies to friends, and Sunday, I want to be happy and calm, and to work on my pretty, lavender cowl.

"Famous Blue Raincoat" is a song by Leonard Cohen, and Jennifer Warnes has a wonderful, graceful voice that suits the song beautifully.

Hallelujah

2010-02-15T11:49:00.009-05:00

some fragments -

I have two knitting projects right now. One is for the Ravelympics, the stacked eyelet cowl (scroll down) and the other is the Amanda hat (pdf.) . They're both easy patterns that require little concentration

Louisa May Alcott, the woman behind Little Women is the logical successor to American Bloomsbury, but it's not as much fun to read. In fact, it's rather plodding. But Louisa herself shines through. Has anyone read Eden's Outcasts? Tell me about it. Bronson Alcott both repels and fascinates me.

I haven't been able to see much of the Olympics, but I did catch the opening ceremony, and heard k.d. lang sang "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen. Her rendition was beautiful, but listen to Rufus Wainwright.

I mourn for Kate McGarrigle. Here is a video of Kate, her son Rufus Wainwright, and Anna McGarrigle singing "Hard times come again no more," the heartbreaking song by Stephen Foster.

American Bloomsbury

2010-02-06T21:10:00.003-05:00

American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work by Susan Cheever

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The word "Bloomsbury" conjures a time and place peopled by artistic visionaries whose creativity changed the perception and practice of art, literature, philosophy, and criticism. I think of it as a wheel that radiated outward from Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, Carrington, Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Lady Ottoline, Vita Sackville-West, Katherine Mansfield, Ethyl Smith - clearly, not all Bloomsberries, but artists who were reaching out and breaking barriers everywhere.

These people (especially VW!) were great gossips, and they had plenty to gossip about. Everyone seemed to be sleeping with everybody else, in and around Garsington, and feuding with someone over something, or pretending to be the father of someone else's child... All manners of sexual expression were the norm (as it should be). This was a vibrant, exuberant, iconoclastic bunch of people, and I wish I could have been there, just to listen and pour the tea.

Ms. Cheever wants to makes the case for Concord as an American Bloomsbury because of the writers who lived in, or passed through the area. Ralph Waldo Emerson desired a creative community, and his influence drew some literati, either for love or for money. (Often, for Emerson's own money!)

Some passed through on their ways to or from one failed utopian community or another. Two of these, Brook Farm and Fruitlands, were the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blythedale Romance. Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May, brilliant and inscrutable educator, and abysmal provider for his family) showed up after one well-meaning failure or another. He visited (unnamed) Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and made an appearance in Louisa May Alcott's [Little Women:] as the usually) absent Mr March. (William Ellery Channing described him as "Orpheus at the plough.")

Only one woman was and intellectual brilliant enough, to fit into this community: the doomed Margaret Fuller: intellectual, vigorous, and devastating to many a married couple's domestic bliss. Not a single Transcendentalist male seemed to be able to resist her charms, whether by lusting in his heart or in a more appropriate region of his body. (They disappointed her, however. As she wrote in her journal, "Waldo was here three times yesterday, and sang his song... on his lips is the perfumed honey of Hymettus, but we can only sip.")

Hawthorne, described by Ms. Cheever as "a rat with women," was more openly besotted than any other. He used her as the inspiration for the character Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. She also may have inspired The Scarlet Letter's Hester. As Ms. Cheever writes, Fuller was "a Dorothy Parker woman in a Jane Austen world."

The writers of Concord were good for gossip, and loved to gossip as much as any of the Bloomsbury crowd. Since the Transcendentalist philosophy was born and developed there, Emerson's Concord did create something new and powerful, even though there was no moment when the world changed (as it purportedly did when Lytton Strachey pointed at a stain on Vanessa Bell's clothes and said, "semen?") Some have followed Thoreau's lead by going on their own into the woods, to meld philosophy and science.Emerson's essays are masterpieces of philosophy and graceful writing. Hawthorne's novels are (rightly) studied in nearly every school in America.

Ms. Cheever writes, "people of the time still believed that at the north and south poles the globe was indented with a tropical paradise... Another of the exotic beliefs of the age was that women were inferior to men," and they could not change the mores of their time. How could they, when people still believed these fantasies? (I enjoy imagining Bronson Alcott, for example discussing gardening with Vita Sackville-West, or art with Virginia Woolf, but in reality, both groups were products of their times, and most likely would have bewildered each other.)

And what of Louisa May Alcott, whose Little Women may be one of the most beloved books ever written? She played with Thoreau, moved back and forth between Boston and Concord, Fruitlands and borrowed houses, for most of her childhood, and never had sufficient food or security because her father never earned a living. She was too young to play a role in developing new philosophies. We are lucky: her hard life never stifled her love of words and writing, so she was able to earn a living writing potboilers under pseudonyms. But she never would have written Little Women had it not been for her parents' urging for her to write "a girl's book." In my mind, Louisa May Alcott is the best ambassador between Concord and the present - quite an accomplishment for anyone, man or woman.

If you are looking for a detailed critique of Transcendentalism, or in-depth biographies, look elsewhere. American Bloomsbury is a gossipy romp and chronology of a time and place where a group of fascinating and intellectually-fearless men advanced the American spirit.

View all my reviews >>

Haiti - please help

2010-01-13T16:09:00.002-05:00

two American Idols

2010-01-01T23:42:00.004-05:00

Did you enjoy New Year's Eve? My husband and I went out for an early dinner, watched some of a "Twilight Zone" marathon, and ate a truly ridiculous amount of chocolate, including truffles from "See's" that would beat anything Godiva could throw at them, no question.

The last week of December was unusual because it offered two amazing television programs about two amazing women who were - at least on the surface, quite different. I wonder, though, whether they would have liked each other for their boldness, their resourcefulness, and their practicality. Both women worked to support families. The Alcotts needed support because Amos Bronson Alcott was brilliant, but unable to hold a job. Patti Smith had children to support when her husband died. Sometimes, necessity can be a powerful muse.

The American Masters program, Lousia May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women, was too short. I wanted more - more Louisa, of course, but also more Amos Bronson and more Abigail. He has always fascinated me because he was known for his brilliant and iconoclastic speeches and innovations, but he was unable to write a coherent paragraph. (He was, however, able to design and the building that housed meetings of the Transcendentalists. Look at that photo and tell me you don't feel drawn to its whimsy!) Abigail has always fascinated me because she did not hold him back from his experiments or object to his passion for philosophy and innovation, despite the practical hardships and chaos the family endured.

I have not read the biography that the program was based on (nor the collection of her journals, alas), so it shall be the first book I'll add to this year's TBR list. (Last year's list was huge. I managed to whittle it up tenfold.)

And then, there was Patti Smith: Dream of Life. I have written about Patti Smith before, but I don't think I ever could capture my passion for the woman. This film, a type of cinema verite, follows Patti Smith through ten years, countless flashbacks, interviews, and snippets of performances.

Throughout the film, she takes photographs using an old Polaroid camera. Isn't that a perfect metaphor for artistry? She looks at an object, a scene, a peron, photographs what anyone else would see, and then peels that objective reality away, leaving a blank space for her own vision.

The film got, shall we say, mixed reviews, but Andrew O'hehir from Salon got it right:

One of the greatest things that can be said about Patti Smith, I think, is that although she was either an inventor or a precursor of punk (depending on how you look at it), it rapidly bored her and she moved on. She couldn't be contained by any movement or ethos or ism, and anyway was always closer to being Rimbaud or Ginsberg than to being Billy Idol (or, for that matter, Joan Jett), and by the early '80s she was married and living in suburban Detroit. Her great triumph was not that she was a female rock revolutionary, or that she left music for a domestic life, or that she came back to it when that domestic life ended. It was that she never questioned her right to live her life exactly as she saw fit, to make it up as she went along in the great tradition of all those dead white male artists she worshiped. As Sebring's film makes clear, she's still doing that today.

b r a a a a a i n s

2009-12-25T14:20:00.007-05:00

Kiwi is afraid.

Kiwi is afraid that teabird is going to spin her brains out.

Not to worry.

Yet.

may we all be healthy and strong

2009-12-18T10:05:00.005-05:00

To honour my friends and family, I have donated to Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans frontieres), because --

MSF's work is based on the humanitarian principles of medical ethics and impartiality. The organization is committed to bringing quality medical care to people caught in crisis regardless of race, religion, or political affiliation.
MSF operates independently of any political, military, or religious agendas. Medical teams conduct evaluations on the ground to determine a population's medical needs before opening programs. The key to MSF’s ability to act independently in response to a crisis is its independent funding. Eighty-nine percent of MSF's overall funding (and 100 percent of MSF-USA's funding) comes from private sources, not governments. In 2006, MSF had more than three million individual donors and private funders worldwide.

Love, health, peace, and beauty to all -

too cold to be outside

2009-12-12T23:45:00.007-05:00

Here on Long Island, it's utterly freezing, way too cold to be outside. Today, let's brew up some Yorkshire Gold tea and visit a few of my favourite bookish blogs.

Book-Wyrm-Knits, is where Nicole reviews books, writes about writing, knits, and shows pictures of her very adorable kittehs.

Donna, What you think on grows , writes meditations that flow from the daily, and the really gorgeous she just finished knitting.

Melanie, The Indextrious Reader, is a fellow librarian who writes about books books books with gusto, intelligence, and an energetic love of reading.

dovegreyreaderscribbles writes (does not scribble!) and leads her readers to gems by Anne Bronte, Susan Hill, Sarah Waters, and (darn her!) books that US Amazon won't have for months.

The Overdecorated Bookcase, is Inkslinger's repository of insatiable bookishness and reviews, and whose taste in music is eerily near my own. (Rodrigo's guitar concerto, Bach cello suites, Dvorak, and Glenn Gould playing Brahms. I'm there, dude.)

Daphne's Somewhere I have never traveled includes photos of chickpea cutlets and insane gingerbread cookies, invitations to begin to read the Fingersmith books -- and a spot-on rant about The Holidays that I wish I had written. (Brava!)

If you visit these bookwomen, tell them teabird sent you!

** A special thank-you to Carrie of Nomadreader, my secret pal in the Book Blogger Holiday Swap. She chose April & Oliver by Tess Callahan for me, a fabulous choice, worthy of the to-be librarian she is! She also sent the softest bamboo yarn and bamboo needles. Thank you, Carrie!

MaozTsur - Happy Chanukah

2009-12-11T11:09:00.006-05:00

One of our family's Chanukah traditions was to listen to the song "Maoz Tzur" after we lit the candles on our silver menorah. The menorah had a music box in its base, so all we had to do was move a silver switch, reminding us that "a great miracle happened there."
Maoz Tzur is taken from the phrase "Fortress, Rock...." from Isaiah 17:10 according to most. The title is taken from the opening words, as is Jewish custom of the musical accompaniment.
The song is fitting for Hanukkah due to the content of the song. The song reminds us of the history of the Jewish People and our hope for freedom and restoration of self-determination from our foes. It expresses hope for the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Bet HaMikdash. And the song thanks God for delivering us from Egypt, Babylonia and Haman. Specifically it reminds us of the miracle of Hanukkah. Lastly, it includes a prayer for the restoration of Israel.(source: About.com)

The lyrics (stanza 1):

Rock of ages, let our song
Praise Your saving power;
You, amid the raging foes,
Were our sheltering tower.
Furious they assailed us,
But Your arm availed us,
And Your word, Broke their sword,
When our own strength failed us.

Would you like to hear the song?

A happy and healthy Chanukah to all.

not again, please!

2009-11-30T18:58:00.000-05:00

second star to the right, part two, and Friday fill-ins

2009-11-27T12:26:00.009-05:00

I was up late last night, writing and rewriting what I thought was a blog post. I just shredded it. Writing it was cathartic, but this isn't a cathartic blog, for which you all may thank your lucky stars.

Giving advice is not my strong point. Neither is receiving advice. However, my new therapist gave me some advice that I do want to share:

Take one day at a time.

Cynical as always, I rolled my eyes when she said this. Platitude, I thought. "What does that mean?" I asked.

The reason I went (back) into therapy is that I've been seriously depressed about having to retire, being pushed out of my career. When I wrote "I'm ready" in October, I was not telling the truth, neither to myself nor you, dear readers. Instead, I was distancing myself by saying things like "I'll buy myself a spinning wheel when I retire," or, "my kind is extinct." (Not that these things didn't seem true at the time, and may still be true.) They distanced me from the inevitable existential questions: Who am I? Who will I be when the primary meaning of my life - working - no longer applies? Why bother?

These questions kicked me hard. Very hard. Right through the therapist's door, in fact. There I heard the platitude and realized how wise it really is.

I'd been torturing myself (one of my favorite hobbies, by the way) for nothing.

Take one day at a time.

I don't have to decide what to do, how to be useful, how to use the rest of my days - not today. I'm not falling down a rabbit hole. I'm not leaping into a bottomless, black ocean. I'm simply leaving my job, and I don't have to decide immediately what to do with all of the days before me. I only have to deal with tomorrow. One day at a time.

Anyway, let's have a little fun with Friday Fill-ins.

1. Wait! Wait, don't forget to bring in the dog and put out the cat.
2. Home-made gingerbread followed at once by vanilla ice-cream is a recipe for bliss.
3. The trouble is calories make you fat.
4. Paris is many miles away. I want to go there. I want to learn French before I go. I want to write at a cafe with a blue Waterman pen, sip tea and watch people. If all this sounds cliched, I don't care -- get your own fantasy!
5. It started with a faint pop and unleashed a tremendous whoosh of smoke and a truly pissed-off genie.
6. The Haunting is shadowy and ominous.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to finishing a cowl in luscious Malabrigo, tomorrow my plans include my usual Saturday morning time at Barnes & Noble, and Sunday, I want to try out yet another spinning wheel! (Maybe an Ashford Kiwi. Or maybe the Ashford Joy, again, which does seem to be calling me even though I haven't been able to do anything but spin fleecy brains on it.)

nothing's gonna change my world

2009-11-11T01:13:00.008-05:00

Across the Universe. John Lennon.

listen

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind,
Possessing and caressing me.

Jai Guru Deva Om

Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe.
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box,
They stumble blindly as they make their way across the universe.

Jai Guru Deva Om

Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.

Sounds of laughter, shades of earth are ringing
Through my open earsinciting and inviting me.
Limitless, undying love, which shines around me like a million suns,
And calls me on and on across the universe.

Jai Guru Deva Om

Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.
Nothing's gonna change my world,
Nothing's gonna change my world.

Jai Guru Deva
Jai Guru Deva
Jai Guru Deva..

Thank you, John.

Dona Nobis Pacem

2009-11-05T00:22:00.001-05:00

second star to the right, and straight on till morning

2009-11-01T23:07:00.008-05:00

I am going to retire.

Funny. When I finished graduate school in 1980, I had already worked as a librarian trainee for a year. Then I got the first position that I interviewed for. (I lied to get it. The director needed someone for a temporary position to do reference and the library's newsletter. "Can you do camera-ready pasteup?" "Oh, sure...")

The position was supposed to expire in 30 days, but here I am, 30 years later, and I'm going to retire. I don't know when the state will decide to correlate 30 earthly years with its own unearthly and nutty calendar - maybe 3, months, or 4 - but then, I will leave, and I will not be replaced.

I will not be replaced. My kind is extinct. ("Oh, I remember when librarians did that picky stuff....." ) We catalogers were trained to be analytical and precise, maybe even picky, maybe even prissy. We used an official thesaurus from the Library of Congress, and strict rules of punctuation that separated the title from the subtitle, the author from the illustrator. We followed many rules. We had to: if we were sloppy, if the card catalog was downright wrong or even imprecise, the books would be forever lost on the shelves, lonely and unread.

Now that the online catalogs can be searched as easily as Google, catalogers are just the annoying creatures who buzz around the library sidelines, hairpins dropping from our buns while we practice that ancient Olympic sport, synchronized shhhh-ing.

I wonder who will do the simple things once we all are gone, the non-glam, prissy things like proof-reading. If you happened to look at the library catalog before I proof-read the entry for a new children's book about Disney's wide world of fairies, you, too might have believed that the doyenne of Disney's fae folk was -

***Thinkerbelle!***

Thinkerbelle! I bet she could tell some stories about ol' Peter Pan and Wendy!

To be continued --

goldengrove unleaving

2009-10-27T23:45:00.004-04:00

Spring and fall: to a young child
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

(Autumn: Mary Cassatt)

what's the buzz? or, bees in my bonnet

2009-10-26T19:30:00.009-04:00

"Buzz" has become one of the most hateful words in the English language.

About 2 weeks ago, I found a dead - insect - in my bathroom, which has no insulation, a pitiful, tiny heat grate, a veneer vanity that peels if you try to clean it, and a door that opens to the garage. The previous owners must have been - - words fail me, especially since they built it for their aged parents. (Perhaps they did not like their parents. It happens.) Only one detail distinguishes this room from an outhouse: it doesn't have a crescent moon carved in the door.

The next day, I heard buzzing. Several - insects - were flying around the skylight. Since I was not wearing my glasses, I assumed the buzzing was from bees. I panicked (even though I do have an Epi-pen on the shelf), and grabbed the first thing I could to spray at them. Unfortunately, it was a tub cleaner with bleach. The buzzing continued. The bleach fell onto some of my clothes. (In fact, about 1/3 of my work clothes now sport polka-dots. I do not like polka-dots.)

The bleach did not work. Next, I swatted at them with a towel. I missed. Good thing, too. When my DH came in to see, he informed me that the buzzers were not bees. They were yellowjackets. Ferocious, lethal yellowjackets.

We got some of the appropriate insecticide and sprayed all of the suspected portals. They kept coming. My DH began to caulk the likely portals. They kept coming. Then he broke out the duct tape. They kept coming.

I wandered outside the yard while he caulked and taped. What I saw out there was horrible, horrible: a swarm of yellowjackets, hundreds of them, flying in and out of the siding outside of where the bathroom had been ~~slapped together~~ built. It was like something out of Hitchcock - The Birds, perhaps - except with buzzing. My DH emptied a can of wasp spray under the siding.

If a wasp could twirl its moustache and sneer, these would have been twirling and sneering a loud HAH! I went to the hardware store and said, "short of a flamethrower, do you have anything for swarms of yellowjackets?" I came home. DH sprayed. HAH!

I did some research and learned that yellowjackets can build nests that can cover a football field. (Slight hyperbole. Slight.) I probably have been showering about 2 inches from an entire wall of their honeycomb-like nest. (The horror!)

The exterminator is coming tomorrow. I hope he has a flamethrower.

When I get really depresssed, a donation to Heifer International often cheers me. Usually, I buy a beehive. Somehow, yesterday, I didn't feel like buying a beehive, so I went for the trees. Yes, I do feel a little better.

little things I've been meaning to write, and Friday fill-ins

2009-10-09T15:51:00.004-04:00

Do you love fountain pens? Do your hands sometimes look as though you have soaked them in ink? Mr. Clean's Magic Eraser will make your hands look like human hands again. (I can't answer for your cuticles. Tell everyone you have invented a new style of manicure.)

Have you seen Awful Library Books? You'll laugh, you'll groan... We librarians have to weed the book collection. Weeding is a necessary evil because buildings do not stretch. Awful Library Books displays some of the truly horrible stuff still on library shelves. There must be a middle ground between "keep everything" and "go after your collection with a weed-whacker."

I am addicted to Farmville. Darn that Facebook! I tried Yoville, but didn't enjoy myself there, partly because the only way I found to earn money was to suffer in a bakery, making cookies I couldn't eat. Farmville has become my online dollhouse, with cute animals, trees, crops, and darling things you can buy to dress up the place. (I'm saving up for a pink flamingo.) At one point, I had 7 baby elephants, all gifts, thank you, but I had to sell them because they made the rest of my animals wander. I found a horse in the rice paddy, chickens hiding behind banana trees, a duck and a baby elephant staring each other down, and a swan roosting in a tree. Unacceptable.

And now - Friday fill-ins.

1. Sweet dreams are made of this.

2. I want an iPod Nano especially for me, but I'm torn between purple and grey, and I can't justify the purchase until my little Sansa fails. Which it never will. Apparently, Sensa doesn't subscribe to planned obsolescence.

3. Silliness is obsessing over the colour of a Nano one isn't going to buy.

4. I want to dress like a Moleskine this Halloween.

5. Outstanding or not is too damn subjective.

6. Dancing and cheering and crying with joy is what I want right now because Barak Obama has won the Nobel Prize! I haven't been this excited about a Nobel winner since it was awarded to Jimmy Carter!

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to hearing what Bill Maher has to say about the award, tomorrow my plans include listening to the sound of heads exploding because of the award, and Sunday, I want to knit on very large needles with my peeps!

where I've been

2009-10-08T15:56:00.005-04:00

Please pardon my absence from Tea Leaves. I'm still here. I have been distracted, nearly beyond tolerance, by (amongst other things) :

A swarm of wasps in my bathroom. At first, just one, then two, then - many - My husband came in to look. "They're not bees." They were yellowjackets. I'd been swatting them and spraying bleach on them. (I know, I know - not many people in this world use bleach as an insecticide. I'm - imaginative.) We had no idea where they were coming from, so he duct-taped every conceivable opening. Next day, more "bees." And then, I saw one crawling out from behind the shower enclosure. How relieved we were - so that's where they're coming from! The next step was to find out why they were coming under the shower enclosure, so I went outside to look - and saw a pandemonium of swarming yellowjackets climbing under the siding. They have built a nest there. A huge one, judging from the furious buzzing. My husband is, as I write, closing up every conceivable opening into the shower stall. If this doesn't work, I'll have to abandon the bathroom and let the yellowjackets have it.
My boss, who is pushing me, none too gently, into retiring as soon as the state decides its version of 30 years. You know something? I'm ready.
The first cataract surgery. I replaced the lenses in distance and reading glasses because I was seeing two separate worlds. The second will be in 1 1/2 weeks. Again, I'll replace lenses. 6 weeks later, my eyes will (for the first time in my life) be both usable and stable. Then I'll face another eye surgery - but I can't think about that right now.
Proof that I needed cataract surgery. I was looking for eye drops in the drugstore and wondering why they didn't have the brand I needed. It took me a full 5 minutes to realize that I was looking at a shelf of nose spray.
A gift card from Borders. What does your average reader use her gift card to buy? Well of course. Looking for Anne of Green Gables and a Devil Duck.

to be continued...

Goodbye, Mary Travers

2009-09-17T10:04:00.003-04:00

You made a difference in this world.

overthinking

2009-09-14T22:33:00.010-04:00

I've begun to read Spinning in the Old Way by Patricia Gibson-Roberts. Not only am I getting a sense of how truly ancient spindles are, but how many so-called "primitive" cultures developed the tools and the craft. It might not be the best time for me to be reading about spinning, though. I've now been "espinnerated" twice (i.e., introduced to the hand spindle), and each time I've been stymied by overthinking.

As a former dance student (very, very former) and musician, I know that overthinking is the best way to keep muscle memory from developing. As a leftie-turned-rightie with some dyslexia, I know that overthinking is keeping me from committing to s or z spin, or even spinning in the same direction twice. In practical terms, it means that most of what I spin becomes un-spun with the next twist of the spindle.

Maybe I should detail my spindle...

Paul Rieckhoff: Eight Years Later: Why Is There Still A Hole at Ground Zero?

2009-09-13T00:56:00.001-04:00

Paul Rieckhoff: Eight Years Later: Why Is There Still A Hole at Ground Zero?

Posted using ShareThis

September 11, 2001

2009-09-11T16:29:00.004-04:00

I wrote this post in 2006. Nothing has changed. I decided to join Anna and re-post what I wrote then.

So many commentaries today. So many opinions. So many recollections of worldwide sympathy. So much riding on a shared definition of what happened 5 years ago.

Unless you are an artist or a farmer, or, perhaps, a lover of the moon and stars, the changing slant of sunlight is not as meaningful to you as it is to the multitudes of live beings around us and underfoot. The concept of time, measured on a calendar, means only what we assign to it. Maybe a particular day means gifts and flowers to you. Maybe, to another, it means release from imprisonment, or the gift of new and exciting opportunity. If an anniversary means anything, it ought to measure what we have learned, or what progress we have made toward understanding, compassion, and peace.

September 11, 2001 was a horrible day. Nearly 3000 Americans died because a murderous ideologue and his followers executed them by executing a hideously clever and minimalist plan. No WMD, no missiles: just box-cutters and hatred.

We were right to mourn the dead, and to comfort those left behind. We may have been right to take military action against the country that had harbored the killers - although one can make the case, rather easily, that by attacking Afghanistan, which had been hijacked by the Taliban, we turned its citizens into victims once again.

We veered off course when we expanded that war and used our military against Iraq, a country whose leader had not participated in the September 11 attack. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a brute. He was not, however, an expansionist brute, or a brute whose arsenal included WMD. Iraq did not threaten us, but we invaded Iraq --because we could, and because we wanted control over Saddam's oil resources.

Ego and oil. Oil and ego. What do you call a leader who invades another country to capture its natural resources and settle a score? I call him a brute. I call George W. Bush a brute.

Five years have passed since September 11, 2001. On this artificial anniversary, this arbitrary date on a paper grid, is the world safer or more democratic? Are we wiser? Is anyone (aside from Halliburton and the rest of the military-industrial complex) in a better place?

For that matter, is anyone healthier? Surely not the First Responders, or the residents around Ground Zero, whose lungs have been ruined because our government lied about air quality. Surely not the thousands of maimed Americans and Iraqis who have been caught in a deadly crossfire between one ideological force and another, between an occupying force and "suiciders" (good job, Georgie) who gushed into Iraq because of us. Because of us.

In those five years since September 11, 2001, we have killed and maimed more Iraqis than Osama bin Laden killed on our soil.

How Osama must laugh to see a once-mighty nation that now believes its safety depends on keeping toothpaste off planes, or that we are safer if the FBI can monitor how many cookbooks your grandmother has checked out of the library.
(Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.)

Since September 11, 2001, we could have learned two things: they don't hate our freedom, and we might not love our freedom enough to accept that it comes with some risk. But we didn't learn. And when will we ever learn, if not now?

And now, on September 11, 2006, all I can say is that I am a lover of the moon and the stars. I only hope that our mistakes will not change the slant of our collective light - our democracy - forever.

I can haz squirrel

2009-09-05T16:51:00.001-04:00

(you can, too)

In fact, I do still knit

2009-09-02T21:12:00.005-04:00

See?

I've been knitting hats for a Care to Knit project with my Ravelry peeps. This is hat #3. In the background is a stained glass that my father-in-law designed and made.

I've also been knitting a red scarf for The Red Scarf Project. It's just about time to send it in.

The other news in my textile life: I want a spinning wheel. I want this spinning wheel. The reason I want this spinning wheel is that I was permitted to ~~muddle around with~~ try one at Panera a couple of weeks ago. I'm doing a little better with spindling (which is a good thing, since I've collected at least 10 of them already), and I love spindling, but - a wheel -

The woman who showed me how to spin on her wheel was using fibre that looks exactly like my hair - so I ended up spinning a reasonable facsimile of my own hair. Who else can say that?

In fact, if I decide to get a wheel, I'll have to do some research, try some other wheels, decide if I want single or double treadle, and all that -- but I love Victoria already.
What sayest thou? Would she make a good present when I retire?

(And would that help me decide to retire sooner?)

(You betcha.)

Anna, Emily, Betsy-Tacy, and zombies

2009-08-30T22:22:00.008-04:00

Jane Eyre has been one of my touchstones since I was quite, quite young. Until recently, Charlotte was the only Brontë I ever had read with pleasure. (I loathe Wuthering Heights. Always have. Always will.)

I just finished Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë, the youngest and most gentle Brontë. Her novels should not be read with the expectation of finding the temptestuous attributes of Emily, or the fury and passion of Charlotte. Thank goodness! What Anne Brontë brings to the reader is exquisite observation of the small issues, the details that delineate all societies and relationships.

There is no tramping across moors or flying into rages for Agnes Grey. Instead, the young, sheltered woman decides to go into the world, work as a governess, and save her family from financial collapse. Although she is well-educated, the first position she takes is disastrous because the children are hellspawn - completely uncontrollable, cruel, sneaky hellspawn. Poor Agnes is fired. (The children reminded me of the Gremlins in the toy store. Pretty close!)

Agnes goes home to recover, but she is game, and soon accepts another position. The children here are less demonic, and Agnes remains with the family for several years. The child whose selfishness is impossible to temper grows into the most heartless, flirtatious wench this side of Scarlett O'Hara, but quiet Agnes meets a man whose character and heart inspire her to wish for appreciation and love. Even the most passive, meek woman can change a world.

Since I did mention the other Brontë sisters, I should write a little about Emily's Ghost by Denise Giardina. I wish I were more familiar with the biographies of the other sisters (as well as the dissolute Branwell) because the Emily I met in this novel was so sympathetic, and the Charlotte so silly and man-crazy, that I can not sort out the details. Giardina's descriptions are so vivid that you can see Emily's merlin fly across the skies over the moors and feel the heat from the hearth.

Thanks to Jennifer, Book Club Girl, I have begun to read the Betsy-Tacy books. Midway through the first, I am in love with these little girls. Betsy's genuine desire for a friend cracks through Tacy's shyness, Betsy's loyalty enables Tacy to endure the first day of school, and the girls unfurl their imaginations to soar on a feather to visit the beautiful world they hope to see. I thought of Anne Shirley as I read. These girls could be her younger sisters, joining Anne in her fantasies and exuberance (but keeping themselves a bit more centered...)

Jennifer is hosting Betsy-Tacy Convert Week, which will begin on 9.28. Head on over if you'd like to be converted - or just to reminisce.

I seem to have run out of time for zombies. ("No time for zombies" - was that a tv show?) Tune in again...

gonna take that dream and ride that dove

2009-08-27T09:25:00.010-04:00

Gratitude: thank you, Anna, Diary of an Eccentric for Hugh and Bess by Susan Higganbotham. I'm so excited to read this and share it with my friends!

Gratitude: thank you, Cheya (Booklogged) at A Reader's Journal, for The Guernsey Library and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer. I love epistolary fiction, and I've wanted to read this book for a long time. I know I'm going to enjoy it because every friend who has read it is still raving about it.

Gratitude: this morning, on my way to work, I was listening to an album by Laura Nyro. Do you remember the song, "Save the Country"? I cried when she sang about the two young brothers. Now there are three. Please, people, let the dream live on.

Come on, people! Come on, children!
Come on down to the glory river.
Gonna wash you up, and wash you down,
gonna lay the devil down, gonna lay that devil down.

Come on, people! come on, children!
Come on down to the glory river.
Gonna wash you up and wash you down.
Gonna lay the devil down, gonna lay that devil down.

I got fury in my soul, fury's gonna take me to the glory goal.
In my mind I can't study war no more.
Save the people! Save the children! Save the country now!

Come on, people! Come on, children!
There's a king at the glory river.
And the precious king, he loved the people to sing;
Babes in the blinkin' sun sang
"We Shall Overcome."

Come on people! Sons and mothers!
Keep the dream of the two young brothers.
Gonna take that dream and ride that dove.
We could build the dream with love, I know,

I got fury in my soul, fury's gonna take me to the glory goal.
In my mind I can't study war no more.
Save the people! Save the children! Save the country now!

We could build the dream with love, I know,
We could build a dream with love, children,
We could build the dream with love, oh people,
We could build the dream with love, I know,
We could build the dream with love.

and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

2009-08-26T09:25:00.003-04:00

Friday fill-ins

2009-08-21T14:59:00.006-04:00

1. I remember, I remember, just give me a minute.

2. Dear Anne Tyler, I want you to know that I want you to write more books, and soon. (Please.)

3. Is that my, um, whatchamacallit !!?? (I guess I didn't remember after all.)

4. I'm trying to resist the temptation of halvah. It's been a long time.

5. I'm saving a *interesting, I can't seem to answer this one... * just for you! (I wonder what that says about me? )

6. If I made a birthday list a spinning wheel would definitely be on it!!!

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to Bill Maher on HBO, tomorrow my plans include laundry, letter-writing, and finishing Agnes Grey, and Sunday, I want to practice spindling with my Ravelry peeps. (I'm doing much better. I'm no longer in danger of strangling myself.)

haiku by Basho

2009-08-18T22:20:00.010-04:00

The sea darkens;
the voices of the wild ducks
are faintly white.

by Matsuo Basho
1644-1694

an award, a gift, a teaser, and a duck

2009-08-18T10:59:00.011-04:00

First, the award, from Kristi, who blogs at Books and Needlepoint.

Do you reach for a cup of cocoa or tea when you're relaxing, seeking comfort, sharing a plate of cookies with family and friends? You know that feeling you get when you drink a yummy cup of cocoa, tea or a hot toddy? That is what the Heartfelt award is all about: feeling warm inside!

Thank you!
The rules are to nominate up to 9 blogs. First, I'll cheat a little: go back to Kristi's blog and look at the other nominees. Go on - I'll wait. (tap tap tap) Now you can visit these friendly blogs:

A pass through the Moon Garden
The Cauldron
Elizabetty Knits
Hand eye crafts (the annual Knitters' Hunk contest is underway...)

... and everyone else in my sidebar!

Jennifer, the Book Club Girl is enabling me to become a Betsy-Tacy Convert! She has given me the first four books in the series. (Incidentally, her blog also is very friendly.) I'm going to start them this weekend. Somehow, I never read this when I was a young girl, and it'll be such a treat for this old(er) girl. Thank you so much, Jennifer!

For Teaser Tuesdays, I'll give you a verse from The One and Only Human Galaxy, a new book of poems by Elizabeth Swados.

You are a city made of dots
the tops of your heads
merge together
into a mosaic.

Oops. I seem to have run out of time for the duck.

Friday fill-ins

2009-08-14T11:03:00.003-04:00

1. When will I decide to retire? How will I make that decision? It's not as easy as I thought it would be. So many issues, beyond the financial...

2. "Carnival of Souls" was the last good book I read or movie I saw or tv show I watched. It was the "Rifftrax" version, so it didn't have quite the ... atmosphere ... that it usually has, but I needed to be cheered up and taken away, just a bit, from reality.

3. Everything has its beauty but war.

4. A weed-whacker salad (i.e., Mesclun) with craisins and walnuts and mozzarella cheese is what I ~~had~~ will have for dinner.

5. I'd like your metabolism. Mine is a disaster.

6. The Delaware Art Museum is where I want to be right now, loving the collection of Pre-Raphaelite art.

7. And as for the weekend, tonight I'm looking forward to Ralph's spumoni cream-ice, tomorrow my plans include a little spindle-spinning and knitting _____ and Sunday, I want to knit and spin with Ravelry peeps!

The Chosen One - Carol Lynch Williams

2009-08-11T20:33:00.005-04:00

Last night, I read the ARC of The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams that I received from Julie at Booking Mama. I intended only to read a chapter or two, but I read it at one gulp. Young Kyra, only 13 years old, lives in a locked compound led by The Prophet, and policed by The God Squad. The members of this religious group practice polygamy and believe that the word of The Prophet is the ultimate authority on earth. Although Williams avoids labelling the sect, her descriptions of the families, with women in long dresses and braided hair, call to mind the offshoot-LDS group depicted in "Big Love."

Kyra has a questioning nature, and has already begun to question the strict rules about reading books other than scripture, the rules that prevent her from calling outside doctor for her ailing, pregnant birth mother, the rules that require child abuse in the name of discipline - and, especially, the rules about the relations between men and women. She has been rebellious, as far as possible, by visiting a bookmobile, and by kissing a boy from the compound, but she is a loving daughter to all of her mothers, and to all of her siblings.

Her rebellion turns to panic when The Prophet decrees that she has been chosen to become the seventh wife of Uncle Hyram, gentle father's brutal, 60-year-old brother. Although her father pleads with The Prophet and his brother, Kyra is told that she must marry, or face disasters worse than the brutal beating she is given by The Prophet's enforcers. She knows that her family, also, will be punished severely by The God Squad, which not only delivers beatings, but is known to have murdered those who disobey or try to run.

The Chosen One is considered a teen novel, but Kyra's story is so riveting, so realistically-written, that anyone could read it and be caught up in her choices as the one chosen to live a life she never would choose for herself.

Thank you, Booking Mama, for sending me this book.