Born Before Calculators

Bill mentioned to his students that he was born before calculators.
Born before calculators? You're ooooooooooold! How old are you?

Thomas Wolfe

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.
-Thomas Wolfe

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
-Thomas Wolfe

Cool

Cool never mattered to me.
Consumer Obsession Or Lunacy?

Jeff Alberts

What My Pets Say About Me
by Jeff Alberts
read here.

Yosuke Kawamura, Illustrator

view here.

A Good Day

I was in a panic yesterday because the 50 degree weather caused my lungs to react badly to mold. Bill got home and we ran to CVS to refill my emergency inhaler. HURRAY! We got two for the price of one and it was covered on our insurance. AMEN!! As we were getting into the car I looked down and saw a folded up to an inch - 10 dollar bill on the asphalt parking lot. I picked it up and unfolded it. Look! I said to Bill, A gift from my Grandparents in heaven! We raced off to the dairy farm and got a gallon and a half of milk and with the three dollars left we got a quart of Budweiser. We came home and had my Jambalaya soup and Bill had a glass of beer. A good day.

Three Poems by Rick Bursky

The Separation
by Rick Bursky

My father built a wall in the middle of the yard;
five feet high and seven feet long,
separating nothing there from nothing not there.
At night he whispered to the wall.
Mother didn¹t care, "what a man whispers
in the shadow of his wall is his business alone."
Large flat stones, mortar, moonlight,
the damp quiet ­ father leaned against the wall
like a man waiting in an alley.

After he died mother closed her eyes
and placed her ear against the wall.
One side of the wall was love.
One side of the wall was longing.
Later she donated the wall to a church.
One side of the wall became sky.
One side of the wall became earth.
Mother never said what she heard
or if she heard anything at all.


Macrocephalus
by Rick Bursky

After my dog was killed by a car
my parents gave me a baby sperm whale.
In a small wooden boat,
father on one oar, mother on the other,
we rowed past the swells.
The only sound was the oars' monotonous
work followed by the sigh
of the ocean pushed behind.

When it passed beneath
mother shouted "there, there"
and pointed at the large dark shape.
Father took photos with an old Instamatic.
On the way back to shore,
the only thing spoken
was by mother who asked
if I named it and I had.


Along with other primitive tools
by Rick Bursky

early evidence of photography was found
in a Neanderthal-era cave in the Pyrenees Mountains.
The discovery was made public seventeen years
after the findings and were released
in an article written by Dr. Murray Wasloff
of the State University of New York at Buffalo.
The article went explained that the idea
of monastery was also created,
somewhere in that dark,
when a frightened man
cupped his hands like a cave
and into them blew warm breath.
There was no evidence to suggest
a successful exposure, this would come
tens of thousands of years later.

from The Myth of Photography
© 2005 Rick Bursky

Originally published in Moonday

Rick Bursky's poems have appeared in many literary journals including American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review and Harvard Review. He works for the advertising agency DDB, and teaches at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. His first book, The Soup of Something Missing, is out from Bear Star Press. Reprinted with the author's permission

Benjamen Nugent

read.

Housecleaning for the Body

read.

Jumping Spiders

Focus like a camera to hunt. Read.

Lily's Anniversary

Tomorrow, January 31, is Lily's three year adoption anniversary when we picked her up from the Elmsford Humane Society. We love her!

Poet Mark Doty

read.

Teaching Cops to See

Teaching Cops to See
At New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Amy Herman schools police in the fine art of deductive observation

By Neal Hirschfeld
Photographs by Amy Toensing
Smithsonian magazine, October 2009

article here.

Vanessa Valliere

read.

Andreas Scholl

Fabulous interview!!

The Bach Hour
Andreas Scholl Sings Ich habe genug
The German countertenor talks with host Brian McCreath about music, life, and Bach, and sings the Cantata No. 82 (translation).
Today at 5pm on Classical New England

HEAR THE INTERVIEW AND PROGRAM on the WGBH web site

Dream

I had 11 hours of sleep! I dreamed I was justice of the peace in a wedding but lost a shoe. I was running around looking for it as the ceremony was about to begin. My favorite band was playing: BRAVE COMBO and they had live baby lambs with them too.

Arthur O'Shaughnessy

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

-Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1874)

Julius Lester's Birthday

today. link here.

Mozart's Birthday

link here.

Astor Piazzola Interview

here.

Nin Andrews

Interview:here.

I write what I write, guided by intuition. Sometimes I want to emphasize the story in the poem, and other times, vice versa. Sometimes I want to speed up the reader, and other times, slow her down. Sometimes I want to control the reader. But other times, I want the story to be the poem.

-Nin Andrews

Ecomind by Frances Moore Lappé

Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want

By Frances Moore Lappé

read review here.

A Chekhov Bender

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.
-Anton Chekhov

I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.
-Anton Chekhov

If you are afraid of loneliness, do not marry.
-Anton Chekhov

It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
-Anton Chekhov

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.
-Anton Chekhov

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
-Anton Chekhov

The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.
-Anton Chekhov

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.
-Anton Chekhov

The Cherry Orchard

Many years ago I invited a group of friends to have a reading of the Anton Chekhov play The Cherry Orchard in my Providence kitchen. I was pleased when everyone showed up with copies of the play. What we hadn't considered was that all of the translations would be quite different.

Anton Chekhov

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.
-Anton Chekhov

When an actor has money he doesn't send letters, he sends telegrams.
-Anton Chekhov

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.
-Anton Chekhov

Man is what he believes.
-Anton Chekhov

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.
-Anton Chekhov

Money, like vodka, turns a person into an eccentric.
-Anton Chekhov

Not Even A Full Moon

Bill is pulling an all-nighter grading papers, drunks staggering in a group down the street woke me up at 2 AM. Someone just drove into our stone wall leaving behind a smashed headlight and chunks of rubble. The police came and Lily jumped into their arms. A lively night and it's not even a full moon.

Nin Andrews

poem here.
and here.

Funny, You’re So Sad

from NYT read here.

An old W.C. Fields joke. If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady, then kick him down the stairs. If you want to make a comedian laugh, you kick a real old lady down the stairs.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Origami Bonsai

Benjamin John Coleman's origami Bonsai books.

Health

If you don't take time for your health,
you will have to take a lot of time for your disease!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Scars

My husband has a student named Rastiana. Half of her face is melted from a fire. She's a lovely girl who started out very shy but now has a gaggle of girl pals and is enjoying school. I met her when I visited his school and after a few minutes you do not see her scar. I've been thinking about this and scars and what they mean. I was punished for all of the scars on myself and our house as a child. I remember when played baseball in the front yard. My first hit of the ball went straight up and cracked the skylight of my mother's art studio above the garage. She replaced it but was still angry. All of my mistakes were never forgotten. They went on my permanent record. My parents were like bad employers. We always had to look busy or we'd be given a task. So I hid in my basement studio and bedroom until I ran away from home.

Dr. Archie Keigan

Throughout his career, he provided free care to needy patients. There was no need for his patients to fill out lengthy forms to document the need. Keigan knew his patients on a personal level, and he didn’t need paperwork to know when a helping hand was in order.

He did a tremendous amount of good for the community, and he never worried about how much money he was going to make. He cared more about the community than he did about monetary gain. That's a quality that has been lost in this country. Keigan was a man whose heart belonged to his patients.

I'm glad I had the opportunity to be a general practitioner. I've never regretted it. It's been real fun.
-Dr. Archie Keigan

It sounds foolish, but I enjoy it all: helping in surgery, delivering babies, helping sick people. I wouldn't want to do anything else.
-Dr. Archie Keigan

Chinese New Year

Year of the dragon! Read here.

Dear Occupant

Read.

Carmen Herrera

Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win.
-Carmen Herrera

Teachers Wounds and Powers

If we want to improve the quality of college teaching, a million workshops on methodology will not be enough. Good teaching does not come from technique. It comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. If we want to teach well, we must learn more about the human dimensions of our craft-about the inward sources of our teaching, about the claims it makes on our lives, about our relations with our students, about a teacher's wounds and powers.
-Parker J. Palmer

Carmen Herrra

You don't decide to be an artist, art gets inside of you. Before you know it you're painting, before you know it you're an artist. You're so surprised. It's like falling in love.
-Carmen Herrera

Mary Karr

There’s something fascinating about a single voice telling you its life.

They wanted another “Eat, Pray, Make Money.” But the pages were duller than a rubber knife. Writing about spiritual stuff for a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio.

I can only compare my early memories with my sister Lecia’s. She’d admit that mine are keener than hers. She’ll say, Oh my God, that’s right, that did happen. She doesn’t remember many details until I write them—which seems, by the way, like a much better way to be. She just moves forward through the world. If I could do it her way, I would. It’s much more functional. Time never passes for me.
It’s scary how my memory became the family memory. My mother, before she died, and my sister both remember events as I rendered them. They’re carved in stone, in a way. That’s a lonely feeling. It’s too much power. I’m sure I misremember a lot.

I remember going to work in business, for instance. At first, wearing a suit and toting a briefcase, I felt promoted to being an actual citizen.

There’s no magic in it. Just one moment at a time, one detail at a time. I’m just asking myself as I go along: What was it like when I came home for Christmas? I remember Daddy came to fetch me at the bus station—a greasy bus station if ever there was one. He passed me a pint bottle of whiskey, which surprised me. If you had asked me whether my father had ever given me whiskey, I’d have said no. But once I revisited that instant, I could see him offer me a bottle across the truck cab. What a strange thing to offer your seventeen-year-old, whiskey. It’s what worked for him. Many memories are dead ends. That’s why I throw away a thousand pages. If you haven’t thrown away a thousand, then you don’t have four hundred that are worth a shit. You have to edit ruthlessly.

INTERVIEWER: When do you write?

KARR: Mostly mornings at home. I made a habit in grad school of getting up at five in the morning to work. When my son was born, in ’86, I had to get up really early, like four. I was teaching six sections of comp at three different schools, and that was the only time I had. For ten years there, I didn’t have time to shave both legs the same day. If I had even an hour, I could work anywhere. I was very unpersnickety. But I usually can’t write big prose while teaching. I can write journalism or lectures. And I’m always scribbling poems.

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world. Poetry relates more closely to my present experience, and it’s aesthetically harder, because you’re trying to create a form that embodies the content. With prose, you spend so much time evoking a place that it’s emotionally more catastrophic. It’s like someone’s holding the back of your head and putting your nose right in it. When you do prose, you are deep in another element for months or years. I’m sure that private intensity is no different for novelists.

I corresponded with Toby Wolff after This Boy’s Life. Toby nudged me to read Harry Crews’s A Childhood. I also read Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I read loads of biographies, too—W. J. Bate’s books on Keats and Samuel Johnson. Ian Hamilton on Lowell. Henri Troyat on Chekhov and Tolstoy. The letters of Flannery O’Connor—The Habit of Being.

-Mary Karr quotes from The Paris Review

I Tell My Students

I tell my students the computer is a tool. It doesn't see or drive for you. Use your own eyes and brain and lead the machine. Don't be like that guy who set his RV on cruise control while barrelling down the highway and ran in back and made a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich.

Dreaming

I woke dreaming of Holstein cows with a disappearing disease. They were vanishing in bits and looked like jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Fanny Mendelsshon

Fanny Mendelssohn 1805 – was a German pianist and composer, the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

Man Ray

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor.

A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him.

-Man Ray

Sewing Soakers for Skaters

How to: here.

Nin Andrews

Loved this.

Martian Meteorites in Morocco

About one of the Martian meteorites that fell in Morocco last year.
Bill says, Mars is throwing rocks at us!

Dream

I dreamed I made a birthday quiche for a friend. Popping out of the surface were two hands holding a camera made of carved bread to look like a photographer was taking pictures.

When I woke I heard the hum of a firetruck engine outside my window. The red lights were flashing the curtains and buildings pink but no sirens. I stood at the window and watched eight firemen carry a young woman away on a stretcher.

Woonsocket's Finest Cobbler!

Pierannunzi Shoe Rebuilding
(the coolest place!)
534 Elm St, Woonsocket, RI (401)767-2948

Hours: Mon, Tue, Fri, 8:30am - 2pm; Thu, 8:30am - 5pm; Sat, 8:30am - noon; Wed, Sun, closed.

Pierannunzi Shoe Rebuilding is a small mom and pop shop that was originally established in 1902 by Carmillo Pierannunzi. It was subsequently handed down to his son, Carmello Jr., who in 1947 hired Norman Decelles. In 1993, Norman took over as the shop's new owner and although he is now retired, he still opens his shop five days a week. After more than 100 years at his initial location on Court Street, Norman moved to Elm Street due to the schedule demolition of the old building. Pierannunzi's repairs shoes and handbags - mainly leather - and offers shoe shines while you wait. The equipment is kept in fine working condition, and Norman can still give the best shine in town. He states that as long as he still feels good (he is now 71 years old), he will continue to open the shop. He began shining shoes when he was just 13 years old; "It's something I've done all my life... I love my work." When he goes, he states, the name will go with him.
-Woonsocket Patch

I often feel like a horse in need of a farrier, I walk so many miles with my dog. Normand has built my Dansko clogs four times over fifteen years! He's a genius with repairs and he loves Lily.

Gramercy Tavern Gingerbread

The use of leavening in a cake is first recorded in a recipe for gingerbread from Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, published in Hartford in 1796; I guess you could say it is the original great American cake. Early-19th-century cookbooks included as many recipes for this as contemporary cookbooks do for chocolate cake. This recipe, from Claudia Fleming, pastry chef at New York City's Gramercy Tavern, is superlative—wonderfully moist and spicy.

Ingredients

* 1 cup oatmeal stout or Guinness Stout
* 1 cup dark molasses (not blackstrap)
* 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
* 2 tablespoons ground ginger
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
* 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
* Pinch of ground cardamom
* 3 large eggs
* 1 cup packed dark brown sugar
* 1 cup granulated sugar
* 3/4 cup vegetable oil
* Confectioners sugar for dusting
* a 10-inch (10- to 12-cup) bundt pan

Preheat oven to 350°F. Generously butter bundt pan and dust with flour, knocking out excess.

Bring stout and molasses to a boil in a large saucepan and remove from heat. Whisk in baking soda, then cool to room temperature.

Sift together flour, baking powder, and spices in a large bowl. Whisk together eggs and sugars. Whisk in oil, then molasses mixture. Add to flour mixture and whisk until just combined.

Pour batter into bundt pan and rap pan sharply on counter to eliminate air bubbles. Bake in middle of oven until a tester comes out with just a few moist crumbs adhering, about 50 minutes. Cool cake in pan on a rack 5 minutes. Turn out onto rack and cool completely.

Serve cake, dusted with confectioners sugar, with whipped cream.

Cooks' notes:
- This recipe was tested with Grandma's brand green-label molasses.
- Like the chocolate decadence cake, the gingerbread is better if made a day ahead. It will keep 3 days, covered, at room temperature.

-Gourmet Magazine

Sharp Skates!

Lemay's is a great place to have your skates sharpened. It's like a museum and shrine to the history of skating in Woonsocket. It's almost more fun to go to Lemay's than to go skating! They have photos on the wall of all of the local players. They also have an amazing collection of antique skates. I was told that whenever ice hockey star Brian Boucher is home to see his parents he zips over for a Lemay's sharpening.

Lemay's Skate Sharpening
206 Saint Barnabe St, Woonsocket, RI
(401) 769-1095

Hours: Mon - Thu, 10am - 8pm; Fri, Sat, 10am - 7pm; Sun, 10am - 5pm

The FREE Ice Skating Rink at River Island Park opened January 7th. The hours of operation are 12:30 pm to 9:00 pm, 7 days per week.

How Often Should Figure Skating Blades Be Sharpened?

In general, figure skates need sharpening after about forty hours of ice skating. Figure skaters can determine that their blades need sharpening when the blades start to slide sideways too easily.

Sadly all of the free skate loans are on dull skates. We need to find local businesses to sponsor the sharpening of the park skates so the kids can have a rewarding skating experience.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

George Bernard Shaw

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
-George Bernard Shaw

Ann Cameron

The Zen Buddhists have a saying: "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." Their point is that you don't find your freedom or your enlightenment by imitating someone else; and when you're tempted to do so, you lose your discovery of your own path, your own unique way of being, which finally is the one thing of value that's worth living for. Similarly as a writer, don't bother about the supposed virtues of writers who bore you--and if you meet Shakespeare on the road, kill him!

-Ann Cameron

George Bernard Shaw

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.
-George Bernard Shaw

Maya Angelou

One of the problems we have as writers is we don't take ourselves seriously while writing; being serious is setting aside a time and saying if it comes, good; if it doesn't come, good, I'll just sit here.

-Maya Angelou

John Hersey

To be a writer is to sit down at one's desk in the chill portion of every day, and to write; not waiting for the little jet of the blue flame of genius to start from the breastbone — just plain going at it, in pain and delight. To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again, and once more, and over and over.

-John Hersey

Anais Nin

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

-Anais Nin

Sinclair Lewis

It is impossible to discourage the real writers - they don't give a damn what you say, they're going to write.

-Sinclair Lewis

Philip Pullman

Don't listen to any advice, that's what I'd say. Write only what you want to write. Please yourself. YOU are the genius, they're not. Especially don't listen to people (such as publishers) who think that you need to write what readers say they want. Readers don't always know what they want. I don't know what I want to read until I go into a bookshop and look around at the books other people have written, and the books I enjoy reading most are books I would never in a million years have thought of myself. So the only thing you need to do is forget about pleasing other people, and aim to please yourself alone. That way, you'll have a chance of writing something that other people WILL want to read, because it'll take them by surprise. It's also much more fun writing to please yourself.

-Philip Pullman

Jose Saramago

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

-Jose Saramago

Jorge Luis Borges

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

-Jorge Luis Borges

Henry James

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting. That general responsibility rests upon it, but it is the only one I can think of. The ways in which it is at liberty to accomplish this result (of interesting us) strike me as innumerable and such as can only suffer from being marked out, or fenced in, by prescription. They are as various as the temperament of man, and they are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others. A novel is in its broadest definition a personal impression of life; that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression. But there will be no intensity at all, and therefore no value, unless there is freedom to feel and say. The tracing of a line to be followed, of a tone to be taken, of a form to be filled out, is a limitation of that freedom and a suppression of the very thing that we are most curious about.

It is equally excellent and inconclusive to say that one must write from experience... What kind of experience is intended, and where does it begin and end? Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius-it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.

The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen. I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling me that she was much commended for the impression she had managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she learned so much about this recondite being, she had been congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities consisted in her having once, in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a pastor, some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only a moment, but that moment was experience.

Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention.

It appears to me that no one can ever have made a seriously artistic attempt without becoming conscious of an immense increase-a kind of revelation-of freedom. One perceives, in that case--by the light of a heavenly ray--that the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision. ... it is all experience.
-Henry James, The Art of Fiction (1884)

George Orwell

...One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
-George Orwell

Mark Twain

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
-Mark Twain

Anton Chekhov