Self loves the lore of the Thames. She loves the Embankments in London: Southbank, with the National Theatre and Waterloo Station and the Tate Modern. And the Victoria Embankment, with the Jubilee Bridge and that view of the London Eye. The Thames has quite a different aspect in Oxford. There, it has boats and punts and rowers.
There’s a big event that occurs annually, end of May: the crew races where teams from all the Oxford colleges compete against each other. This was the vantage point from Donnington Bridge.
She had no idea until that day that crew was so grueling. As the boats skimmed beneath the bridge, she could hear grunts. Loud grunts. Which was so at odds with the graceful way the boats skim the water. There are shouts, too, from a person at the front of the boat (the one who steers, holding two lines) who has a whistle and keeps up a constant stream of encouraging cries like “Come on!” She’s sorry that the boats were moving so fast (they cleared the bridge in seconds) that, even though she pointed her camera straight down into the individual boats, everything was really blurred.
It has been a very, very busy month, but here’s a picture of a racing crew during last week’s annual Oxford crew races (called “the Bumps” — self should explain, but no time right now). This crew is at rest, waiting for the start of the races. Very exciting — all the Oxford colleges, men and women, participate.
She is currently in Oxford, UK. The last trip she took before the pandemic was also to Oxford, to listen to a reading by Oxford’s first ever female professor of poetry, Alice Oswald, Nov. 2019. She was in the company of friends Jenny Lewis and Joan McGavin. It so happened she was here on Armistice Day, Nov. 11.
She attended a service at Christchurch. No tourists, but she told the guard she was NOT a tourist, she was here to attend the service. So he let her through.
The service was very moving. The names of all the men of Christchurch who died in World War I were read aloud. Later, she saw a wall on the side of the chapel, with all the names inscribed in stone, a single wreath leaning against the memorial.
Doing these challenges are so much fun. Self very much enjoyed the intensity of Cee’s yellow and purple gallery!
Here is her own gallery: photos with YELLOW and PURPLE.
The big yellow YO is in front of the Cantor Art Center on the Stanford University Campus. The buttons were give-aways from the latest AWP Conference in Philadelphia. The daffodils are in the garden at River Mill, Co. Down, Northern Ireland.
This is self’s entry for the Macro Monday challenge. Jez Braithwaite’s Funghi and Moss post is wonderful.
She just finished attending the AWP 2022 Conference and Book Fair, the first in-person AWP conference since 2019. This year’s was held in Philadelphia. It was a bit overwhelming, but she loves the city. The Reading Terminal Market and Tattooed Mom, where Drue Heinz Prize winner Caroline Kim read, were fabulous. She even got to pay a quick visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, her first visit in decades.
At the Book Fair, in addition to discovering some wonderful new presses, she was able to add to her button collection! Feelings, indeed!
Your topic this week is March Spring or Autumn Season. In the southern hemisphere Autumn has just started and in the northern hemisphere Spring is coming into full swing most places. Feel free to post either season.
Self created a collage of photos where the color green (color of spring!) appears. Most were taken at the just concluded AWP annual conference, the first in-person conference since 2019:
The annual AWP Conference was held in Philadelphia this year. Self spent two days browsing the AWP Bookfair: she uncovered a whole treasure trove of quirky literary magazines and small presses.
There are six words in the title of this post: She can link to the Six-Word Saturday Challenge, hosted by Travel with Intent. YAY!
After years of Black people being killed by police and having their deaths broadcast in videos streamed across the world, after a white supremacist went into a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, and killed nine people as they prayed, after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protect a Confederate statue and reclaim a history born of a lie, after George Floyd was killed by a police officer’s knee on his neck, cities across the country have begun to more fully reckon with the history that made such moments possible — a history that many had previously been unwilling to acknowledge.
“The policeman wanted to throw my three-year-old daughter out the window but I held her tight.” — Simon Ackerman
It is Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass.
The violence was so chaotic, it was hard to believe it was planned. But it was.
“Goebbels holds a press conference to castigate Lochner, Schultz, and other foreign correspondents for writing what he insists are false stories. No stores were looted. No Jews were killed.”
More than ever I’m convinced, we are going down this dangerous road. Right now we have Joe, but can he pass the baton? He should pass the baton because we need a strong AFTER.
Hitler didn’t even need a Supreme Court to justify him. WE DO.
After Kristallnacht, something breaks in the Americans. Ambassador Hugh Wilson is recalled to Washington “for consultation.” He never returns to Berlin. The US Embassy is left in the hands of junior diplomats. Consul Prentiss Gilbert is given a hasty promotion to chargé d’affaires. He dies of a heart attack, five months later.
Kanlaon 