zirconium

A local radio station has been playing an ad with Mavis Staples the past couple of weeks. Which in turn reminds me of the Ysaye Barnwell workshop I participated in a couple of Junes ago, which included improvising verses to "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round."

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From Bill Penzey's latest e-blast:

One of the things I admire most about conservatives is their sincerity in their belief that they take responsibility for their actions. As Lincoln said, we can all be fooled some of the time; there is no shame in that. The trick is to not fall into the crowd that can be fooled all the time. What matters is what you do next; you can dig your heels in and become what you've stood up against your whole life. Or you can simply make amends and move on.

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Resources:
https://5calls.org/
https://jenniferhofmann.com/home/weekly-action-checklist-democrats-independents-republicans-conscience/
https://calvinslist.org/

The subject line is a chant from Chicago's March for Science. This photo is from this morning's march in Nashville:



It was taken by a woman whose mother had knitted the hats; she was there with her grandson, who worked toward getting a selfie with the dog as we chatted:



I've posted a cross-section of photos to my Twitter account (@zirconium). I'll add some more later, but I actually do have a grant application deadline to meet.

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.

My offer: buy my book for yourself or someone else you're fond enough of to spend 5 USD on (at Amazon or elsewhere), send me some indication of the purchase (order #, screencap, whatever...) by 12:01 a.m. CST on December 26, and I will donate $2 per copy to The Flint Water Fund.

Alternatively: mention my poem "Look at that, you son of a bitch" on one of your social media platforms by 12:01 a.m. CST on December 26, and I will likewise donate $2 per mention.

ETA: My big sister is going to match my donation!

What's the cap? $200.

Why the offer? A sudden urge to goose up my royalty/readership figures.

Why $2? Because "useful, oddly very crisp," and categorically queer (for certain iterations of "categorically" and "queer") could well be used to describe me.

Why December 26? It's the Feast of Stephen. The first Christmas carol I ever learned to play on the piano was "Good King Wenceslas," which is but one of the reasons it's deeply embedded in my blood and bones -- if there's a carol I can sing in my sleep, it's that one. And as my friend M'ris might could tell you, there are a multitude of ways to sing and hear about the snow so deep and crisp and even. (And about what we know to tell, for that matter. Hence the subject line.)

["Under the oak leaves" - a line from "Au clair de la fontaine" (By the clear fountain)]

The senior minister at my church is on sabbatical, and Rabbi Rami Shapiro is visiting monthly as a guest preacher. On September 11, he brought with him a shruti, which he played as the congregation learned a new round:



Longtime readers/friends may recall that I do have a thing about fountains... though this past month my scant spare time has been more on lake and river. My Labor Day getaway plans having fallen through twice, I decided to get on a paddleboard four out of my five days off, and last Friday I watched the full moon from my lantern-lit plank on the Cumberland.

Elsewhere and elsewhen: Paying work. Housework. Homework. Paperwork. Footwork. Speaking of--
Dancing: hip-hop, flamenco, Afro-Cuban (orishas), English country.
Friends: Visiting from France and elsewhere. Running for office.. Organizing campferences. Selling taco + lesbian farmer buttons (coupon code here, btw). Preparing for High Holy Days. Coding. Cajoling. Caretaking. I could go on ... in short, inspiring me.
Harvesting: peppers.
Deadheading: zinnias.

Recently published:

At unFold: "Spacing for Sky," with typography by J. S. Graustein

At Folded Word: "O Margaret, Here We Are Again"

At 7x20, a weekful of polished micro-poems: 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

There is more to say and write, much of it off-blog, but a guest arrives tomorrow, so for now it's back to cleaning. Onward!

At church this morning, div school student Sara Green read some passages from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Beyond Vietnam" speech, delivered in 1967. Two excerpts:

Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement, and pray that our inner being may be sensitive to its guidance. For we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy...

This is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

Today's subject line is from Jane Hirshfield's Hope and Love. It is one of the pieces I am currently rehearsing for this Sunday's services. The other one is a lively setting of Emily Dickinson's "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers":



I've also been looking at various hymns set to "Charleston" (albeit wayyy slower than the midi at Hymnary). We sang the version that begins "There's a wideness in your mercy" (words by Frederick William Faber) at church not too long ago:


There's a wideness in your mercy like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in your justice which is more than liberty.

But we make your love too narrow by false limits of our own,
and we magnify your strictness with a zeal you will not own.

For the love of God is broader than the measures of our minds
and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

My new icon (chez Dreamwidth) comes to you via a photo in the latest Vanderbilt University Medical Center Reporter of the sew-ins from earlier this month. (I'm third from the left; I like that my hands are what's visible.)

The November 2012 issue of Vogue arrived in my mailbox a day or two ago, and I'm really enjoying it so far. It starts with ten pages of Tiffany ads, showcasing some spectacular arrangements and gowns. The "letters from readers" section include four letters about Bel Kaufman that are a welcome tonic to fears of aging:

To read of her life and undiminished enthusiasm for books, theater, and people at 101 humbles me in light of my waning interests at a mere 70 years of age. When I was 23, I wanted to be like Bel Kaufman, and now, 47 years later, there are miles to go before I sleep and that goal is still before me. - Rocky S. Thomas

While many [of my med school interns] say, "Oh my goodness, you're turning 30. Yikes!," Kaufman's story puts things into perspective--this woman is 101 and talking about editing her works for e-books! - Sofia Mohammad

There were also two letters about the excerpt from Paris: a Love Story, which I finished recording for the Talking Library earlier this week...



...and four letters in praise of Pamela Paul's article on the trouble and condescension women run into when they want to obtain a tubal ligation. I skipped reading the original -- it's not as if I lack for material to enrage me these days, especially on the topic of people being arses when they encounter others who don't share so-called traditional values -- but I have to admit I had a moment of "my tribe!" in reading these letters -- three of the writers likewise knew in their 20s that they did not want to become parents, and encountered doctors unsympathetic to their efforts to avoid pregnancy:

In 1973, as a recently married young woman, I visited my family physician to seek information about tubal ligation. He responded that he would recommend a good psychiatrist for me. - Elizabeth Soladay

Also in this issue: an ad for the Oscar de la Renta exhibit in Little Rock, featuring Penelope Cruz in a phenomenal red gown, an excerpt from Richard Russo's new memoir (about growing up in New York with a single mother), and Lisa Cohen on her friendship with Sybille Bedford. When they met, Lisa was in her 30s, Sybille was 86, and Lisa was researching Madge Garland, whom Sybille had disliked because Madge had made clear she cared only about "people who were successful. I was an aspiring writer; she made one feel it." Lisa continues:

I was in my 30s, with no book to my name. But she did not make one feel it. Instead, exacting as she was, she made it clear that good friends were what she lived for, along with excellent writing, food, and wine. . . . She considered herself, not just her book, a work in progress.

Yesterday, the Velveteen Rabbi posted a Yom Kippur sermon, In The Belly of the Whale, that's richly seeded with stories, including this one...

My teacher Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi tells a Sufi story about a great teacher whose disciples wanted to learn his mystical wisdom. Okay, said the teacher; here is a dove; go someplace where no one can see you, and kill it, and when you come back, I will teach you what you want to know.

Of his 12 students, eleven came back with dead birds, and he sent them away. One returned with the living dove. "I couldn't find a place," said the student, "where no One could see me."

...and question-observations that are at once not easy and un-easy (myself shying away from the mirror as I choose a quote):

How much of our lives do we spend fleeing from what matters? From the awareness of our mortality? From the acts of lovingkindness we know we should be doing? From the brokenness of the world, the awful stories on the news, murder and rape and injustice? Even from our loved ones, when we choose checking email again on our smartphones rather than putting away the electronics and connecting with our parents, our children, ourselves?

This is not new. The internet offers new and fascinating ways of fleeing, but this inclination is as old as humanity.

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Also yesterday: 7x20 published my micropoem "Yom Kippur."

Also: on Tuesday, Moment published a review of my book (quoting from my Kol Nidre poem, among others).

One more thing on whales: Moby Dick Big Read -- as in, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, and others podcasting That Big Book. Whee!

She herself was delighted with her large family and would have been glad to have had a few more. But she had seen enough of life and the tragedy of poverty-stricken mothers worn out by childbearing and overwhelmed by too many children not to be outraged on their behalf.

...In her old age, she became something of an old-fashioned fanatic, traveling to the Philippines, India, and Israel, visiting clinics, and exchanging "lore." As a spry old lady of eighty-four, shod in blue sneakers and leaning on a cane, she went with my sister Linda, at that time head of an adoption agency in Washington, D.C., to an International Conference of Social Work in Rome. They stopped in London, then flew on to Istanbul, Tel Aviv, and Athens, but not until they reached Belgrade did my sister, much to her horror, discover as my mother's battered old suitcase fell open that it was stuffed with contraceptives of all sorts and sizes. As my sister rather bemusedly remarked to my mother, "Why, Mother, you never taught me to travel that way!"

...Abortion clinics seemed to be the chief answer to the birth control problem in Yugoslavia. My mother insisted on visiting various examples of the clinics, leading my long-suffering sister through malodorous back alleys and up fetid back stairs into these sordid establishments where she spread the word and apparently the contraceptives, for my sister remarked that when they reached Rome, my mother's suitcase was empty.

- Marian Cannon Schlesinger, Snatched from Oblivion: A Cambridge Memoir (Little, Brown, 1979)