backstage at the field museum

on thursday evening we went with chris’s mom and dad to the field museum’s member night and glimpsed behind the exhibitions to witness some of the designer’s spaces and rarer specimens. the things that most appeal to my eye are, I think, telling.

illustration sketches:

the exhibit design loft space:

and creatures:

Gretel Again

little girl lost

Gretel Again

Lost herself on deertrails
and rabbit trails winding through
stands of snagged branches,
gloomy hemlock and witchwood
saplings, toadstool-strewn, the sort
of woods favoring cool pockets,
fragrant hollows bushy with rhododendron,
geography redolent with the ether of myth
and history seeped through the pores
like a sap. She places, so ginger,
a sole 
rolled to flat-footed in front
of the other, barely-progress amounting
incrementally to eke 
a murky way
between finger-like roots and burrows
of creatures who creep. Crevices
tempt with capacity and she dreams
herself sufficiently small to curl
within and rest. Waking where
darkness hollers: screech
owl-maybe, wishes she’d paid
closer 
attention, wonders what school
has given of use after all, what specific
implements of navigation or leverage
for the situation, what physics relative
to this something short of a trail. Thinks
of books back home, heavy trove
shelved square in place to squared walls,
and she, here, flung, flying  through snatches of stars,
brushy 
glimmers of a sky so vast, black and blue,
and swirling, its impossibility loses her wind.
Those remembered tomes tote ballast of sorts
to catch breath once more and, taking a step
forward, consider a 
multitude of heroines
well-wrought and writ to a T, finished,
pressed and bound
 with cloth and leather
and tresses of their own hair. Ingénues
both callow and scripted. She envies them
their castles for starters, their fabulous
duds or not so fancy but period, surely,
gifted in token by some monarch or author.
Those girls in and of themselves
retrospective of little, heroines regardless,
by what not-quite-womanly magics
still surviving, seemingly forever after
thrusting an older generation into oven or wolf
of precocious ingenuity, if convenient
occasion, despite mistakes with breadcrumbs,
weak character, epochs of hesitation or outright
slumber. The outrage! She stumbles, spluttering,
ungame for the current narrative, left to devices
of shift and typeface, exhausted by threadbare dilemma,
urgent with clumsy imagination in avenues of not-even
rumored footsteps,
 palimpsest of conundrum
and choice, all alien, terrestrial, other. Betimes
her own limbs
, branching, thrust down, forfeit
walking, take root and climb deeper.

summer comin’

sunny warmer late spring days mean basking, face up, eyes closed out on the back porch.

container garden in the works…

sitting in the sundazzle and painting toenails with ridiculous sparkly colors is requisite…

as is lots of tasty grilling…

Thriftriffic!

this morning while walking floyd I found a four leaf clover, and apparently it works, as evidenced by today’s ridiculous-awesome thrift fun: a globe ($5) which is both an educational toy and a LAMP! shirts $2-3 each; jacket $4.50. highway robbery. call me the baron of thrift.

(for the record I’m blaming excessive cleavage prominence on sark)

pattern & color

words are flummoxing, persistent, legion. poised at the digital nexus of blogs & email & facebook & twitter, I’m foundering a bit in a soup of verbosity.

in lieu of words, I’m currently losing myself in concrete shapes and patterns of color.

homemade book cloth & paste paper finding unbound purposing…

oddly thematic etsy favoriting…

for no one

Lately I’m grappling and struggling to come to terms with the prospect of simply writing– without the need for response of any kind, complimentary or critical or simply discursive.

While my chosen web moniker might suggest some degree of equanimity with a state of solipsism, the lived truth little resembles such self-satisfaction.

I imagine most of us who write compulsively do so at least in part from the urge toward two-way communication, rather than aiming intentionally for the unidirectional prose that often results.

Conceivably this is why bloggers study their stats, attempting to detect by evanescent digital footprints what invisible participants may have visited their thoughtscape, and revel in the gracious gift of commentators.

Principally, writers write to be read. So the absence of any proof of an audience can be discouraging or at least give one pause: why are we failing to inspire readership? Yet we go on writing, compulsively, regardless. I think, therefore I write.

Occasionally our words seem indeed actively to provoke the opposite of their desired result: silence. Recently my posting of written thoughts in email to two different collections of reader/participants (my book club and a virtual mailing list discursive “community”) has prompted only crickets. After having written and submitted and waited for some form of engaged response, and waited and waited some more, I’ve had to consider the possibilities: that I’m simply bad at this written communication, or that I’ve managed inadvertently to offend others or have made them uncomfortable or possibly bored or irritated or… In lieu of any evidence or responsive indications in one direction or another, I have simply to wonder.

Sometimes this back and forth, or back and no forth, process stills or stuffs the compulsion to write, if only for a time. I’ll go inward, curl around the uncertainty, maybe find some entirely other medium to muck around with for a bit, photography or bookbinding or printing or collage– but eventually I will, without fail, find my way back once more to words.

And write for no one. Simply write. Because I can’t not do so for long. And so it goes its windy, rambling way who knows where– and as a three year old me once said– but who will get there first.

20110501-091556.jpg