Long Aphorism

“The arts are not a way of making a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio.

Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”themed pirate ship jump house

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

Genre

In order to offset the inferiority complex generated by other “best” lists that I had little or no experience with, consider please NPR’s new list of 100 Fantasy and SciFi novels. What’s your count? How far down before you hit one you’ve not read? What do you think of the quality of the list? I’ll compile my response and add it in the comments.

The list is here.

Con Artists

Please see the included image of the cards I received in trade for my own. One of them is Dale’s, but the rest originate from the creative minds of Dragon Con. A couple of these will be sent out to a couple of you, as the artist insisted I take extras to trade. I have a list of emails, should any of you wish to trade with someone from this group.

Presence

I knew when I was drafted into the ATC project that I wanted to contribute, in part at least, in the medium of photography. That was the purpose of the visit to the labyrinth that spawned this pic. I may stick some more in a flicker account if anyone is interested.  The image is a single exposure, with considerable help from Dale in both the inspiration and execution.  I’ve provided some post-processing via Adobe Lightroom, but mainly along the lines of bumping this and pulling down that.  No substantive changes were made… but then again, its all a canvas.

By popular (read:Marc and Dale) request...

Assignment 2010.n+1 – Soup to nuts

Jeff called me earlier tonight to share an inspiration he had while listening to NPR.  I’m certain I will mangle some portion (or perhaps all) of what we discussed, but I will make an effort to recount it with you just the same.

He heard a story of a group of folks that would get together and support projects by combining small donations.  This reminded him of a group he used to be a part of that would gather periodically, each bringing their own soup with them as a meal.  These concepts, along with a dash of Lichtenbergianism, inspired the idea I will now share.

What IF:

We met, as a group, at a regularly scheduled interval (say, once a month).  The location of this meeting would rotate amongst the ash-bound (as available anyway) to host.  Each attendee would bring 3 things: soup (or some form of self-nourishment), $10, and their attentiveness.  The latter would be used to consider the presentations of various artists with projects in mind that a small donation would help make possible.  At the end of the evening, those donating would place in a hat the name of the project they would like to support.  The top vote getter would receive the collected funds with the understanding that they would come to later meetings to share their progress.  In this way, we have an excuse to meet and a consistent way to act as microfinanciers of local artists.

Jeff, please correct any mistakes when you escape the technology void that is Mississippi.

What do y’all think?

L.10.1 – Turff

Repeating my first submission, from the comment within Dale’s post:

Brine
Spry
Sigh
Fear
Oomph
Sex
Seeping
Clocked
Annoying
Sane

And my second one, which I’ve been holding back to work on a bit:

Who flows,
knows,
phases,
cuts through…
sinks through.
Stays.
Settles.
Soaks through…
…new waves
dies.