anthropometaphors

“The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly.” – Charles Reznikoff

“Beauty, unaccompanied by virtue, is as a flower without perfume.” – French proverb

“A diamond with a flaw is better than a common stone that is perfect.” – Chinese proverb

“Desire is a horse that wants to take you on a journey to spirit.”  - Malidoma Some

“The most important and enjoyable thing in life is doing something that’s a complicated, tricky problem for you that you don’t know how to solve.” – William Vollman

“Few are altogether deaf to the preaching of pine trees.” – John Muir

“Do you ever allow yourself to question, to have a burning question–and not put out the flame quickly with the first answer that you hear?” – A.H. Almaas

“If you come upon a lamp with a genie in it, don’t wish you had a magic wand.” – Rob Brezsney

“Brainwash yourself before somebody nasty beats you to it.” – Rob Brezsney

“A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.” – Victor Hugo

“Minotaur (MIN-uh-tawr) noun.  Someone or something monstrous, especially one that devours.”

“The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You have a gentleness that can sift inside and ignite, you’re a well set up campfire, basically.” – Michelle Medina

“That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, he said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.” – Rumi.

“For one human being to love another is the most difficult task of all. It’s the work for which all other work is mere preparation.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

“Someday after we have mastered the winds, the waves, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of love; and then for a second time in the history of the world, human beings will have discovered fire.” – Teilhard de Chardin

“Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.” – Leo Tolstoy

“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough.” – Blaise Pascal

“Until you have loved, you cannot become yourself.” – Emily Dickinson

(The file was aptly named “Quotes”)

I’m soooooo excited!

Several months ago I stumbled across iri5, an artist who works in conceptual mixed media collage.  Mixing media and genres of media, iri5 creates pieces that tickle my brain.

Robert Smith (by iri5)

Face of Change (by iri5)

Check out her other pieces here and here.

Last month I came across her art for the second time, and requested a price list for her work.  Most of the pieces I’d seen were unavailable, leading  us to talking about alternatives and the possibility of a commissioned original.  We tossed around a few ideas, images and more ideas.  After a few more ideas were tossed around, we came to agree on the creation of a bust of Oscar Wilde…comprised of snippets from The Portrait Of Dorian Gray, my fave book evar.

The work has begun, and iri5 has posted the first sketch on her flickr.

My Guys

Did I know any of these things about myself before I took the quiz?  Yeah sure, but I hadn’t thought about all of them in one go.  Now that I have them, I’m not sure what I’ll do with them, but I definitely see a few patterns.  Then again, when don’ t I see patterns?!

What patterns do you see?  And for those who know me, does any of this surprise you?

1. What part of the newspaper do you read first?
Don’t read the newspaper; I use Netvibes to collate the RSS feeds I’m interested in.
To rephrase the question in terms of my Netvibes, below are the 3 tabs I check every day and their corresponding RSS feed (from first read to last):
1. News – GeneomeWeb Daily News Articles, Pharmacogenomics Reporter, SFGate, New Scientist
2. People – Gmail, friends Delicious and blog feeds
3. The Black Hole* – Apartment Therapy San Francisco, Stereogum, Decor8
* So named because I often get lost in the intertubes once I open this tab

2. What are three books you’ve read in the past year?
Because I lurve so many, here are 5:
St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves: Stories (Karen Russel)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
All Cats Have Asperger Syndrome (Kathy Hoopman)
The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen)
The Children’s Hospital (Chris Adrian)

3. As a child, what did you do in your free time?
I read books and played with my imaginary friends in the large expanse of the backyard.  Summer was spent inside the cool darkness of our big house; I’d sit silently near a window, warming my toes in puddles of sun on the carpet.

4. What’s a goal that has been on your list for a few years?
To write and publish a book, story our journal (i.e. peer reviewed) piece

5. What do you actually do with your free time?
I read.  I play with my blessing of a dog.  I’m often at the dog park, walking through plants.

6. What types of activities energize you?
Writing a list.  Spending time alone in my home when it is clean and well-organized.  Waking early while the birds are still participating in the dawn chorus, knowing I have so much free time ahead of me that I can’t imagine the end of it — for this reason I love staycations.

7. What famous people intrigue you?
I’m not really intrigued by famous people so much as wild animals and children.

(from The Huffington Post)

In no particular order I’ve accomplished the following:

• Napped.
• Designated a bucket for “gray water” collection. Any water that would normally run down the drain is now being collected in a special bucket. For example: the water run down the drain as temperature heats up for showers or washing dishes, pre-soap. At the end of each day, I take the bucket outside and water my (non-edible) plants.
• Read a book: The Pharmacist’s Mate by Amy Fusselman. A most satisfying McSweeney’s selection from 2001, TPM is a memoir written in the time following the death of Fusselman’s father.
• Created a workshop en plein air. Within the confines of a somewhat enclosed patio I’ve placed a pair of benches. The current configuration allows one surface to be used for repotting and other gardening tasks, while the second is set up for painting and finishing furniture.
• Transplanted the dozen (or so) ferns from the side yard into containers in the back yard. The containers have been topped off with river rocks to keep Winslow “Dirtmouth” Gray from digging up the fragrant earth.
• Napped.
• Painted a holder for the gardening hose that’s been relegated to a pile on the ground for the past year. Next up: installation!
• Spent some QT in the great outdoors that is my backyard, which included multiple bird sightings and hearing the racket that is a pair of crows mating in the redwood overhead.
• Hopped around the internet a bit. Found Dutch photographer Peter Funch’s work (via BoingBoing); screamed with appreciation for his thematically composited photos. For example:

Following Followers, Peter Funch

It’s been unusually hot in SF this week, with cities in the Bay Area easily clearing the century mark. While my cats and I languished in the heat, I read about stormy weather and rainclouds.

Imagine: a catastrophic flood had drowned the entirety of Earth’s population beneath 7 miles of water, save a children’s hospital full of sick and deformed children in various stages of dying. Everyone and everything – dead and gone. Present and future had suddenly merged into one enormous flood of water. The only life remaining is the (seemingly) random assortment of employees, visitors, sickly and unfortunate that happened to be within the walls of a miraculously floating hospital on a particularly stormy night. This is the premise of Chris Aiden’s The Children’s Hospital, a recent McSweeney’s novel that literally haunts my dreams.

Despite my miserable description of Aiden’s text, I find the story irresistible. To stretch the water metaphor a bit, I began to think of myself as a wee sponge taking in the immensity of the flood that defines the world upon which the hospital floats. I’d read chapters at a time only to find my fingertips shriveled like prunes and my mind waterlogged with curiosity for children I’ll never meet. All from the safety of my kitty-ensconced couch.

In parallel, I’ve begun reading Granta #101, which is atypically themeless and, as a result, somewhat hodgepodge. The new editor, Jason Cowley, has re-opened the format of Granta. In the Editor’s Letter, Cowley clearly states his intention as Granta’s new editor:

Many assumptions have been made about Granta: we don’t publish writing about writing, we don’t publish poetry and each issue is themed…Granta has always succeeded when at its boldest and most unpredictable, when it has sought to challenge and confront as well as entertain and inform. Our intention, then, is to publish new writing in whichever form of genre we choose; to be more internationalist in outlook and ambition, to publish more literature in translation, more photography, more investigations and long-form reportage.

Speaking of large bodies of water acting in unpredictable – and undesirable – ways, a letter from Akash Kapur entitled “The disappearing beach” demands recognition. In short, Kapur describes the very non-fictitious account of several beaches disappearing due to economic development in India. Ports developed on idyllic beach front property – without even cursory environmental impact assessments – have caused the unbelievably fast destruction of delicate beach property near Pondicherry on the order of 30 metres of beach lost to erosion “in just a few months”.

Aiden’s piece describes the heaven-sent annihilation of >99% of the human population for yet undisclosed reasons.  The environmental devastation taking place in India has been driven by government officials insistent upon modernization for the benefit of the country and it’s people.  However, the lives of those in villages adjacent to eroded beaches are swimming in chaos and uncertainty; livelihood, home and family have been lost to the erosion.

In the face of the port’s clear failure, the Pondicherry government is considering building a new, larger port south of the existing site:

Local environmentalists have warned that a new port risks destroying a hundred-mile stretch of the coast.  But the government is insistent: India is developing, modernizing and Pondicherry can’t be left behind.

I find it challenging to select fiction, and more challenging to complete the works I select! As far as the first challenge goes, Green Apple Books in the Richmond makes my life loads easier. The store is a new and used bookstore, meaning I can take two boxes of completed books in to sell and walk out with a half dozen new-to-me books in exchange. On my most recent trip, one of the books I left the store with was Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish.

I don’t recall how I came to select the book, perhaps by the museum-quality paintings of fish adorning the cover? Or by the slight confusion as to whether the book was fiction, memoir, biography or something else entirely? It could very well have been on an “Employee Pick!” rack, I really can’t remember.

Once I returned home from the bookstore, I proceeded to sort and organize the new additions into my minimal library. The availability of a spare shelf in the bookcase was put to use as a “To Read” staging area, where I arranged books much like a syllabus for a comparative literature course. With strategy and forethought I considered how themes from several works could interact; spacing some texts apart while bunching others close together to create a particular, desired effect. [It just so happens the spines of all the books on my "To Read" shelf are some shade of either yellow or blue. However, I'm not reading too much into that.] Another perk to such an arrangement is the carelessness it will allow me, now the initial setup has been completed. When I complete a book I may simply grab the next in line. No need to ponder – and potentially become derailed by – a next step, I continue to read, undisturbed by the transition to a new work.

the "To Read" staging area

So this month, after finishing up with April’s Harper’s and this quarter’s Granta, it was Gould’s Book of Fish that was next in queue. This novel about a penal convict turned fish painter, William Buelow Gould, is remarkable, although dripping as it occasionally does with the grotesque. While I’m just beyond the midway point, I will venture to say I’ve managed to stay on board as the story has successfully maneuvered through several unexpected turns. I’ve begun to hear wisdom in Gould’s sorrowful ruminations; timely prognostications in the guise of fables, diary entries and fish paintings:

And when I finished the painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go around as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?

It began to worry me, you see, this destruction of fish, this attrition of love that we were blindly bringing about, & I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish.

Life is a mystery, Old Gould used say, quoteing yet another Dutch painter, & love the mystery within the mystery.

But with the fish gone, what joyful leap & splash would signal where these circles now began?