Animals
Dog photos with comedy captions:
Astronomy
Someone paid to register an asteroid name in honor of John Scalzi. It has since been upgraded to "minor planet" status, and it really is officially called Johnscalzi. Some people think of the darnedest ways to publicize their books...
Books
Another look at The First Four Years, which is as different from the rest of the Little House books as is its own happier sequel, On the Way Home:
Both are posthumous collections of notes, never polished for publication. One has an overall grim emotional tone, though I don't read it as altogether "depressing." When Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder, she never promised to obey him. She wanted a more secure lifestyle than they'd grown up having on the prairie. They didn't want to quarrel so they made a sort of bet: She gave him four years and a "year of grace" to convince her he could earn enough as a farmer to keep them secure on the prairie...leaving the final decision to chance. If the first four years had gone well, Almanzo would have won, fairly and squarely, and Laura would have had to deal with it. Laura was not a depressive woman and does mention the good times in those five years, but the bottom line was that Laura won their bet. They went back to Missouri and, although Laura didn't write a great deal about their Little House in the Ozarks (Rose Wilder Lane's protege did that, much later), they'd found the home where both of them were reasonably content for the rest of their lives.
Poem, That Free Bonus
So I linked my "Folsom Childhood Blues" poem to the open link-up at dVerse. This obliged me to read other people's poems right on the screen and post comments. Given my luck you know this would mean a super well attended link-up with about fifty poems to read on the screen...I chose to do it, so no more whining about it, though it's not something I plan to do regularly. Anyway the "optional prompt" was the suggestion that people write about the painting you see shrunk above. If you look at it the right way you can see a face. The eyes are closed. The face may be sleeping, or weeping. It's not smiling.
The back-story about the painting is: The painter, Frantisek Kupka, had already painted a conventional portrait of his wife, in a formal, frilly, late nineteenth century white dress, probably more elaborate and uncomfortable than most wedding gowns are today. Years later, he painted her face into this blob of vertical brush strokes.
People had lots of different views of this painting. Because the woman wasn't smiling some people predictably saw her as trapped in a stifling historical era, a bad marriage, or both. Because her face seems to float in the brushstrokes some saw her face as a memory floating on the edges of moods. Because she seems to be blocked off by bars of bright color someone even saw her as an image of today's gender-confused teenagers. (The picture was painted more than a hundred years ago.)
Nobody else seems to have seen this:
"You have already painted me," she said.
"One time, and that was tedious enough."
"This time I vow I'll only paint your head,"
He pleaded. "And I'll buy you lots of stuff."
The whole time he was working on her eyes
She haggled over gemstones, works of art.
"I'll never get your mouth right, realize,
If you keep talking, treasure of my heart."
"Let it look green, for lots of good green cash,"
She said impatiently. "My foot's asleep.
You could just give me a great big moustache!
Who cares? I've other promises to keep!
Just fashionably fill the canvas in
With Abstraction." He did--the prize to win.
That's a Quatorzain, a fourteen-line poem that's not quite a sonnet, but my writing mind ran on:
He took each tube he'd squeezed on the palette
And squeezed more on the brush, in turns, until
The colors that mixed into fleshtones, wet,
Dried in long bricks of vertical ground-fill.
That's an Out-Take.
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