Hand-built clay sculpture, Bird, by Tammy Vitale of Tam’s Originals

I take it back.  I am not returning Andy Wibbels’ Blog Wild book to Amazon.  Maybe the information is duplicate to the Blog Squad gals’ Build a Better Blog book.  But it’s small, thus portable, and bound and will travel easier to say, California, than my binder bound Blog Squad book.  The right tool for the right job.

First I must find a flight.  I think I will give up on reasonable cost and just pick one – not that I can find a straight through anywhere.  This morning I was thinking about flying to Las Vegas and driving the rest of the way.  Given flight schedules that the airlines have put together, I can’t see how it could be any worse time wise.

Today (June 3) over at myspace I posted pieces of the first chapter of a book based on my master’s thesis (written in 1996, the thesis, and around 1997/98, the first chapter of the book).  It’s not bad.  I’d rearrange it a bit, but it’s not bad, and I found the copy where I took the time to collate the poem part, Night Vision,  in with my journals and interpretation…Re  interpretation:  "those who hate interpretation and say the myth is enough are right.  The interpretation is a darkening of the original light which shines in the myth itself.  There is no real end to methodological analysis [of myths], no hidden unity to be grasped once the breaking down process has been completed…Just when you think you have disentangled and separated them, you realize that they are knitting together again in response to the operation of unexpected affinities." (Trin T Minh-ha). 

But if I don’t interpret, then I don’t have a book, with exercises (a la Julia Cameron and a lot of other writers I admire), I have a poetry chapbook.  So.

Alicia Ostriker poet, professor and author, says that in the past it has been a given that only male poets write large, thoughtful poems.  Women poets write petite, emotional poems.  If a woman were to write a book-length mythological poem it would be a declaration of trespass on the understood boundaries of the literary landscape. (We seem to be spending a great deal of time on the gender issue, the "women" part of this site, lately.  Not planned.  Just happening.  Makes me wonder where my path is curving right now.)

Night Vision is an act of trespass on the male-dominated authorship of poems of creation and transformation…Since the poem starts as trespass, we are freed from accepted modes of thought at the very start.  We can study the realm where the divine and the demonic come face to face without apology, and claim the darkness which we have been told to ignore and deny for so long.  How might our lives be different if we were able to not only acknowledge, but also to embrace all that we are –  terrible and wonderful – together? [quoting from the first chapter of the book].

Sara, who comments here, tells me I also have the core of an Art Marketing book buried on this website.  I reviewed.  Indeed, I have. 

Between the two books, I should have enough to keep me out of trouble when I travel to California to visit with Linda.

Which reminds me.  Please do click over and read yesterday’s (June 2) post at myspace.  It is on Ovarian Cancer, which is called the silent killer.  It also shares how Linda handled her surgery – information anyone anywhere should have to be a self-advocate for any surgery or any medical treatment.  Way to go GayGay!  And you can catch up with how she is, too.

thought for the day:  "And so I turn to Alice Through the Looking Glass, always so useful in matters of the construction of alternate worlds.  At the beginning of the story, Alice is on one side of the mirror – the ‘life’ side, if you like – and the anti-Alice, her reflection and reverse double, is on the other, or ‘art’ side.  Like the Lady of Shalott, Alice is a mirror-gazer:  the ‘life’ side is looking in, the ‘art’ side is looking out.  But instead of breaking her mirror and thus discarding the ‘art’ side for the hard and bright ‘life’ side, where the ‘art’ side is doomed to die, Alice goes the other way.  She goes through the mirror, and then there is only one Alice, or only one that we can follow.  Instead of destroying her double, the ‘real’ Alice merges with the other Alice – the imagined Alice, the dream Alive, the Alice who exists nowhere.  And when the ‘life’ side of Alice returns to the waking world, she brings the story of the mirror world back with her, and starts telling it to the cat.  Which at least solves the problem of audience….

"The act of writing takes place at the moment when Alice passes through the mirror.  At this one instant, the glass barrier between the doubles dissolves, and Alice is neither here nor there, neither art nor life, neither the one thing nor the other, though at the same times she is all of these at once.  At that moment time itself stops, and also stretches out, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world."  Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead:  A Writer on Writing

Note:  That intersecation is also the place any art gets done. To quote from my poem, What the Dragon said:  Between was and will be/I am.