2014: Forget Me Not

forget-me-not by Alice Popkorn  (cc)

So long 2014.

I will not forget you
but not for trying.
Your whirlygig antics have
ground my nerves raw.

Thanks for the memories...
urm...not so much...
well, one, anyway.
OK...two.

I guess you were an affiliate
of the School of Hard Knocks
and devotee of the theory:
'you must be cruel to be kind'

for you were generous with your cruelty
and stinting of your kindness.
Maybe someday I will thank you for the lessons
having found them crucial to my future joy.

but not today...

Today I say "Get thee hence
before I slam that door on your behind...
and take your 'kindness' with you
to where the sun don't shine."

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Friday Foray's in Fiction: Quote

Visions by Alice Popkorn -flickr

“The great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa said that to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And that's the hardest thing, because we want to flinch. The artist must go into the white hot center of himself, and our impulse when we get there is to look away and avert our eyes.”

― Robert Olen Butler

From Where You Dream

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Sunday Serenity #403

Joy by Alice Popkorn--flickr
Creative Commons License

Love it!!!

Love also that the artist has a large collection of images on flickr that she's put up with CCL that allows use on a web page with attribution.  This won't be the last you see of a Alice Popkorn image on Joystory





[This is one of the posts going up retroactively after the weeks long unintended hiatus that began the week after July 4th.  See She's Back for more detailed explanation.]

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Let Me Lego Like This

James May’s Lego house

I saw this in this PCMag slideshow featuring ten amazing Lego Projects.  I then followed the link to the topgear.com article about this project and saw a slideshow walkthrough of it.

Among the other projects featured in the PCMag slideshow are a working mortercycle, Van Gogh's Starry Night, models of Hogwarts, Taj Mahal, and the Game of Thrones castle. I hope to return to follow the links to each of them to see more pics and read the stories.

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Sunday Serenity #372

My Two Favorites of Mom's College Paintings

I found a stack of a dozen or so of Mom's paintings from college.  I was hoping to get pics of each of them but time ran out and I had to settle for one pic featuring two of my favorites.

I've been into Peacocks since I became a fan of the novelist Flannery O'Conner who raised them.  And blue is my favorite color.  Nuf said?

The house is another story.  It needs a story to explain its meaning to me.  This was my grandparents' home in Tahama county California.  Mom spent her teens in this house.  I visited it an average of twice a year until I was fifteen when Grandpa and Grandma Myers moved in with my Aunt Helen in Longview WA.

I'm pretty sure Mom drew this from a black and white photo taken in the early years of their residency here.  By the time I knew this house it was covered in climbing vines of various kinds, the trees were twice as tall and the yard was full of flowers and flowering shrubs.  If this was a photo then behind the photographer is the field where the milk cows grazed and off to the right aka the back there was a chicken coop and a small barn for milking the cows.  There was a vegetable garden which I'm not quite placing in my memory.  Grandpa was a truck farmer while raising his family.  Before he married he was a school teacher as was Mom's mother.

I could go on and on but I have appointments with both my med nurse and counselor tomorrow afternoon so mustn't linger over this now.

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Sunday Serenity #355

Fun.  Relaxing.
Color Mandala

Spent most of the day looking for and installing productivity aps.  Along the way I came across this one. It might seem closer to a game at first glance and can be treated as such but I can think of many productive uses of these images once created.

You can print off uncolored line drawings for coloring with your favorite media or save image (colored or not) to your computer for future sharing or use in creative projects.  You can select from a large gallery of already created mandalas or use design mode to create your own.

Once you have colored one you have the option to share on facebook, email or send as greeting card.

I already have too many to count ideas for using them. Here's a few:

• Make a coloring book
• Make stationary and greeting cards.
• Resize image and make bookmark
• Laminate and use as coasters or placematts or vase matts
• Use as pattern for fiberart: needlepoint, embroidery, crochet, quilts.
• Decorate the surfaces of any number of things: binders, laptop lids, canisters, boxes, spiral notebooks...
• Use on blog posts or in web page design

I could go on and on.

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Sunday Serenity #300

Blue Moon Wallpaper

Later this week there will be a second full moon for the month of August which is known as the blue moon.  Lot's of images of blue moons are popping up all over the net.  Seeing as how blue is my favorite color my eyes feel like they're in the candy store.  When I spotted this one at profilekiss.com I just had to have it for my desktop.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

...when it comes to writing fiction, the writer's only responsibility is to look for the truth inside his own heart.  it won't always be the reader's truth, or the critic's truth but as long as it's the writer's truth...all is well.
~~from the Afterward in Stephen King's Full Dark, No Stars

Speak The Truth by ~Gerkitda on deviantART

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

Pink Cat by Diane Ong  @art.com

Something about this picture mesmerizes me.  Am finding it hard to tear my eyes away.  Was trying to figure out why when it occurred to me that 'why' was the wrong question.  If there even is a right one.

My gaze reminded me of the quizzical steady gaze of an infant so maybe it is similar in nature to that ever fresh wonder of a baby's encounters with the new and strange which for them is a constant of their days but for adults who are unpracticed at seeing something for the first time it is rare to have our gaze captured like that.

I just had to spoil it by 'figuring it out' didn't I?

But those thoughts either were stimulated by or reminded me of the recent posting by Laurie Halse Anderson of that Chuck Palahniuk quote over at Mad Woman in the Forest:

The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.    ~~Chuck Palahniuk

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Friday Forays in Fiction: The Art of Transgression

Through childhood I hiked, roamed, tirelessly "explored" the country side; neighboring farms, a treasure trove of old barns abandoned houses and forbidden properties of all kinds, some of them presumably dangerous, like cisterns and wells covered with loose boards.  These activities are intimately bound up with storytelling, for always there's a ghost-self, a "fictitious" self, in such settings. For this reason I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. (I never saw a NO TRESPASSING sign that wasn't a summons to my rebellious blood.  Such signs, dutifully posted on trees and fence railings, might as well cry COME RIGHT IN!) To write is to invade another's space, if only to memorialize it; to write is to invite angry censure from those who don't write, or who don't write in quite the way you do, for whom you may seem a threat,.  Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it.  the more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.


Joyce Carol Oates
The Faith of a Writer  p33

This quote from Joyce Carol Oates, one of my favorite authors spoke to me.

I'm sure fear of transgression of both known and unknown boundaries is one of the elements holding me back, manifesting at times as writer's block and other times as hypergraphia in which words accumulate but art is still elusive.

My perfectionism and fear of making a mess is involved as well as my resistance to dealing with the messes once made aka the 100s of thousands of words in story drafts and notes.  And I'm sure my reluctance to pursue my stated goals in ROW80 related to requesting beta readers and publishing ebooks is related.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: At Home in the Story

Le village de livres de Marie Montard
http://www.mariemontard.com/

Have you ever been so into a story you felt as though you lived in it?

That has happened to me many a time with books but less and less as I get older.  My memories of the times that was typical are from ages 8 through 20 something.

Then something happened.  Not sure what.  But it was as if I had stepped outside and could only look in the windows from the street.

I read just as voraciously but seldom have the sense of living in the story anymore.

i want that back.  How do I get that back?

Hmmm.  Just had a thought: It was in my mid twenties when I started reading writing craft books and in my late twenties when i went back to school as an English Major, taking creative writing classes and literature classes.  I wonder...

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Beyond Thought

Beyond Thought by Diane Ong
(yep, another Ong.  Can't get enough.
  I would like a poster of this one for
the closet door of my new office)

I don't have time to think.  Just do.  I have to be ready to leave for Portlant OR where we're holding Mom's 80th birthday bash in less than ten hours.  It is already looking doubtful I'm going to get to sleep before either.

Last minute.  That's me.

So gotta get busy tucking tails, sewing buttons in center of flowers and pins on back of flowers and bows and if there is a couple of hours to spare and I'm not desperate for sleep I'd like to make two more bows and two more flowers--in white and pastel green.

Here is a pic from a previous post of the bows and flowers:

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Flavorwire » Pic of the Day: A House Made Entirely of Vintage Books

Flavorwire » Pic of the Day: A House Made Entirely of Vintage Books:
'via Blog this'

I would like to have a writing space just like this.  To be enclosed by the soul of books and present for the spirit of story.  Not being able to open them might be a frustration but also a benefit as the temptation to distract and intimidate myself with another's words would be eliminated.  And frustration can be channeled into the writing giving its energy to the storytelling.

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Sunday Serenity #247 The Soul of Books

print for sale @ art.com

This could have been me at three.

Books were my obsession even earlier than that.  I can't remember a day when they weren't.  Mom tells me that I began begging to keep the bedtime storybook she had just read to me under my pillow almost as soon as I could roll over and reach through the crib rails to grab it.

Today I'm hoping to devote some time reading one or more of the banned or challenged books I have in honor of Banned Book Week.  Scroll down before the review of The Lovely Bones to see the list in yesterday's post.  Only there are a few more I've discovered qualified since I posted that.  One of them the library book East of Eden by John Stienbeck.  Not that I didn't know I had it but I didn't find it on any list of banned or challenged books until late last evening.  And I had actually been looking for it because I want an excuse to bump it up in queue despite not having as urgent a due date as several others.

Well we'll see.

I'm also hoping to spend time visiting other BBW bloggers to see what's on their mind and maybe enter giveaways.  :)

I will leave you with this awesome quote from a sublime novel:

This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.   --Carlos Ruiz Zafon in The Shadow of the Wind.

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Reading Overdue Library Book

print for sale at art.com

I've more than a hundred pages left in the novel Haunting Bombay that was due today and need to be finished by 8am when Ed leaves for work.

It's a ghost story and a very good first novel by Bombay born author Shilpa Agarwal who now lives and teaches at university in Los Angeles.

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Arm Yourselves

Library 1969
by Jacob Lawrence
print for sale at art.com

“You want weapons? We're in a library! Books! The best weapons in the world! This room's the greatest arsenal we could have - arm yourselves!”—Doctor Who

H/T I Love Libraries for reminding me of that quote. One of the reasons I love Dr Who!

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Let Me Just Look at You

print for sale at art.com

photo by Norbert Rosing

Temps here in mid 90s today. Don't make me speak. I just want to gaze in longing.

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Bud Wise

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Anaïs Nin

H/T to Laurie Halse Anderson for posting this quote. It reminded me once again what I've known for some time. I once posted one of my own poems that expressed a similar thought--especially if I were to make one word substitute:

Bud Wise
by Joy Renee

A bloom in the womb is a poem life curled
Tight around the pistil of its power.
Does a lily take thought of
The process of its being?
Does a rose not repose in that
Ball of its becoming?
Then let your story incubate
Enfolded in its dreaming,
Until the moment of its glory when
Unfurling reveals its flower.
..._________________...

Whether you're thinking of your life or a poem or a story or any other creative endeavor there is that moment when it's right to transition from the bud and manifest the full glory of its flower and neither fretting with impatience at the slowness of its incubation nor resisting the metamorphosis our of fear of the unknown is helpful or healthy.

I am always doing both. Why can't I hang onto this hard won knowing long enough to see something through to its moment of glory?

Trusting the process is the hardest lesson an artist must learn but it is the most necessary as without it the work is stunted, withered, contrived, stale and lifeless.

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Friday Forays in Fiction: Quote

<-- La Lectrice Soumise by Rene Magritte
print for sale @ art.com

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Sunday Serenity #235

This painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is the embodiment of serenity. Anything I add would be a subtraction.

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