What I do know is I just read Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Now I’m stumped, busted by ignorance again. There’s not one word in that book that struck me as fake or out of place or fanciful, but it’s all made up. What’s up with that? The protagonist started out a mystery and remained that way until the end. And now it’s over and still a mystery. Is it is girl thing? Am I just stupid? How can something be so plain and yet so deeply baroque?

So much beauty and so much mystery and so much ignorance. Is ugly good? Is smooth rough? Can the world be reflected in the oily shimmer of a pearl? I think it can, but then that world is ignorance to me. Why are people like this? Why is anything like this? Why everything?

Truth is a glimmer of light across the wall in a painting by Vermeer. Ignorance is everything else.

Gurk,

LWIII

This one is for healing, an enchantment to send deep healing to the dark winds and back again, for has not enchantment always involved chanting? And is not art healing?

I do not know, for I know so very little, but art has always ever been my healer, and we have need of healing this November, for NaNoWriMo and for mega wrimo as well. Turquoise is the color of the wounded healer, as a wise woman once told me, so I invoke that sacred color, the celestine of wind and waters, torn by darkness.

The wound is the resource, for it breaks the heart and channels empathy, boon of healers and the healed. Together we sing our chant of health.

Am reading my first steampunk novel right now, Perdido Station by China Miéville. It carries the same casual brutality of much contemporary art, especially recent movies. Don’t know what to think of the author yet. He strikes me as a not very nice man, though I’m probably wrong on that. Perhaps niceness is out of fashion, and slashing pain and gritty slime more the thing these days.

Miéville is a superb stylist, but what he styles is unknown to me before. I am used to writers I can relate to in a human way, but he seems beyond my ken, almost insectile, his words a rending of the wings of flesh into something chitinous and alien, something dark, like a butt tattoo.

Awwwk!

LWIII

I got this opportunity from Jake Gest, who won the right to establish the subject of my frog blog by being the first and tweeting the word “frog” when I asked for input on Twitter. Later on I wandered over to his blog and saw his post about this free drop cap site by Jessica Hische.

Never in my lifetime have I had so many people to work with, and I don’t even know any of them. Goddess bless the internet. The worldwide web is a web of heads and hearts. It might even be considered one giant world-encircling, globe-girdling, graphic poem song book painting operatic omnilaborative artwork, a symphony of sympathy.

Unite,

LWIII

A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise.

~ Carl Sagan

Many thanks to John Boswell at Colorpulse for creating that masterpiece.

We shall overcome,

LWIII

Why this should be so I haven’t the foggiest. Oh…okay, actually I do have a fog, a giant one, the kind of misamic dank that could cover the entire eastern seaboard in pea soup of the dankest, darkest variety, completely socked in.

It’s a massive hoot, first if all, the most fun this writer’s had in quite some time. I kind of feel like I was born for it, the class clown’s heaven, and a wordsmith’s paradise, as long as the smythe is a dedicated procrastinator like myself. Most writers clasp procrastination to their souls with hoops of steel. Anything to keep from facing that dreaded blank page, all by your lonesome. And Twitter is a blank page with words already on it. Other people’s words for goodness sake, that you get to respond to! You can write and not be alone. Whoo-hoo!

There are some terribly attractive sorts on Twitter, the pageant of humanity in all its scruffy glory, scrolling downward on your screen avatar by avatar, as they post their witty words or imaginative links or favorite tunes or daily tasks and habits. I’ve made some delectable friends there. And it’s the perfect place to share some of the quotes from my Extracto Literarium – another one of my favorite procastinatory delights, gathering goodies from other people instead of going through the grueling process of making them up myself.

Plus I have this really fun thing I do that gives me the chance to work with God, word-to-word. Yep, William Shakespeare. There’s a guy on Twitter named @IAM_SHAKESPEARE who is tweeting the bard’s entire body of work, line by line. So when one of his tweets pops up on my screen, I giggle and go for it, taking a couple words or three and using them as seed corn for a 140 character-or-less harvest I call twitoetry, or poemitters, or poetweets, or something.

Here’s an example from yesterday:

@IAM_SHAKESPEARE  BERTRAM. I’ll lend it thee, my dear, but have no power

@TomYHowe  Lend it thee, I’ll give it back, as soon as I am done, though I may play with it a bit, because it is so fun. Who needs virginity anyway?

Ha, could I have any more writer-laughs?

No,

LWIII

Unfortunately M Theory deals with more than just Ms. If it were merely about Ms I wouldn’t have to watch the Science Channel to learn about it. Could just stick with Sesame Street.

Parallel Universe was the first time I ever in my life watched a scientist gird his hypothetical loins, snap on the pocket protector, bust out the slide ruler with a swashbuckling swish, and careen straight through the Big Bang and out the other end, whistling and measuring – on both sides.

The other side of the Big Bang!

That’s the Holy Grail, ain’t it? What a cool show. Hate to spoil the plot but here goes, in a dumbish nutshell.

Physicists tried to come to a Theory of Everything using String Theory, but ended up with 5 string theories. All of which held in common the understanding that there are 10 parallel dimensions inside/outside our own. But as a guy in the show puts it, “Five theories isn’t the Theory of Everything, it’s the Theory of Nothing.”

So now comes the gravity part. This one scientist lady was wondering how come gravity is so weak, in compairison to other forces, such as electromagnetism and Tiger Woods? She thought maybe because it was leaking from here into another dimension. Then she had the strange thought: what if gravity is leaking here, into our universe?

Apparently that was the major breakthrough that led to the development of the theory of an 11th dimension, the place we get our gravity from. That led to the gradual realization among many physicists (don’t ask me how – something to do with numbers, one assumes) that the strings were actually membranes, or at least this postulated the existence of a membraneous parallel universe, which eventually became filled theoretically with several then many then an infinity of other parallel universes. And all these other membranes (M theory) were moving and flowing through the 11th dimension.

That strange thought led to the charming occurance of three smart guys riding in an English train to a symposium having an hour-long conversation. What would happen if a pair of these differently-shaped membranes/universes ran into each other? It would be a pretty ‘big bang’ eh?

Upshot of it was that they figured out a theory that goes right through the big bang and out the other side, intact, beyond that bourne from which no throught-traveler had yet returned.

M theory,

LWIII

And I was right. Ever since then, movies, books, art, and music have filled me with lust for greatness and longing beyond wonder. A greatness much larger than myself. Unfortunately, my life has been way too realistic to live up to those dreams and yearning, but who cares, for my greatness is in my emotions, and only I can know it, Bojangles in a wheelchair.

Rage on, you dreams of beauty.

Love,

LWIII

A thoughtful friend just sent along to me an NPR piece on Jimmie Spheeris. I had no idea his music almost died to the world. Thank you, powers that be, and friends of those who amn’t, for bringing it back.

Jimmie Spheeris Memorial Gallery

Isle of View,

LWIII

Hope this will work. Haven’t tried embedding any songs in here yet, but we’ll see how well we do. It’s a 5MB file, so may take awhile to get if you click on whatever thingie comes up when I embed it (if it works). Still think that’s better than a lower-quality MP3, though. I turned it into a MP3 already, but the crystalline ear-vision of the horns and stuff goes away.

Hope this works!

Summertime

(Oh well, 5MB is too big so I had to use the MP3.)

Here’s to high cotton and easy livin!

LWIII

There has to be a phrase: art imitating art, death intimating life? Something in the ‘form follows function’ line. I don’t know, but it was beyond a normal stage production. It was partly the poignancy of the sometimes less-than-ideal acting from those kids that made it so amazing for me. I’m not one generally to go all smoogey about children on stage. This time I did. Way smoogey. Who cares about perfection, when art and life merge so perfectly?

Perhaps it was because my best friend played the lead. Goodness he was magnificent, hunching his back, gritting his teeth, and holding Death in abeyance for all of us, but most especially the children on stage. Of course the abeyance was temporary, but it was magnificent, and it made me feel like a hero just to watch it.

From a witness who saw the procession of Korczak with the children from his Jewish orphanage in Warsaw on their way to the death train:

“A miracle occurred. Two hundred children did not cry out. Two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak, so that he might protect and preserve them. Janusz Korczak was marching, his head bent forward, holding the hand of a child, without a hat, a leather belt around his waist, and wearing high boots. A few nurses were followed by two hundred children, dressed in clean and meticulously cared for clothes, as they were being carried to the altar. (…) On all sides the children were surrounded by Germans, Ukrainians, and this time also Jewish policemen. They whipped and fired shots at them. The very stones of the street wept at the sight of the procession.”

Wish I was a better writer, or was taking some kind of good-writing drug, because I can’t begin to accomplish here what I experienced there, at Loveland High School last night. Unusual for a high-school production to bring in both an adult for the lead and elementary school kids for the younger roles, but it was perfect, the best example of the horrors and heroism of the Holocaust I’ve ever seen, and most especially felt. All the way to the bones of my soul.

There are no Jewish children. There are only children, and God must have forsaken those Nazis who forgot that.

Bless our hearts,

LWIII