(202) 224-3121

 85 schoolgirls were murdered by this administration in a senseless, unauthorized attack on Iran.

Please take a few minutes to make a phone call or two.  

(202) 224-3121  

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The History Teacher by Billy Collins

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

No Unsolicited Advice. Except from Walt Whitman

 I've never been one who appreciates unsolicited advice.

Never.

However.

Picking up an old copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and reading what Mr. Whitman advises gives me a different perspective.  

But.

Even though I can appreciate what he has to say, I'm sticking by my own philosophy of "No Unsolicited Advice!"

I mean it.

Mr. Whitman gets a pass.  The ONLY pass.

* * * 

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured … others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches … and shall master all attachment."

   -  -  -  Walt Whitman

Pro Femina by Carolyn Kizer

A question -

Are you so disturbed and sickened by events of late that you're embracing your feminism a little more than you once did?

I am.

And I find I am seeking out more poetry.  

Poetry in all forms written by well-known poets, unknown poets, men, women, and feminists.

Carolyn Kizer speaks to me.  

"Carolyn Ashley Kizer was an American poet, translator, editor, and advocate for feminist and human rights causes. Known for her wit, formal mastery, and political engagement, she co-founded Poetry Northwest, served as the first NEA literary programs director, and taught widely. Her 1984 collection Yin: New Poems won the Pulitzer Prize. Blending classical allusions with feminism, her works like Pro Femina and Cool, Calm, and Collected reflect decades of cultural change."

Born:

Dec 10, 1925 (Spokane, Washington)

Died:

Oct 9, 2014 (Sonoma, California)

ONE From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women. How unwomanly to discuss it! Like a noose or an albatross necktie    The clinical sobriquet hangs us: codpiece coveters. Never mind these epithets; I myself have collected some honeys.    Juvenal set us apart in denouncing our vices Which had grown, in part, from having been set apart: Women abused their spouses, cuckolded them, even plotted    To poison them. Sensing, behind the violence of his manner— “Think I'm crazy or drunk?”—his emotional stake in us,    As we forgive Strindberg and Nietzsche, we forgive all those    Who cannot forget us. We are hyenas. Yes, we admit it. While men have politely debated free will, we have howled for it,    Howl still, pacing the centuries, tragedy heroines. Some who sat quietly in the corner with their embroidery Were Defarges, stabbing the wool with the names of their ancient    Oppressors, who ruled by the divine right of the male— I’m impatient of interruptions! I’m aware there were millions    Of mutes for every Saint Joan or sainted Jane Austen, Who, vague-eyed and acquiescent, worshiped God as a man.    I’m not concerned with those cabbageheads, not truly feminine    But neutered by labor. I mean real women, like you and like me. Freed in fact, not in custom, lifted from furrow and scullery,    Not obliged, now, to be the pot for the annual chicken,    Have we begun to arrive in time? With our well-known    Respect for life because it hurts so much to come out with it;    Disdainful of “sovereignty,” “national honor;” and other abstractions; We can say, like the ancient Chinese to successive waves of invaders,    “Relax, and let us absorb you. You can learn temperance    In a more temperate climate.” Give us just a few decades    Of grace, to encourage the fine art of acquiescence    And we might save the race. Meanwhile, observe our creative chaos,    Flux, efflorescence—whatever you care to call it!          TWO I take as my theme “The Independent Woman,” Independent but maimed: observe the exigent neckties    Choking violet writers; the sad slacks of stipple-faced matrons;    Indigo intellectuals, crop-haired and callus-toed, Cute spectacles, chewed cuticles, aced out by full-time beauties    In the race for a male. Retreating to drabness, bad manners,    And sleeping with manuscripts. Forgive our transgressions    Of old gallantries as we hitch in chairs, light our own cigarettes,    Not expecting your care, having forfeited it by trying to get even. But we need dependency, cosseting, and well-treatment.    So do men sometimes. Why don’t they admit it?    We will be cows for a while, because babies howl for us,    Be kittens or bitches, who want to eat grass now and then    For the sake of our health. But the role of pastoral heroine    Is not permanent, Jack. We want to get back to the meeting. Knitting booties and brows, tartars or termagants, ancient    Fertility symbols, chained to our cycle, released Only in part by devices of hygiene and personal daintiness,    Strapped into our girdles, held down, yet uplifted by man’s    Ingenious constructions, holding coiffures in a breeze,    Hobbled and swathed in whimsy, tripping on feminine    Shoes with fool heels, losing our lipsticks, you, me, In ephemeral stockings, clutching our handbags and packages. Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, In need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware,    Keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.    Look at man’s uniform drabness, his impersonal envelope!    Over chicken wrists or meek shoulders, a formal, hard-fibered assurance.    The drape of the male is designed to achieve self-forgetfulness. So, Sister, forget yourself a few times and see where it gets you:    Up the creek, alone with your talent, sans everything else. You can wait for the menopause, and catch up on your reading.    So primp, preen, prink, pluck, and prize your flesh, All posturings! All ravishment! All sensibility! Meanwhile, have you used your mind today? What pomegranate raised you from the dead, Springing, full-grown, from your own head, Athena?          THREE          I will speak about women of letters, for I’m in the racket.    Our biggest successes to date? Old maids to a woman. And our saddest conspicuous failures? The married spinsters    On loan to the husbands they treated like surrogate fathers.    Think of that crew of self-pitiers, not-very-distant, Who carried the torch for themselves and got first-degree burns.    Or the sad sonneteers, toast-and-teasdales we loved at thirteen;    Middle-aged virgins seducing the puerile anthologists    Through lust-of-the-mind; barbiturate-drenched Camilles    With continuous periods, murmuring softly on sofas    When poetry wasn’t a craft but a sickly effluvium,    The air thick with incense, musk, and emotional blackmail. I suppose they reacted from an earlier womanly modesty    When too many girls were scabs to their stricken sisterhood,    Impugning our sex to stay in good with the men, Commencing their insecure bluster. How they must have swaggered    When women themselves endorsed their own inferiority!    Vestals, vassals, and vessels, rolled into several, They took notes in rolling syllabics, in careful journals,    Aiming to please a posterity that despises them. But we’ll always have traitors who swear that a woman surrenders    Her Supreme Function, by equating Art with aggression    And failure with Femininity. Still, it’s just as unfair To equate Art with Femininity, like a prettily packaged commodity    When we are the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret:    Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity. But even with masculine dominance, we mares and mistresses    Produced some sleek saboteuses, making their cracks Which the porridge-brained males of the day were too thick to perceive, Mistaking young hornets for perfectly harmless bumblebees. Being thought innocuous rouses some women to frenzy;    They try to be ugly by aping the ways of men And succeed. Swearing, sucking cigars and scorching the bedspread, Slopping straight shots, eyes blotted, vanity-blown In the expectation of glory: she writes like a man! This drives other women mad in a mist of chiffon. (One poetess draped her gauze over red flannels, a practical feminist.) But we’re emerging from all that, more or less, Except for some ladylike laggards and Quarterly priestesses    Who flog men for fun, and kick women to maim competition.    Now, if we struggle abnormally, we may almost seem normal; If we submerge our self-pity in disciplined industry; If we stand up and be hated, and swear not to sleep with editors; If we regard ourselves formally, respecting our true limitations    Without making an unseemly show of trying to unfreeze our assets;    Keeping our heads and our pride while remaining unmarried;    And if wedded, kill guilt in its tracks when we stack up the dishes And defect to the typewriter. And if mothers, believe in the luck of our children, Whom we forbid to devour us, whom we shall not devour, And the luck of our husbands and lovers, who keep free women.     - - -  BY CAROLYN KIZER Copyright Credit: Carolyn Kizer, “Pro Femina” from Cool, Calm, and Collected: Poems 1960-2000. Copyright © 2001 by Carolyn Kizer. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P. O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA 98368-0271, www.coppercanyonpress.org. Source: Cool Calm and Collected: Poems 1960-2000 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001)

Today in Meat Camp. AND, I leave for Paris in one month (squeee!)

 'tis another snowy day in Meat Camp

Winter is the best time

to find out who you are.

Quiet, contemplation time,

away from the rushing world,

cold time, dark time, holed-up

pulled-in time and space

to see that inner landscape,

that place hidden and within.

- - - by David Budbill

I leave for Paris in one month.  

(yes, yes, yes, I know I've mentioned it a time or two.  No Apologies!  I'm excited.  And, yes, I'm absolutely positively sure I'll be mentioning it more than a few more times both before leaving, while I'm there, AND upon returning.  It's good to have good things happening to be happy and excited about during these hard days of gloom and doom.  Right?!!  Damn right.  😊 )

Today, I decided, is a perfect day to pull out a few guidebooks to decide which, if any, to toss into my suitcase.

This is, of course, way too many guidebooks to even consider packing.  Add to that, I am being very careful this trip to pack as lightly as possible.  I would normally have Donald with me when flying, and he (being the gentleman his mom and dad raised him to be) always lifts my suitcase up and into the overhead for me.  Without Donald this trip, it will be up to me to get tha suitcase into the overhead.  Weight is of THE utmost importance this trip.

Once deciding if I need to take a guidebook or two then I'll check to see if there's a Kindle version.  OMG i love my Kindle.

Yes.  I do have a fascination with Paris.  

And a deep love of books.

 And, okay . . .

 admittedly, a bit of an obsession with books about France. 

And (again) I make no apologies -

I do love my Little Paris Library

But wait -

That's not all!

Looking for an escape to France?!

Check here -

https://www.kayebarleymeanderingsandmuses.com/2018/01/my-paris-reading-list.html

Looking for research material for France?!

Check here -

https://www.kayebarleymeanderingsandmuses.com/2022/02/my-paris-reading-list-non-fiction.html

Both lists were updated last May.  

Maybe I'll use this snow day as the perfect opportunity  to update the lists.  Maybe.

Bonne lecture, mes amis

❤ ❤ ❤ 

🗼💋 ☕ 🍾 🇫🇷 

Recommendation -

 If you're familiar with author Jeffrey Siger, it's probably because you read his Andreas Kaldis series set in Greece.  And if you haven't discovered this series yet, you should!  After all, The Greek government named Jeff as the only American author writing novels serving as a Guide to Greece.  

Aside from that - it's a terrific series that gets better with each book.

BUT.

Now we have a new Jeff Siger book.  The first in a new series.

I received it yesterday and read it in one sitting, and already tapping my foot impatiently waiting for the next one.  

Description from Jeff's webpage -

A Study in Secrets

Book 1 of the Redacted Man Mysteries

Now available in the UK and US

A retired gentleman with a complicated past. A missing priceless treasure. A young woman in trouble. The first in the brand-new Redacted Man mystery series set in NYC featuring Michael A, a Sherlock Holmes-worthy sleuth with a George Smiley secret-agent past.

Michael is a true gentleman who since retiring from the intelligence services lives a quiet, comfortable life. Practically a recluse and partially handicapped, he spends his days imagining the lives of the anonymous people he watches in the park beneath the windows of his elegant New York City townhouse–number 221–his every need tended to by his housekeeper, Mrs. Baker. He takes great care never to get involved in the lives of those he observes…until one day everything changes.

Each morning for weeks he watches a girl sit in the park at dawn. Always alone. Always watchful. And when the sun rises, she vanishes, as if she were never there. One day her routine changes–and Michael realizes she faces terrible danger. For reasons unclear even to himself he makes an uncharacteristic decision to abandon his solitude and help her.

Soon, Michael finds himself confronting the New York City underworld in an unexpected search for a priceless missing treasure. He’ll have to rely upon all the tricks of his former trade and resurrect long neglected relationships if he’s to keep not just himself, but his new friend, alive.

* * *

Now, in the spirit of transparency, I may have met the guy a time or two.

Let me just say - he's a doll.  Married to one of the most sainted of women.

And he can make you laugh till you think you might die.

These photos were taken in New Orleans at Bouchercon 2016 with some of my partners in crime

David Chaudoir and Lesa Holstine

David, Lesa and Jeff

Me with the Mrs. and the Mr.
Barbara and Jeff

Lesa, me and Jeff chatting about . . . shoes???

Jeff and Barbara

Maddee James (webmaster extraordinaire), David Chaudoir, Lesa Holstine, Jeff and Barbara, David Magayna




Now go buy Jeff's newest book!

You will thank me

😘

Happy President's Day!

 

Small Kindnesses

 Some days we need to be reminded -

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying…
Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back…
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

              - - -  Danusha Laméris