ripe

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The time has almost come. One week from tomorrow our first child will be married.

The second she was born 28 years ago, her eyes shone big, round and clear. They say newborn eyes can't focus well, but whatever the birthing room's morning light fell upon, she seemed to absorb and approve of through those little portholes of hers. She has always been ready to take in as much of the world as she can fit.

Before she learned to walk, she learned to run. We never used a leash, but maybe that would have preserved a year or two of our lives.

At age 6, shortly after we moved to Istanbul, she corrected my halting Turkish when I misunderstood our door woman - stating sweetly, "No, mommy, she asked if you wanted bread delivered today."

When we returned to the U.S., she fell in love with Elijah Wood and decided to become a marine biologist after seeing "Flipper," maybe hoping that would get her closer to him.

For a while she preferred her hair pink or blue to its natural medium brown. She wore army boots with skirts. I'm ashamed to say I was embarrassed when people stared at her extravagantly in our conservative town. That embarrassment was so much more about me than her. But I did let her have pink hair.

She dove into mosh pits. She totalled a car. She changed majors at community college until she found Design. She exploded beauty out her fingertips, and Art School sent her to the Furniture Design show in Milan. She got a job and moved to New York.

She fell in love, this time with a Philosopher, not a Movie Star - thank goodness. We fell in love with him too. With our family and friends we will witness their vows, toast their long happiness and dance until midnight. The fireflies will watch us from the tops of the black locust trees, and I will watch for your eyes too from the lower tree limbs of the orchard, you enthusiastic friends who have touched me with your interest and support. And then back to real life - the work of taking in the world as much as we can fit.

I will see you after the wedding and share moments of the day - of course!

All my love.

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Carol Ann Duffy: first female Poet Laureate of Britain

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Not that I was paying any attention to who were British poets laureate up till now (don't mean to sound proud of that), but for the first time in 341 years the Brits have honored a woman as poet laureate. John Dryden 1631-1700, below, was the first. (Others were Tennyson, Wordsworth, Ted Hughes. It is a surprisingly short list - 19 - considering the span of time, but since appointments were for life, some served decades after their appointments.) The New York Times piece about Duffy's ten-year appointment is here. The news has been out a while, but I had stopped reading newspapers online when my job got stressful in March. Do you do that? Stop reading the news when you're blinded with stress? Then I got happily distracted by the upcoming wedding. Anyway, I started writing this back in May, and it kept getting pushed to the back burner. So it's old news by now, but maybe you missed it.

A Scottish playwright, poet and children's story writer (including adaptations of stories by the Brothers Grimm), as well as Creative Director of the Manchester Metropolitan University's Writing School, Duffy calls herself “a poet and a mother — that’s all” and is both popular and brilliant. Apparently she took the job only because she would be the first woman in the role.

Meager book reader that I am - so no reflection on her or her popularity - I had neither heard of Duffy nor read any of her poems. If I lived in the UK I would have known her as the most popular poet for the past decade. I see that she has written some wonderful, edgy story poems, some of them about imagined wives of famous men.

Four things I found out about Carol Ann Duffy that interest me:

• She's 53, close to my age.
• She was considered for the job of poet laureate ten years ago, but they didn't choose her because she is a Lesbian. (Wow, first female and first openly gay person in the role.) But she says the media have been making too much of this, and she's tired of the imagined controversy. (Andrew Motion was picked that round.)
  
• She's a mom - to 13-year-old, Ella. (Ella's father is the writer, Peter Benson, which indicates she is actually bi-sexual. NOTE: thank you for the correction in your comment, Ginnie. This does not necessarily indicate that.)
  
• Besides her annual salary of 5,700 pounds, she will get a traditional reward of a "butt of sack" — about 600 bottles of sherry, donated by the Sherry Institute of Spain (Ten Star Tapas is their online guide for cooking with sherry). Back when Dryden received his butt of sack, dark libraries with roaring fires were full of men mumbling in flat British dialogue, fingers pinching sherry glasses. I wonder what she'll do with it. Maybe she'd share some with me after the wedding when it's time to relax. I would want a fino, dry and light, none of that sweet Jerez Dulce. Remember Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado"? Amontillado is a bit darker than fino, because it is exposed to oxygen. I digress.
  

Her most famous collection of poems - it does sound intriguing - is the 1999 The World's Wife, a skeptical view of "great men" from the view of their wives, like Queen Herod, or Pope Joan, Mrs Lazarus and Mrs Foust. Mrs Darwin's words: "Seventh of April 1952, Went to the zoo. I said to him, 'Something about that chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.'"

Duffy's popularity with even teenagers in Britain, and now the attention she's garnering for being the first woman poet laureate (and the first openly gay one), seem to set her up nicely to educate the masses that poetry matters - as her predecessor Andrew Motion put it, poetry isn't a "weird addition to life but a primitive thing at the centre of life." In these days of Twitter poetry (hey, President Obama digs Urdu poetry; when did he have time to learn Urdu? I think it shouldn't be read in translation; I digress again) Duffy can remind us that poems should be NEW, kick us in the pants, shake up our brain synapses and leave us wondering why we never saw the world like that before - and yet as if you always knew it. But I'm not going to toss out my 17th Century Prose & Poetry anthology from college, which contains Dryden's essays, and also one of my favorite poems: "Upon Julia's Clothes" by Robert Herrick. Pretty sexy for 17th century (though Herrick died a bachelor). Oh wait. Shakespeare already showed us the 17th century was sexy.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES

by Robert Herrick

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me !

If you don't like or usually read poems, why not give it a go? This is history, my dear. Well, and that's the name of one of Duffy's poems - rather heavy. Read it and feel something shift.

History

She woke up old at last, alone,
bones in a bed, not a tooth
in her head, half dead, shuffled
and limped downstairs
in the rag of her nightdress,
smelling of pee.

Slurped tea, stared
at her hand--twigs, stained gloves--
wheezed and coughed, pulled on
the coat that hung from a hook
on the door, lay on the sofa,
dozed, snored.

She was History.
She'd seen them ease him down
from the Cross, his mother gasping
for breath, as though his death
was a difficult birth, the soldiers spitting,
spears in the earth;

been there
when the fisherman swore he was back
from the dead; seen the basilicas rise
in Jerusalem, Constantinople, Sicily; watched
for a hundred years as the air of Rome
turned into stone;

witnessed the wars,
the bloody crusades, knew them by date
and by name, Bannockburn, Passchendaele,
Babi Yar, Vietnam. She'd heard the last words
of the martyrs burnt at the stake, the murderers
hung by the neck,

seen up-close
how the saint whistled and spat in the flames,
how the dictator strutting and stuttering film
blew out his brains, how the children waved
their little hands from the trains. She woke again,
cold, in the dark,

in the empty house.
Bricks through the window now, thieves
in the night. When they rang on her bell
there was nobody there; fresh graffiti sprayed
on her door, shit wrapped in a newspaper posted
onto the floor.

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echoes

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Colors echo
between a Norway maple and a tiger lily

and then a little bee
imitates
the shape of the lily's anthers




like open parentheses

and you know the parallels will go on
always
between them

as well as
between you and me
as we keep changing positions

to understand each other.

I thought I could change the world. It took me a hundred years to figure out I can't change the world. I can only change Bessie. And, honey, that ain't easy either.
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- Annie Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany, at 104 (as quoted in The SUN magazine's Sunbeams page, April 2009, Sunbeams are only in the hard copy I think)

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Enjoy the good

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It takes all of us to make a balanced world. But silly me I fight battles where there aren't any, usually little skirmishes inside my head and heart. I can tell someone not to compare themselves with anyone else, but I'm not as good at believing it for myself.

Prepping for Farm Wedding day right here where we live, I've watched my sister scrape, sand and paint the porch and deck four days straight. I've watched my niece weed the veggie and flower beds and paint the studio roof in the hot sun for hours on end. I've watched Don build a fence, straighten the barns and a dozen other tasks. I've watched Peter dig dirt, haul pea gravel, design a stoop for l'atelier and paint roofs. Me? I've watched myself float from laundry line to flower beds to the stove and the sink, all things I enjoy. I compare tasks, and mine come up short.

But by the end of the second day when my dear, weary hard working family was eating a meal outside that I had loved fixing, and we sat there in that perfect evening light with a breeze touching the outside of us while warm food and wine touched the inside - I got it - and actually felt a little proud.

My sister loves to paint, making everything fresh. My niece loves to weed and see what she accomplished. My husband loves to piddle in his barns and garden. I love to plant flowers, hang laundry, cook, organize and clean. Carrying a tray of farm glasses outside full of cold well water to the troops makes me happy, and so does chopping garlic and an hour later smelling its musk on my fingers. Just as there is a time to work and a time to rest, different people are good at different things and have different roles. I had to remind myself of my Christmas post.

And as my sister later said, she'd rather work 8 hours scraping, sanding and painting than spending one hour in the kitchen cooking.

No, I didn't bake this chocolate torte, but it sure was good. I did make the savory spaghetti from scratch. It was the perfect balance.



Ecclesiastes 3

¹To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

²A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

³A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

⁴A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

⁵A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

⁶A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

⁷A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

⁸A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. . . .

. . .

¹³And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God. . . .

. . .

²⁰All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

Listen to Pete Seeger, and members of The Byrds - Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby talk about Pete Seeger's song "Turn, Turn, Turn" that he wrote in 1959 pretty much word for word Ecclesiastes 3. Of course Seeger added that last line to verse 8, as well as the refrain "turn, turn, turn":

A time to love, a time to hate
A time of peace, I swear it's not too late!

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Sunday morning

At 7 in the morning
the leaves on each plant and every tree
channel the sun.
They haul fire without effort
like bird wings soaring, gliding.
No movement,
no flame,
they burn
into air.
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HOME

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Trying to stay informed and sane at the same time seems impossible. Just when I'd spent five days following the Iran protests (even started a Twitter account to do that), I watched a movie about how close our planet is to being utterly depleted. By us. At the Group of 8, China and India refuse to commit to a plan to reduce carbon emissions and lower the global temperature by two degrees. Remember who else refused to participate not too long ago? Oh yeah, there are other problems in the world too (stretching my neck side to side, right shoulder, then left). I don't mean to be harping on this being overwhelmed thing. It is what it is: a devastating, overwhelming planet.

Peter in Paris had told me it was to be June 5 - World Environment Day - when Yann Arthus-Bertrand (of the NGO GoodPlanet) would release his film HOME that had taken 18 months to shoot in 54 countries entirely from a helicopter and is completely copyright free and not-for-profit. I could have watched it then on my computer, or on TV, but I waited for it on my Netflix queue.




In the first few minutes the photography was gorgeous, but the pace felt plodding and the mystical Gaya music a tedious cliche. I started folding laundry, telling myself to stick with it, it was my duty. Then Glenn Close's voice and Arthus-Bertrand's saturated images slowed me down seductively, horrifyingly.




I left the pile of towels and took a seat. Don too sat down to watch and listen. As we watched we continuously paused the DVD to absorb what had just been said or shown, to lock eyes in stunned disbelief, or to discuss.

Synopsis

In 200,000 years on earth humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it's too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its spoilation of the Earth's riches and change its patterns of consumption. By bringing us unique footage from over fifty countries, all seen from the air, by sharing with us his wonder and his concern, with this film Yann Arthus-Bertrand lays the foundation stone for the edifice that, together, we must rebuild.

The photography itself is extraordinary art. Entirely shot from a bird's eye view, some scenes appear artificial, such as the iceberg island in the top photo or the heart below.



Like me, you'll choose to watch this or not. But let me say, I thought it would be "preaching to the choir." I mean, I'm already convinced we have to change our carbon emitting and consumer driven ways. But this film puts visuals on the data, and it's chilling.

The movie HOME isn't just about eating sustainably and locally grown food, but it's one issue I can focus on. I am more convinced than ever to buy every morsel of food locally that I can. One protein source for us that uses land more efficiently than beef or pork (as for chicken, Don raises our own) : Michigan beans. Check out a big list of delicious-sounding recipes from the Michigan Bean Commission (which allows no GMOs, by the way). One of them is below, though I haven't tried it yet.

I was happy to learn from some post-HOME-movie digging that wild caught Pacific salmon is pretty much sustainable. I'm still not in love with having it shipped all the way from Alaska to my door in Michigan, but at least it's riding on a plane with a lot of other goods. I hope.

It's an overwhelming planet we live on. It has abilities to heal itself in ways we haven't discovered yet, almost miraculously with its dazzling Life. I hope it isn't too late for us human beans.

Navy Beans and Eggplant Curry


1 (16-ounce) can navy Beans, drained and rinsed
1 medium eggplant, peeled and cubed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons oil, divided
2 tablespoons curry powder
1 teaspoon cumin
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3/4 cup vegetable stock
2 carrots, sliced
2 cups potatoes, diced
1 green bell pepper, sliced
2 cups onions, chopped
2 cups cauliflower florets
2 medium zucchini, sliced
2 cups tomatoes, peeled and chopped, reserving liquid
1/4 cup raisins
8 tablespoons plain lowfat yogurt

PREPARATION
Place eggplant cubes in a colander and sprinkle evenly with salt. Set aside for 30 minutes to dry. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large nonstick skillet. Add eggplant and cook, stirring often, for about 5 minutes. Remove eggplant from pan and set aside. Heat remaining oil in skillet and add curry, cumin, garlic, and pepper. Stir in stock, and cook for 2 minutes. Add carrots, potatoes, green pepper, onions, and cauliflower. Cover and simmer for 5 to 7 minutes. Return the eggplant to the pan and add beans, zucchini tomatoes, and raisins. Cover and simmer for 10 minutes. Serve with a dollop of yogurt.

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empty

Empty


I am always emptying something -
compost buckets, watering cans, coffee grounds,
refrigerator fruit drawer.

I empty things and they refill as if by magic.

The sink fills with dishes waiting for the dishwasher
to be emptied, dishes stacked in a cupboard
soon to be dirtied again.

Sometimes I sit and stare

at unopened work emails with a subject line
URGENT!!!!!

paralyzed, lacking will to finish one cycle and begin
a new one, opening up space
for another to enter
the emptiness

Emptiness that pulls at me
with primordial longing
as if it has existed forever
for just a moment or two.

Note: First I was thinking about an "empty mind" - wondering if you could take a picture of an empty mind, what would it look like? It was too esoteric. Then this came.

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golden raspberries

These beauties are growing amid the pines at the edge of the orchard where Lesley is getting married in a few weeks. They are a natural variant of red raspberries, which I eat most mornings with other berries in plain yogurt for breakfast. Raspberry preserves with the seeds spread on Monterey Jack cheese is a snack I remember eating in college. Very yum. I just ate a golden raspberry, and it was tart and not very tasty. Maybe it's not quite ready yet. But it wasn't as bad as raspberry flavored cough syrup.

The Golden Raspberries are also "awards" for the worst of Hollywood. Last year's big "winner" was Mike Myers' The Love Guru - worst picture, worst actor and worst screenplay. I didn't see it, did you? And worst actress was Paris Hilton in The Hottie and the Nottie. That last one was actually pretty good, I thought. And the plot is fascinating, about a man who wants to woo a beautiful woman (Paris) but her not-so-hot best friend is an obstacle.

Um, I didn't really see it.

If you have a few minutes, it's fun to browse the Wiki site for the Razzies and see the connections between the Oscars and the Razzies (which are awarded the day before the Oscars). The site shows many actors and filmmakers who won or were nominated for Oscars and Razzies in the same year. For instance, Jack Nicholson was nominated for worst actor in 1992 for his roles in both "Hoffa" and "Man Trouble" but was also nominated for Best Supporting actor that year for "A Few Good Men."

Have you ever walked out of a movie at the theater because it was so bad? We walked out of "Congo" when Tim Curry's character Herkemer Homolka said "Liar, liar pants on fire." Even our kids looked at us in disbelief. Hey, I just looked up "Congo" on the Golden Raspberries site and it got worst picture for 1995, Tim Curry got worst supporting actor and John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of Michael Chrichton's book got the worst screenplay award. Ha!

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posterization

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My brother Bennett, who died in 1996, would be gaga over technology now. He had a personal computer before most people and was close friends with one of the early technicians of the Internet (no, not Al Gore). Besides being a computer geek he was a stellar amateur photographer who serves as inspiration for everyone in my family who takes pictures. As a 14-year-old I sat on the floor of our parents' living room spellbound watching slides from his college trip to Europe in 1970, especially captivated by Lautterbrunnen, Switzerland, a tiny hamlet in the narrowest and deepest valley in the world at the foot of the Jungfrau. (I was so smitten I took the same study abroad trip five years later.) Then after he graduated college he used to stay up all night developing photographs in the dark room he'd set up in Mom and Dad's basement.

One of my favorite projects was when he posterized photos, including one he took of Rembrandt's Dutchmasters painting in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. The original is above, and Bennett's posterized image is at the right. It's very 1970s-looking. (Sorry, my photo of it has some lamp flare.)

Posterization - which can be intentional or not - is when tones that are gradual in a photo become more abrupt and distinct with flat areas of contrast. When it happens by accident and is unwanted, it's called "banding." When it's intentional, think Andy Warhol's silkscreen of Marilyn Monroe, below. Actually the process of posterization reminds me of silkscreening.

When Bennett did posterization purposely in his dark room, he had to create several separate high contrast negatives and positives for each layer of contrast. It took hours to create one posterized image. The negatives and positives have to be paired and aligned on the photographic paper. I remember several piles of discarded attempts with misaligned layers of color scattered around the darkroom floor.

I often wonder if Bennett were alive, what he would think of digital cameras and digital photo processing. He was so fastidious about his film images, would he have chafed at the easy manipulations I do on PhotoShop and picnik? And would he prefer that particular quality of film that is lost in digital? I appreciate film photographs, but I'm grateful I don't have to practice on film and can delete thousands of digital images without a care for expense.

My preference for a photograph is an image as close to what the eye sees as possible, but it is also fun to play with processing and create an image that enhances what you see in some way. I almost always adjust levels of light and dark and contrast before posting photographs.

Here is an untouched digital photograph of a clematis flower on our farm.















This second image is after cropping it in PhotoShop to make a more pleasing composition (although I kinda like it uncropped too), adjusting levels of light and dark, as well as some highlight/shadow adjustment. Then on picnik I used the Orton effect then desaturated it a little.

Below is my posterization of the clematis flower done on picnik. Still at picnik I added frames and then did that "tearing up" of the frame I like doing on PhotoScape.

I recognize and appreciate beauty in other people's work that I will probably never replicate - either because I lack their imaginative powers (for instance rauf for his eye, skill and human connection, and Claudia, for her craft, composition and imagination), or because their style isn't my style, though I might still love their work, like Garry Winogrand.

I am not a trained photographer. I use "auto" settings most of the time and am hopeless at learning the rules about aperture and the rest. The way pianists "play by ear" I "shoot by eye"with a camera. But until I take Photography 101, I guess passing a quiz isn't important.

If you want to play and pay use Adobe PhotoShop, or you can use free downloads like PhotoScape and online tools such as picnik. There are many other tools, and if you use one and want to share, please leave info in a comment.

Here is a quote from David Bailey (extraordinary work), to remind myself (but not to reflect negatively on my dear painter friends who need insight and imagination too):

It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less imagination to be a painter because you can invent things. But in photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you can learn to see the extraordinary.

Here is Bennett in a rare photo.

Man, I wish I could talk with him.

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