NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 25

I think we’re all seeing the finish line in sight. Can’t you imagine the ears pricking a little as the head and eyes come up? Go go go April poets! You can do this!

Today NaPoWriMo.net challenged us to take the Proust Questionnaire (see also here). It had been awhile, so I printed it out (how analogue) so I could look it over in between listening to the SCOTUS oral arguments today. I didn’t get to it until afterwards, but maybe it had been simmering overnight. I jotted down a couple quick answers but didn’t see too much coming of it but then the very last question:

What is your motto?

That had a clear answer! From the quilt annals of 2002…

Always be learning.
Practice. Persistence. Beauty.
Always do the work.

NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 25

NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 20

Today is the last “official” day of isolation for me. Yes I could have gone out after day 5 (and I did get some needed groceries, masked and ducking in and out of the store one day). I am advised my tests can be positive for three months! I am advised, rather too mildly I think, to wear a mask in crowded places. I think we’ve lost track of what we’re doing here but I’m not an advisor to the CDC etc.

Today is also day twenty of NaPoWriMo and the prompt today was “write a poem that recounts a historical event. In writing your poem, you could draw on your memory, encyclopedias, history books, or primary documents.” I do sometimes tell people about how I went to a lecture in early March 2020 and felt iffy, had a headache and then was sick in bed for two weeks. Luckily I stayed home. And when I went to the doctor on the twelth to get a note to return to work he said, well, we’ll never know for sure… And right after that, the world shut down. And I never went back to my workplace to work.

March 6, 2020

I hope you are well.
Tuesday night I went to a lecture
it turned out to be surprisingly a bust
but I had a headache. Maybe it was me.
I drove home wishing I was home.
I crawled into bed and woke up sick.

I slept most of today. I have a cough
and think I have a fever but I
can’t find my thermometer
just the one I use for the cats.
So I went back to bed.

A few days later and the radio voice
says there’s some sickness
filling hospitals and they don’t know.
I stayed home trying to breathe
I fixed a thermos of hot tea and
I’m crawling back into bed
trying not to cough
the news says stay home.

Hope you are well. Be safe.

NaPoWriMo 2024 Day 20

The Gettysburg Address

I am reposting this, from 2019 and as far back as 2015, because it still matters, remembering what our nation is about.

Looking back,I first posted these words here in 2015 after an incident in Baltimore triggered violence and looting. I reposted them two years later, a month after this president took office and thinking about what it means to be American and what is worth fighting for.

Today is the anniversary of those words being said overlooking the battlefields of Gettysburg. Two minutes that sum up what is worth fighting for and why we must continue to fight for what we believe.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

The Gettysburg Address

Still on the Brink of the Web

A year ago, a first big wave of migration from Twitter happened and I found myself trying Mastodon and CounterSocial. Mastodon felt better somehow and it’s very nice, has great community, you can work up some conversation if you persist and post and leave comments – but that’s how ALL social media works.

Today I see a FB memory that I was trying these out and now we’re in the middle of another round of shouting about how awful Twitter/X is and especially because

the owner is a loud jerk who allows others to be loud jerks. OMG the other N word! OMG! Another round of migration.

Oddly, this is not at all my twitter experience. I don’t see any of that and it’s a MUCH better platform for getting faster news. I’ve laid off it for a few days because a part of me is bothered by the jerk-who-owns. (since the first migration, I’ve actually increased the number of artists and writers I see there as well as adding some excellent opinion people)

But, despite following so many of the same accounts of news and opinion people in Mastodon and now Threads (another arm of FB so don’t bother telling me how wondrously shiny and human it is – it also has a board of directors and a profit motive and an often jerky bossman), there is just not the same stream of information there. I don’t know why these news and opinion folks say they’re on other platforms and then don’t mirror their posts but they don’t.

Mastodon at least has the ability to find people across the fediverse, to search for hashtags etc and to f-ing edit posts. So despite and because of its reliance on volunteer folks willing to run physical servers, it has a lot going for it. Twitter has lost a lot of features but keeps its speed of delivery. FB is just awash in fake ads and other crap.

Deep in my gut I think that even if the Far Right folks prevail in real life, no one will care as long as their cat pictures and videos can still be posted. I am SO positive about this. I hate it. I remember when I had to continually explain what a blog was, so there’s not much can be done about my disappointment in this.

Congratulations for making it this far.

Still on the Brink of the Web

Remember

This year marks twenty-two years since that day. Over the last week or so I’ve noticed people are saying things like “we need to all grieve, whether we lost someone or not, directly or not…” We did all lose someones that day, and we lost part of ourselves too, and our innocence. Maybe not innocence exactly, but maybe some of our belief that good will triumph was shaken…

We still remember that beautiful September morning, blue skies and all the promise of back to school and autumn ahead. While I may repeat my post from year to year in memory of that day and the lives lost and changed forever, the feelings are fierce.

Things have changed in the world due to politics and a pandemic. The flow of days and what happens has changed, probably forever. But, we all know where we were; how we heard; what we thought; what happened next, even while trying to swim and keep our heads above water today. We may be frightened by different events as we were by the idea of homeland security and attacks against Americans by other Americans because they looked different or worshiped difference. Things aren’t that different now. Much of our fears and anger are created within our own borders these days. People are hard to understand, their actions sometimes unreasonable, dangerous, unloving, full of rage and hatred without realistic cause.

911, quilt by Mary Beth Frezon, 2001. Photo by Pearl Yee Wong of the Michigan State University Museum

This is what I wrote as an early statement about this quilt:

September 11, 2001
The phone rang. I watched my mother talking and prepared myself to hear that someone had died. Who could have imagined? We didn’t have a TV where we were so we didn’t get the barrage of instant images. All we could do is listen to the phoned reports and wonder.

What stuck me about that day was the change. The sky was crystal blue, the Adirondack water still sparkled with the sun, the mountains still held in the lake on all sides. What had changed was me. I felt that someone had knocked a hole in my body or head. That there was a gap between the me of a few minutes before and the me now. I looked at the others and they seemed to have the same problem putting themselves into this new existence.

I’ve used simple images to portray that turning point where the innocent happiness changed on a moment in time. I’ve left a suggestion that this will continue to evolve. All grief becomes tempered over time but how long before the memory of that moment is softened?

We continue to remember and take the time to memorialize and to remember.

…I grabbed the last Sunday Times
You stole my cab
We waited forever at the bus stop
We sweated in steamy August
We hunched our shoulders against the sleet
We laughed at the movies
We groaned after the election
We sang in church
Tonight I lit a candle for you
All of you

from — “Nine-Eleven” by Charlotte Parsons

---

Remember.

Recently I realized that people coming into an age to work and to vote were either just born or about to be born in 2001. So we begin layers of people who have no connection, no memory of that day or its events. I realize that small children alive then don’t really remember, in the way that some younger than me at the time don’t remember Kennedy being killed. I don’t always know what to make of everything that brought us to this time, but I am still here, trying to do what’s right and making art and words and to keep remembering.

I remember being buoyed up by the responses to the September 11th attacks and also being worried about the sudden homeland security and searches and all “to protect us”. And I remember the rising tide of hatred, surrounded by all those flapping patriotic flags, hatred against those “other” people who hated us enough to want to hurt and terrify us. And here we are today.

Tides of fear and anger and hatred rise up over and over again and we must rise up too without fear and without anger and without hatred. Not in my name. Be strong enough to resist those easy paths and act with understanding.

Be kind. Be kind. Be kind.

---

This is the quilt I was working on that day as it was in September, 2001. It is still a favorite and still filled with loss.

This is Repercussion, the quilt I worked on in 2002. (Now in private collection)

Remember

Covid Isn’t Over

Got a text that V-safe check in will be ending June thirtieth. Signed up for that with my first COVID-19 vax and it’s made me feel like a tiny part of the solution for something.

PS – Yesterday I found out – oops zero hashtags have been arriving here at masto, so wtf is up with that? No doubt something like my theme got updated and overwrote the changes I’d made… ratz. hate that when that happens! Will now attempt to fix.

Covid Isn’t Over

May the Sixth

Feeling a little jet-lagged but I only lost sleep because Mom and I got up to start watching the coronation. Coverage started at 5 am. It was worth doing from a historical-I-might-not-get-to=see-this-again point of view. By the time it was over, we were BOTH starving and I made a full English breakfast with all the goodies. Turned out pretty darn good if I do say so and mom scarfed it up too.

Dug up some stuff in the front yard – by the time I sat down to do a quick paint, I was pooped.

May the Sixth

NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 4

Mom and I had dueling eye doctor appointments, same time, different doctors. We drove home via Joann’s and I picked out some fabric for chair cushions, after we sat in the car and read today’s breaking news headlines. Then it was home to enjoy a wonderful dinner of Norwegian salmon and celebratory bloody marys.

Sat in the front yard
watching the daffodils blooming
rather than the news

it’s possible spring
will last a week or so
unless we get snow

over there a grackle
is being scolded by a
chickadee or two

such a relief, the sun
warm on me and the garden
be hopeful today

NaPoWriMo 2023 Day 4

Charles Simic, 1938-2023

When you read a nice poem, somebody else’s poem, you become attuned to the words on the page. The language seems so rich, so beautiful, imagination making connections. You do need the reader as a collaborator. There could be other experiences beyond that of course. There might be some thoughts, some ideas emerging out of that, but I think the most basic fundamental thing is to give the reader something pleasurable. – Charles Simic

“Charles Simic, Pulitzer-Winning Poet and U.S. Laureate, Dies at 84” NYTimes obit, outside paywall.

Eyes Fastened with Pins, Poetry Foundation

Midsummer, Rattle 2016

The Vices of the Evening, Rattle 2016

Crepuscular, Poetry Foundation (see here for more)

Will be attempting to send blog posts to Mastodon as well. Let’s see how that goes.

Charles Simic, 1938-2023

January 6, 2023

Two years ago, I sat, like many, watching the insurrection unfold on live television. I’d started out with the intention, like many, to watch this thing called the electoral college do its supposedly boring task and accomplish its part in the peaceful transfer of power.

It was clear that Trump and others had other ideas and plans to make this not happen.

One of the things that stands out in my mind is the camera crew that was stationed on a street corner, really just to provide background images and the odd bit of commentary with the capitol as background. They and others started reporting things like people with guns up in trees and people breaking through lines of police going into the capitol. There came a moment when a couple people started going past this news crew and you could sense that the crew wondered if they were in danger. One asked the people if they had any knowledge about what was going on. Who were they? Where did they come from? The reporter pressed on – do you know you have blood on you? Are you all right?

Whereupon the guy told how he had gone with a group into the Capitol and they had broken a window into the chamber and a woman had started to go through the window and was shot. And the blood was hers. And he told the story like it was out of last week’s news from another city.

Someday I’d love to hear what that news crew and reporter thought about all that. And I’d very much like to thank them for keeping the cameras and sound going so we could hear all that first hand. I was watching on the Washington Post live feed so I assume the crew was theirs or a pool crew. I know that some crews had damage done to their equipment since they were considered “fake news”, but we all got to see what happened, as it happened because they were there.

Because of the Jan. 6 committee we were able to see a lot of other footage from inside the building too and hear a lot of the communications that were going on.

So don’t try to convince me that Trump and the rest of them don’t deserve indictment, a trial and hopefully jail time for trying to take over the United States. We all saw the evidence and many of us watched it live.

January 6, 2023