Foodies-8/7/2014 Gluten Free Woes

Aleathia says:

It is hard to think about food today.  Last week we went off of our gluten free diet to see if there really was any distress that was caused by food.  We went off of it because we felt like we were eating prison house meals all the time.  In essence....it got boring.  It felt so restrictive to have to read and inspect every label.

We ate pizza.  Real honest to goodness NY style thin crust pizza.  It didn't stop there.  Donuts, fresh baked bread, banana bread, bagels, and anything else we had not eaten in almost 2 years.  At first we didn't have any reaction. We thought we were in the clear and so started grocery shopping without limits.

Today, after a week of eating gluten I feel like shit.  I'm bloated and have gas and nausea all the time.  My joints ache like they haven't in years.  I'm tired without doing anything.  I feel like I have allergies and post nasal drip all the time.  The only thing that changed was gluten.

DAMN IT!!!

Food with gluten is sexy, but feeling like I am on the verge of cholera all the time is not.  It isn't worth those devilishly devine foods.  Mike quit eating foods with gluten 2 days before me and reports that he feels "great".  Bastard.  I was so hoping to roll around in a room full of Boston Creme Donuts and eat my way out.  Sigh.  Damn this old body.

Lit Bits-8/6/2014 Karl Ove Knausgaard vs. Proust, Mary Oliver

John Says,

I’ve never been able to get through Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  I’ll admit it.  I’ve tried on several occasions.  Mostly recently I tried making it through all of Proust in 2012.  It was to be my “summer of Proust.”  As always I got through all of Swann’s Way and one-half of Within a Budding Grove before giving up to read something else.  I don’t know when I’m going to try again.  I thought about doing it this summer.  But it’s already August, and to be honest, 600 plus pages of Of Human Bondage is wearing me down in terms of novels big in scope.  I wish that I knew what a beach read was.  I wish I enjoyed the beach.

I was curious if my failure to read Proust had anything to do with simply not being able to sustain a multi-volume novel set in which nothing much happens.  I was pretty sure of that fact.  Until I came across this guy….

This is Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Knausgaard is the author to the 6-volume Norwegian novel, My Struggle (Min Kamp), of which the first three volumes have been published in the U.S.A.  The first of the three volumes centers on Karl Ove as a teenager and then as adult dealing with the passing of his alcoholic/abusive father.  The second volume deals with Karl leaving his first wife and meeting his current wife, and the two of them setting out on having a family.  The current volume, subtitled Boyhood Island, focuses once again on Karl’s childhood, delving more into the relationship with his old man. 

As with Proust nothing much happens in Knausgaard’s novels.  Well, life happens, I guess.  But I’ve found myself drawn to them in a way that I never could with Proust.  Perhaps it is the time the books were written.  There is a considerable difference between reading about Paris salons and reading about some kid fixated on Rock’n’Roll and dealing with his dad.  In many circles My Struggle has been hailed as a masterpiece.  In some it is seen as inflated and dull.  The novels are not without their share of criticism as well considering Karl Ove Knausgaard, at 45, is contemporary, is writing about people whom are still living, and, in some circumstances, are still intimately involved with the author.....and, you know, the book is called Min Kamp...which in German is Mein Kamph (if you haven't made the title connection yet I can't help you).

But for whatever reason I dig them.  The translation is fantastic and while some of the writing can be plodding it’s worth it for the insight one man's search to understand himself and the life given to him.  Knausgaard excels at his own personal philosophy.  Reading Min Kamp is, in a way, reading a version of your own life.  I fully admit to looking forward to each successive volume, and that I have a small envy against the people of Norway for having all six books at the ready.

Aleathia says:

When I first moved to Seattle I was amazed by the amount of book stores at my disposal.  Oddly, I felt blanketed most in the University of Washington book store.  It was always lively and full of young students and tourists.  Being new, it made me feel like I belonged there at the time.

I was unsure about my poetry at the time.  I was afraid to write it, afraid to show it.  I figured I was out of my league in the big city.  I picked up a book of poetry by Mary Oliver and it changed my life.  She spoke of nature.  She brought it alive and gave it personal character.  She made it human when it wasn't.  From that point forward I have loved her work.  It is clean and simple while retaining a deepness that sneaks up on you.

Here is a video of her reading her poem "Wild Geese":

 Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Let's Go Somewhere-8/5/2014 Canandaigua KOA

Aleathia says:

We do a lot of writing about going places around here.  Always leaving, always going away.  These days I have not done as much traveling as I would like, but this half of the year will see that changing.

What is summer without camping?  Last year we camped our brains out, but with having a 100 pound Husky who doesn't tolerate the heat, it makes going into the woods a bit more difficult.  So old Marshall is going to stay at my friend's kennel for a few days while we head out.

Now it won't be down and dirty camping.  I'm old and I can't stand listening to the kid gripe about how boring the woods are.  She is happiest with a computer in her face, but I try like hell to get her outside into the world.  The compromise was spending a little extra to stay at a KOA.  She seems like she is dreading camping, but she has never enjoyed the wonders of KOA.  I think I may have stayed in one only once as a kid.  There is mini golf, a swimming pool, game room, movie room, and bike and boat rentals.  What is not to love?  I'm not a kid and I LOVE that.

I guess it is just the age, or just my kid being lame sometimes, but I always loved camping at her age.  I loved the silence of it, the solitary moments, and the opportunity to meet people I would never see again.  It is the perfect recipe for fun.  So here is to the end of summer.  Grab your sleeping bag and tent.  Stoke up the fire and get one with nature and the peace inside yourself.

Music Monday - 8/4/2014 Max Richter

Ally says:

Between 1917 and 1919 Franz Kafka kept a series of notebooks called the Blue Octavo Notebooks in which he kept, not so much a daily journal, but musings. Scribblings. Passing thoughts.

Things that were never really meant to see the light of day but published posthumously by Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor. While a jumble of moments, these are not a writer's junk drawer of starts and fit but instead are like the old shoebox you find in the back of your recently deceased grandfather's closet. Inside are yellowed old love letters, a single dried rose, the covers of an old and now page-less paperback, the gears to a dissembled pocket watch. These are things that might not belong together but are meant to be kept. To be read.

And now to be heard.

Max Richter, a composer, or really more often a re-composer, has put together an exquisite album called The Blue Notebooks. The opening track is not music per say but piano and the haunting voice of Tilda Swinton sounding utterly ethereal. It starts off with a soothing piano pinging out a gentle almost unsure rhythm as if it were just being composed right now the second we started listening. Underneath that the roll of thunder in the distance, drops of rain on the roof. And then in an act of  near dissonance the organic piano is joined by the clack and clatter of typewriter keys, as if mice were trampling to and fro over an old Underwood in a deserted dimly lit shack out in the woods. And finally Tilda's voice whispering to us:

 “Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”  

As the piano fades out you hear the tick-tock of a clock counting out the second in the deserted old shack out in the woods. Imagine the door open. Imagine Kafka just leaving, his own shoes shuffling through the newly fallen leaves.

The second track is called "On the Nature of Daylight.

It starts off with the echoing call of cellos, lapping and overlapping each other like the velvet darkness of the night before the pitch-black is broken through by one high violin, seesawing, like a gust of wind blowing the clouds and the dark away - clearing the path for the sunlight, yet another edgy keening violin, to punch through the darkness and bring forth the daylight.

All three combining in that moment, when the light passes through the nebula and darkness of space to call forth another day - here now the music rushing forward as the light overtakes the earth. A moment, we, as humans, barely even register in our waking existence - this miracle that is the hum drum rotation of this planet. And then finally winding down as this miracle is completed.




The start of another day moving you towards the end of your life. If music does nothing it should remind you of that which you may, in your own malaise, take for granted. Much like the steady unaffected calling forth of the dawn.

OM-8/3/2014 Profundity

Aleathia says:

Sometimes a word pops into my head.  It will seem random and disconnected to what I think my state of mind is at the time. This word will follow me around.  It will repeat itself in my head a hundred times like a mantra.  I might say it out loud in several different kinds of voices and accents.  Sometimes I do not know the definition of the word.  Sometimes I look it up in the dictionary, sometimes I don't.  There is something magical about how the word has to bounce around my very being until it has had its fill.

PROFUNDITY

This word found me as I was slicing a bagel and thinking about how my mother's jade ring no longer fits my finger now that I don't think about her everyday after her passing. Standing by the kitchen sink I started to smile as the old familiar habit began.  Profundity.  Pro-fun-di-ty. Profun-dity. Pro-fundity.  In my head I spelled it differently and thus I thought it meant something else.

Profundity: deep insight; great depth of  knowledge or insight.

I had to stop and think about this a moment. What the hell was so deep this morning that I had to have this word in my life?  What is the connection between the bagel and the ring besides the circle?

For me bagels represent a certain amount of happiness.  I remember my first real NYC bagel from a Jewish bakery that my friend brought up from a visit with family.  It was the size of my head and put me in a carb coma that I hoped I would never leave.  I share bagels with my boyfriend on the weekends.  It is something we do. It feels like love to me.  It means we will have a conversation over the sink waiting for them to toast. It is never deep conversation but it is loving.  It is covered with smiles and sleepy faces.

Wearing my mother's ring got me through the period after her death.  I felt like this particular ring was in her collection only because it reminded her of me.  It wasn't something she would wear, but something she would have known I would love.  I wore the ring to remind me it was ok to cry, ok to be sad, ok to move on with my life, ok to forgive her for all the rotten things she put me through, and ok to love the hardships I wanted to hate.  I felt stronger wearing the ring.  I felt like she was there with me waiting for me to stop being a baby about life.

I still cry sometimes, like right now, but they are getting farther apart. I don't need the ring as much as I need and want the bagels.  I think this is progress.

I realized that the ring and the bagel are both circles, both symbols of connection for me; one of strength and one of happiness.  They both continue infinitely.

That, my friends, is some deep shit.

Quills and Frills - 8/2/2014 This Is Poetry, Ann Menebroker

Ally says:

Sometimes social media really sucks. It can be tedious and petty and like being in high school over again - you know what I'm talking about.

And other times social media can be an amazing force for good. This is one of those times:

Back in February I got an email from Michele McDannold. Michele is a part of the Literary Underground, a kick ass organization of writers and editors that have their fingers in more projects that I could highlight here. Michele wanted to know if I was interested in participating in a poetry project she called THIS IS POETRY.

Here's the basic gist:

THIS IS POETRY
The Literary Underground is pleased to announce a new project called “This is Poetry”. The project will ultimately result in an eight-volume collection of poetry, each volume representing poets from a specific geographic region as well as several special collections. These perfect-bound books will be published under Citizens for Decent Literature Press, founded as part of The Literary Underground. Co-edited by Michele McDannold and Brian W. Fugett, we are currently working on the first two volumes: Women of the Small Press and the American Midwest.

Poems selected for this project will first be published online via tumblr blog – http://thisispoetry.tumblr.com/ – a bit of a social media experiment with poetry. Wouldn’t it be great if poetry went viral? We think so.

Submissions are taken by invitation only and based on referral from poets participating in the project. This is how the project is taking on an organic life of its own. It’s not just the eds hitting up their favorite poets. It’s the eds hitting up their favorite poets, their favorite poets tossing in their favorite poets and so on etc into awesomeness.

Another important and exciting aspect of this project is that we are encouraging contributors to send in their best, most defining work including and emphasizing on previously published poems. It is our intent to highlight other small press publishers, noting the publication credit with a link to the online presence of the small press publisher with each poem published on the tumblr as well as a links page including the same, gathered for easier reference.

viva la Underground
SUPPORT THE SMALL PRESS!

http://theliteraryunderground.org

Naturally I said yes. 

I think one of the best things about this project is how they emphasized previously published poems. Small press publishers work so hard and they need our love and support (I, for one, would never have anything in the world if it weren't for them and am eternally grateful.) and they also need to support each other. The list of presses on the tumblr page is a hell of a group of editors, not to mention a goldmine for writers looking for good homes for their work.

Since then the tumblr has exploded with poetry resulting in not only the first print edition of This Is Poetry Volume 1: Women of the Small Press but they're also having a party and if you're in town you should go:

More information on the party is here.

If you're anywhere near The Legacy Theatre - run, walk, drive, hitchhike - just get there because it promises to be a grand ol' night.

Finally here's one of my favorite pieces from This Is Poetry:

Road Trip

Road Trip
(for T.C.)

Hell, go there, where there
is a long stretch of music and no
destination except to go there;
not even get there, but just
the going wherever going goes
when it needs no more sense
than a bat flying out of hell, its
blindness singed with the power
of speed, with the glory of not
knowing where the walls are
and flying through them.

---

©Ann Menebroker has been writing and publishing for over fifty years. She has been published in the United States, Sweden, and has had some of her work translated into German and other languages. Among the anthologies she has appeared in is The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Her work has also been in two college text books.

She continues to write and lives in Sacramento, California.

"Road Trip" was previously published in the broadside Swallowed by This Whale of Time, Littlesnake Broadsides by Rattlesnake Press.

Art Bomb-8/1/2014 Sigmar Polke, Georgia O'Keeffe

Ally says:

I'm a librarian. That's what I do for a living, at least, and often people will find that out and say "what an interesting job." Now I'm not disagreeing here. It definitely beats office drone (did it), waitress (did it badly) and door to door salesman (did it briefly AND badly). But I think we need to recognize that there are much much more interesting jobs out there.

For instance, there is a guy named Magnus Schaefer who is a curatorial assistant at the MoMA and one of his jobs, right now, is to check the ripeness, sprouting and potential rot on potatoes.

Specifically on Potato House.

Potato House is exactly what it sounds like. A house built of wood and potatoes, the ripeness of which must be checked by Mr. Schaefer. It is also an installation by Sigmar Polke. As of last month I had never heard of Sigmar Polke but since the Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010 opened at the MoMA I've been back a few times.

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer. To say he had a wide range of styles would almost be an understatement. This guy did everything from potatoes to exposing paper to uranium to get this:

Pretty huh? That's what keeping uranium in a lead box in your studio can yield.  Polke's interest seemed to know no bounds either - there was very little he wouldn't find inspiration in: Alice in Wonderland, Paganini, bear baiting in South Africa, religion, homeless people in New York City, Superman in the Supermarket and his most relevant symbol - the swastika. As a resident of East Germany, Polke was well entrenched in the darkness that festers just a hair below the light; in the absurdity of that symbol and the impossibility of atonement. 

One of my favorite pieces in the collection, which I must say can be overwhelming - my husband and I managed to spend close to three hours in Alibis - was Paganini:

It recounts the tale of Paganini, the violinist who "sold his soul to the devil" for his talent. Depicted, is a dying Paganini, the devil at his bedside playing the violin for him - the notes of which morph into little swastikas as in the corner, death dressed as a clown, juggles a few skulls. It's a large piece (200 x 450 cm, 78 3/4 x 177")  - one of the largest in the exhibit.

Weaved throughout the exhibit is the sense of mischief - Polke's art comes across as a irreverent joke which you are sometimes in on - nudge, nudge, wink wink - and sometimes the butt of. And his jokes extend from the political - the horror of the Holocaust - to the ludicrous. Like a store for superheroes.

That said there is a sadness to his joke - a melancholy sort of arrested development. Polke did very few interviews before he died after a long illness - he retreated from his art, his friends and especially the public. But his work still stands as does his reputation for the impudent. Polke used his art to hold up a mirror to his own culture, humans in general and especially the art world. 

And behind that mirror, he was always the one pulling a face.



Aleathia says:

Georgia O'Keeffe was born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, WS on a dairy farm.  She lived there with her parents and four sisters.  Her mother and grandmother had both been artistic and taken classes, so all the girls at a young age were given instruction.  In this particular time women were expected to be somewhat artistic as they had to create the decorations seen in the home.

In 1903, the entire family moved to Virginia to escape the brutal mid-western winters.  O'Keeffe was enrolled at the Chatham Episcopal University.  Here the fashion was typical Southern Belle which included corsets, petticoats, and highly curled hair.  Georgia was different from the beginning.  She chose, in face of being excluded, to wear a simple ponytail in her hair.  She dressed in a plain suit coat or a plain white dress. She was always marching to the beat of her own drum.

When O'Keeffe turned 18 years old she moved to Chicago to live with her aunts.  She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She had top honors in her life drawing class and had moved into the top quarter of her class after only the first term.

Georgia would not complete her studies in Chicago and in 1907 she moved to New York City and enrolled in the Students League.  She earned a scholarship under William Merritt Chase for her painting Rabbit and Copper Pot:

This scholarship allowed her to spend her summer's at Lake George which had a significant influence on her early work and her ability to find beauty in nature.  After this summer, she found herself in financial difficulty and was forced to return to Chicago.  She began to do commercial graphic design art work in which she worked 12 hour days, 6 days a week.

During these grueling hours of work, O'Keeffe contracted a severe bout of the measles which left her temporarily blind.  She was forced to give up graphic design and returned to Virginia to recover with her family and was so discouraged that she gave up painting all together.

At the urging of her sisters, Georgia enrolled in the University of Virginia in 1912 to take art classes.  Her sisters were very concerned about Georgia's lack of painting.  They encouraged her to listen to a speaker named Alon Bement.  He was an artist that pushed his students to produce original works instead of making copies of master works like most other teachers were doing.  This was known as the Dow Method.

"That which anybody can do, is not worth doing.  If your drawing is just like your neighbor's it has no value as art."--Arthur Wesley Dow

This quote would become Georgia O'Keeffe's foundation for her art work and the way she moved her career.

She would obtain a teacher's certificate and move to Amarillo, TX to teach high school art for the next two years.  In this time, she discovered the rich, beautiful canyons of Texas and spent a lot of time capturing the beauty and light.

In 1914, she moved back to New York City to study at Teacher's College at Columbia University to obtain a better teacher's certificate to obtain better teaching posts.  She later moved to South Carolina to teach there at Columbia College.

After taking this position, O'Keeffe underwent a radical and intense self-critique of her work in which she decided that all of her work was a derivative of all the teachers she had studied under and destroyed all of her paintings.  The only one to survive from the early period was the Rabbit and Copper Pot as it was in an exhibition and not with her.

In the years following this critique, O'Keeffe worked in watercolor, charcoal, and pastels:

Train at Night in the Desert, 1916 by Georgia O'Keeffe

Blue 1, 1917 by Georgia O'Keeffe

Seated Nude, 1917 by Georgia O'Keeffe

The Flag, 1918 by Georgia O'Keeffe

After the destruction of her work, O'Keeffe spent time doing expressive drawings which she sent to her good friend Anita Pollitzer in New York City for a personal viewing of her return to art.  Though O'Keeffe asked Anita not to share the work, Pollitzer took them to photographer Alfred Stieglitz at gallery 291.  He showed them in his gallery without O'Keeffe's permission.  Later when she would take a trip to the city, she would see them hanging in the gallery and demanded they be taken down.  Stieglitz convinced her to keep them up for display as well as convinced her to marry him.

With  Stieglitz's support, O'Keeffe started painting full time and began working on her now famous abstractions of nature.

East River with Sun, 1926 by Georgia O'Keeffe

The Shelton with Sunspots, 1926 by Georgia O'Keeffe

White Rose with Larkspur, 1927 by Georgia O'Keeffe

Red Hills, Lake George, 1927 by Georgia O'Keeffe

Yellow Hickory Leaves with Daisy, 1928 by Georgia O'Keeffe

In turn, she inspired Stieglitz with her simplicity and began taking her "portrait" which consisted of photographs of her face and body, hundreds of prints which he would add to for the rest of his life.

Over the years, O'Keeffe and Stieglitz would have extended periods of time apart when she would go into isolation in New Mexico to paint during the summers.  She would spend the winters in New York City with him.  After Stieglitz died in 1946, O'Keeffe moved to New Mexico permanently.  She died at the age of 98 in 1986.  She was often remarked as the most influential American female painter.  To this, she was quoted as saying she wanted to be remembered  "as a painter--just a painter".