The Beach at Capitola
101 North
Missing home and friends and familiar places:
- The beach at Capitola
- Highway 101 on the northbound approach to San Francisco
- The sculpture garden in the de Young Museum
- More Capitola beaches
Stay tuned.
Friends, Self Will Be Home Soon!
June 4, 2017 at 6:09 am (destinations, Lists, Places, postaday, Sundays)
Tags: art, California, Capitola, Golden Gate Park, memories, museum, postaday, postaweek, San Francisco, Wordpress
More Friends: An Ever-Shifting Panoply
June 3, 2017 at 9:24 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Family, Filipino Writers, Lists, postaday, Publishers, Relatives, short story collections, Traveling, Venice, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: AWP, Los Angeles, Mayor of the Roses, memories, Miami University Press, postaday, postaweek, teaching, UCLA Extension, Wordpress, writing conferences
This week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge is FRIENDS.
Which is a very fun theme!
Three Cheers for UCLA Extension’s Writers Program! Love the people. Here they are, doing Spin the Wheel at the 2016 AWP Book Fair in Los Angeles.
Keith Tuma of Miami University Press, at the 2016 AWP Book Fair in Los Angeles
Self and Irene, Café Flor, San Marco Square, Venice: November, 2015
- Nutschell Ann Windsor, Program Administrator, UCLA Extension Writers Program (She writes, too!)
- Keith Tuma, Director of Miami University Press, which published self’s Mayor of the Roses, the first in their fiction series
- Amy Toland at last year’s AWP Book Fair in Los Angeles
- Irene Lacson, niece and travel buddy
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Other Takes on ‘Evanescent’
May 25, 2017 at 8:47 pm (Eavesdropping, Links, Lists, Places, postaday, Recommended, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: England, Flowers, London, New York, postaday, postaweek, websites, Wordpress
“One day they’ll be painted over, completely erased . . . “
— Krista Stevens, explaining this week’s Photo Challenge on The Daily Post
The evanescent is powerful: whether it’s a fleeting moment of sunshine in London, or the moment just before the seeds of a dandelion are scattered by the wind, or the delicacy of woodland fungi, or a collection of bird shots, or a moment when sun pierces the cloud cover around Aoraki/Mount Cook, or a 10-year-old photo of New York’s Grand Central, one never forgets the moment that is captured.
Hats off to these six bloggers:
- Dr. D in Oz
- Lin’s Doodles
- letting nature back in
- lindylecoq
- The 15th Day
- The Roaming CounselorThe Roaming Counselor
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Links to Other Earths
April 24, 2017 at 8:40 am (Artists and Writers, Links, Lists, Places, postaday, Recommended)
Tags: art, Canada, England, environment, postaday, postaweek, websites, Wordpress
English fields in Chris Beebart’s What’s (In) the Picture?
Beautiful paintings by Pain(t)h.D.
Beautiful picture of High Park, Toronto in crafts.feelings
A day at Griffith Island, Port Fairy in Sukies Original
Earth Day community tree-planting in Do What You Wish
Anjung Kampiun’s picture of Kaolin Lake, Indonesia
Protect our Earth. Once her resources are used up, they can never be replaced. Never.
CATO in Robert Harris (Conspirata, p. 92)
April 19, 2017 at 4:51 pm (Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended)
Tags: bestsellers, book lists, historical fiction, novel, reading lists, thrillers
#amreading all Imperial Rome narratives
Until next week, when self begins Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
Robert Harris’s Conspirata (In the United Kingdom it’s got a different title: Lustrum) covers exactly the same ground as the books self just finished reading: SPQR by Mary Beard, and Rubicon by Tom Holland. So she knows how everything is going to end. But Harris is such a good writer (She read Fatherland, years ago: highly recommend) that self is giving Conspirata a go.
Here’s a speech by Cato which self thinks is fascinating for what it reveals of the character (Also, it is interesting that millions of youths around the world see the name Cato and think immediately of that blonde bully in The Hunger Games):
Never be moved by favour. Never appease. Never forgive a wrong. Never differentiate between things that are wrong — what is wrong is wrong, whatever the size of the misdemeanour, and that is the end of the matter. And finally, never compromise on any of these principles. “The man who has the strength to follow them — is always handsome however misshapen, always rich however needy, always a king however much a slave.”
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Surprise! It’s Spring
April 19, 2017 at 7:24 am (Artists and Writers, destinations, Flowers, Links, Lists, Places, postaday, Recommended, Surprises, Weather)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, Garden, Ireland, New York, poetry, postaday, postaweek, seasons, transitions, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Wales, websites, Wordpress
Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
— Wallace Stevens, quoted in The Daily Post
Yesterday was self’s first walk to the lake in over a month. It’s but a five or 10-minute walk at the most. But self has been busy, and the weather’s been unpredictable.
Yesterday, Esther came to change the sheets. So self took advantage of the break to go out of her cottage. And the first thing she noticed was: close by the cottages, there were suddenly so many flowers! (Has it really been that long since she took a walk? Apparently, it has! Surprise!)
Self had a lovely walk. Spring has truly arrived!
Here are some other beautiful spring shots:
- from megakaodesigns, shots of a waterfall in a garden (Water and gardens go together like white on rice!)
- from What’s (In) the Picture?, fields of tulips
- from Pastries, Pics & Politics, Coney Island in April
- from The Dreamer, a surprise gift from The Body Shop
- from Hugh’s Views & News, a haiku prompted by a view from a hotel in Wales
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Nearing the End of RUBICON
April 14, 2017 at 12:49 am (Books, Lists, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: Fridays, historical fiction, history, reading lists, Roman Empire
The next book in her reading list is a novel, which is a change from the history she’s been reading most of 2017. But it’s a novel of ancient Rome, and the lead character is Cicero, who’s been a major player in SPQR and Rubicon. She’ll probably move faster through that book. In the US it’s Conspirata but in Ireland it has a different name — ? She ordered it from Dublin bookstore Chapters.
After that, she’ll be reading Rinker Buck’s The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, and then William Finnegan’s surfing memoir, Barbarian Days. Those are the last books she brought with her from the States. After that, everything she reads will be what she can find here.
Rubicon was great. Five stars.
In the final pages, a young man appears at the home of Cicero, introducing himself as the heir of the murdered Julius Caesar. The stranger is blonde, bright-eyed, all of 18. A month earlier, he’d been with an expeditionary force on the Roman frontier of Parthia. Next thing you know, Julius Caesar is murdered, the will is read, and the eighteen-year-old becomes Julius Caesar’s designated heir.
You couldn’t make stuff like this up.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Book # 8: Unit # 1, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
April 13, 2017 at 1:49 pm (Books, Lists)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, discoveries, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints by the Rev. Alan Butler, Volume II
The publisher: Virtue & Co., Ltd.
The saints are grouped by month. For example, April includes five Popes (Anicetus, Leo IX, Soter, Cletus, and Marcellinus), three Abbots (Stephen, Beuno, and Robert), and three Archbishops (Elpheg, Anselm, and Mellitus).
June has two Queens (Clotilda, Queen of France and Margaret, Queen of Scotland), one King (Ladislas I of Hungary) and 4 Apostles (Barnabas, Boniface Apostle of Russia, Peter and Paul).
It is amazing how few women there are. Aside from the Queens, there are three Virgins and two Widows.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
We Have Just Bombed Syria!
April 7, 2017 at 5:11 pm (Artists and Writers, Lists, The New York Times, Women Writers)
Tags: Fridays, humor, interviews, politics, The Guardian, Tom Hiddleston
And The New York Times wrote a drippy article which made it seem as if Trump was such a humanitarian for doing so! He did it to stop chemical gas attacks on innocent civilians, you understand.
Since I’m still recovering from the whiplash of a CNN pundit (Zakaria) announcing that Trump appears to be “growing into” his Presidential role, I will dispense with the “self” point of view and go into a list of celebrity interviews that were ticked off by Hadley Freeman in her Style column in The Guardian of 21 March 2017 (I clipped it out; it was so entertaining).
In it, she cites some glaring differences in interview styles between men and women who do celebrity interviews.
Exhibit # 1: Rich Cohen interviews Margot Robbie for Vanity Fair, and puts in “She can be sexy and composed … ” never mind the rest of the sentence. The fact is he put in “sexy” and I don’t know if that’s a thing with male interviewers or what but if I interviewed, say, Tom Hardy, and called him “sexy” everyone would call me a cougar.
Exhibit # 2: Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s interview of Tom Hiddleston for US GQ in which “she teased out his private-school shallowness.” I like! I make a decision to search out this interview. (I’m so hyper today! I already looked up and read the entire interview — all right, I admit, I find Tom Hiddleston attractive! I think it’s okay to say that. He looks grrrreat in a brown suit. Just sayin’.)
Exhibit # 3: Anna Peele’s interview of Miles Teller in US Esquire “in which she unforgettably skewered his pretentiousness.” Another interview I decide I must search out.
Ms. Freeman points out that there “is something vaguely prostitutional about” doing a celebrity interview: “there you are, the journalist/client, demanding this far more beautiful person simulate intimacy with you for an hour.”
Okay, I like this woman.
One big difference between English journalists (i.e. Hadley Freeman) and US journalists is that Ms. Freeman gets commonly asked if she slept with any of her interviewees (I am shocked! So shocked at that question! But I do want to hear Ms. Freeman’s answer. I expect absolute candor!) and her answer is NO.
Other celebrity interviewees listed in the article: Paul Rudd, Idris Elba, Selena Gomez, Alicia Silverstone, Scarlett Johansson.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
“Rufino” from Self’s Collection MAYOR OF THE ROSES
April 5, 2017 at 6:18 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Books, Calls, Conversations, Dearest Mum, Family, Filipino Writers, Lists, Memoirs, Places, Publishers, short story collections, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Asian American Writers, book lists, California, Mayor of the Roses, memories, Miami University Press, short story
There were fourteen years before self’s first and second book.
The first was published by Calyx Press in Corvallis, OR.
The second was published by Miami University Press.
The third, The Lost Language, is only available in the Philippines.
The fourth is an e-book published by Vagabondage in Florida.
There’s also an anthology she co-edited for Calyx Press: Going Home to a Landscape.
Recently, she got an email from writer and teacher Susie Hara, who said she had liked the story “Rufino” in Mayor of the Roses.
It was the last story to be included in the collection. She threw it in at the last minute.
Rufino was a real person.
Here’s an excerpt from the story:
Towards the end, he couldn’t wear any clothes. They had to cover him in banana leaves.
It was in July he died — I couldn’t believe it. A voice on the phone told me.
“Rufino died na.” It was my mother speaking. Naturally, she had to be the one to break the news.
I was staying in a friend’s house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. In the mornings, fog blanketed the hills. We heard the mournful mooing of invisible cows. One or another of us would look east, toward where we heard Neil Young had his ranch, wondering whether we’d catch a glimpse of his pink cadillac that day.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
