Waking Dream

Crunch and I were headed out for a walk this morning a few minutes after 6:00 a.m. At that hour I was ridiculously under-caffeinated and, as I sleepily locked the front door behind us, I saw what I thought was a loose dog coming down the road, about ten yards away. It was big and lean and moving in a strange way, rapidly covering the ground between us. I hate encountering stray dogs, so I immediately began pulling Crunch back up the steps toward the front door. By the time I had the key in the lock, I realized that it wasn't a stray dog coming toward us, but a large, lean, wild coyote. It was moving so quickly that it was in front of us before I could push the door open and, before I could pull Crunch into the house, it passed us, not twenty feet away. It had a strange, effortless gait, ghost-like in the dawn light. My heart was pounding and I was immediately thankful that Crunch either hadn't seen it or hadn't reacted to it--and that it was not the least bit interested in us. I've never been that close a wild coyote.

It was better than a shot of caffeine anyway, because I was wide awake after that. I kept a careful lookout the whole time we walked, knowing that it wasn't coming back, but wondering where it was headed.

I wonder what it meant, this coyote, this powerful symbol, in the dream that is my waking life.

Meat Week

Dave's been out of town for the last week or so, on a roadtrip with his mother. He got home just today. And this picture represents a chunk of my life when Dave is out of town:

This is a receipt from Lotaburger, where I eat about three times a week when Dave, the vegetarian, is gone. That's one of my typical orders, a Lotaburger combo with cheese (and usually green chile, but not that day), large seasoned fries and a large Diet Pepsi.  Fatty, salty, greasy, yummy.

Aside from eating meat, I've also been reading. I finally finished a book this month! Two books even! Of course they were both Hollywood biographical trash-y type books, but they still count!  One was an autobiography by Tab Hunter, the fifties teen (closeted a la Rock Hudson) heartthrob. It was sadly meh-ish. The other was John Waters's book Role Models. I enjoyed it more than the Tab Hunter one.

Oh! And today I set foot into an actual bookstore! Two bookstores even! Dave and I went down to two NM used bookstore institutions, BookStop and Birdsong Books. We've shopped at both over the years, but haven't been to either in a few years. (Damned Amazon, bringing cheap books right to my front door.) I walked out of each shop with three books from each. One, Cheaper By the Dozen is one I read back in middle school and which I wanted to pick up again, just to see if it's still as interesting as it was when I was ten. I also picked up a book about relationship and sexual mores in modern Japan, a nonfiction travelogue by a woman who traveled solo through Europe, a travel book by Daniel Defoe. I read A Journal of the Plague Year a long time ago and loved it, but aside from that and Moll Flanders (which I also really liked) I've never read anything else by Defoe. (Of course I'll sum up the books at the end of the month, just to keep track of my year of reading.)

Bloomers!

Little Bloomers:



Here are our two little cacti blooming their little hearts out.

Summer is right around the corner, isn't it? Lots of blooming things coming and some are even already here in our little corner of the desert. Right now there's a big chive plant with fuzzy purple flowers in bloom as well as some marigolds and alfalfa. I'm tempted to cut down the alfalfa, but today when I went out to water, there was a lone bee buzzing around it and I don't have the heart to take away a bee's pollen source, seeing how bees have been having a hard time recently.

And this conversation that I recently had with someone just about killed me: I was talking about how the bees come down into the garden to drink whenever I water, and they told me that they used to have lots of bees come to their pond to drink but it's been a couple of years since they've been around. I asked if the bees disappeared about the same time they started to put something in the pond to poison the mosquitoes. And of course the answer was yes. And it had never occurred to them that the two things might be related.

Are we that clueless as a species? We are, aren't we? Let's poison the world because some insects and spiders and bugs are inconvenient for us. That sounds pretty good.

Grrrr.

Anyway, on a work-related note,  I took a bunch of cell phone photos of new work on Sunday and the f'n new phone refuses to upload the majority of them to flickr so I can post them here. Of the handful that did load, I got this little guy:



Not a great picture, granted. But enough to note that that is B-3 clay, white slip, underglazes and a sponged-on layer of clear over. It's a wee bit too shiny for my tastes, but I'm not going to complain because I'm just happy that the B-3 didn't crack in the kiln. (Thank goodness for small favors.)

Maybe if I can get my phone to cooperate, I can show off some of the other new vases in the near future.

And, lessee: In other studio news, I've signed on to run a studio-wide sale at the end of June. That should be fun. The summer sales don't usually do as well as the Christmas season sales, but it'll be a good chance to get some work cleaned out of storage. The sale's happening the last Saturday and Sunday of June.

Las Hermanas y Las Arañas

More "ollas" to be buried in the garden, awaiting their turn in the bisque kiln.



These are handbuilt, the larger (at the back) holds maybe half a gallon of water and the smaller holds maybe 45 or 50 ounces. The stripey head dresses are funnels that will be used to fill up the ollas once they're buried.  Their little heads will protrude above ground of course. I imagine these two to be hermanitas, sisters, so they'll probably have to face each other, no?

Ah, what else has been going on around here?

Well, we're having a black widow population explosion for one. Normally the adults don't survive the winter, but this year the winter was so mild that we had several hold outs. We found a very large one living (relatively discreetly) by the front door. We relocated her. Then we found three or four more on the patio, hiding in the crevices between the pavers. I was reluctant to use insecticide on them until one of their egg sacs hatched and left about a hundred tiny baby black widows crawling around. Apparently they can produce four to nine egg sacs per season, each with 100 to 400 eggs inside.

I love spiders--yes, even black widow spiders, which, believe it or not, are actually beneficial--but enough was enough. We sprayed the places on the patio and around the garden where we found their characteristic webs. That seemed to take care of the problem on the patio, but the next day I found a black widow web protruding from underneath the stove. I sprayed again--ugh--and although I haven't seen the spider, the web hasn't come back. Either she died under the stove or she relocated somewhere inside the house.  (Yay.)

A couple of years ago, I found a really large black widow behind the bed. Judging by her size and the size of her web, she'd been there awhile, hunting successfully there at the head of the bed. I only noticed her because I dropped something between the bed and the nightstand and when I reached to pick it up, her scurrying up into the wall heater caught my eye. She was incredibly fast and it took me three nights to catch her, but I did it because I hate spraying insecticide/poisons inside the house. We took her outside and let her loose in a more appropriate environment.

So yes, black widow invasion. What are you gonna do?

New Books, But Why?

I tell you, I'm doing craptacularly on my reading goals so far this month. One week in and all I've got under my belt is the first 50 or so pages of Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan (which, meh). Today though, the postman dropped off an Amazon order: Role Models by John Waters (yes, the filmmaker), Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star by Tab Hunter and Eddie Muller, and three books about clay.

The John Waters and Tab Hunter book came about because I Netflix'd This Filthy World, Waters's filmed one-man show. In it he name-checks Tab Hunter (who of course was in several of Waters's films). Looking them up on Amazon yielded autobiographies by both. I'm a sucker for a juicy closeted (and non-closeted) Hollywood star autobiography, so I ordered them both.  I'll probably jump into the Hunter one first, push back Absurdistan.


Weather's really been too nice to sit inside reading though!

April's Books

Reading-wise, I did a lot of messing about this month--picking things up and putting them down, sometimes for good, sometimes for no good reason at all--and this is the second month in a row that I haven't made my 13 book quota. *Sigh*  I also did a lot of television- and movie-related book reading, quite inadvertently. (I had hoped it would shape up to be a polar exploration kind of month actually.)  But here is what I did manage to get read:

1. True Grit by Charles Portis

My god, I wish I had read this book when I was a girl. I wish I had read it instead of seeing the movie for the first time--but, no. No, that's not entirely true. I loved the movie--the original movie, the John Wayne version--from the very first time I saw it on late night television back before you could conjure up any old movie on the internet at any hour of the day or night. I was perhaps nine years old--the movie and I were the same age, just about-- and I sat in the dark in front of a flickering television, transfixed by Mattie Ross. I remember so well the scene where she chooses her pony Little Blackie, and the scene where she tells Rooster about LeBoeuf, "Look at him grinning like a skunk. He'll cheat you for sure," and the scene where she falls into the pit of rattlesnakes and breaks her arm.  I loved that movie. 

I loved Mattie in part because I was starved for young women who acted as the agents of their own stories. I loved her the same way I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, but I loved Mattie even more than I loved Laura because Mattie was smarter and more outspoken, strong enough to stand up to and even best John Wayne's salty old Rooster Cogburn. I truly loved that movie. 

When the Cohen brothers remade it, I was determined not to like it, but I liked it anyway. It wasn't a great movie, but it was a very, very good one, and against my better judgement I liked it. When they were mocked for the celluloid sin of remaking a movie, the Cohens squawked about its not being a remake but rather a more faithful accounting of the novel. (Which: Yeah, right. Let me assure you: It's a remake.) But the novel--My god. 

The novel is a fine and beautiful thing and the Mattie of the novel is even better than any Mattie ever put on film. I appreciate her now more than I ever did, perhaps because the Mattie that narrates the novel is the same age that I am now.  It's rare that a male author can (or will) write a female narrator that gets it right, but Portis does. He nails it. Definitely a keeper to be re-read.

2. I Await the Devil's Coming by Mary MacLane

What do you do when, like Mary MacLane, you are born with the heart and mind of a warrior, a conqueror, but are also the butt of the cruel joke that made you a woman and confined you to the late nineteenth century when your only outlets are likely to be marriage and child-rearing? You rail against fate as well as you can. But it is ever enough?

3. Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Admiral Richard E. Byrd

I love a good polar adventure and this is almost that. I love a well-written nineteenth century narrative and this is also that. Byrd spent almost six months (March through August) alone in a small cabin in the Antarctic, cut off from anyone by the inhospitable polar winter. Only a few weeks in, the heater in the cabin malfunctioned and poisonous carbon monoxide gas became his constant companion. He survived, just barely, by going without heat for much of the day (even when temperatures dropped below -170) and living with the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning the rest of the time. He was eventually rescued by a group of men who risked their lives to save his.

4. An Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett 
 
Cute, I guess. A quick read.

5. Journals: Captain Scott's  Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott and Max Jones^***

Scott was kind of a jerk, but these journals have been edited with an eye toward crafting a more inspiring explorer. Lots of nuts and bolts stuff about the expedition, but also some interesting stories. (One of my favorites is about a group of eight killer whales that broke through a two-foot thick ice floe while hunting a group of staked sled dogs). Scott of course died on his quest to be the first to reach the South Pole, but his greater disappointment was probably the news that reached him only days before sailing for Antartica: Roald Amundson, a Norwegian explorer, had planted Norway's flag at the pole. Scott went anyway, died there anyway, and his journals were retrieved and sent to his widow.  I bogged down in this book and abandoned it about 300 pages in, when they hadn't even started for the pole. I'll pick it up again though, I'm sure.

5. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout***

I bought this because it won a Pulitzer Prize. (That'll teach me.) It is a collection of very well written but not very interesting stories that reminded me of the British TV show that starred Martin Clunes, Doc Martin. I abandoned this book about a third of the way in.

5. Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times,
6. Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse,
7. Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End by Jennifer Worth

Worth's trio of autobiographical books have recently been turned into a hyper-nostalgic series on the BBC that I watched based on the recommendation of an online stranger. (I like the series, despite the sometimes sappy sentimentality.) The books are, of course, far better than the TV series. They paint an unfamiliar picture of a familiar time in history: Just after WWII a young woman becomes a nurse and midwife and goes to work with a group of similarly trained nuns in the overcrowded, poverty-stricken East End of London.  We hear many stories about the after-effects of the last world war on young men, but we almost never hear about how it affected young women. This book gives a glimpse of that. I'm also ever-curious about London's East End as it existed in that time in history, as a Cockney stronghold.

8. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

I loved it in so many ways, but I think Cheryl Strayed must be (must have been then?) kind of hard to take in person. A relatively quick read--I stayed up all night to finish it--but I will admit that I skipped right over the part where she and her brother have to kill her dead mother's aging, ailing horse.

9. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*

Yes, of course I've read it before, many, many times. In fact, had a great love affair with the works of Fitzgerald when I was in my late teens/early 20s.  Still, it's been almost 20 years since I read it. Fitzgerald can turn a phrase and do it deftly enough that if you follow the curve of the sentence you might almost miss the deeper sentiment behind it. I still like him, despite his fascination with the amoral rich. (That mirrors our own generation's fascination with the amoral rich, I guess.)

10. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim^

I'd seen the movie (twice, actually) and really liked it. I had no idea it was a novel though and was pleasantly surprised to find that out--and also to find that it was a free download from Amazon. I'm about half-way through it now, but it is a quick, pleasant read.

*-Re-read
**-Finishing a previously shamefully abandoned book
***-Begun and shamelessly abandoned
^-Kindled

Not 4/20, No, But Pot Anyway

Did I already show you the new planters? Here are two (and a half):

The white one is simply white glaze over red clay. The green is mint glaze under gun metal green. The tiny planter behind the white one has a black underglaze and red glaze polka dots.  Hard to see though.

We're still trying to decide what should go in those pots, but we've had no trouble filling our commercial pots. We're planting planting planting like crazy:

Lots of things in pots, but lots of seeds in the garden, too. We've had a couple of below freezing nights since we started planting, but everything's made it just fine. (Although Dave did haul in several pots last night.)

This photo was from a trip to a local greenhouse. This is one of the rooms that you can wander through.

Pretty cool, no? At least it is to a girl who grew up in the desert.

READ MUCH?

Well...This month has been a bit of a slog. I'm nine books in, but ugh. I've abandoned a lot of books this month and that has slowed me down considerably. Right now I'm re-re-re-re-reading The Great Gatsby because I was having a conversation about it with someone at the studio a couple of weeks ago and I realized that, damn, I've forgotten so much of it. It's been more than a decade (lots more) since I read it last, so it's interesting coming back to it as a (nearly) bona fide adult. Fitzgerald was a good writer, I think. Probably not a great one, but a very, very good one.

This is hilarious. I was googling around for more information about Zelda Fitzgerald and found this recipe she wrote when asked her to contribute to Favorite Recipes of Famous Women:

"See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy." 

 After Gatsby, I've got a 1922 novel called The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Arnim lined up.

Garden Altars

Sea Change, Take I

Too small to fit the space; maybe needs to be tucked away somewhere.

Detail:

Dismantled it.

Sea Altar, Take II

Don't know...the size fits the space better, but I'm not sure about it; missing something.

Coral detail:

Intended as insect dwellings. No insects have moved in, but it's still early. Maybe they're like bat houses; You put them up and four years later something moves in.

Egg Altar

Nascent Altar

Seems right so far. What next?

Shady Pines, Ma! Shady Pines!

Approaching Storm by NM artist Bruce Lowney

(at the Albuquerque Museum)

The last several days have been fairly typical for April in New Mexico: Hail, snow, wind. But what a difference a day makes: This weekend's forecast is for sunny, 80 degree days. 

Despite the crap weather, I've been busy on the patio, setting up altars and prepping for days of planting. We've decided to forgo our usual display of annual flowers and instead plant from the seed collection that we amassed last year around this time when Dave went a little nuts (with my encouragement) buying seeds. We didn't really put any effort into storing them correctly over the winter, so I imagine quite a few of them will be duds. Still, we'll plant them and (having failed to prepare for the worst) hope for the best anyway. 

When I'm not out on the patio dreaming of green things, I've been inside watching old episodes of The Golden Girls on youtube. When I was younger I thought that show was a drag, but twenty-five years later I really like it. More than liking it, I think it's hilarious. (Dave sniggered when I told him that.) Are there any shows like it on television anymore or is it all vampires and rich, bored housewives and po' white child pageant contestants? Are there witty widows and wise-cracking old ladies and I'm just missing them?

Oh, and I'm reading. I'm just barely scraping by the minimum of my weekly goals, true, but I did polish off Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader this afternoon.  Then I dove right back into Randolph Falcon Scott's antarctic journals, which are alternatively tedious and exciting--much like any travel narrative, I suppose, however extreme.

Spring in New Mexico Means...

No pictures, just words today.

Around here:

We've been working on the garden and patio recently, Dave and I. The raised beds are ready for planting but--lo and behold--tonight's forecast is for 10 to 60 mile per hour wind and snow in the mountains (though the temperature in the city is not predicted to drop below freezing). The wind is blowing the seeds from the elm trees and in a couple of weeks we'll be pulling handfuls of elm tree seedlings out of the garden beds and around the patio.

Spring in New Mexico is wind, pollen, allergies, dust, wind, cockroaches, wind and wind. I always forget this when, in the middle of winter, I long for spring.  Benadryl is my friend these days. My BFF Benny.

At the studio I've been working on various things, glazing the large planters I made months and months ago and making smaller hanging skull-shaped planters. We're likely to have a studio-wide sale at the end of June which I'll end up organizing. (The studio director wants no part of it beyond sending out postcards and paying someone to cashier during the sale.) I would like to unload some stuff. A lot is going to go for bargain prices, I'm sure. I need the room in the cubicle.

On the reading front, I'm taking a shotgun approach this week. I've got three--no, four books going all at once: The Uncommon Reader, Olive Kitteridge, I Await the Devil's Coming, and Journals: Captain Scott's  Last Expedition. I like Scott's (he, the famous Antarctic explorer) journals very much. But I'm a sucker for a good polar expedition tome. 

Spring Again

Shinjuku Sakura, Tokyo

SPRING

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots,
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Second April



Fallen sakura petals along the stairs in the tiny park--on the way home from the gym, 2 a.m., Higashi Mukojima, Tokyo.

That was an intense time, spring.

Fail! (March Reads)

One from the archives, a photo I called "Failure!" when I posted it on this day last year. (Ugh, has it really been a whole year?)



So March then might just be failure month for me. Want more proof?

I'm didn't make my monthly thirteen book goal this month. (So it's good that I'm six books up from January and February.) I'm going to blame the copious amounts of benadryl I've been taking for my allergies. I just wasn't feeling the books and the reading this month. I was mostly feeling the napping and the sneezing.

Anyway, this month's reads were a mixed bag: some emotional wallops and several busts. I wrote each little "review" as I finished the book (usually I wait until the end of the month and then do a massive round up), which is probably why there are fewer books and longer reviews.

Some of next month's books are already on their way from Amazon: I Await the Devil's Coming by Mary MacLane, True Grit by Charles Portis, Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Richard E. Byrd, The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, and Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. I've also got a biography of Lynda Barry (Lynda Barry: Girlhood Through the Looking Glass by Susan E. Kirtley) and a book called Ancient Rome in So Many Words by Christopher Francese in my basket, not yet ordered.

1. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis^

I picked up this book because someone on AskMetafilter recommended it. And I've been on a kind of Brit lit kick recently, what with the Churchill and the Mantel and so on. The novel's introduction is hilarious and makes it sound like the novel is also going to be hilarious. But. But instead of hilarity you get a kind of frantic energy that is supposed to be akin to--what?--some kind of "comedy." The novel ended up reminding me of an extended remix of every episode of Frasier ever.  Now, I happen to like Frasier, but what I learned about Frasier after watching eight seasons worth of it on Netflix in the span of about two weeks is that every episode has essentially the same plot (misunderstanding, frantic running around trying to cover up misunderstanding) and the main guy, Frasier, is the least likeable guy on the planet. I mean, you don't hate him (he is funny after all), but you don't much like him either. And that is the same thing with the main character of Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon. You won't hate Jim, but you definitely won't like him. In fact, there isn't a single truly likeable character in the novel. (In many ways very Brit lit, that.) Still, I'm glad I read it, if only because it often hits the top 100 novels you should read (or die trying) lists that get compiled by the pompous asses who work the lit crit angle and, since I'm apparently never going to get around to, say, Infinite Jest, at least I can bring knowledge of Lucky Jim to the party.

2. Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa

I liked this short collection of eleven strange short stories, each somehow linked to another. They had the definite sense of the uncanny that marks many Japanese ghost stories--and even  Japanese non-ghost stories like The Tale of Genji. I actually picked this book up because I mistakenly thought it was by another author, Yumiko Kurahashi, who wrote another book of eleven strange short stories, The Woman with The Flying Head. (Kurahashi's book is far superior.)

3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
and
4. Maggie-Now by Betty Smith*

I actually didn't pick up either of these books for the first time until I was an adult, sometime in my mid-twenties. And, saying that, I should add that though they have a reputation for being children's books, they aren't really; Betty Smith intended them to be novels for adults.  The copy I have is a two-fer, both novels together along with an introduction by Smith. I loved them immediately and have read them many times in the last 15 or so years. This time I was in tears from page one, not even the novel proper, but the introduction.  I know nothing about Betty Smith, though casting about online, I read that she published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn--her first novel--when she was in her mid-forties and that none of her subsequent novels (Maggie-Now was her third) reached the same success. I imagine that this is not the last time I will read these novels. Of the increasingly fewer number of books that I will re-read in my lifetime, this one has a permanent place on the list.

5. Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayals of Unconditional Love by Marilyn Van Derbur^

Holy shit, this book kicked my ass. Marilyn Van Derbur is a former Miss America. Her father began 
raping her when she was five years old and didn't stop until she was 18. She confronted him when she was 40, and he seemed contrite, but she later found out that he continued molesting and raping young girls until just before he died at the age of 76.  Her eldest sister, and possibly all three of her older sisters, were also raped by the father. (The mother, who later admits that she had some idea that it was happening, never apologizes or even acknowledges it beyond asking her daughter to not tell anyone in order to protect her (by then dead) father's reputation.) It might seem like the whole book is just violation after violation, but in fact the bulk of the book is about the long and painful process of recovery (most incest victims come undone in their 30's and 40's and can spend decades recovering, if they ever do) and about what parents can do to protect their children. It's definitely worth reading, but it packs a devastating emotional punch. There were times when my eyes were swollen almost shut from crying during the two days it took to read this book.

6. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling^

Reviewers have compared this to Tina Fey's Bossypants, but in fact, it's funnier. There's less substance to it (which Kaling admits, saying that it's a two day book at best, so if you're reading it every night for a month, you've got a problem), yes, but there are more laughs.  It was a quick, light read. I needed that after Miss America by Day.

7. 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill***

I abandoned this collection of short stories about halfway through the first story, midway through a description of a boy whose eyes have been gouged out by a serial killer who's curious to see how long the boy will live after being thusly mutilated. Don't need such images in my brain, thanks.

7. Hatchet by Gary Paulsen^

I've been wanting to read this young adult novel by Paulsen for a while now, so I kindled it. It's a relatively bare bones story about a thirteen-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of a plane that crashes in the Canadian wilderness. I probably would have rolled my eyes at this book when I was younger, but then again maybe not; I mean, when I was younger I thought that Judy Blume was an interesting and credible writer. (I was gullible, a gullible pre-teen reader of fiction, is what I'm saying.) One of the things that struck me as I read Paulsen's novel was how generally devoid of complex emotion it was. In that regard, Blume (and even Paul Zindel, another of my pre-teen/teen favorite authors) have him beat, hands down. Still, I found this short novel interesting enough that I might read the four follow up novels that Paulsen wrote involving the same character.

8. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver^

Should have called it "Animal, Vegetable, Insufferable." The first and last Kingsolver book I will ever read. (However, if you decide to read it, here's my suggestion: Skip all the preachy parts. Then you're really only looking at reading, like, ten or so pages of a 400 page book. So there's that.) Want a summary? Rich white lady and her family move to a farm, spend thousands and thousands of dollars to renovate it, then raise their own food for a year so as to have more ammunition to make you feel bad for ever eating packaged food. Or something. Something? Anyway, lots of lecturing from a very high horse for those of you into that sort of thing. For example: A young guest's request for bananas at the grocery store is haughtily and very publicly denied (and then later mocked in print) because--quelle horreur!--bananas are not locally grown. (But, shhhh, ignore the man behind the curtain that delivers the family's monthly rations of equally non-local coffee, wine, wheat flour (from which they bake their own bread, natch), pasta, oatmeal, spices, olive oil, hard cheeses, and on and on.) Same ole, same ole hypocrisy.

9. Agnes Gray by Anne Bronte^

I'm not well-versed in the Bronte sisters' work to be honest. And I only kindled this one because it was free. However, turns out that I actually liked this surprisingly modern novel (that was published 166 years ago). The first part is an honest in its depiction of the kinds of nuclear family-oriented parents and children that likely have always and will always exist, as seen through the eyes of a young governess. (Turns out that spoiled, brutal, selfish children and their indulgent parents are a transcultural phenomenon.) The second part is pure Bronte sisters, as I understand it: a presumably unrequited love turns out to be very much requited. I enjoyed this book very much.

10. Villette by Charlotte Bronte^

Thought I'd pick up another novel by another Bronte after liking Anne's book so much. This one though--ay yi yi--reads like a semester-long survey course in British Victorian Gothic literature. Creepy stuff. And tedious. And it beat me. I'm not proud to say it, but I got my ass kicked by a Bronte sister. I gave up on it about half-way through.

10.  George's Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dahl

A book for children 8-12, so says the cover. I picked it up because we have a shelf of Roald Dahl books--why?--that I never touch. I mean, I like Roald Dahl; didn't read him until I was an adult though, when I picked up his autobiographical books Boy and Going Solo, but I like his stuff for adults. For some reason (I'm going to egotistically suggest--ha, ha--that it's because I was such a precocious young reader), I never picked up his stuff for children when I was a child. The Dahl books we have are used bookstore finds reaching back to my 20's. So what about this book? Would've made a fine bedtime book for children who had parents who read them bedtime books, I imagine.

11. The Pot Thief Who Studied Pythagoras by J. Michael Orenduff^

My first foray into local fiction, recommended by one of the men at the studio. I laughed at least once, when the main character is talking with another about Socrates and he says about The Cave, "It was an allegory," and she replies, "No, I think it was a real cave." Otherwise not an amazing book; I suspect all the good Amazon reviews were written by J. Michale Orenduff.

12.

13.


_______________
This is the legend:
*-Re-read
**-Finishing a previously shamefully abandoned book
***-Begun and shamelessly abandoned
^-Kindled 

New Altars (Quick Pics)

A few quick and dirty pics of new garden altars, just out of the kiln this afternoon.

I want to start with a detail shot, just because I love this glaze action going on here:



Damn. Check that out. That is Annie's Mix clay with a wash of iron oxide then a run of glazes: Archie's base, ice blue, mottled blue, blue purple, cactus crawl, and blue crawl. The strange bare clay protruding bits are meant to hold the kinds of bits and pieces that outdoor altars seem to collect, rocks and feathers and such. We'll see how they work. If they work.

Anyway, here's the bigger picture:



This is one of my favorites of the five I fired yesterday. It's much calmer in person than in the photo. (Note however the crack that runs along the middle of the floor. That, I think, is the result of my impatience when working with too soft clay. I put the feet on the piece too soon then tried to dry it standing and uncovered which made it dry unevenly, front to back, ultimately causing the split.)

Here's the next altar:



This is the same clay and iron oxide wash, glazed with mint and gun metal green. I added shelves to this one, though I don't know how I feel about the shelves. We'll have to see how they function, I suppose. I like the little windows though.



This next altar is my egg altar. No joke. I made it about six inches deep so that it could hold an ostrich egg my mother gave me a few years ago. It will be joined by a ceramic egg I traded for at the studio. I imagine other eggs will come along with time.



Picture it in your mind, an ostrich egg standing in for The Madonna.

And a bit of vulval detail:



I wanted the interior to be pink, obviously, so I layered Archie's base over white. The most simple glaze combination of the lot actually.

This is what i called my wild card:



I don't think it photographs well; it's visually very chaotic. Mentally, too, it was very chaotic to build. The four pockets on the side and the single long pocket on the front (though it's hard to tell from the photo that there is a pocket in the front) are meant to hold cut flowers.  There are seven glazes on this altar, three of which I'd never used before (or had only used on miniscule test tiles): black, saturated iron, red gold, blue crawl, saturated gold, lustrous jade, and textured turquoise.

Detail: 



I like this altar if only because it is the least like me.

And this, the largest of the five:



Cracked right down the middle in the glaze firing.



There's probably a lesson in that.

I had a hard time photographing these things. The late afternoon sunlight was a little too intense and the inside fluorescent lights too dull. I had a hard time getting the true colors of the glazes right. Maybe I'll photograph them again once they're in place in the garden and have started doing their work.

Time Stands Still

Not a sculpture, but a stack of three free-form bowls, just out of the bisque kiln.  Stacked bowls sometimes crack me up. Like this run of spouted bowls in Simon Leach's Pennsylvania studio:

Pucker up, buttercup!

We spent a chunk of the day--six hours or so--at the studio. David and Judi were raku-ing and I helped out with pulling the work in between loading a bisque kiln (wanted to get my work in, didn't want anyone else handling it) and glazing my altars. (Well, glazing one altar, the one I like to think of as my wild card altar.) Can't wait to fire the four I have glazed.

Reading the Year Away

I'm chugging along at a snail's pace this month, feels like. Eight books into my monthly thirteen book goal, I'm fighting every page feels like. I blame spring for both drawing me outdoors and knocking me for a loop allergy-wise. (Ugh. My sinuses feel like they're packed with those strange, pokey bits you have left after you punch out all the parts to build model airplanes. Only, you know, surrounded with runny mucus. Benadryl helps with the allergies, but not with the reading comprehension, you know?)

Anyway, last night I read Gary Paulsen's Newbery Award-winning young adult novel Hatchet and started in on Barbara Kingsolver's preachy little tome Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Shoulda called it "Animal, Vegetable, Miserable." "Animal, Vegetable, Insufferable." Why can't every "food writer" write like M.F.K. Fisher? That's really what I want to know. I mean when ol' M.F.K. looked down her nose at you food-wise, it was a class act all the way: You were duly chastised and resolved to do better, to cook better, to eat better, to be more thoughtful and more thankful for your daily bread. When Kingsolver tries to preach at you, you just roll your eyes and tuck into that fatty, greasy, artery clogging Big Mac anyway. Or I do at least.  Kingsolver's entire preachy family gets in on the act, too, just about. (The pre-teen daughter is allowed to sit this one out, being, quote, too young to sign a book contract, unquote.) Her husband writes his little preachy little bits about the evils of commercial farming. And her nineteen-year-old daughter writes her preachy little lectures about the values of eating vegetables with that special brand of annoyingly earnest naivete that privileged white college girls manage to raise to an art form.

So yeah. Not getting along too well with the Kingsolver book.

Hairy Matters (For the Record)

(Every once in a while I remember that this is not just a pottery and books blog, but also a personal blog, where I (used to anyway) record personal things. This is just me then, getting back to my roots.)

So this happened.

Yes, that's an (out of focus) pile of my own hair. (It looks grosser on camera than it did in real life.)

I hacked it off Thursday night, around midnight. No, I wasn't drunk. I've just been wanting to cut a few inches (about 5 or 6) off and finally it was time to do it.

It looks like a massacre from that pile of hair, no? But actually I cut it from hip length to waist length, so not a drastic change (especially considering that I wear it up most of the time). I almost cut it shorter, but then I put on my glasses and had a look and decided to wait a bit before going shorter. (I should probably invest in some more suitable scissors though before doing that.)

These were my tools:

Yes, a janky old mirror, my wooden comb with a couple of teeth missing, and the kitchen scissors that were last used to cut open a jumbo-sized package of Snapea Crisps from Costco.

It's been, lessee, a few months since my last "trim" (which was kind of hilarious considering that, yes, I used the same scissors, forgot to comb my hair out before cutting, and just hacked off about 3 inches of daggy ends off). Before that, it hadn't been cut at all for seven years. 

Oceanic Inspiration et Book Soapboxing

Look at these beauties that Kelly brought back from Florida!



This.



And this.



And this!



How crazy is this?!



Now to do them in clay...

Take A Ride on the Reading!

I am so far behind this month. Only four and a half books into my thirteen book goal and almost halfway through the month. Ay yi yi. It's not like I've been out saving the world, either. I've just been indecisive about what to move onto next and next and next, book-wise.

Right now I'm reading Miss America by Day, which is amazing. You can buy a hard copy for around $18, but I kindled a copy for under $10.

And speaking of Kindle, I have to say that I've gotten a bit spoiled kindling things. I say spoiled because first, I can have a book in under a minute in the middle of the night without leaving the comfort of my own bed. (Instant downloading easily beats Amazon Prime's 2-day shipping.) And second, because as expensive as kindling a book is, it's not as expensive as buying a copy of a book in a bookstore. In fact, it used to annoy me that I was handing Amazon $10 for a non-thing, a book that I didn't even get to hold in my hand. But I was at the bookstore (Barnes et Noble) a few days ago with my mom and aunt and I thought I'd pick something up and so I picked something up, saw that I was going to pay $15.95 plus tax for it and I put it back down again. C'mon, seven bucks is seven bucks, you know? I mean, yes, I'm sad that the book industry is crumbling. Or is it? Random House just handed Lena Dunham a $3.7 million dollar advance for an advice book. And Tina Fey got a $6 million dollar advance for Bossypants, so, you know, maybe all that crumbling is not my fault for not wanting to pay an extra seven bucks for a book. But then again, libraries, used bookstores and free book exchanges didn't kill the publishing industry either. And not to pick on Random House, but their recent 200-300% increase in prices for ebooks sold to libraries doesn't make for a charitable incline on my part, you know?

Anyway, enough from my soapbox.

We've had the plumbers in for the last few days (which has been only just slightly less expensive, I'll bet, than having an actual live-in plumber) and I'm ready to take a nice, long, hot shower and drink a big, big glass of water, and maybe even do some dishes! Or mop the floors! The sky's the limit, plumbing-wise!

The Naked and the Black

This is a kind of unruly clay from Laguna called B-3. This vase is about five or six inches tall, thrown and stamped with the stamps I carved. It's fired to cone six, unglazed.

Here's another smaller vase, made the same way.

This is the same vase as up top along with bisqued pieces of the same clay.

I love the color transitions. In the bag, the clay is a kind of dark chocolate color that pales out to various shades of brown in the bisque firing and then goes black in the final firing.

I call this clay unruly not because it's difficult to throw (in fact it's a dream to throw) but because the glazes that I have tried almost uniformly hate this clay. There are one or two glazes that sit very heavily on the clay and don't run at all in the firing that work, yes, but the fit is so bad that if I only glaze the inside of the pieces (leaving the gorgeous black clay bare on the outside) the pieces tend to crack in half. I tried putting some clear on it and though the clear normally doesn't budge on other clay, on this clay it ran off the piece and stuck it to the shelf.

So bare it is. Naked as little jaybirds.

What else have I been working on? Well, altars and altar accessories mainly.

These little scrappy roses are bits of groggy, iron-oxide rich Annie's mix (around some highly textured B-3 bowls).

This is an altar I made last week, the smallest of the five I've put together recently. I was toying with the idea of having little shelves inside to place little things on, as one does with little shelves.

Damn, my cell phone camera is effed up. Lens is all scratched, I think, so all my photos are nice and fuzzy.

On The Book Front

Damn, I am being lazy so far this month, only have made it through one book and two half books this week. I finished...what was it? Oh, yes, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, and I began both A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (a re-read, obvs) and Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Yoko Ogawa.

I meant to start in on everything Hilary Mantel has ever written, honest, but after I kindled and read samples from each of her novels, I was hit with a kind of decision-based paralysis and I was unable to choose which novel I wanted to read. I had to step away and think about it for a bit.

While I was flitting around the Amazon site looking for my next victims, I downloaded a bunch of free stuff I've never read but probably should: Persuasion by Jane Austen, Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Tess of d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and a handful of others.

One of the things that I've realized from my ongoing reading resolution is just how many books are not worth keeping. I mean, I used to be a Book Collector. Capital B, capital C. I kept every single book I ever bought; I felt obligated to do it. I started my descent from Book Collector to book collector when I worked in a bookstore and handled thousands of books a month, stripping covers off of paperbacks and marking down the stuff that didn't sell, and saw what kind of profit margins (40% plus, usually) new books have. That erased a lot of the respect I had for books themselves, honestly. From there, I stripped my collection down to next to nothing before moving to Japan, and I stopped thinking of myself as a collector (of books or anything really). And now, looking at what I'm likely (or more likely unlikely) to want to or have time to re-read in the coming years, I have to say that I'm very much disinclined to hang on to books. Of the 32 books I've read since New Year's, I'd probably keep maybe--maybe--six. Maybe.

Change is good though, no?

February Reads

Sticking to the ol' New Year's resolution to read 3 books a week (or 13 books a month or 156 books a year, depending on which counting scheme works out for the best).  I ended up kindling a lot of stuff from Amazon this month, even though I have scads of paper books already queued up. Ay yi yi. I've got to get myself to a decent used bookstore in the very near future.

Anyway, these were February's reads:

1. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

I really enjoyed this book, even though I feel it's a good but not great novel. I probably would never have read it if Ang Lee's movie hadn't been so compelling, but it was and I did and I'm glad.

2. A Double-Barreled Detective Story by Mark Twain**^

A strangely complicated little novel that mocks Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures. In it, Sherlock Holmes finds himself in the American west to visit his nephew, Fetlock Jones, who commits a murder right under the nose of his clueless uncle. The great detective is reduced to size with great relish by Twain, who delights in aping Doyle's writing style.

3. Rifling Through My Drawers by Clarissa Dickson Wright**^

Reading this chronicle of a year in the life of Clarissa Dickson Wright was a chore. Don't get me wrong, I love CDW. I mean, her life: She was, of course, the younger and fatter of the Two Fat Ladies. Her father was a surgeon to the British royal family. She was the youngest woman lawyer in Britain (though later disbarred). She drank and gambled away a literal fortune, inherited from her mother, an Australian heiress. But given a lifetime of material like that to work with, the book is a chaotic and uninspiring biographical collection of--what?--rants about "antis" (PETA types in Britain who protest things like fox hunts), rambling AA stories, overly long reminiscences about her cataract surgery, and recipes for things you'll never, in a million years, cook. Sadly, this book reminds me of Susan Powter's book Stop the Insanity which I purchased years ago at a thrift store for 98 cents and actually brought it home and read. Yikes. It reads like one long cocaine-fueled rant. Stop the Insanity? More like, Put Down the Coke Spoon, Girl.) Anyway, I hope Wright received a hefty fee for her book because I like her anyway and I want her to be comfortable in her old age.

4. Pollyanna
and
5. Pollyanna Grows Up by Eleanor H. Porter^

When I was in my early 20's, a young man I was dating called me 'The Anti-Pollyanna,' and I knew exactly what he meant even though I'd never read either book. Still, twenty years on, I'll admit I teared up now and again at this pair of easy reads.  They're definitely not at the level of Louisa May Alcott's books for girls (Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, etc.), nor do they remotely approach the emotional complexity of Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but I would still recommend them to little girls. (Though I seriously doubt that very many modern little girls would be the least bit interested in them.)

6. An Englishman's Travels in America His Observation of Life and Manners in the Free and Slave States by John Benwell**^

This was a Project Gutenberg find about an Englishman traveling in America in the mid-1800's, just prior to the Civil War. He travels through huge swaths of the country by horse, by carriage and wagon, by train, by boat and steamship, and by foot. He is understandably appalled by the treatment of slaves and Indians, who were then being hunted by the federal government. He had intended to emigrate to America, but a few months in very primitive conditions in Florida (alligators, Indians) changed his mind and he returned to England.

7. Everyday Matters by Danny Gregory

An artist writes and draws about his family life, his young son, and his wife, who became paraplegic after an accident in which she was run over by a subway train. Danny Gregory interests me in part because he visibly struggles with something I have problems with, mainly how to pick oneself up and move on from a devastating event.

8. Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes^

You know, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was written, I believe, in part so that Hughes could introduce his young son to the ins and outs of public (British public, not American public) school before sending him off to one.  Though it was published in 1857, it is remarkably modern. In some ways, it reminded me of The Great Brain series (which I adored as a young girl, young, like, first or second grade-aged).

9. A Daughter's Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill's Youngest Child by Mary Soames^

There are only a very few passages in this greatly under-developed book that make reading it worthwhile. The best it has to offer is a criminally brief description of a wartime, middle-of-the-night walk through a deserted, blacked-out London, the way lit only by a full moon. The story picks up in the last chapters, as WWII comes to a close and Winston Churchill is voted out of Parliament. Just as abruptly as it becomes interesting, the book ends.

10. God, If You're Not Up There I'm F*cked: Tales of Stand Up, Saturday Night Live, and Other Mind-Altering Mayhem by Darrell Hammond^

I'm actually glad I read this, Hammond's terrifying autobiography which documents his personal life as it spun out of control for decades as a result of PTSD from childhood trauma. The smallest part of the story, thankfully, is about his stand-up comedy and time on SNL.

11. Girl Walks into a Bar...: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch^

Another SNL alumni writes an autobiography. I laughed in a couple of places. The bulk of the book is about her search for love (still ongoing, apparently) and a relatively unintended pregnancy at the age of 43.

12. Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller^

Kindled because I seemed to be on an SNL kick and it was cheap enough--under $7.00.  It was worth about half that.

13. My Early Life by Winston Churchill^

Churchill is a delight to me, a treat, so I took a leisurely five days to read this autobiographical work. I find him hilarious, laugh-out-loud-ly so. His early memories--earliest memories, in some cases--are sweet and strange as early memories tend to be and he jokes about them in an easy, charming manner. My favorite read of the month.

14.Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson^

An amazing YA novel about a young woman with anorexia whose best friend's death nearly puts her over the edge. The New York Times loved it and I did too. I would read more by this author, even given my complicated relationship with YA stuff. (I still feel burned by Judi Blume.)

15. Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi by Bob Woodward^

I'm on an SNL jag, I guess. This was the best of the SNL-oriented books I waded into this month--at least the first half of it was. The drug binges get tedious and oppressive after awhile (always true, and it almost made me abandon the book) and the whole thing ends rather abruptly (though I guess that is how it all ended for Belushi anyway, no?).  One of the eye opening footnotes was about the scads of money Belushi (and many Hollywood stars) burn through on a monthly basis, so much so that Belushi's $2500 a week plus for drugs was a very tiny drop in a very big bucket. The other eye-opening bit was how open many of the big and biggish names (Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Robin Williams, Ed Begley Jr., Treat Williams, Carrie Fisher, Penny Marshall, Betty Buckley, and on and on and on) were about their drug use and abuse. Reminds me of Mia Farrow's recent tweet during the Oscars broadcast: "You can tell who's doing coke."

16. Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir by Hilary Mantel

My god, this woman can write. Just this first foray into her work (and she's published eight novels before this memoir) is enough to convince me that she writes books that are worth killing trees for. Wow.

________________________________________________________
These were my January Reads.
This is the legend:
*-Re-read
**-Finishing a previously shamefully abandoned book
***-Begun and shamelessly abandoned
^-Kindled

Altar'd State

This doesn't look like much yet, my green altar. (Green as in dried but not yet fired, not green as in color, or even as in environmentally friendly.)

Hard to tell, but it's maybe twelve inches tall, maybe eight inches wide, and around six inches in depth. Once it's glazed (blue? pink? on the inside only) and fired, it'll go onto the patio; I intend for it to hold eggs of one kind or another.

I've completed four altars so far; this is the first, the next two are larger, the final one smaller. As always, the next question is: Where do you/I go from here?

On the Reading Front

I finished up Wired, the John Belushi biography, finally. Talk about tedious. Reading about addicts turns out to be as tedious as dealing with addicts. Who knew? Toward the end I was like, oh god, just OD already. (I would not make a good interventionist.) Anyway, now I'm reading the most amazing book: Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir by Hilary Mantel. (Here's a review of it in the The Guardian UK. And here is a sizable chunk of the book in The London Review of Books.) I'm just snobby enough literature-wise that it's not often I come across a writer who makes me think that what they write is worth killing trees for, you know? But goddamn can this woman write. I don't want this book to end, like, ever.

The Mantel book is the 16th book I've read this month, one of thirty-two books so far in 2013. I was telling David yesterday that even at this pace (which admittedly feels much less breakneck two months in), and given my expected lifespan, I'm realistically only going to read around 6,000 more books. Like, ever.  Now, maybe 6,000 books sounds like a lot to you, but honestly it sounds like next to nothing to me. Google tells me that in all of modern history, only around 130,000,000 books have been published. 6,000 is 0.0045% of that figure. In all my years, past-present-future, of dedicated (and not so dedicated) reading, I'll have read far fewer than nine-tenths of one percent of all published books by the time I'm dead and buried.  Can't think too much about any of that though.

February Sucks Generally

As we were leaving the studio this evening, locking doors and turning out lights, there was a  pottery book on the front desk, something probably published in the 1940s by the look of it. I opened it at random to this page:

Ay yi yi. You have to laugh, really; You could reverse those captions and it wouldn't make any more--or any less--sense.

Anyway, as you know, February sucks. Good thing it's a relatively short month, short and sucky. I don't know why it's so sucky, but it is. They try to fool you with Valentine's Day, but that sinks like a rock in the middle of the month. (And for those of you without Valentines, it makes the month even worse, doesn't it?) So.

What have I been doing besides resenting February?

Well, I've been reading like a fiend. I was a bit worried about making my monthly reading goal (set at new year's as 3 books a week or 13 books a month), but it's been no problem at all. I'm a quarter of the way through my fifteenth book and will probably make it through at least a couple more before the end of the month. It's been crazy, subject-wise. I've read biographical works by and about Winston Churchill, Rachel Dratch, and Darrell Hammond. I've read novels about teenaged anorexics and little British schoolboys. I've read books for children published one hundred and fifty years ago and books for adolescents written last year.  Right now, I'm mired in Bob Woodward's unflinching biography of John Belushi.  I'll have a full list in another few days, my monthly book report.

At the studio I've been building altars. (Wind me up and set me down and sooner rather than later I'll end up making altars. I'm always only ever in search of the perfect altar.) I've made two so far, both intended to go onto the patio when they're finished.  One is going to hold eggs, ceramic mostly but also ostrich. The other? Well, we'll see.

I've been using Annie's Mix to build the altars, a kind of clay that I have limited experience with. It's made by Laguna, but was actually developed in the studio where I work for an artist I met a long time ago, Annie Rogers. Annie died a couple of years ago, but her clay (red, groggy) lives on. (Her little kitty Saba also lives on, adopted by Dave and me after Annie died.)

The days are getting longer of course, thankfully. Today you could sit on the patio in the sun, but midweek we woke to a couple of inches of snow on the ground. It's getting time to turn over the soil in the garden and to start thinking about seeds and growing and such. I'd like more peas and beans this year and lots of sunflowers. Both Dave and Kelly seem happy to grow any- and/or everything. Kevin mentioned a tomato plant he'd like to put in. Spring will be here before you know it.