Confession Tuesday

Tuesday evening and I'm here for one reason.... Confession Tuesday.

Let's go to the Confessional.

Dear reader~  Where has the Summer gone? I must confess that the older I get the swifter our seasons seem to come and go.  Last weekend I was in a Target store and heard some teenager telling her mom that "xyz" store already had their Christmas displays going up. Really- before the end of August!!??

I suppose it is only natural that time seems to go faster as we get older. I think as we age and take on responsibilities we must think less about seasons or even months and more about paydays.  We seem to move between paydays swiftly. Like maybe we simply live for the next payday. At least that is what it seems like to me.

I confess I wish for some different benchmark to look forward to. I'm open to suggestions.

A Writers Cottage

It’s where quaint and secluded
merge back from the road,
nestled in the verdant treed lot
where even the postman
never comes. It is here

by the fire at night
I read what I wish
till my book falls helpless
into my lap
until supple rays find my face
while birds scold me awake

and with brawny coffee
I embark on the new day
with the purity of paper
void of anything
and my head chasing
transitory images
to pen down on the page.

 
 
© 2010 – Michael A. Wells
 
 
 A part of Magpie Tales 29

A Collision of Past and Future

I read Victoria Chang's second book before I read Circle which gave me reason for pleasant surprise. You could easily be fooled into believing this work is anything but a first book. There is cohesiveness in Circle that many poets have not mastered in their second or third publication.

In Circle Chang embraces an exposition of culture and gender in ways that are not worn or over worked. She demonstrates the spiral collision of past and future. She is often edgy but her word skills have a well controlled precision that can slip a point past you like smooth butter.

I especially enjoyed the following poems: Lantern Festival, Seven Changs, To Want, Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer and On Quitting.

Circle was a winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press.

A Driveway Moment Missed

Just returned from a brisk evening walk with MO (pictured left), the weather is so nice, I hope tomorrow is a xerox copy.

 

Earlier today I had NPR on in the car listening to Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know? and he had as a guest Ayelet Waldman the author of Bad Mother.  It was one of those "driveway moments" or should have been as I had arrived at my destination and really wanted to hear the rest, but couldn't (I'll have to await podcast).  I haven't read her book but she was hysterical on the show.

 

Evidently she was at one tine a public defender and married to a writer she decided whe wantd to do what he does... write for four hours a day and well, do whatever the rest of the day. Of course in order to do that you have to become successful at writing, which evidently she has. Her 2005 New Yourk Times Essay about sex and motherhood opened a lot of eyes. The essay titled Truly, Madly, Guiltily can be read here.

A review of her book: BAD MOTHER A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace published by Doubleday can be found here.

Gag Me With A Spoon!

E-books purchased in Apple's iBookstore may soon include iAds. "If you flip to page forty of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, you may be served an iAd instead of page forty-one." (CNET)

Keep Language Alive!

"No doubt some languages have died, but we don't know which ones they were." - William Matthews

Confession Tuesday - you are what you read edition

Tuesday again… this time I’m prompt. I actually have to say I’ve thought a lot about this confession so let’s get started.




Dear reader:

 That sounds funny addressing you as reader when my confession today is about me as a reader. Yesterday I was reading something – I don’t recall what exactly when this came to me as I read a number of articles and blogs yesterday, but I thought back over my own reading past experiences and realized I have a problem.

 All right, I have a number of problems so don’t go there. The problem I’m confessing is my reading habits. If I were looking at what I read as a menu of food I eat, I would be totally deficient in some vitamins and minerals.

 My own book shelves basically can be divided into three sections - poetry/poetics, baseball, political - biographical. Actually I have a number of biographical that are linked to poetry as well.

I don’t as a rule read novels. Occasionally I’ve read a science fiction. When I was younger I read fiction and a fair amount of historical fiction but as I grew older most of my reading had a more direct purpose.

 I confess this is not a totally new revelation to me, but thinking at in the context of contributing to some kind of deficiency is quite frankly a new and startling insight or self discovery. And here is the rub… a part of me says at my age why care? If given the choice what to sit down and read this very afternoon I would likely not stray from the comfort of my well worn path. Yet, there is this part of me that says perhaps I could be a better, a stronger writer if I opened myself to broader tastes in reading. It’s a thought.

 I’ll let you know where this leads, if anywhere.