hello kitty

Sharpshooter heron on the toppled tree.
humid. what is this?
Curtis reports finding young raccoon curled up in trash barrel. Sleepy eyed.
Library lecture last night. Keyword: Empire.
Curse of drinking class calls.
Distract with trivia, enrich with trivia.
Obsess with celebrity, cherish celebrity.
Fascination with the fertile couple. Fascination with life.

Her Eminence Teresa Arana

Did You Ever Know Love? poems by Teresa Arana

    Thursday evening, we were given the opportunity to attend a book signing by Reading, Pennsylvania author Teresa Arana, a lovely young lady who has put together a dual collection of heartfelt poems in their original English (front) with Spanish translations (atrás.)

   The Meet and Greet to announce the publication of  Did You Ever Know Love? was held at Mi Casa Su Casa, 320 Penn St., Reading  from five to seven p.m. Guests were treated to wine with fresh fruit, cheeses, and empanadas and the author’s daughter Esmeralda twirled about in a lavender dress fit for a princess.

  “She dressed herself!” said Arana.

    Arana told the audience she began writing in a diary at age nine and credits her family, friends and  teachers, along with the habit of keeping  journals with helping develop her interest and talent.

   Her Mexican grandfather Gabino Arana, who could neither read nor write, would have the family and children all around and tell stories, she said.  

  In fourth grade she saw her own poems, written for an English assignment, displayed on the wall by her teacher  - and published – she felt encouraged to write more.

   During her first year of college in Martinsburg, West Virginia, Arana’s mother, Bonnie, sent her a box of  “stuff” including the diaires.

   ”I was cleaning out the attic!” Bonnie said.

   This inspired Arana to later collect the early and recent works. She returned to Reading, and has not only taken a diploma from Penn State University, but also produced and published her first book of poems, self-published under the name Eminence Publishing Company: Creating new horizons.

   “I wanted it to have a message,” Arana said. “A positive message.”

    It was  two-year project, Arana said, including a trip to Los Angeles in order to publish:

   “I had barely any money, but I went!”

   The message she hopes to send is: Life will have its share of obstacles. Make something great out of it.

    Although the dates they were written are sealed and secret, the poems show an openness that reminds us of an hibiscus.  As we read our signed copy we are delighted with the careful and thoughtful organization of the book, the delicate touch in graphics and the jacket photos of Ms. Arana and the dashing Carlos. She did it. She did it all by herself.

   For more information or to order the book, go to: www.eminencepublishing.com.

  

Bookmark It

free market tool

 

 

 

Dear Free Library of Philadelphia  and friends,

Thank you very much for the delightful festival and

for opening up some of the more private nether

regions of the Parkway Central Library.

 It could not have been a more perfect day.

Yours truly,

Seraglio and Lions

Real Artists Ship

    Mantra from Organizing Genius: Real Artists Ship. Book by Bennis and Biederman.

real artists ship

 

Can you believe the cutest pink bib remains on the trail?  Terry cloth construction with applique kitty and pink leopard print accents. Sunday in the Park with… relic. 

Other ingredients peppering the trail or viewed from it: a bit of branch bent in a zig-zag formation, one bottle cap with yellow, the bracht of opening leaf, two turquoise spheres unequal in size in the garden of one of the few houses along the path, metal nailed into the asphalt – a washer and a pin/bolt shank? (turns out looking like olive and pimento).  A bicycling coed wearing a SHIP sweatshirt, as in Shippensburg University.

   After making a puzzle a day for more than a year, one notebook has grown into a stack of 15 measuring about a foot tall. Although it gives me great pleasure to share them on line, the opportunity cost of that is: in order to scan, the page needs to be torn out or many gyrations performed with the scanner lid, blankets and things. Plus, I like the books intact. That is a dilemma!

  The HP scanner likes the cover nice and tight. Color copy has additional time and materials considerations. Printer/scanner in copy mode accepts cover partly open. Go figure! 

   Economics or aesthetics?

Walk over. Head up the final stretch to the car. Geared up for fishing, a man and his son read the information board, a bulletin board with protective plexiglass and cedar-shake roof. The boy wears jeans, a black-and-white coat with a touch of pink, and pink sneakers. Pink sneakers? Unusual choice, that, for a boy.

Rabbit Rests

Rabbit at Rest

  ):< Brewer mourns loss of native son.  Kingdom for an Angstrom. >:(

“Fuck the utility

    It’s all futility.”

photo: bitemyhorse.com

 

A quote from My Favorite Things.

A little night reading

   Question for pondering, posed in the book The Library at Night by Alberto Manguel:

Burning question

Water Skiing

   All you need are sturdy legs and some coordination, according to Norman Phillips, author of All About Houseboats.

This photo is from a souvenir booklet: do not try this at home.

From the Office of the Vice President

   I have been sent another book in the mail, upon which are written the letters OVP. It is a paperback in Erin Hunter’s cat tales series, called Forest of Secrets. OPV.  Text messages are three letter words.

   OVP. Office of the vice-president. Also a something something venture partners. Ohio Valley.

This may be an initial Rohrshach test. OVP. It’s also written on each odd-numbered side of the tape cassettes. POV is point of view, something that is found in screenplays, (ahem). Could mean, over, please. Over, vous please.  Ovarian partnership. Ovariparous. Bearing fruit.

   Sometimes an abbreviation is just an abbreviation, such as Overbrook Park.

I listen to side three of the tapes again today, Abt Vogler is one that always strikes me, especially the lines:

That out of three sounds he framed, not a fourth sound, but a star.

 

Color Imperative

 

 

    Have you read the book about great groups, Organizing Genius by Bennis and Biederman?  One of the chapters describes Black Mountain and Josef Albers, the color theorist, who is said to have said and taught that regarding an object, one looks at three aspects: its inner qualities, external appearance and how it relates to other objects.

   In Albers’ own book Interaction of Color, he performs a series of color juxtaposition experiments that are optimum optical illusions: depending where color A is placed - next to, upon or near – color B, it may seem to change color. It may vary in brightness and intensity, a color light or dark.  “A color has many faces,” wrote Albers.

   We are like colors,  vibrating at definite frequencies.  For example, I could call, or describe myself the color navy blue, the HTML #000080. I have my own personality; I have my own looks. Put an Other near my close to me, it may affect how I come across. If it is another navy, you have a condition called birds of a feather, flocking together. Put navy with yellow or white, it can all change. Other people can influence us, as we can influence others, for better or for worse. We are objects that relate to each other, living and breathing objects.

    Sometimes I may not be navy at all. I might be green #008000. If I were interacting with another #008000 green that day we would increase our good green qualities or mischiefs, whatever you please. Introduce a red (#FF0000) person, the interaction perhaps motivating us to do this or that, turning us into #6F0039 at least temporarily, whereas another color might have a completely opposite effect.

   If a person can augment, duplicate or take on the colors and aspects and appearances that make the most sense and feel the best for them, that person would be a self actualised color, if we may combine Albers with Maslow with Sizzyphus. Adopt and adapt. Adapt or die.

   Aren’t some of us “on the same wavelength,” or page, and others not even in the same ballpark, or in left field? Have you ever experienced a time when healthy individuals shunned a diseased or sick person? Or a clique developed at a party, aligned along some uniting vibration, such as a school alliance or Initiated Persons Discussing Sports? Change the context – for contrast – place a pretty girl among mice,  one result. Pretty girl with relatively equal girls (a beauty pageant). A pretty girl with a business of beautiful women? She may look ugly. Small fish, big pond; Big fish; small pond. Medium, medium.

    If you are your own person you have Color Imperative, you own yourself, and juxtaposition with others enhances you and enhances them. Call it win-win.  Call it the most valuable player theory, where the MVP performs well AND makes everyone else around him – or her – better. It is intergrity.  It is Know Thyself and to thine own self be true. You can go anywhere. You are tailored, ready to wear (RTW) and one of a kind as-if-from-boutique-wear.

   Albers describes the rare occasion when two stand-alone bodies of color can be placed together such that their boundaries vanish. It takes patience to achieve, he wrote. They seem one and the same, yet they are separate and independent.  The disappearance of differentiation. 

   A portion of Robert Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi is read on side three of the I Remember, I Remember collection, beginning with the 300 mark:

We’re made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;

And so they are prettier painted – better to us,

which is the same thing;

Art was given for that,

God uses us to help each other the same way,

Lending our minds out…

…The world’s no blot for us, it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

 

To Love and to Work.