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.