These are not my poems. These were written by my friend Kate Temple-West. She's been a poet since we were about 6 years old. Actually, I have one of her poems from when we were 9. Here it is:
The Purple Dog
Under the Magic cherry tree
lives a little purple dog;
who is as cute as he can be.
He likes to visit me,
for afternoon tea.
Kate Temple-West, c. 1986
My sister found that in a book we cleared out of my Mom's house.
I also have a video (yes, VHS) of the first play she wrote and produced. Circa 1992. I even have the program. I'm saving that for when they teach her in schools. Then I can pull down a boatload on it.
But last year she did a 30 day poem challenge. One poem a day for 30 days. This one was my favorite. Have you read The Phantom Tollbooth? It has the Terrible Trivium, who traps travelers into useless tasks that can never be accomplished, and the Lethargians, who you can't see but who are sent to enforce laws against thinking and laughing, and the Senses Taker, who can convince you that your only purpose in life is to answer useless questions. It think that Kate's Deadly Shoulds belong in this pantheon.
The Deadly Shoulds
Let them go
All of them
Do not let
one shadow
remain
of the shoulds
the deadly shoulds
Scrap them
Burn them
Trick them
Vomit them up and out
They will try to snare you
with their wheedling whining pleas
their antiseptic perfume
their weighted compliments
their prickly handshakes
They will grey your flesh
Cover you in dust
File you under undone
They will rifle through your dream machine
Put red rubber stoppers on all your gaskets
Plug up the exhaust system
Chase out the fairies
Choke out the magic plants
and leave you trussed
vacant
and full of lists.
Kate Temple-West, April 15, 2009 (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=72352596375)
But as a person who just wants to make everyone I care about happy, I have to give you all this one too:
You can’t make other people happy.
That's the conventional wisdom.
But I want to.
I want to push them off cliffs
into oceans of their own happiness.
Maybe I can do that.
After all, conventional wisdom agrees
its very possible to push people off cliffs.
I will lure them to their cliff edges
by baking violet cakes topped with dandelion frosting
and placing them on the paths leading up.
I will bribe the birds to sing sweeter the steeper the climb.
I will tell stories to distract them,
and when we reach the top
I will lie and say their shoelaces are untied.
And then I will run at them,
pushing with all of my weight,
a low deep battle cry booming from my chest
AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
until we sail out beyond the rock,
flying for a moment
before tumbling into a frothy sea
full of frolicking dolphins,
laughter washing over our bodies
in waves.
Kate Temple-West, 2009 (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=76129211375)
And finally, this one's for me, because today my horoscope said that even though I'm grown up now, I can still believe in the things I believed in when I was a child. And for me that means believing in magic. And if I'm going to believe in magic, I might as well believe in that horoscope. And in Kate's poem that is the magical stories we shared when we were children:
I looked down a rabbit hole and saw only dirt, no cottontail, even.
I pushed my way into the back of the wardrobe and found a fox stole with the head intact. It had claws and fangs and smelled like mothballs.
I walked over a bridge in the woods, eyes closed, and found myself on the other side of the stream.
I scrambled over the crumbling brick wall and found another patch of poison ivy.
I crawled through the drainpipe and came out the other end, a little farther away from where I had started.
But I could smell the roses of Wonderland, taste the Turkish Delight of Narnia, see the majestic river of Terabithia, hear the birds chirping in a secret garden, and feel the velvet air in my own as yet unnamed enchanted world.
Kate Temple-West, 2009 (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=78160626375)
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Grocery store checkout line magazine covers
Anyone who's been to the grocery store with me in the past year or so has probably gotten my spiel on magazine covers, if not been subjected to standing in line with me while I take pictures of the checkout line magazines.
I don't know when I noticed but at some point it struck me that these covers all have one thing in common - they juxtapose a weight loss plan with pictures of baked goods or incredibly high calorie comfort foods. I'm not sure what to do with this. It goes beyond the impossible body types of most magazine cover models - they're beautiful and posed and dressed and coiffed and ultimately airbrushed. As much as people talk about the message these images send, we all know, somewhere deep down, that these pictures aren't really real. They're staged and altered. That's why magazines also have the "caught on camera" features with celebrities looking, well, still better than most people, but way, way more normal than they do on the covers of magazines.
The women's magazines in the grocery store line (I never see them anywhere else, so that's what they are) carry a very different connotation. These magazines aren't about celebrities, they're not even supposed to be Martha Stewart-type shelter magazines. These are the magazines that are supposed to be by mainstream women, for mainstream women. They're not about celebrity lifestyles, they're supposed to be about mainstream lifestyles - for women who are interested in tips on slashing grocery bills, easy weeknight meals, and miraculous cures for every disease and disorder under the sun. So what's the message? You should be able to eat anything and stay thin? Make these things for other people, but watch your own weight? Is it the 1950s Mom who makes steak for her husband and eats salad herself? I don't know. I haven't worked it out yet. But it's percolating in there.
So, for your consideration, a selection of grocery store magazine covers:
I don't know when I noticed but at some point it struck me that these covers all have one thing in common - they juxtapose a weight loss plan with pictures of baked goods or incredibly high calorie comfort foods. I'm not sure what to do with this. It goes beyond the impossible body types of most magazine cover models - they're beautiful and posed and dressed and coiffed and ultimately airbrushed. As much as people talk about the message these images send, we all know, somewhere deep down, that these pictures aren't really real. They're staged and altered. That's why magazines also have the "caught on camera" features with celebrities looking, well, still better than most people, but way, way more normal than they do on the covers of magazines.
The women's magazines in the grocery store line (I never see them anywhere else, so that's what they are) carry a very different connotation. These magazines aren't about celebrities, they're not even supposed to be Martha Stewart-type shelter magazines. These are the magazines that are supposed to be by mainstream women, for mainstream women. They're not about celebrity lifestyles, they're supposed to be about mainstream lifestyles - for women who are interested in tips on slashing grocery bills, easy weeknight meals, and miraculous cures for every disease and disorder under the sun. So what's the message? You should be able to eat anything and stay thin? Make these things for other people, but watch your own weight? Is it the 1950s Mom who makes steak for her husband and eats salad herself? I don't know. I haven't worked it out yet. But it's percolating in there.
So, for your consideration, a selection of grocery store magazine covers:
Friday, February 11, 2011
Ellipses
Today is dedicated to the ellipsis. For the non grammar nerds out there, that's this: ...
Last year, I tried to give up ellipses. I went cold turkey. No more ellipses. Cut them out of my punctuation vocabulary entirely.
Christ, it's harder than quitting smoking. They just slipped right back in there.
I've been told that I write just the way I speak. There have also been lots of complaints that I trail off at the end of sentences. So until my speech patterns change, it looks like the ellipses are here to stay.
So here's to you, ellipsis. We're going to be together for a long time.
Last year, I tried to give up ellipses. I went cold turkey. No more ellipses. Cut them out of my punctuation vocabulary entirely.
Christ, it's harder than quitting smoking. They just slipped right back in there.
I've been told that I write just the way I speak. There have also been lots of complaints that I trail off at the end of sentences. So until my speech patterns change, it looks like the ellipses are here to stay.
So here's to you, ellipsis. We're going to be together for a long time.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Ack! My friends just come up with too many wonderful things.
Amanda Jain found this doing research at the Lee-Fendell house.
Alexandria Gazette, September 6, 1851:
WANTED, A HUSBAND.—Being desirous of entering into the holy state of Matrimony, with a sensible, loveable man, I have adopted this plan to accomplish that, which, by the custom of the world, I am debarred from doing in any other fashion. As no one will buy a pig in a poke, or trust to lottery chances, I feel it incumbent upon me to say, that I am what the world calls handsome, and have a disposition to drive away dull care. My husband must be from 20 to 30; good sense preferred to good looks; and no simpering fool, who imagines a lady taken off her feet, by his smiles, no uneducated ape in lavender kids and yellow stick, no mature dandy, such as promenade for smiles of silly girls and impudent starers, no mustachioed baboon, need apply, as no one will please me but a sensible, educated gentleman, who appreciates domestic happiness by the possession of one heart. If such an one is desirous of taking to himself a wife, who has a small fortune, and who would try to make her husband happy, he will receive the attention of the advertiser, by addressing through the Post Office, a note to ADA.
-----------------
As some of us dec art geeks know, there was an explosion in flatware during the 19th century, and a lot of it was given as wedding gifts. Here's hopes for ADA (thanks Marissa for the picture)
Alexandria Gazette, September 6, 1851:
WANTED, A HUSBAND.—Being desirous of entering into the holy state of Matrimony, with a sensible, loveable man, I have adopted this plan to accomplish that, which, by the custom of the world, I am debarred from doing in any other fashion. As no one will buy a pig in a poke, or trust to lottery chances, I feel it incumbent upon me to say, that I am what the world calls handsome, and have a disposition to drive away dull care. My husband must be from 20 to 30; good sense preferred to good looks; and no simpering fool, who imagines a lady taken off her feet, by his smiles, no uneducated ape in lavender kids and yellow stick, no mature dandy, such as promenade for smiles of silly girls and impudent starers, no mustachioed baboon, need apply, as no one will please me but a sensible, educated gentleman, who appreciates domestic happiness by the possession of one heart. If such an one is desirous of taking to himself a wife, who has a small fortune, and who would try to make her husband happy, he will receive the attention of the advertiser, by addressing through the Post Office, a note to ADA.
-----------------
As some of us dec art geeks know, there was an explosion in flatware during the 19th century, and a lot of it was given as wedding gifts. Here's hopes for ADA (thanks Marissa for the picture)
From Jewelers’ Circular and Horological Review.
Lydia Pinkham
Lydia Pinkham is known as the "mother of American patent medicine." Her "sure cure for... feminine weakness" (i.e. menstrual pains) derived its effectiveness primarily from being 18% alcohol or 36 proof - roughly the same as tequila.
An article on "Pinkham's Vegetable Compound" from Nostrums and Quakery by the American Medical Association.
Saul Zalesch at http://ephemerastudies.org posted an 1869 Pinkham handbook today (making this my favorite thing today. Yes, a lot of these come from Epherma Studies.) Go read what he has to say about it.
And an additional nod to Mrs. Pinkham, from the Irish Rovers...
An article on "Pinkham's Vegetable Compound" from Nostrums and Quakery by the American Medical Association.
Saul Zalesch at http://ephemerastudies.org posted an 1869 Pinkham handbook today (making this my favorite thing today. Yes, a lot of these come from Epherma Studies.) Go read what he has to say about it.
And an additional nod to Mrs. Pinkham, from the Irish Rovers...
For Tuesday, 2/1/2011
This is my favorite thing today. A ten-foot tall robot lecturing on the glories of Ovaltine.
http://ephemerastudies.org/gallery/ovaltine-wonder-robot-1934/
http://ephemerastudies.org/gallery/ovaltine-wonder-robot-1934/
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