Categories
Photography Weather Writing

It’s not a doorway

I have been reading about the snowstorm in New England, and hearing about snowfalls of several feet, which can take forever to recover from in cities; especially Boston with its narrow streets and parked cars. However, Boston is only three miles long and unless you’re heading across the river to Harvard, you can walk to work. In a couple of hours or so.

The snowstorm that struck the Midwest and the Northeast passed us by and we’ve had mild temperatures. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before we get hit, but we’ll take the mild weather and the beautiful sunsets for now.

However, we can’t have snow without a little poetry, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow agrees with me:

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

“Snow-Flakes”

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Easier to find poetry about snow than about sunsets, as I found when I looked about. Other than:

Red sky in the morning,
sailor take warning.
Red sky at night,
sailor’s delight.

I think its because sunsets have their own beauty and anything to do with them — poetry, painting, or photography — is a given and a bit of a cheat. But I’ll take the cheat for now.

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Of course, the sunset figures prominently into our fiction, particularly westerns. Cowboys would always ride off into the sunset when they’ve saved the day, which I thought was stupid.

I mean think about it: they ride in, get shot up, go against the bad guys 2 to 1, overcome against all odds, and just when the farmer’s daughter cries out, “My hero”, and we presume is feeling mighty grateful, the idiots ride off into the sunset.

I bet the horse had more sex. No wonder there’s no poetry about sunsets.

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That’s not completely true, there are poems about sunsets. Emily Dickinson wrote a couple — she wrote on everything it seems — and I rather liked, “The Sunset Stopped on Cottages”:

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Sunset hence must be
For treason not of His, but Life’s,
Gone Westerly, Today –

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Morning just begun –
What difference, after all, Thou mak’st
Thou supercilious Sun?

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Tired of sunsets yet? Just be glad I didn’t publish the other ten photos I took tonight, because the sky did put on a lovely show. I grabbed my camera and ran down outside, fighting my cat at the door — me out, her in — before standing out on the deck in bare feet snapping pictures.

The neighbors are used to it: they think I’m nuts, and maybe I am. Am I of age to be eccentric yet?

Oh who cares. I spend too much time worrying about what people think of me when they see me puttering about, and most likely they don’t think of me at all (which is very liberating, let me say).

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The sky is pretty and so are the trees, but yes I do need new subjects, which means I’ll have to go look for them. New things to write about, too. Good.

And on that note, I’ll end with JRR Tolkien:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

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Categories
Just Shelley

Auction Excitement

Things are heating up at the auction now that it’s getting down to the last few hours. Of course, the reserved price still hasn’t been met but I’ve been getting some serious questions about the collection.

Now that it looks like it might sell, I’m kind of regretting having to let it go. There’s a story with every rock, which I did my best to record. That’s just it – there is a story with each, and I recorded my memories of these stories and those I’m not selling.

Speaking of which, I had a lovely compliment on the show, left in comments:

You have written a throughly charming and idiosyncratic book on your mineral collection. If I were an editor I would publish this in an instant. Thanks for giving me the pleasure of your collection.

Made my day.

Besides, if I keep the collection, I’ll just end up stroking the Pet Rock again and ruining it.

Categories
Writing

Borrowing a Page from Wood s as Thanks

I found a page that lists several literary magazines and publications and over the last month or so have been skipping about among the entries, checking out each publication. One such is the The Diarist’s Journal, a revival of a publication that ended a few years back. According to the description, the publication contains Fake, Fictional, and Fictionalized Diaries. I was, of course, compelled to read more, and spent some time among sample entries based around September 11, 2001. For instance, the following, written by “A 33-year-old Journalist in San Francisco”:

9/11, 11pm
The WTC is just gone. People I know, they saw it collapse. Saw it collapse into itself and rain metal and glass and desperate bodies. What’s the point of talking about retaliation? Who do you hit back at? How do you fight a non-corporeal entity? And what good can it possibly do? It’s gone. A terrorist attack with George W. Bumfuck Bush at the wheel. Gods help us….

9/12
I slept until almost 11 today, not wanting to wake up to the changed world. I’m afraid of what might happen. People are attacking Arab-Americans, sending hate mail to mosques. Shrub is talking about a battle between good and evil, an American jihad. People are talking war, not criminal investigation. Who do you hit?…

9/13
…I don’t know what scares me more: the possibility of further attacks, or the possibility that our leaders will destroy our freedoms in order to save them.

The world has changed forever. I know that’s obvious. What’s really disturbing is that the change began some time ago and no one seems to have noticed….

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Several of the publications only print their Table of Contents online, which is a bit of a tease. But considering that most operate more on hope than on solid funding, it’s not surprising that they don’t want to give “the goods” away for free. But I still prefer the publications that at least provide some of the material online.

That’s why I love The Missouri Review, with so much wonderful reading freely available. Most people turn immediately to the fiction and poetry, but I rather fancy the editorials, in particular those by Scott Kaukonen. Learn that name, you’ll hear it more in the future:

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, I feared that I would enter the field with a handful of disadvantages, given my what-I-perceived-to-be generic upbringing. I’d been raised in the Baptist parsonage of a small Midwestern town and enjoyed a pleasant childhood. I did well in school, stayed out of trouble, participated in all manner of socially-approved activities, and loved my parents, who in turn loved me. You could say I lacked personal traumas, at least those personal traumas that could be most obviously turned into the material of potboiler fiction. Non-descript seemed the best description.

But when as a young adult I began to travel ‘to see other parts of the country and the world’ the generic seemed less generic. The town in which I’d been raised, the circumstances under which I’d grown, the world as I saw it suddenly appeared different. I’m not exactly sure how that has translated into my stories except to say that I no longer assume that a story set in some faraway land is necessarily more worthwhile to read than a story set in a town that remarkably resembles my own.

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Then there’s my favorite repository of American poetry, The Academy of American Poets. I found two new poems that I liked, both by very well known poets. The first, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is The Day is Done:

The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.

I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o’er me,
That my soul cannot resist:

A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.

Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.

For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life’s endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.

Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;

Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.

Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.

Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.

And the night shall be filled with music
And the cares that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.

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Another poem I liked, very much, is Walt Whitman’s “Spirit that Form’d this Scene”, about the connection between artist and the natural world, no matter how separated from the world the art is:

Spirit that form’d this scene,
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,

These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
I know thee, savage spirit–we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s
grace–column and polish’d arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here–spirit that form’d this scene,
They have remember’d thee.

Yes, more pictures of rocks. I cannot go for another walk until my foot is feeling better so I am forced to dig into my photo repository for photos not yet published. Are you tired of trees and shrubs, and ponds, and rocks? Well hopefully soon, I’ll have something new for you.

Speaking of trees and rocks, Rolling Stone Magazine has a wonderful article called Crimes Against Nature, about the destruction of environmental laws in this country. But, like so many other writers, the author of the article also brought in the comparison of times between now and Europe of 1930’s:

Corporate capitalists do not want free markets, they want dependable profits, and their surest route is to crush competition by controlling government. The rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many informative lessons on how corporate power can undermine a democracy. In Spain, Germany and Italy, industrialists allied themselves with right-wing leaders who used the provocation of terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland security to tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents and turn government over to corporate control. Those governments tapped industrial executives to run ministries and poured government money into corporate coffers with lucrative contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. They encouraged friendly corporations to swallow media outlets, and they enriched the wealthiest classes, privatized the commons and pared down constitutional rights, creating short-term prosperity through pollution-based profits and constant wars. Benito Mussolini’s inside view of this process led him to complain that “fascism should really be called ‘corporatism.’ ”

I was wrong to push back so strongly about the comparison of modern times and the facism of the 1930’s. However, I am still wary of it because I wonder – if today the US is the Germany of the 1930’s, what does that make us? We who live in the country that other people look at with so much distaste? Will the people from the rest of the world some day make us stand in our virtual village greens over the bodies of dead Iraqi and face what we have allowed our leaders to do?

How will you feel about us if we do not manage to remove Bush next year?

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Finally, from Mark Morford at SF Gate, Be Thankful you are not Dubya, a list that only Mark can write, and one reason he is still my favorite:

Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya’s massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.

Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort on the part of numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty much slap down most all tender offerings of the planet, Earth still manages to produce for us an astonishing array of flora and fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring trees and relentless merciless beauty.

We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and insolent and abusive and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex positivism and community awareness and quiet personal spiritual questing and lots and lots of great bookstores.

Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the cynicism and the sighing and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get quiet, look around, look inside, check the karmic inventory and offer up heaping pies of gratefulness for what you find.

Amen, Mark. Amen.

(And thanks to another Mark for bringing us so much, including a unique and wonderful style of journal from which I borrowed liberally from for today.)

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Categories
Just Shelley

Men on Harleys

If I seem cranky in my recent posts, I am a bit but that’s just because in the last few days I have had some discomfort in my teeth/jaw/sinus, as well as my foot. These are two areas of the body most sensitive to pain, and I’m hit with both at the same time.

However, I now have legal drugs. Good legal drugs. Nice legal drugs.

I’m also a bit disappointed about a couple of things, including the fact that it doesn’t look like my minimum reserve on my mineral collection auction will be met. I have a starting bid, but not enough to justify selling the collection. My roommate suggests that the timing was bad – Christmas is coming up. Too true. If it doesn’t sell this week, I’ll try again in January.

Also, the Practical RDF book isn’t quite selling as well as other books I’ve written. I’m not surprised – it is a very esoteric subject, and I don’t go to conferences and put my face into other people’s faces, or talk about RDF a lot. It should be a consistent seller over time, especially if I keep updating outdated sample code and putting said code out at the O’Reilly site. But it’s not going to be the success Unix Power Tools is (which was just published in Japanese – I’ll post a photo of the copy being sent to me when I get it), or Developing ASP Components. (which made it into Russian and Spanish).

However, with the sour always comes the sweet. It doesn’t look like my foot is broken, but some toes most likely are and haven’t healed well (heeled well, heh), and the X-Rays tomorrow won’t cost me a dime with my medical (I do have very good medical insurance).

In addition, I’ve had the loveliest comments from the rock and mineral Interest community about the collection. They loved the collection, the stories, the photos. Makes me feel good about the job I did putting this site online.

A couple of other things might be looking up nicely soon, but I won’t say anything specific until the rubber hits the road, so to speak. I also have a very good friend (who happens to have an exceptionally handsome voice by the way), who suggested that my next bits of photography focus on things I don’t normally take photos of, or don’t like taking photos of, to increase my expertise and reach.

Excellent advice, except that I like taking pictures of everything, being a most indiscriminate photographer. However, I am shy about taking photos of people, and that’s one I need to work on. Also, I haven’t spent much time recently taking photos within cities or towns, or of industrial areas, and these could use more attention. In fact, there is a road trip I want to take (when I can afford it again) that will involve taking pictures of people and places of this nature, not just the wonderful Missouri country side.

But I will never tire of taking photos of Missouri. I may mention the statistics about St. Louis and the crime, but this really is a wonderful city full of charm and character. And the countryside – if you’ve never been here, nothing I can photograph, or tell you, will ever convey the richness of this state: the forests, wetlands, granite mountains, and deep rivers. And the charming towns, and quirky, maddening, fascinating, and complex people that live here.

And, girlfriends, the men on Harleys here are drop dead gorgeous. When they say life begins at 50, they must have been talking about these guys, silver foxes everyone, I tell you. Youngsters got nothing on these guys. Well, okay, maybe Johnny Depp and Hugh Jackman, but that’s it.

Did I happen to mention the good drugs?

Categories
Burningbird

No worries

I rarely get the poetry writing bug, preferring to expose others’ excellent work when I do my poetry-photography pairs. I loved the pic, though, and couldn’t find a poem to fit it for the life of me.

(Well, that’s really an excuse – everyone is a poet wanting to show their friends their bits of verse. It’s just that, thankfully, most people don’t have weblogs.)

Of course, when he reads the poem, Joe may regret his school’s efforts into bringing poetry to the computer scientists and engineers at his college.

Other news: In addition to closing down the Practical RDF weblog, I will also be closing down the Semantic Web for Poets weblog. I think that the act of writing about the semantic web is really the act of writing about everyday uses of everyday technology, so I’m adding other sites in its place, including a MySQL/SQL for Poets. Besides, I find myself falling between the cracks of the Great Debates around here – not glowing enough about the twitchy bits for the Semantic Web folks; not condemning enough about the overall concept for the “Keep Your Meaning out of Our Web” folks.

(Should make more than a few of the techies around here quite glad – I think they were beginning to view me in a manner similar to how the butterfly viewed that bee in the last story. )

update

I originally wasn’t going to point out this post, because what could one say, but I did think the condemnation of the RDF supporters in regards to the Atom effort was a bit tactless, considering how much work the RDF supporters (such as Danny Ayers and Ken MacLeod) put into maintaining the ATOM wiki, as well as helping with the other non-RDF bits of the effort. I guess that grace in code is valued in some circles more than grace in behavior.

All the rest of the Wayward webloggers have been moved, and aside from finding that some files transferred as zero bytes, we’re all cooking now. Including Loren who has Been Doin’ a Litl Read’n:

Did I tell ya I’d been wanderingm doin a little read’n? Read’n ain’t always a good thing. Ups and gives ya ideas. Me and Tom Joad gots ideas.

Don’t be telling no Ashcroft and his assholes I nos how to read. Don’t wanna be on nobody’s LIST.

I need to finish my clean up and move, but I’m not much in a mood for it. Maybe tomorrow.