“Silence is your treasure”

Self is reminded of this again when she reads Diane Gilliam’s essay on “Working in Silence,” on A Room of Her Own Foundation’s website.

The full quote is:  Silence is your treasure.  Do not exchange it for an easy life.

Walking to Annenberg from Littlefield, you pass this meadow. Self doesn’t know the name of the artist who made this sculpture, but right in front of the Cummings Art Building is a Henry Moore.

Last night, self found herself back in Stanford.  Self enjoyed the walk through the still campus.  She remembers thinking:  How quiet it is here.  How peaceful.  And that’s what Stanford gave her:  four years of peace.  Two years in the East Asian Studies Program, with a concentration in Chinese, two years as a Creative Writing Program Fellow.  What an unimaginable luxury.

Self originally meant this post to be about the Rolling Stones.  Specifically, the Rolling Stones as they were in 1972, when Robert Frank made the documentary “Cxxxxsucker Blues” (Self blushes to admit that the x’s are her own.  The early 1970s were still the 1960s. What self means by that is that drug use was still rampant, and so was free love. And Mick wore velvet jumpsuits spangled with sequins and looked vaguely reminiscent of Elvis, only much thinner).  They showed it in Annenberg, last night. Amazingly, the theater was packed, even though at that very moment, the San Francisco Giants were facing off against the Saint Louis Cardinals.

Frankly, it was just painful to see the way women were treated in this movie (like pieces of meat — yes, exactly. Thank you Jennifer Lawrence or whoever): they were either in bed or shooting up or sewing. Yes, sewing.

With one exception:  Bianca Jagger. Who was in no way a groupie. Who Mick treated with affection.

Thank God for Bianca Jagger.

The album “Exile on Main Street” was self’s first ever Rolling Stones album. And the Robert Frank documentary was about the 1972 tour for that album. If for nothing else, self had to see the documentary.

And Mick had this amazing, amazing diffidence (Keith Richards had it too, to a lesser degree). At one point, he stares straight at the camera (presumably being held by Robert Frank) and says, casually contemptuous, “Fuck you.” And it’s not as if Frank caught him in an intimate moment, either.  He’s just standing there, and he decides to turn his head, look at Frank, and without his face changing expression, says “Fuck you.”

Now, that’s a moment.

And now, before self gets too carried away with this post, she needs to get moving. She realizes she hasn’t even connected the dots between the quote “Silence is your treasure” to the Stones documentary.

But, ta-ta, dear ones! To be continued.

Endurance: WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge

This week’s WordPress Photo Challenge is ENDURANCE.

Show us what endurance means to you. Is it that high-school diploma, beads of sweat earned on a long run, a treasured family heirloom, or something else entirely?

Street Vendor, South Super Highway, Manila: That smile. Wonder how much money he makes selling from car to car when the traffic stalls. Warrant ya, NOT MUCH. Still, he endures.

Gracie dozes — Self missed spending time with her when she started traveling. Adopted at 1 yr. old, she passed away three years ago from complications of diabetes. But she had the biggest, bravest heart. She endured self’s long absences.

Mount Kanlaon: Still active, after thousands of years. It’s in the center of Dear Departed Dad’s home island of Negros, in the central Philippines. Its mystery only seems to grow, with each of self’s succeeding visits to Negros. It endures.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Shared By a Student Who Adores Ferlinghetti: “I Am Waiting”

I Am Waiting

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

(An excerpt)

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

Thank you to self’s UCLA Extension student Cyndy for sharing this poem!

You can read the rest of it here, at the Poetry Foundation website.

Stay tuned.

Sebastian Barry, Again

(It occurs to self that she never stumbled across anything by Barry when she was at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, in May.  And she did give those bookshelves a good going-over.  Oh mystery!)

The book self is currently reading is Barry’s 2008 novel, The Secret Scripture (She advanced five pages since yesterday.  Today, she’s on p. 13):

His voice entered my head as a sort of honey, that lingered there potently, buzzingly, banishing all the fears of childhood.  As the voice rose up, so did all of him, arms, whiskers, one foot swinging a little over the old carpet with its pattern of repeating dogs, his eyes brimming with a strange merriment.  Even Napoleon might not have scorned him as a man of elevated qualities.  At such moments he exhibited a most beautiful timbre in the quiet passages of songs that to this day I have never heard outmatched.  Many fine singers made their way to Sligo when I was a young woman and sang in the halls under the rain, and for a few of the more popular sort I even played piano accompaniment, chopping out the notes and chords for them, more of a hindrance than a help to them perhaps.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Extra, Extra 3: WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge

People, self is home.

Which means she is back in the Good. Ol’. US. Of. A.

YAY!

Three cheers America!

Unted from Newark, NJ to SFO officially sucks.  Sucks.  Sucks.

Stayed on the runway in Newark an hour, and no one was allowed to unbuckle their seatbelts, and there were many children on flight whose parents self was sure were having nervous breakdowns.

But on the approach to San Francisco, self got to take photos of the city lights.  Which led to her pairing these photos for another take on this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge:  Extra, Extra.

Find a photo with an added element that makes it an image only you could capture.

Last Shot of Dublin: From a Taxi on the Way to the Airport.  What a trip she had!  Un-be-lie-vable.  Simply unbelievable.

On the Approach to SFO

Interestingly, the first thought that entered self’s mind when the lights of the City began to sparkle through the plane window was not:

Oh, what a pretty sight!

No, self started thinking of 9/11.

Don’t ask why.  Her mind moves in such unpredictable fashion.

She was thinking of the planes that were used as missiles, and how terrible it was for the passengers.   Especially when she thought back to the Wright brothers and how excited they were and wasn’t Kitty Hawk beautiful?  And all the forms of manned aviation after.  Like the Gossamer Condor? She’s referring to the plane itself.  Not the plane as a purveyor of bombs but the object itself.

This evening, self thought:  The plane is back to being a beautiful thing.  So she silently dedicated this flight to all the innocent people riding in the planes who lost their lives on 9/11.  Yes, this post is for them.

Self remembers how, for a few years people were stressed about getting on a plane.  Everyone was high-strung.  Some people even refused absolutely to fly.

But she was sitting over the wing and thinking:  what an experience!  To see a city from that vantage point!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

 

 

Room 3: Button Factory, Temple Bar, Dublin

Lest dear blog readers think self is losing her wits, she blurred these photos deliberately, to give an effect of — mood?  Energy?  Transience?

The setting was the Button Factory, in Temple Bar Music Centre, 4 Temple Bar, Dublin.

Self is riffing off this weeks’s WordPress Photo Challenge:

SHARE YOUR TAKE ON THE IDEA OF ROOM — it could be an actual room in your house, a favorite gallery in your local museum, a cubicle at work.

Last Set of the Night: Jaime Nanci Barron & the Blue Boys Getting Ready to Set Up

The audience at the Button Factory listens with rapt attention.

The Magic of Music and Midnight in Temple Bar

Why, self muses, is this bar called the Button Factory?  Having been in Dublin for a wee bit, she knows it is because, in all likelihood, the place did indeed use to be a button factory.

Her B & B is near Ballsbridge.

The local supermarket is called Spar.

The street itself is called Lower Mount Street.

The saloon on the corner of her previous B & B, in Inchicore, was called the Black Horse Saloon and in fact that was the name of the actual stop on the Luas (tram) line.

Some of that nuance and pungency must have worked itself into her writing.  The stories she’s written here in Ireland are:  Spores, Toad, Residents of the Deep, Breeder.  She likes!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Pigeon, Flying Away

Yesterday, in a Park Near Dublin Castle

Self is re-reading John O’Donohue’s poetry collection Conamara Blues.

The first section, “Approachings,” begins with quotes by Hélene Cixous, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Naomi Shihab Nye.

Love the quote from Cixous:

I want to watch watching arrive.
I want to watch arrivances.

Self was at the Chester Beatty Library yesterday until closing.

She then decided to sit in a little circular park to rest before catching a bus back to her B & B.

For some reason, there was a whole pod of pigeons in restless flight around a nearby bush.  So self waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  Until she finally caught the rustle of a wing almost directly above the bench where she was sitting.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

 

Gratuitous Annaghmakerrig Selfie (Because What Else Is There To Do When One’s Written for Four Hours Straight)

Hello, dear blog readers!

This is for all the people in California who might be missing self right now!  While she cools her heels in this most amazing, green, rainy, fascinating corner of Ireland — Newbliss in County Monaghan!  Where there are absolutely NO ghosts or banshees, but where there are a most intriguing flock of wild swans.

Regarding said swans: five are a unit; one is a definite black sheep, because it is always off by its lonesome. And this one “lone wolf” swan is definitely a creature after self’s own heart, because it is always bottoms-up in the lake, or has been, the last four times self has seen it.  There must be very delicious food in the lake — or at least, an ample supply of pondweed and tadpoles.

Her short story “Spores” is shaping up quite nicely.  She’ll be getting it ready to send out, soon.

Two days ago, she began writing another one called “Residents of the Deep.”

It is raining again, boo boo boo.  Ireland’s such a bog.  But self loves it and its boggy, temperamental ways. And why not? In what other place could self receive lessons in how to “artistically” curse?  Curses sound 10x better in an Irish accent than in an American accent, self swears.

Self on the 2nd floor of her farmyard cottage

And here the chef’s name is Lavina, which reminds self of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and also of that Avox in the Hunger Games trilogy.  Oh, this is such a bloody, cursed land, beset by dreams.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

 

 

 

Letters 3: WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge

So far, self has managed to hang on to everything. She made it to London, really really tired, but she’s already been to Stonehenge.

Now, if she can only keep her luggage safe while she takes the train to Southampton (day after tomorrow), she can give herself another big pat on the back . . .

This had better work . . .

From the ONE STORY Magazine Book Table at the AWP Book Fair February 2014 in Seattle

Hard to believe she arrived in London just two days ago!  Yesterday she took the train to Salisbury (about an hour and a half from Waterloo Station) and joined a five-hour tour of Stonehenge:

The approach to Stonehenge, near Salisbury. The land around the monument is controlled by the British National Trust. Visitors approach the site on one narrow road, and no one is allowed to stray off the road to the meadows (except for sheep, who do double duty as lawn mowers)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.