January 20, 2020 at 8:10 pm (Books, destinations, fpj-photo-challenge, Holidays, Links, Places, postaday, Recommended, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Albuquerque, California, memories, Menlo Park, Mondays, New Mexico, photography, websites
Leading lines carry our eyes through a photograph. They help to tell a story, to place emphasis, and to draw a connection between objects. — Tina R. Schell on the blog Travels and Trifles: Expressing Thought Through Photography
Self loved the quote from Pete Bridgewood:
- Unlike the painter who starts with a blank canvas and builds up his image by the addition of paint, as photographers we work in the other direction.
The photos below are from December 2019, during which, as usual, self did a lot of traveling.
Old Albuquerque, December 2019
On the I-25 from Santa Fe to Albuquerque, 27 December 2019
Kepler’s Books, Downtown Menlo Park, December 2019
Thanks for the interesting prompt, Lens-Artists!
Stay tuned.
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January 8, 2020 at 4:05 am (Books, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, Filipino food, memories, New Mexico, teaching, The Philippines
Doreen G. Fernandez was self’s Freshman English professor at the Ateneo de Manila University. Her greatness was in her writing. She wrote beautifully about her subject: Philippine food, and its long history.
Recently, self began re-reading her book Tikim: Essays on Philippine Food and Culture (Anvil Publishing, Philippines, 1994)
Her Process:
My teachers are all those who give me information about food: market vendors, street sellers, cooks, chefs, waiters, restaurant and carinderia owners, farmers, tricycle drivers, gardeners, fishermen, aficionados, nutritionists, readers of my columns, friends, food critics and historians, fellow researchers, authors of books (and cookbooks), writers of columns, food anthropologists — everyone who eats and cares.
— Doreen G. Fernandez, 13 June 1994
For self, the biggest, most interesting stop in her very brief late December visit to Santa Fe, New Mexico was the Farmer’s Market. It was bitter cold, snow lined the tracks of the railyard just adjacent, and inside a vast warehouse were smells, the indescribable smells of chili, pine, roasted coffee. Oh, heaven.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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January 6, 2020 at 12:53 pm (Artists and Writers, Conversations, Filipino Writers, Links, Surprises, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: advice, artists residency, complaints, disappointment, Margarita Donnelly, memories, Mondays
Years ago, when Calyx Publisher Margarita Donnelly was still alive, she told self about Hedgebrook. She said, It’s the most magical place. But you can only go once. So don’t waste it.
Self had Hedgebrook, that tantalizing lure, in the back of her mind, for decades. Eventually, she started writing a novel. Then she thought: This could be finally be the project I can apply to Hedgebrook for.
She did not hear back on her application, for almost a year.
Wow, they must have tons of applications, self thought.
Finally, because her landlady was pressuring her to extend her lease, and self didn’t want to do that if she was going to Hedgebrook, she decided to call Hedgebrook.
“Umm, hello,” self said. “Have the results of next year’s residencies already been released?”
Impactful (maybe also painful) silence.
Who is this?
“Marianne Villanueva.”
Another long silence. “The results were announced six months ago. We’ll have someone call you.”
And that’s when self’s gut fell all the way to the bottom of her shoes.
Sure enough, someone did call to tell self she’d been rejected. Not wait-listed. Just flat-out rejected. “There’s Centrum, if you like the area,” said the caller.
“Oh,” self said. “Thanks so much for the recommendation.”
Stay tuned.
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January 2, 2020 at 5:58 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Family, Food and Drink, fpj-photo-challenge, Holidays, Links, Lists, Niece, Places, postaday, Recommended, Relatives, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: art, Bacolod, Christmas, Cork, Cornwall, Events, Filipino food, Fowey, Ireland, London, memories, Menlo Park, Oxford, Prague, Redwood City, restaurants, The Philippines, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
Great theme!
In 2019, self traveled the world. Her life triangulated between home in Redwood City, California, to England and Ireland, to the Philippines. Side trip to Prague with her niece, Irene!
Here goes, all the images that mattered most to self in 2019, arranged from most recent — December 2019 — to the earliest, January 2019: Starting with her home in Redwood City in early December; to London’s Blackfriar station; to Manggapuri Villa in Don Salvador Benedicto, Negros Occidental, Philippines; to Prague; to Oxford University’s Exam School for Alice Oswald’s first reading as Oxford’s first woman Poet in Residence; to Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park; to the Main House of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig; to the fire pit in Manggapuri Villas; to the Daku Balay in Bacolod City, the Philippines; to self’s bedroom; to the Blue Room in Café Paradiso in Cork, Ireland; to Fowey in Cornwall; to Courthouse Square, Redwood City; to the cover of last winter’s issue of Prairie Schooner, which included her story Things She Can Take
Prague, May 2019
Waiting for the Alice Oswald lecture to begin, 13 November 2019
Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Republic of Ireland, last week of October
Manggapuri Villas: September 2019
Daku Balay, 50 Burgos Street, Bacolod City, Negros Occidental, The Philippines
Self’s headboard in Redwood City, CA: Made in the Philippines
Paradiso, Cork, May 2019: She bought the Converse sneakers in London a few weeks earlier. Now they are scuffed and smudged, everywhere.
Stay tuned.
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December 18, 2019 at 1:49 am (Family, Food and Drink, fpj-photo-challenge, Holidays, Links)
Tags: Christmas, happiness, Home, memories, Redwood City
I adore this week’s Tuesday Photo Challenge.
- Common… Whether it is the every day, common object or the things that you have in common, or crossing the town common…
There is such beauty in everyday things.
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December 14, 2019 at 8:51 pm (Dearest Mum, Family, Holidays, Pianos, Relatives)
Tags: Bacolod, Half Moon Bay, Manila, memories, nostalgia, Redwood City, Saturday, The Philippines, Ying
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November 30, 2019 at 3:50 am (Artists and Writers, Books, Conversations, Family, Food and Drink, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Fridays, humor, memories, novel, reading lists, San Francisco
The Mars Room is so in-your-face, so sassy.
It mentions Carol Doda and there is indeed a San Francisco institution called Carol Doda. In fact, on self’s first family trip to the United States (She was 13), her father was super-excited to get to San Francisco to see a Carol Doda performance. But Carol Doda was already pretty old by then, so he was vastly disappointed. In fact, when self asked her father when he got back to the hotel later that night what he thought of Carol Doda he had this look on his face and said only one word: “Old.” (Come to think of it, it is pretty wild that she, a convent girl from the Philippines, was asking her father what he thought of San Francisco’s most famous stripper. Wilder is that he thought self had asked a perfectly legitimate question because he answered in all sincerity)
Since The Mars Room is set in San Francisco, self wondered if there was an actual — ehem! — establishment. She guesses not because the only place she could find after googling was a Mars Bar and Restaurant on Brennan.
In Rachel Kushner’s novel, the manager of the Mars Room is called D’ARTAGNAN.
RUDE!
Self loves it.
Stay tuned.
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November 28, 2019 at 5:24 pm (Books, destinations, Food and Drink, Holidays, Memoirs, Niece, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Publishers, Recommended, Relatives, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, art, England, Events, Fowey, Fowey Festival, Ireland, Liverpool, London, memories, Oxford, Prague, Thanksgiving, The Philippines, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
Prague, May 2019
Two Handmaidens, London’s Canary Wharf: November 2019
Waiting for the Alice Oswald lecture to begin, 13 November 2019
Currently Reading
Christ Church, Oxford: Remembrance Day
Prague Castle, Last Week of May 2019
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November 24, 2019 at 12:36 am (Food and Drink, Links, Places, Traveling)
Tags: Filipino food, Garden, memories, nostalgia, summer, The Philippines
Self loves photo challenges. Especially ones that have to do with color.
Her last post was for Cee Neuner’s Fun Foto Challenge: RED.
This one’s for Nancy Merrill’s A Photo a Week Challenge, and the color is BROWN.
The first one’s of a butterfly that landed on the wall of her house last summer.
The rest: self’s front lawn, last summer; danggit, in Negros Occidental, the Philippines; and chorizo, also from Negros Occidental.
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November 23, 2019 at 6:01 am (Books, destinations, Food and Drink, Memoirs, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Women Writers)
Tags: English writers, Fridays, memories, nostalgia
Something about an island . . .
- In the early evening we’d sit at Basil’s Bar, drinking sundowners and watching for the green flash, as we’d done ever since she had come alone for the first time.
She being Princess Margaret. There is something so melancholy about Anne Glenconner’s depiction of the Princess. First of all, she was lonely. But somehow so down-to-earth. A modern woman.
Stay tuned.
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