zirconium

Today's mailman asked about the dog, having not seen her for a while. He said she was one of the few who didn't bark at him. I might be snuffling as I type. ( Read more... )

Finally: I started this entry some hours ago. Night has fallen, so let there be light.

[subject line from Matthew Arnold's Lines Written in Kensington Gardens, which correspond to a UU hymn set to a Thomas Tallis canon that I often play when in need of solace]


(The Writing on the Pharaoh's Wall (detail), Gabriel Shaffer, Asheville Art Museum)

Hello, new month
of maybes, maybeings,
and wish-I-mays now here --
behold how bedecked
you already are
with swirls of stitchery

already a diary
of crossouts and detours
and acronymed prayers
and half-rehearsed words
and words for rehearsals.

To tally today:
how many angels
in toeshoes on
the sparkling tips
of pinwheel spokes?

Any minute now
the rules that you thought
were to keep you in line

will vault
with a vehemence
over the handlebars.

O brace yourself
for the many-tongued wind

its whipsharp accents
its cloudblurred vowels

you will grapple for years
with what it has to say to you.

~pld

2015:
firmly rooted to the floor
yet floating


(Playing within a thicket of mirrors at the Asheville Art Museum. Album here.)

Earlier this afternoon, my dog continued ripping the guts out of her old Santa toy and then started dry heaving.

My state of mind isn't quite that bad, but things are a bit crunchety here wrt the time-space continuum, which (as many of you know) I have an ongoing lovers' quarrel with at the best of times. So sharing my notes and snapshots of the archives, bookstores, chapels, graveyards, and restaurants I visited on my way back from Miami (via Jacksonville, Charleston, and various cities in North Carolina) will have to wait until the new year.

As it happens, I'm booked through January work-wise, so it'll be nice to go through the sheaves during breaks from citation-herding. Plus many of you are still in the thick of your own elfish/elven plots...

But speaking of elven plots -- there is no escape! [click the images to enlarge]



I went to the Karpeles Museum in Charleston to look at the Doyle, Sayers, and Fleming manuscripts they had on display there. I'll write more about that later, but the salient point is that the building used to be a Methodist church in a rather run-down part of the city, and the stalls in the women's bathroom are papered accordingly, with flocks of angels ... and, inside one door, a very detailed family tree lifted from LOTR. LOL.

Another delight was the Stowe Garden's orchid "tree":



(16 ft. tall. 300 orchids. An aside to Nashvillians: my Cheekwood membership covered admission to the garden and three museums, and would've covered the NC Arboretum if I'd had time for it.)

And here's me with an old pal on the Green in downtown Charlotte:



Wishing you all a smooth end to the year (or a crackletastic one, if you're into fireworks and other happy kabooms), and a happy and healthy 2013 ahead.

Mary McLeod Bethune doll, at the Doll & Miniature Museum of High Point, NC

Writing news: 7x20 recently published "Gray Areas".

Weekend reading: an interview of Bel Kaufman (author of Up the Down Staircase) by Robert Sullivan, and parts of Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life. Among other things, I hadn't known she was such a Francophile. And I loved this glimpse of her Columbia j-school training:

[John] Hohenberg would run students through harrowing "speed drills"--demanding that they crank out stories in just a few minutes. And he urged everyone to keep $100 set aside. It was basically a Fuck You account--so that if an editor ever demanded that you do a story you hated, you would have at least $100 to help you walk away from the job.

[Minutaglio, Bill; Smith, W. Michael (2009-10-15). Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life (Kindle Locations 1611-1614). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.]

The summer day
smudged with humidity --
eyeshadow-colored ciphers
crowding the page in my sketchbook.

(The Hen House is a pottery and condiment shop in Highlands, NC.)