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Cucumber peeled and sliced into coins or lengthwise wedges chopped into bite sized wedges, apple chopped into small bites, raisins, yogurt, cottage cheese salt pepper, onion chopped, and vinegar.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Quick and Easy Salad
I'm not ambitious for money or power.
“I guess I'm afraid of not being like other people. No, that's not true. I'm not afraid of not being like other people. I'm afraid I won't find anybody who doesn't mind me not being like other people. I'm not ambitious for money or power. I want to find some real way to live.”
― The Gap of Time
I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely.
Readers, I think, are more sophisticated on the whole than critics. They can make the jumps, they can make imaginative leaps. If your structure is firm and solid enough, however strange, however unusual, they will be able to follow it. They will climb with you to the most unlikely places if they trust you, if the words give them the right footholds, the right handholds. That’s what I want my readers to do: I want them to come with me when we’re going mountain-climbing. This isn’t a walk through a theme park. This is some dangerous place that neither of us has been before, and I hope that by traveling there first, I can encourage the reader to come with me and that we will make the trip again together, and safely.
JEANETTE WINTERSON
Ted Kooser on The Writer's Almanac
It's the birthday of poet Ted Kooser, born in Ames, Iowa (1939). He said, "I had a wonderfully happy childhood," and, "All this business about artists having to have terrible childhoods doesn't play with me."
He started writing poetry seriously as a teenager. He said: "I was desperately interested in being interesting. Poetry seemed a way of being different." His first poem was published because his friends sent one of his poems to a teen magazine behind his back.
He wanted to be a writer, but he flunked out of graduate school. So he took the first job he was offered, at a life insurance company, and he worked there for 35 years. He said: "I believe that writers write for perceived communities, and that if you are a lifelong professor of English, it's quite likely that you will write poems that your colleagues would like; that is, poems that will engage that community. I worked every day with people who didn't read poetry, who hadn't read it since they were in high school, and I wanted to write for them."
Every morning, he got up at 4:30, made a pot of coffee, and wrote until 7. Then he put on his suit and tie and went to work. By the time he retired in 1999, Kooser had published seven books of poetry, including Not Coming to Be Barked At (1976), One World at a Time (1985), and Weather Central (1994). He resigned himself to being a relatively unknown poet, but he continued to write every morning. Then, in 2004, he got a phone call informing him that he had been chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He said: "I was so staggered I could barely respond. The next day, I backed the car out of the garage and tore the rearview mirror off the driver's side." As the poet laureate, he started a free weekly column for newspapers called "American Life in Poetry."
Ted Kooser Poem: Skater
Skater
She was all in black but for a yellow pony tail
that trailed from her cap, and bright blue gloves
that she held out wide, the feathery fingers spread,
as surely she stepped, click-clack, onto the frozen
top of the world. And there, with a clatter of blades,
she began to braid a loose path that broadened
into a meadow of curls. Across the ice she swooped
and then turned back and, halfway, bent her legs
and leapt into the air the way a crane leaps, blue gloves
lifting her lightly, and turned a snappy half-turn
there in the wind before coming down, arms wide,
skating backward right out of that moment, smiling back
at the woman she'd been just an instant before.
Ted Kooser from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2004
Ted Kooser Poem: Tattoo
Tattoo
What once was meant to be a statement—
a dripping dagger held in the fist
of a shuddering heart—is now just a bruise
on a bony old shoulder, the spot
where vanity once punched him hard
and the ache lingered on. He looks like
someone you had to reckon with,
strong as a stallion, fast and ornery,
but on this chilly morning, as he walks
between the tables at a yard sale
with the sleeves of his tight black T-shirt
rolled up to show us who he was,
he is only another old man, picking up
broken tools and putting them back,
his heart gone soft and blue with stories.
Ted Kooser from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2004
The Swimming: Be Kind Be Gentle
The cool down has helped me tremendously. No more paralyzing hip and shin pain the day after a swim. Now that I can imagine the muscles recovering filtering lactic acid I enjoy the cool down. It's its own thing! A bit like tai chi in the water. Be kind, be gentle.
I do have a vulnerable hip muscle and found this website to be informative and helpful.
https://theswimmingpt.com/how-to-fix-hip-pain-when-swimming-part-2/
Craig Thompson
Now I’m not saying that we should give up on our hopes and prayers or that we should simply accept whatever comes our way. (Some things are not only imperfect, they’re simply unacceptable!) No, I’m suggesting that we hope and pray for something better than the Perfect! location, the Perfect! contact, the Perfect! connection, the Perfect! event, or the Perfect! method.
And in so doing, we’ll learn to hold our plans more loosely. We’ll learn to pray more “Your will be done.” We’ll learn to seek and assert less Perfect! and look for more God-blessed serendipity. We’ll learn that while that apartment will never be what we’d hoped for, it can become the place that makes us feel at home. Over time, we’ll learn to make more room for Unpredicted! and Wonderful! and Challenging! and Sufficient! and Flawed! and Lovely! and Unexpected! We’ll learn to find the splendor of God moving gracefully in imperfection. https://www.alifeoverseas.com/author/craig_thompson/
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. Marcel Proust
https://clearingcustoms.net/2013/12/17/what-marcel-proust-really-said-about-seeing-with-new-eyes/
What Marcel Proust Really Said about Seeing with New Eyes
In his TED Talk—on home, travel, and stillness—author Pico Iyer refers to the words of the French author Marcel Proust:
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes.
When I Googled that phrase, I came up with several similar, though slightly different, versions. The most popular one comes up on over 800,000 sites, often used, as Iyer did, in the context of travel:
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
But I wasn’t done yet. I don’t trust “famous quote” sites, nor do I trust the democracy of the Internet. A little more searching led me to the actual quotation, and the original source. It’s Proust’s seven-volume work, Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time). The quotation above is a paraphrase of text in volume 5—The Prisoner—originally published in French, in 1923, and first translated into English by C. K. Moncrief.
In chapter 2 of The Prisoner, the narrator is commenting at length on art, rather than travel. Listening for the first time to a work by the composer Vinteuil, he finds himself transported not to a physical location, but to a wonderful “strange land” of the composer’s own making. “Each artist,” he decides, “seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten. . . .” These artists include composers, such as Vinteuil, and painters, such as the narrator’s friend, Elstir. He continues:
This lost country composers do not actually remember, but each of them remains all his life somehow attuned to it; he is wild with joy when he is singing the airs of his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back upon it, and it is only when he despises it that he finds it when he utters, whatever the subject with which he is dealing, that peculiar strain the monotony of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical in itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. But is it not the fact then that from those elements, all the real residuum which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even by friend to friend, by master to disciple, by lover to mistress, that ineffable something which makes a difference in quality between what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with his fellows only by limiting himself to external points common to us all and of no interest, art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, makes the man himself apparent, rendering externally visible in the colours of the spectrum that intimate composition of those worlds which we call individual persons and which, without the aid of art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse infinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.
So there you have it. Maybe this adds to the meaning of the more-familiar “quotation.” Or maybe it lessens it, in your mind.
Maybe, for you, this is no longer a phrase about travel. Or maybe it is now much, much more so.
Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Garrison Keillor
I sit looking up at that skinny triangular tower and a man and woman sit down a few feet away; he’s wearing a sweatshirt with a big TEXAS on it and I say, “How’s the city treating you?” They’re teachers at a Baptist school. I grew up evangelical. It’s their first time in New York. Their daughter lives here, wants to take up acting. There’s plenty to talk about. They both attended public schools but now they worry about bad influences. I understand. It was good to meet them. This is why people wear clothing with writing on it: it’s an invitation to conversation. Garrison Keillor
The Column: 04.22.24
What’s something that’ll make a British person say, “ooh, someone’s doing alright for themselves”?
A friend tells a story which he swears is true. That he was behind two old biddies in Asda in Gloucester. One looked into the other’s basket and said ‘Coleslaw eh? Very lah-di-dah’.
Years ago my wife was making a sandwich and her Mum walks in. "Oooh!" pipes up her Mum. "Ham AND cheese. Bit extravagant isn't it?"
My Dad said to me “your brother is doing really well for himself he has a bin that opens when you put your hand near it”!!
Or when someone says ‘I knew you when you had nothing’ when you buy a slightly more expensive supermarket meal deal. Or my grandad used to say when I asked for a sugar in my coffee ‘all luxury you’ x
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The Men
The men in hard hats and excavators have arrived for the day. The dozen yellow saw horses have turned our street into a western prairie for the second week.
I'm hearing the beep beep backup sound and occasional jackhammers and dump trucks unloading gravel and then sound of asphalt pressing machines.
Total silence at coffee break.
I will miss them when they're gone.
Produce & Produce
Being able to produce a story or buy produce (broccoli, cabbage apples, oranges) are the things that make me happy.
going on a date with index cards
My general approach to writing fiction is that you try to have as few conceptual notions as possible and you just respond to the energy that the story is making rather than having a big over plan. I think if you have a big over plan, the danger is that you might just take your plan and then you bore everybody. I always joke that it’s like going on a date with index cards. You know, at 7:30 p.m. I should ask about her mother. You keep all the control to yourself but you are kind of insulting to the other person.
George Saunders
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