chrysanthemum

signal boost: looking for Danielle Lee Moyer

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 15:16:00 GMT

Jaime Lee Moyer is trying to reach Danielle Lee Moyer, her niece

among the tulips

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Wed, 2 May 2012 22:34:00 GMT

unFold has started its literary garden show with one of my photo-poem pairings, Lickety-split.

Please see my latest entry at zirconium for a catalog of April's goings-on.

Hope this finds you well!

sprawling, yet (mostly) meticulous

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:27:00 GMT

[The latest post at zirconium:]

It has been a week of dropped eggs, burnt beans, buggered-up code, scorched towels, hurt feelings, feet in mouth, and other damage, but there has also been plenty in the way of good tidings.

The book:

It's back on a couple of Top 100 lists in the US and the UK. \o/

Heather Kamins reviews it.

Renee Emerson liked the sharpshooter poems in particular.

The copyediting:

Sarah Suiter's Magdalene House: A Place about Mercy is now available.

I have resumed reading The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (1999 ed.). I love this line from the foreword:

As the previous edition of this book noted, there is little difference between a Martini and a martini, but a rule can shield against untidiness in detail that might make readers doubt large facts.

And this:

The 1923 booklet cautioned printers that in following copy, they must make allowance "for the intelligence (or lack of intelligence)" of the advertiser. It listed pasha, pigmy and seraglio among "Words Frequently Misspelled" (raising a question: What were they doing in the Times at all, not to mention frequently?).

Goodreads, ebooks, and pumpkins

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 11:23:00 GMT

Details at zirconium.

tongues in trees, books in the running brooks

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:50:00 GMT

The subject line's from As You Like It, written by the Bill Shakespeare whose very large head stared right back at me as I read aloud my poem about practicing jump shots with him.

Other things: announcing the publication of two new poems ("A Multiple of Sorrows" and "Good Morning"), at Houseboat (halfway down the page); messing with ranunculus and admiring tulips; giving thanks; nattering about science; writing a letter to my sixteen-year-old self; and posting a few more snapshots from Memphis. Whee!

book! and Jerusalem sharing a moment with Nashville

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:30:00 GMT

[Crossposted from zirconium.dreamwidth.org]

My poetry chapbook has been listed at Smashwords! 4.99 USD (19 Israeli shekels) will get you the PDF edition of forty-odd pages of poetry by an odd forty-something. :-) (Kindle and epub editions forthcoming within the fortnight.)

I still have not truly organized the photos from my 2009 stay in Israel. I peeked into one of the Jerusalem folders earlier today, and ended up lingering over the snapshots I took of a fountain on the southwest campus of Hebrew University:

From Israel 2009 - set 3

Which, in turn, reminded me of a winter afternoon two years earlier in Nashville:

From Frist Center

Science, Sonnets, and Speculation

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Sat, 3 Mar 2012 08:26:00 GMT

Please join award-winning writers Mary Alexandra Agner (The Scientific Method; The Doors of the Body), Joanne Merriam (A Multitude of Daggers; The Glaze from Breaking), and Peg Duthie (Measured Extravagance) for Science, Sonnets, and Speculation. Ranging from tales of goddesses, immigrants, physicists, and werepenguins to Shakespeare-laced hallucinations, the poems you will hear at this gathering include pieces praised for their ferocious lyricism, eloquent explications, and compassionate heresies.

it has ISBNs now...

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:42:00 GMT

To be published in March: Measured Extravagance (a chapbook of my poetry)

Latest updates at zirconium.dreamwidth.org and @zirconium. Hope this finds all y'all well!

a new year, a new location

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Wed, 4 Jan 2012 16:16:00 GMT

Going forward, I'll be posting mainly to zirconium.dreamwidth.org. JournalScape has been a good yard to hang my hammock in the past four years, but Dreamwidth is a better fit for my current needs (particularly accent retention, comment handling, and a url in sync with my Twitter handle [@zirconium]).

So, hope to see you over there! I apologize for the inconvenience to those of you who have gotten used to this location. :-/ I plan to post some reminders and updates here once in a while (the communications mavens at church tell me it takes at least 7-8 attempts to get the average message to its intended audience, and lord knows how slow I am to update my own feeds), but the bulk of my natterings will be yonder.

Speaking of which, here's the link to today's entry:
zirconium.dreamwidth.org/761.html

we are all just visitors in this world

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:21:00 GMT

Last night, one of my aunts quoted that line from the prayerbook I'd sent to her for Christmas. It's echoing in my head today as I skim the Winter 2011 issue of EKU Magazine -- especially the obituaries section. My grade school classmates and I have reached the age where our parents and teachers are populating that column more often, and even though I wasn't a particularly social or socially aware child (put mildly), I recognized most of the names in the "former faculty and staff" section.

I'm reminded of my friend Richard's comment (made during a memorial service reception maybe seven years ago), about how many of the people around us have extraordinary chapters in their lives that don't show up in everyday conversation, such that we find out about those things only in tributes and eulogies. (Dammit.) I've only now learned that a classmate's father used to play for the Knicks, and that the dean of education became an Episcopal priest after he retired from academia. (Also, the dean passed away over two years ago. And also -- I kind of suspected it already, but it kind of aches to have it confirmed -- the music librarian who put up with me so many afternoons and let me shadow her on career day, she died some time ago, too.)

On a happier note, though, I glimpsed my wonderful fourth-grade teacher's name on one of the donor pages; it's nice to see the university improving its music and science facilities; and, it doesn't take much to get me thinking about the awesomeness of the people still around. (Including the gal who recently posted a paean to her own covey of awesome.) A couple of weeks ago, I was a co-host of Room in the Inn with an eighty-something woman who had just returned from traveling across China with another senior member of my church. She was a professional violinist with the Nashville Symphony -- it was delightful to hear her chat with one of the guests about their careers -- and later a science teacher at one of Nashville's prep schools. Another eighty-something I know is a spry, enthusiastic student of Iyengar yoga; her husband is a WWII veteran, but he would rather talk to me about the time he tried to build a tennis court in his mother's yard (finally giving up when tulips popped up on the baseline). The woman who is one of the church's most accomplished bakers served as a combat nurse in Vietnam. I sing next to people who have appeared on New York stages and as soloists in cathedrals; I get hugs during coffee hour from a man who served on Metro Council decades ago, and hugs during happy hour from the local restaurant owner who used to be a Navy SEAL. I just received a Dorothy Parker t-shirt from a friend I first met at Governor's Scholars twenty-five years ago (EEK); he's now one of Kentucky's top forensics coaches, but I tend to think of him more when I hear songs from Hair or South Pacific or (like yesterday) when the supermarket plays "I Would Die 4 U" on its sound system.

And thinking about these people, in turn, reminds me of the pleasure of spending time with people who are damn good at what they do. I enjoy meeting up with Joanne for coffee or yogurt not only to talk literary shop, but because she's fierce about her day job in a way I totally relate to. I like listening to another friend analyze the learning curve he's traveling on as a trader. I've watched M. bloom as an educator, and it's a treat to hear her talk theory and practice. L. has a young dog she's training with a kind but firm hand; I benefited from D.'s experience as an ER chief during a crisis earlier this year; and hearing my sweetie hold forth on his projects (or, for that matter, heaps of metal and rubber we happen to be passing by) is, well, sweet. :-)

two Hamlets

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:34:00 GMT

From yesterday's New York Times, an article about the cats of the Algonquin Hotel:

Matilda is the latest in a long line of Algonquin cats going back to the 1930s. The first, a stray who wandered in off West 44th Street with as much elan as a famous guest, was known as Rusty or Hamlet. Since then, each cat has been succeeded by another with the same name, Hamlet for the males, Matilda for the females.

Some of the current Matilda's predecessors had real responsibilities. Consider what happened in the 1970s, when the playwright Mary Chase, who lived in Denver, checked in. At the time, her granddaughter was a student at Columbia University's School of General Studies. Ms. Chase, who was famous for the Broadway play Harvey, invited her granddaughter and her granddaughter's roommate to come by for tea.

They were deep in conversation when a mouse appeared in Ms. Chase's room.

She called room service and was told something like: "Just open the door. We'll send the cat right up on the elevator."

Moments later, the elevator doors parted. The cat padded out. It was one of the Hamlets. In Ms. Chase's room, he enjoyed his afternoon snack, and she and her guests went back to enjoying their tea.

And Melena Ryzek interviews Christopher Plummer:

Dying with a sense of joy or breakthrough is easier [to act], he added -- a trick he learned from a mentor, Michael Langham, an early director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, who advised him to play Hamlet with a sense of scholarly wonder. "So you put the words, 'Isn't it extraordinary?' in front of everything," Mr. Plummer said. Then even something brooding like, "the rest is silence" -- Hamlet's last words -- becomes a discovery.

clippings

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:43:00 GMT

Ron A. M. Fouchier, in today's NYT, on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity's request to scientific journals to suppress details re bird flu research:

The only people who want to hold back are the biosecurity experts. They show zero tolerance to risk. The public health specialists do not have this zero tolerance. I have not spoken to a single public health specialist who was against publication. So we are going to see an interesting debate over the next few weeks between biosecurity experts and public health experts who think this information should be in the public domain.

In a profile of chef Floyd Cardoz:

His path to Tabla was karmic. "At Lespinasse, there was a cook charged with making a consomme and he was failing miserably," Mr. Cardoz recalled. As the rest of the staff razzed him, Mr. Cardoz offered his help. The man never forgot it. "When Gramercy Tavern opened, he went there as sous-chef," Mr. Cardoz said. "He heard that Danny Meyer wanted to do Indian food and recommended me."

"a few old socks and love letters"

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:59:00 GMT

Today's subject line comes from the last paragraph of George Whitman's obituary in the New York Times:

Mr. Whitman had variously called himself a communist, a utopian and a humanist. But he may have also been a romantic himself, at least concerning his life's work. "I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions -- just a few old socks and love letters," he wrote in his last years. Paraphrasing a line from Yeats, he added, "and my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart."

That's Whitman's manifesto at the top of this entry. This is the BYM in front of Shakespeare & Company, browsing through a book on the Japanese economy:

This is what the rest of the front patio looks like on a chilly November night:

Lori-Lyn asks (in her "Loving 2011" series), What books made an impression on you this year? One of them was Mademoiselle London Hearts Paris (Sometimes), which I picked up on impulse inside S&Co. I especially like the poem that starts out with her throwing rocks at Hemingway's geraniums.

While in Paris, I deliberately searched for Yves Bonnefoy's translations of Yeats's poems (which I eventually picked up at the Gallimard shop, along with Fuzier and Denis's translations of Donne into French). The thing is, I knew about their existence because I'd come across part of Bonnefoy's rendition of The Circus Animals' Desertion. [I'd post some of the Bonnefoy here, but JournalScape turns diacritical marks into gibberish. There's a mirror of this post at Vary the Line with excerpts from "La desertion des animaux du cirque."]

Anyway, the last words for tonight should be Monsieur Whitman's, non?

books, books, books

mechaieh@gmail.com (mechaieh) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:06:00 GMT

This morning, I started recording Bill Clinton's Back to Work for the Nashville Talking Library. It's not the happiest of reads so far (I'm in the middle of chapter 2, which includes an analysis of what went wrong in the 2010 elections), but better that than the Glenn Beck tome that showed up on the to-claim shelf this morning.

USA Today recently reported on a signing Clinton participated in last week. As a former bookseller, I adore this paragraph:

[Village Bookstore owner] Solomon's favorite moment came when the former president noticed a young girl playing with books by pushing them back on the shelves. "He said to her, 'You know, in bookstores and libraries, they like to line up the books in the front of the shelves, so let's try doing that,' and they did."

In personal book news, the Kindle edition of 140 and Counting (an anthology that includes two tweet-sized pieces of mine) went live yesterday. Yay!

One of the pieces was originally published in microcosms, which is discussed in this interview of its editor, Stephen M. Wilson. (I am amused by the mention of the contributor who told him she was going to spend her payment on beer. You might be acquainted with her. ;-) )