Blogorrhea Junior

Poetry Month! A Prompt a Day.

It's Poetry Month, peeps, and somehow, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and signed up to write a poem a day, from prompts, over at Writer's Digest's blog Poetic Asides with Robert Lee Brewer. Tonight I'm frantically composing at the last minute because I had a long day teaching and grading papers. There will be an instant replay tomorrow night, probably, but here's the first one, anyway. It's an origin poem, as per the prompt.  I thought, what the hell? Why not go for the ultimate origin? So I've committed science poetry.

Start Here

It always starts with light
real and metaphor:
a minuscule point
floating
in the deeps,
one moment quiescent,
the next—
the universe
cracks open.
Fractions later, the shrapnel flies
at the speed limit of sight,
us and anti-us,
bangs around like bumblebees in a bottle
(those will come much later)
smashing itself
back to nothing first, then
smaller, hotter, faster, fortunately
more us than anti.
Baryons
shimmer into being,
condensing like raindrops
(again, much later). The universe
quarks.
A chill sets in, the particles dance
for warmth, and couple
the way everything does
in long, cold nights.
Hadrons and leptons snuggle;
deuterium is born,
grows up to be hydrogen.
Soon there’s a periodic family
at the table.

In the space of
a hundred breaths:
light and matter, and
all that matters.

© Lee Kottner, 2009

This poem brought to you courtesy of Chris LaRocco's and Blair Rothstein's Big Bang Page over at U of M. Meaning that's where I got my quick and dirty summary of the aforementioned events.

Cross posted over at Dowsing and Cocktail Party Physics.

The Best Gift

Happy Holidays to all.

Brief Interlude of Insanity

Sorry for the gap in posts. As you can probably guess by the post being featured on the top of this blog, I've bitten off a big project. Unsurprisingly, it's eating my life at the moment. On top of this, the end of the semester is approaching, I just finished two shorter classes, and been swamped with freelance work. On top of this, I've garnered a new blogging gig at Cocktail Party Physics, and have just been drafted to start blogging (for pay!) over at Talking Science. Now the holiday is coming up and I have company coming, which means I have to clean my hell-hole of an apartment. All good things, but time consuming. So it's going to be a while before I dig myself out from under and get back to posting here on a regular basis. That likely won't be until some time around Christmas, the way things are running.

So hang tight!  I'll be back with some cool stuff, including the mock-up of Carlos's book.

Bad Blogger! No Hits!

Swamped, that's what I've been. Three classes, one guest, too many friends to keep up with (yeah, what a thing to gripe about, LOL) and a partridge in a pear tree. I'm so brain-dead I couldn't think how to spell pear. Pair? Pare? Duh. It's teacher brain; you start thinking your students' mistakes are actually right. EEEEEEEK. I hope I'll be caught up again by next week. Hang tight.

Curses! Foiled, er, Folded, Again!

Well, crap. I'd intended to have a bunch of new books to show you by now, but I've been under the weather for a while now and it finally caught up with me. My wagon is draggin' and is likely to be for a while before this is resolved, but fortunately, other people are far more energetic than I am, and I have a good backlog of stuff to post here.

Classes have started too,  so I'm busy with syllabi and lesson plans and refreshing my knowledge of the stories and poems I'm teaching, and prepping for class. Then there's housekeeping, which is sadly behind at the moment.

It's frustrating to have all these projects in my head, and no energy or time to get to them. This is one of the difficulties of being an artist, and why grants are so important. If we're busy making a living to support our art, it often doesn't leave us much time or energy to actually do the art. Teaching, while it can be exhausting and time consuming, at least has the virtue (at least for me) of inspiring me as well. If only it paid better. If only the jobs at my level (college) were easier to come by.

Enough complaining. Life is still good, and will be better, once I get my health back on track, which should happen soon.

In the meanwhile, Elle Decoration has discovered the wonders ow what it calls book art. In reality, most of it is altered books or paper art derived from books, but it's still awfully pretty.  Book folding is the theme here and one of my favorites is by Lucille Moroni, who takes antique missals and other church books and carefully folds their pages to create intricate patterns with their page decorations. Moroni, who doesn't seem to have a website, was formerly a textile artist captivated by a folded book she saw in a shop window in Lyon. This piece appeared in the 2006 Paper Bienniale.

Then there's this nifty little object by Paul Lowe, which I'm tempted to make for myself. It's so hard to find a good paper sorter, and what better than to have paper help you sort itself? (Click thumbnail to enlarge.) Lowe does some kinda cool things with doilies too, which you'll see on his website. That's something I never thought I'd say. I've got a million doilies, thanks to the crocheters in my family (and my friends) and I'm not a Victorian kind of decorator, so I've never known what to do with them. But now there's hope!

And there's more altered books at Elle, including a lovely window display at Anthropologie, and a nifty DIY two-tiered table. Books do furnish a room.

Gone to the Studio

It's August, in case you haven't noticed, and I've decided to follow the time-honored European custom of bugging out for the month. I'm not actually going anywhere, but I've got a date with my studio and it's about time I got busy and made some stuff before school starts up again and I'm inundated with papers to grade. I've got a some other stuff coming up in September/October too, so I am seizing the day. See you in September! With pictures!

George Carlin, 1937-2008, RIP

George Carlin, one of my heroes, has died at the age of 71—way too young for such a free spirit and incisive observer of the absurdities of life and language. Fitting that he was recently honored with the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor; I can't think of anyone's style that reminds me so much of Twain: irreverent, sarcastic, disrespectful, and fearless. One routine he'll go down in history for was the Seven Words You Can't Say on TV:

"The original seven words were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Those are the ones that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and (laughter) maybe, even bring us, God help us, peace without honor (laughter) um, and a bourbon."

New York radio station WBAI let him say them on the air in the early 70's and in 1978, the obscenity case went to the Supreme Court, where the censuring and censoring was upheld, perpetuating stupidity like the fines for the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction." Carlin was particularly good at pointing out societal hypocrisy, which is probably one of the reasons I loved him so: "The word shit, uh, is an interesting kind of word in that the middle class has never really accepted it and approved it. They use it like, crazy but it's not really okay. It's still a rude, dirty, old kind of gushy word. (laughter) They don't like that, but they say it, like, they say it like, a lady now in a middle-class home, you'll hear most of the time she says it as an expletive, you know, it's out of her mouth before she knows. She says, Oh shit oh shit, (laughter) oh shit. If she drops something, Oh, the shit hurt the broccoli. Shit."

I also loved his language consciousness. He did an entire routine on what he called "soft language" that's worthy of George Orwell's 1984. You can see it here. He's so un-PC that it's wonderful, fearlessly pointing out that those nice comfortable words like "pre-owned" have simpler meanings, like "used": "It's getting so bad now that any day I expect to hear a rape victim referred to as an 'unwilling sperm recipient.'" Language like this doesn't just distort truth, it's us bullshitting ourselves. Carlin had the same horror of  of euphemism that I do. In this routine, in fact, he rails against the use of the terms "pass away" and "expire" ("like a magazine subscription") for "died."

And now that he has, the language police have won a little victory.

[Cross-posted at Dowsing]

Plans, Plots, Programs, Schemes, Contrivances, and Designs

In my usual mode for New Year's, I'm eschewing resolutions and setting forth some modest goals. That's not the same thing at all. Honest. Just a few things I'd like to, er, do differently this year. Okay, maybe it's antics with semantics, but resolutions always seem so unrealistic, and often, grandiose. Which is why they so often fail.  Mostly what I'd like in my life is the same, but more of it, or less.

In 2006, I decided I wanted to work on the following (and here's what's happened):

1. My spirituality. Pray more, think more, meditate, find the core. Do what comes next. Check. Not accomplished so much as a good beginning on an on-going project. Still not sure where it's going to lead, but it's never far from my mind.
2. My entropic body. Yoga. Pilates. Walking. Good food. An on-going struggle, but still making the effort. Doing a bit of Yoga and Pilates for my back, going to the chiropractor, cooking for myself again and eating well. More walking and Tai Chi in the works. Getting out of the damn chair is important but harder than it looks.
3. Learning Japanese cooking. Mmmm, not so much. Maybe a bit more of this in the future, but I don't feel it's really vital. Just a nice and healthy thing to know. I do have some great Japanese cookbooks I'd like to delve into more.
4. More hand-made books. Make and sell more of the Ruins. Do Postcards from Home with Marcia. Do the broadsheet of On High in letterpress. Work with Carlos on his book. Definitely a successful start for another on-going project. Making lots more books than I was before, and learning new techniques, but I need to be more disciplined about it this year. And take a few more classes because I think that's good for me.
5. Writing and publishing. Finish editing my novel and send it out again. Edit more essays and send them out. Send out some more poems, too, while I'm at it. More on-goingness. I've sent out a couple of essays and poems, still need to get at the damn novel, especially now that Allyson was nice enough to hook me up with her agent.
6. Enjoying the city I live in more. Visit the museums. See a few shows. Walk around and take photos. I've take lots of photos since 2006, but not gotten out as much as I wanted. Already made a pact with Dr. Em about this. She's vowed to go see something every week. I'd settle for a couple times a month. I'm getting us tickets to see Patrick Steward in MacBeth, if they're still available, as a start. And now that Julie and I are friends, I'm sure I'll see a lot more art.
7. Reconnect with my friends, when I'm ready. Done with a vengeance, though I still don't see some of them as often as they or I would like. Trouble is, I have so many friends that I can't see them all as often as we'd like, or that's all I'd do, and now that I don't have a steady income, it's a little expensive. Not that I'm complaining. But I hope they don't feel neglected.
8. New goal: Get enough book stock to get an Etsy store opened, at the least.
9. New goal: Get some steady clients for work.

So, some modest achievements in the ongoing improvement projects, especially considering what the past couple of years have been like. Last year was actually pretty good, and I hope this one continues to be. In the meanwhile . . .

. . . health and happiness, pleasures of the body and the mind, success, new adventures, the rekindling of old loves and/or the discovery of new ones, fireworks, candlelight, security financial and otherwise, good stories, continual astonishment, spiritual enlightenment (your choice of dogma or karma), frequent amusement, a wee dram when you need it, big hearts, deep pockets, long tempers, patience, something warm and fuzzy that is already house-trained, a sense of the ineffable, and people in your life who are as dear as my loved ones are to me.

Most of all, I wish all of us peace in a time of war; compassion in a time of natural disasters; courage in a time of repression and justified torture; generosity in a time of greed and self-interest; love in a time of hatred; self-knowledge in a time of blame.

Sign of a Good Year: Pantone No. 18-3943

Ever wonder who picks those colors that proliferate through the year in your clothes, furnishings, accessories, and the coolest magazine layouts? Blame it on Pantone. Pantone, in case you don't know, is a Carlstadt, NJ, (no, seriously!) company that developed the proprietary color matching system used throughout the graphics, printing, publishing, and design worlds.

In a yearly conclave, Pantone's cabal of designers decides on a color-of-the-year and develops a palette around it that designers refer to throughout the year—or not. There's no contractual obligation to do so, and yet a lot of people seem to jump on that bandwagon. So much so that Pantone has gotten or found itself in the color prediction business. This year, apparently, we'll be seeing a lot of blue, in particular ones based on Pantone's Blue Iris, No. 18-3943, if you're ordering printing inks.

I'm taking this as a sign it's going to be a very good year. This is one of my very favorite colors. I love most blues, but this deep, rich blue makes me particularly happy. It's got enough red in it to be a little warmer than blues usually are, and yet it's sophisticated and a little cool. The Pantone folks have this to say about it: “Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspects of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic.” It is kind of a magical color, isn't it? Blue like a wizard's hat, begging for a strong yellow moon or star pattern, or the green of leaves.

If you're interested in making color palettes or patterns, hop on over to COLOURlovers, where you can download them for Photoshop or HTML. Lots of inspiration there, and a little help when you're stuck for design ideas. (Thanks to Green Chair Press for the heads-up.)

But if you're following the Pantone Way, having the blues this year will be a good thing.

PostSecret

In the category of "wish I'd thought of that": PostSecret is possibly one of the most brilliant ideas and one of the most poignant pieces of collaborative art—of art, period—that I've seen in a long, long while. It encapsulates everything fascinating about my fellow humans and proves once again that day-to-day reality is very often more fascinating than anything a novelist could come up with. There are depths in all of us that few imagine. What an amazing way to bring that out.

I saw the original call for entries (if you can call it that) for this project and though it was cool at the time, but I had no idea it would turn out like this.  There's also a book that you can preorder, and a travelling exhibit.

The best part of this project is that it advertises the anti-suicide HopeLine (1-800-SUICIDE [784-2433]). One commenter wrote in to thank the people who've sent in their post cards "so that others know they are not alone with their secrets." 

"Only connect." –E.M. Forster 

[via Rag & Bone Blog, once again]