two step.

These two people. I love them a lot. We traveled to Austin, TX together a couple of years ago for the Renegade Craft Fair. While we were lingering on a hillside one evening, waiting to see several hundred thousand bats (whole other story), I took a picture of their shoes (apparently I mainly take pictures of them that don't show their faces). They both wear awesome shoes, and I loved how these particular pairs of shoes looked standing right next to each other. Their anniversary was coming up, and I flippantly thought "I'll embroider the shoes and give it to them next month! It'll be great!" Hubris. I did embroider the shoes, but it took me almost two years.

I took the original photograph, and converted it to a line drawing in Photoshop. Then I transferred it to linen and stitched it. A lot of it didn't transfer very clearly - the plaid hardly came out at all, so most of that is free-handed and Shawn's shoes aren't as detailed as I'd planned. With Shana's shoes, I had the advantage of having the same pair in my closet for reference. When it was finished, I steamed and starched it and stitched it onto a thin layer of cork, which I then glued onto a small painted bulletin board. Then I sent it off. It's been a part of my days for a long time, and I kind of miss it; but not as much as I miss them. I love you guys, and I miss your shoes.

occasional poetry

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,
gimme a break before I die:
grant me wisdom, will & wit,
purity, probity, pluck & grit.
Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, kind,
gimme great abs & a steel-trap mind,
and forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice --
these little blessings would suffice
to beget an earthly paradise:
make the bad people good --
and the good people nice;
and before our world goes over the brink,
teach the believers how to think.

- Philip Appleman

workshop - barbara dill

I meant to post these pictures in December, after Thanksgiving in Virginia with my family, but forgot I had them. This is my friend Barbara's workshop in Richmond. She was a student in my grandfather's woodworking class years ago. They became friends, and have remained close ever since. Barbara has an immense talent for woodwork (her innovative work in multi axis woodturning is amazing). I was getting used to the new phone the weekend that I took these. They're a little scrappy as pictures go, but they're a record of one of my favorite places and I love them.

My adored grandfather is in physical therapy rehab, following a couple of scary falls. My parents, grandmother and a cousin are taking turns spending the night with him so he never has to be alone overnight, for which they are all my heroes. Dad's been sending daily reports of progress and events, and this one came yesterday:

"Mother and Dad were cute together tonight. Dad had secreted a small stack of old valentines in his room Saturday evening (which I had stolen from their home stash earlier that day), and was obviously eager to surprise Mother with them. She had brought in on Sunday some of her old cards to him, but he hadn't looked at any of them yet. So they sat there together, perusing old...valentine sentiments. When Dad reached the end of his pile, he wheeled his chair over to Mother with fresh declarations of affection and a kiss. Or two. :

That's the sweet stuff. These are two of my favorite pictures of my grandparents. (Grandma apparently disliked the photographer in the camp photo. I love her saddle shoes.)

occasional poetry

I pulled Li-Young Lee's The City in Which I Love You off the shelf on Sunday, and have been soaking in it. The last eleven stanzas of the title poem seem to sing to me particularly right now. A Valentine to absent intimacy.

...And your otherness is perfect as my death.

Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer

would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.

You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.

Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.

At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.

Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.

Straight from my father's wrath,
and long from my mother's womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who's experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

- Li-Young Lee, "The City in Which I Love You" (excerpt), from The City in Which I Love You

Lucifer, Vol. 1: Devil in the Gateway by Mike Carey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been reading this series since a friend loaned the whole collection to me about three months ago. It's profoundly satisfying. Not only is Mike Carey an exceptional storyteller (I'm also a fan of his Unwritten series), but he weaves an enormous amount of diverse mythology into a complex arc. Basically perfectly. His characters are superb: sympathetic, alarming, funny, stubborn and striving for selfhood in the fiercest way. The slant on theology is fascinating. The artwork is stunning, and subtly appropriate to each mythological or atmospheric setting. Superlatives everywhere, is what I'm saying.

If I try to go through and review each volume separately, I'll lose my reviewing momentum, so I'm just sticking to this one. Standout volumes for me were Lucifer 2: Children and Monsters, Lucifer 3: A Dalliance With the Damned (it turns out Hell has an obsession with 18th century high court manners) and Lucifer 11: Evensong.

View all my reviews

long thoughts on short words.

A couple of days ago I used the word funzies in an email to a friend. (I didn't know whether to put quotation marks around word or funzies in that sentence, so I'm just leaving them out altogether.) She came back with "Funzies? That doesn't sound like you." She's right, it doesn't sound like me. For starters, I don't often use abbreviations of any kind. I really, really like words, which means that I generally dislike the bastardized play-words that are such seductive, fizzy social shorthand. So why did I say it?

I'd intended it sarcastically, since the thing I was complaining about was anything but fun. That started me thinking about the way I use abbreviated language and sarcasm. Whatever my original intention is, I think the end result when I use lazy language is masking my experience, rather than conveying it. Using commonly recognized shorthand ends up creating a layer of distance.

For practice, I read back over what I'd written in the original email, and tried to pick out what I had actually been feeling. It turned out to be about 6 parts jealousy, 3 parts anger and 1 part sadness. Of course, figuring that out resulted in my feeling a bonus 1 part of shame - I don’t like admitting that I was jealous, so I shorthanded my way out of it the first time around. I felt less jealous, less angry and less sad after the second attempt, though.

I sometimes feel like I’m getting worse at expressing myself instead of better. That can’t really be true, but it is true that I’m easily influenced by tone. I struggle for bravery and authenticity a lot of the time. Having an online business means I live a lot of my life online, and for me that makes the struggle harder. I’m so easily influenced by the mood and tone of whatever conversational pool I’m currently swimming in. From time to time, I start to feel my attention and intention fracturing and I have to take a social internet break for a couple of days to remember what my true voice sounds like.

I think maybe I’m coming up on a break. Not for any big revelations, just to try to do better.