you have no idea how long since I even allowed myself the luxury of dreaming like this, it’s very healthy, I’m told, hmm, as plane tickets to Dallas! (naw!) (just kidding!) security deposit on a new apartment, so I can move from this one; then use the returned deposit here for some of the foregoing, cunningly
Category: Arts & Letters
Don’t take my word for it
Early praise!
“Quaking Dover is a delightful and informative read. Thanks for your good work!” Beth Collea, Dover
“Truly interesting. I truly appreciate all the work and careful thought and interpretations you put into it.” Canyon Woman, New Mexico
“I really like your voice. It’s engaging, light, and easy to read.” Jim Mastro, science fiction author
“Love it!” Susan Wiley, Sandwich, NH
“I enjoyed your conversational writing style – sharing the research that you did — and confidentially whispering (in your writing style), ‘This is what this finding means and how it should be interpreted.’ … To ascertain what really happened you checked primary documents, read previous accounts of Dover, New Hampshire – triangulated your sources and showed us readers how you reached your conclusion. A very enlightening read — well researched, well written.” Joe Clabby, author of A History of Eastport, Passamaquoddy Bay, and Vicinity
As a guild member
normally, straight into the (meager) savings or IRA but with tax changes anyway thought I’d hold on to it for a while and for a switch dreamed and played, asking myself what I’d like to do with it? pay off on the car? (naw!) finally get a CD player, some Ives and Camerata discs, and those new Boston Acoustic speakers? (now that would be a wonderful self-indulgence!) or how about finally breaking down and getting those twelve-year-overdue cross country skis? gee, I could even finally throw in a ten-speed bike, too! not knowing what the IRS had uncovered but then, surprise
Inside my monkey monastery
inside more piles of shuffling then amid still more piles of shuffling I tried to nap again until outside turned totally gray and then sprinkled until I cooked dinner against reading, my “book and newspaper fast” somehow too enjoyable up to then don’t I live an exciting life?
Jolly presuming it’s Jeff
spent most of my spare time since one coworker helped me unload the last two-thirds seeking traction amid the confusion assumed new meaning with indications of clearing on the horizon {oh, how I wanted that forecast to turn truly true}) may beginning afresh bring only the best, don’t we deserve something like that?
Confidentially Inga
if only to disagree with some passage the page opens more than we come expecting, now let us mud-wrestle and- see what we hate in the Lamb’s War (Ephesians) taken to your closet, taken to the street, this is not law but essential life drama where everyone’s unmasked in the story to embrace a more open stance than I’ve grown accustomed to greeting when some own up to privation lest they finally examine the Bible without the snobbery of Baltimore toward Indiana, :still there’s less resistance in burnished Boston amid some faithful, ahem, affectionately, then, let the red ink dry first
Voices return
We’ll be back in rehearsals starting Monday night, and it’s looking exciting.
Quoddy Voices will be preparing Henry Purcell’s “Ode to St. Cecilia’s Day” and works by Florence Price, Randall Thompson, and John Rutter, among others, for a program to be performed twice at the Eastport Arts Center before Thanksgiving.
Excuse me while I start vocalizing. Don’t want to sound rusty.
Chorro Ferdy
with neglected stretches afoot this past so jammed with rocks juts up between ferns and trees tensing into some ongoing anxiety of unseen opportunities in the day and a traipse around the Quaker burial ground in Ellicott City perceives the stone meetinghouse now a private residence : suspect it was called Elk Ridge Meeting but no proof yet : even boulders where elk roamed or buffalo now a stone enclosure under fieldstone forest before a floating worship the midweek turn here tomorrow night’s a blessing while my suburban exile draws to some close : humbly all we still share
Just listen to some powerful lines from the bared heart
The best poem I’ve ever read in nearly six decades of the New Yorker is one that wasn’t even presented as one of its two weekly poetry selections.
Instead, it appeared recently within a theater review, where the play under consideration reminded the critic “of the late poet Essex Hemphill, a master of frank desire whose smart, life-hungry speakers toss of lines like these:
I am lonely for past kisses,
for wild lips certain streets
breed for pleasure.
Romance is a foxhole.
This kind of love frightens me.
I don’t want to die sleeping with soldiers
I don’t love.”
A bit later comes a couplet from a different Hemphill poem:
I am beautiful.
I will endure.
~*~
My, how I admire the directness of those lines, their acerbic observations unencumbered by literary aspirations.
Yes, he skirts the imagist realm of so much of my own verse but somehow, to my eyes, averts any preachiness that can come from the subjects he’s examining.
What hits me the most is the clarity and intensity of his self-examination.
Yes, each time I return to these.
What’s your take on the season finale of ‘Only Murders in the Building’?
Yeah, those of you addicted to the series.
Anyone else feeling a degree of letdown?
Or did you find it dizzyingly brilliant?
As for the teaser for next season?
Gee, I really do want to discuss this with someone without having to skirt around a spoiler alert.
Jnana's Red Barn 