Words, Music, & Outdoor Adventures

An interesting article about one of my favorite books: The Golden Notebook.

Today we woke up to a revolution of snow,

Its white flag waving over everything,

I just discovered the poet Billy Collins. I read an article about him in Poets & Writer’s Magazine and he seemed interesting. As I am looking through the shelves in the Granby Library (always the 800 section) I see his name on a thin book of poetry, Sailing Alone Around the Room. I check it out and read it the minute I return home. My favorite poem is Dharma about his dog that “trots out the front door/every morning/without a hat or an umbrella,/without any money/or the keys to her doghouse”.

Now, I’m reading Nine Horses. His poems speak to me in a way poetry never has up to this point in my 37 years. I’m reading the poem Velocity. The poet is drawing a motorcyclist who rides up next to the bus he is on. In the portrait of this motorcyclist, he draws “lines to indicate speed”.

We would all

Appear to have speed lines trailing behind us

As we rush down the long tunnel of time

And I say aloud, hmph, to myself; no one is here. I just imagine and feel his poetry like nothing before it. It’s so much fun to discover something new; a new poet, a new book, a new trail in the woods.  

Test your knowledge of western American Literature here.

9) Where was Buster the hermit crab’s transplanted home? (From High Tide in Tucson - Kinsolver) Tucson

21) Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer-winning Angle of Repose features what Rocky Mountain mining town? Leadville, CO.

One of my favorite Artists - Alison Krauss singing Gravity

I left home when I was seventeen, I just grew tired of falling down, And I’m sure I was told, the allure of the road, Would be all I found. And all the answers that I started with turned out questions in the end, So years roll on by, And just like the sky, The road never ends.

And the people who love me still ask me, When are you coming back to town, And I answer quite frankly, When they stop building roads, And all God needs is gravity to hold me down.

You can rot or you can burn but either way, if you’re lucky, a place will shape and cut and bend you, will strengthen you and weaken you. You trade your life for the privilege of this experience – the joy of a place, the joy of knowledge gotten by listening and observing.

Rick Bass, The Sky The Stars The Wilderness

I’m listening to the CD, Walking in This World by Julia Cameron, in my car. This morning on the way to work these words ring true:

All art is is an attempt to map the territory of the heart.

What advice do you have for people who are just starting out as writers? From Amanda Eyre Ward

Have faith. Surround yourself with people who believe writing is important. Fall in love with writers and read everything they’ve done. Be kind to yourself…if you write a page, you deserve to feel proud. And lastly, know that it is possible to make a living as a writer. It’s hard, but it happens, and it’s a great life.

Read this - very cute.

This book is amazing. Hall grew up in North Hampton just south of where I grew up. She is now a writing teacher at UNH. The story is about growing up in NH and getting pregnant and forced by her parent to give it up for adoption. Her family abandoned her and after finishing high school she travelled all over, never forgetting the child she gave up. It is such a touching story of forgiveness, family and love.

“Sometime I cry, pain rising from the place before he came. Now he is here and I finally grieve, crying in the field while Alex and Ben play in the house. My friends tell me, ‘This is a miracle. It is a fairy tale with a happy ending.’”

“I am memory. Everything I have been is carried here in my body. I am written, the pain and the great love, the surprises, the losses and the findings. The young woman’s body I live inside still, the unforgotten home, is a text. It is engraved with memory, my life.” (pg 211)

“We cannot plot out the future. We are a family. We love each other. We need each other. That is our only map.”

 

From Newwest.net

Owners Kim Hunt and Ken Wytsma will staff the bookstore with volunteers, and channel profits to several charities.  They plan to sell books at a discount, “mostly historical, philosophical and human rights tomes, along with some poetry and classic fiction chosen at its founders’ discretion.”

“Dear old world,” she murmured, “you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.”

I just got this month’s Poets & Writers magazine. The Editor’s Note really strikes me, page 6. Mary Gannon writes:

It’s through reading that we engage with the larger truths of being human. In books, we experience our private struggles as universal and come to realize the value of compassion, which is the first step toward creating a more civil and culturally rich society.

I haven’t read Ulysses, but I think I might go to the library today and get a copy and start reading. On  June 16, 1904, at 8 a.m., “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” greeted the morning just as Mr. Leopold Bloom, of 7 Eccles Street, was beginning to prepare breakfast for his wife, Molly. During the next 18 hours or so these people — and hundreds of others — will leap to life in what some literary scholars call the greatest novel in English of the 20th century. During the final 50 pages, Molly Bloom lies awake and revieals her innermost thoughts. The last words of the novel, her memory of Bloom’s marriage proposal:

” . . . and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

http://edoarde.wordpress.com/2008/04/20/writing-to-specification/

Anne sighed.

“Well, that is another hope gone.-* ‘My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.’-* That’s a sentence I read in a book once, and I say it over to comfort myself whenever I’m disappointed in anything.”

“I think he’s lovely,” said Anne reproachfully.-* “He is so very sympathetic.-* He didn’t mind how much I talked–he seemed to like it.-* I felt that he was a kindred spirit as soon as ever I saw him.”

A few days ago I subscribed to dailylit.com; a website that emails you a chapter at a time of classic books. I thought I’d try it out with Anne of Green Gables. I’ve been to Prince Edward Island but this passage makes me remember it again:

-*I’ve always heard that Prince Edward Island was the prettiest place in the world, and I used to imagine I was living here, but I never really expected I would.-* It’s delightful when your imaginations come true, isn’t it?-* But those red roads are so funny. When we got into the train at Charlottetown and the red roads began to flash past I asked Mrs. Spencer what made them red and she said she didn’t know and for pity’s sake not to ask her any more questions.-* She said I must have asked her a thousand already.
I suppose I had, too, but how you going to find out about things if you don’t ask questions?-* And what DOES make the roads red?”

“Well now, I dunno,” said Matthew.

“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about?-* It just makes me feel glad to be alive– it’s such an interesting world.-* It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?-* But am I talking too much?-* People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk?-* If you say so I’ll stop.-* I can STOP when I make up my mind to it, although it’s difficult.”

Hiked with dogs, skied, hot tubbed (therapy for my ankle), now getting ready for work. Here are some photos skiing SolVista on a bluebird, cold morning just before the crowds.

Trails just above my condo:

My new favorite trail: Desperado on the West Mountain:

And cool photo looking east:

James Michener : “I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from the works of Plato and Socrates, the behavior of the three Thomases, Aquinas, More and Jefferson - the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.” (from The World is My Home, 1992)-*

From his early youth, Michener listened to opera, which helped him to see human experience in a more dramatic form than facts would warrant. He also started to collect reproductions of paintings. Among his favorite artists were the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius (1622-1654), the Italian Renaissance artist Benozzo Gozzoli, (1420-1497), and Ando Horoshige (1797-1858), the Japanese woodblock artist.