Bemused, Boggled, and Bedazzled

Here’s another wonderful run-on metaphor from Dave Barry’s great book, “Bad Habits”, a 100% fact free book. This time the subject is pornography, which he takes pains to explain that he is opposed to, claiming that it is directly related to increased drug abuse, unemployment, international terrorism, all-polyester clothing, and above all, violence. As I have mentioned before, Dave’s run-on metaphors are so bad, they’re wonderful. Enjoy!

Pornography is like tooth decay, eating slowly away at the molars of our morals, and if it is not stopped we will wind up as a toothless nation, gumming at the raw meat of international competition while the drool of decadence dribbles down our collective chin and messes up the clean tablecloth of our children’s futures.

The Three Goals
By David Budbill

The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
        No symbolism, please.

The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
        In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.

The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
        Regarding this one, call me when you get it.

Today we have an excerpt from Danny Gregory’s excellent book “The Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to be the Artist You Truly Are”.

What if we treated driving like we treat the arts?

We’d assume that people were either born to drive or not.  We’d wait and see if, as children, they started driving on their own, if they had talent and a calling.  If they did, we would be careful not to interfere with their talent and possibly suppress it.  We would make sure to encourage only those who seemed they’d be able to drive professionally.  We’d pay some of them millions of dollars to drive and lavish them with fame; others we would refuse to support, encouraging them to do something more useful for society.  Everyone else would assume that they would never be able to drive and would just stand on the sidewalks and watch the traffic.  At least the ozone layer would be in better shape.

Today I have chosen some words from Abraham Lincoln, as we prepare to celebrate President’s Day weekend.  This is from Lincoln’s second inaugural address, one of the shortest recorded at 703 words total.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Leisure by W. H. Davies

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

I love Dave Barry. Okay, I’ve never met him, but I can always count on his writing to cheer me up on a grey day. Not only can his writing bring a smile to my face, he is a master of the run-on metaphor (also sometimes known as “running a metaphor into the ground”). Today’s example is from his book ‘Dave Barry Turns 40′. Enjoy! Larkin

I believe it was Shakespeare, or possibly Howard Cosell, who first observed that marriage is very much like a birthday candle, in that “the flames of passion burn brightest when the wick of intimacy is first ignited by the disposable butane lighter of physical attraction, but sooner or later the heat of familiarity causes the wax of boredom to drip all over the vanilla frosting of novelty and the shredded coconut of romance.”

This is the inaugural post of something new here at BB&B.  I love reading, I love words, and oftentimes words will trigger or inform my visual art work.  And so, I have decided to share some words with you.  They may be poetry (as today) or prose, quotes, song lyrics, something from the morning news, or gems of language from the mouths of babes or babblers.  But the words will all have struck me as significant or meaningful in some way.  I’m going to try to post some words here every Wednesday, but forgive me if I am on the road and miss a time or two.

Enjoy, my little chickadees!

Halleluiah by Mary Oliver

Everyone should be born into this world happy
    and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I’m not where I started.

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
    almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
        and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
    is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more
And some days I feel I have wings.

It’s been over a year since I sat down to write anything here.  Life got squirrelly, and then it got busy, and then the habit of writing went away.  It’s amazing how quickly that happened.  After awhile, I no longer felt guilty about not writing.  But now that has passed, and I am back – hoping I have something to say.

Lately, we have been involved in the Great Studio Clean Out.  (I say “we” because my most dearly beloved has been helping out from time to time.)  Bags and bags of stuff have gone straight to the dumpster, and more bags and boxes have gone to other folks who might use the contents in their work.  And I am far from finished.  My goal is to lay hands on everything in the studio (and assorted storage places around the house) and make a decision:  keep, donate or toss.  The most I have been able to accomplish so far is to be able to actually see the floor of my studio, but a little bit every day ought to get me through it.  The bad news is that this could take months!

I find that the hardest decisions to make are the ones that involve things that I paid goodly amounts of my hard-earned money to acquire.  (Of course, some of the easiest decisions are those that start out with “what the heck was I THINKING??”.)  And then there’s all that stuff that was given to me by someone else that I have never figured out what to do with.

Also on the agenda this week is a full revamp of my long-neglected website.  Although the bulk of this work will fall to my most dearly beloved, I have a couple of pages of assignments for writing up information for him to use.  When all is said and done, there will be a lot more pictures of my work, including several new galleries, and everything should look much more coordinated.

In the meantime, I need to get out and take care of some errands.  We stayed away from the Black Friday shopping uproar yesterday, but today I really do need to go to the grocery store, pick up a prescription, drop off some art, etc.

I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving!  Cheers! my little chickadees!

Larkin

Once upon a time . . . okay, it was just last November . . . I took it into my head to have my salt and pepper grey hair highlighted with blue. And not just any blue, but electric blue. So I went to Cliff, my hairdresser, and he applied enough chemicals to do the job. Various folks have been asking me to post a picture of the finished product, and in fact, the day of the great transformation I came home and had my husband/photographer/ webmaster do a head shot for me. It started out rather blue-violet, but after a couple of weeks, most of the violet was gone and I was left with a good strong blue. Worked for me. At any rate, I have enjoyed this thoroughly, and will probably do it again just before I go to Santa Fe in March 2009. So for all those who have been waiting for this, here it is.

Smile, my little chickadees!

If you are expecting me to really answer that question, I am very sorry to disappoint you.  I don’t have a clue what the new year will bring.  I never have.  Oh, I have some things on my calendar – I know where I will be teaching and when – but as for the shape of my year, I really don’t know.  It’s a mystery.  And in some ways, I like it like that!  Without a little mystery, life would be a sterile, boring, all-too-predictable thing.

This is the time of year when people set goals, make resolutions, plan their attack on the year to come.  And these are worthy things to do.  I will be doing some of that myself over the weekend.  (Never one to rush into things, I delayed the planning process to a time when I know I can carve out some uninterrupted hours.)

My point (and I do have one) this morning is that amidst all the planning and resolutions and goal setting, we need to remember to be open to mystery and magic,  serendipity and surprise, blessings and beauty.  We need to keep our hearts, minds and senses open and available to receive what the world would have us experience.  There’s nothing new to this idea – artists, writers, explorers of all sorts have been doing it for millenia.  But as we become more and more bombarded by the “shoulds, musts, have tos, gottas”, it becomes harder to choose simplicity and wonder.

I don’t claim to have all the answers.  I’m not sure I have ANY answers.  What I do have is a wish for you – that among all the rushing and planning and doing, you will find some mystery and wonder to delight your eyes and heart in the coming year.

Blessings to you, my little chickadees!