lizzywing

[lizzywing]

That’s a new one on me...

[lizzywing]

I’ve started blogging again, guys and dolls. I’ll post links and photos and such here, but the main blog has moved to lizblood.com/blog. Check ‘er out! 

The above photo is art by Marcelo Monreal, who I found out about at Hi-Fructose mag and who changed the way I was viewing a problem in my own work.

[lizzywing]

Leap

"Leap," by Brian Doyle

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. No one knows. They struck the pavement with such force that there was a pink mist in the air.

The mayor reported the mist.

A kindergarten boy who saw people falling in flames told his teacher that the birds were on fire. She ran with him on her shoulders out of the ashes.

Several pedestrians were killed by people falling from the sky. A fireman was killed by a body falling from the sky.

But he reached for her hand and she reached for his hand and they leaped out the window holding hands.

The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, wrote John the Apostle, and the elements shall melt with a fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

There is no fear in love, wrote John, but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath torment.

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe that we are not craven fools and charlatans to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

Their passing away was thought an affliction, and their going forth from us utter destruction, says the Book of Wisdom, but they are in peace. They shall shine, and shall dart about as sparks through stubble.

No one knows who they were: husband and wife, lovers, dear friends, colleagues, strangers thrown together at the window there at the lip of hell. Maybe they didn't even reach for each other consciously, maybe it was instinctive, a reflex, as they both decided at the same time to take two running steps and jump out the shattered window, but they did reach for each other, and they held on tight, and leaped, and fell endlessly into the smoking canyon, at two hundred miles an hour, falling so far and so fast that they would have blacked out before they hit the pavement near Liberty Street so hard that there was a pink mist in the air.

I trust I shall shortly see thee, John wrote, and we shall speak face to face.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them holding hands, and Smart DeHann saw them holding hands, and I hold on to that.

(From his book of essays, "Leaping: Revelations and Epiphanies," which is has just come back into print.)

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Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.

Vladimir Nabokov

[lizzywing]

Stoked about this new mural in OKC at the climbing gym. Photo stolen from here: https://www.facebook.com/siloartproject

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It’s embarrassing, how many people died today

and how much I still want

to kiss you in Paris, San Francisco, your bed

in August with the windows open, where my tongue has gone sore

from sucking itself, and I feel

like an ice cream cone someone dropped

on the sidewalk in July,...

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It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound — that he will never get over it.

Robert Frost

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In 1928, Andy Hartley Payne ran and won the 3,423.5-mile "Bunion Derby." The race, organized in part to promote Route 66, began in Los Angeles and ended in New York 84 days later. Out of the 199 runners who left LA, Payne was one of 55 who finished. He averaged ten-minute miles. Andy paid off the mortgage on his father's farm with the $25,000 prize. I want his sweatshirt and to name a future dog after him.

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How "like the human heart" can be said of pert near everything, pint of fizz, punching bag because all moves: the mouse, the house, the pelt of moon corresponding to the seas

from Dean Young's "Easy as Falling Down Stairs." I love his poetry, the way it moves much like this human's heart often does. Quick, erratic, to and away from the point at the same time. I love it enough to email it to friends I've not seen or spoken to in months, enough to recite it on a Korean rooftop in the dark, enough to know the mood, exactly, when I need to read one of his poems—slightly melancholic, slightly bitter, but still in love with the world, with my life, with love. Who's your poet boyfriend? Dean Young is mine.  

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I want to let them know somehow what witnessing their grief means to me, how this same roundness I sense in the room is like so many invisible hoops coming together just above their heads to partake of the only one and infinite pity, the one that goes I forever into the heart of love's mystery; I want to remember these faces and honor them somehow for what they are showing me and showing each other, the ground zero of being human.

Robert Vivian, "These Faces," from his essay collection The Least Cricket of Evening

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My brother's once-upon-a-time Christmas list. Age 9 or 10, maybe? Not sure if John wrote this after the Christmas that mother told him Santa isn't real. His response "On Christmas Eve? Really mom?"

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On the future of journalism (the future is here), the importance of Twitter, why you should pay for media content, Mary Fallin's disregard for the Open Records Act (a serious wtf moment), and a delightful spiral into the "narrative of the NBA," all culminating with music at the end! Whether you're an Okie or not, this is an engaging 35 minutes. 

Dan and Michael raise lots of wonderful points and ideas, and I'll leave you to find most of them out for yourself. Here, however, are a few of my favorites:

"Consumers [will] decide whether or not they get quality journalism in the future. The only news organizations that have the time and resources to do the kind of journalism that matters at the most basic level..reporting on the government, are the kind of organizations that have the resources to pay their employees a living wage and provide them with insurance coverage... It is just asking too much of people out there in the world to make their living doing another job and provide that kind of journalism service in their spare time and to provie it to you for free."

"Are you willing to pay for the kind of journalism that matters? And if you are, then you should pay for it, from one source or another...Consumers need to take ownership of media businesses by participating and demanding better coverage and being willing to pay for it."

"...journalists have the same power to file an open records request that anybody does. We have no additional powers... But that doesn't mean that the people who have those powers will have time to take time away from taking their kid to soccer practice and fixing dinner and fixing dinner to be able to provide those services to people for free." 

(Journalists and teachers, man. Pay them more.) 

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“The greatest satisfaction you can obtain from life is your pleasure in producing, in your own individual way, something of value to your fellowmen. That is creative living!

When we consider that each of us has only one life to live, isn’t it rather tragic to find men and women, with brains capable of comprehending the stars and the planets, talking about the weather; men and women, with hands capable of creating works of art, using those hands only for routine tasks; men and women, capable of independent thought, using their minds as a bowling-alley for popular ideas; men and women, capable of greatness, wallowing in mediocrity; men and women, capable of self-expression, slowly dying a mental death while they babble the confused monotone of the mob?

For you, life can be a succession of glorious adventures. Or it can be a monotonous bore. Take your choice!” —Neil Gaiman

(Photo is of Erwin Wurm’s sculpture “Big Suit” in St. Louis’ City Garden. Quote was taken from today’s Brain Pickings email.)

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Never underestimate the power of a gesture of kindness—"everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." 

Don Ritchie, Angel of The Gap - who helped save 500 people from suicide - dies at 85

Mr Ritchie spent 50 years coaxing desperate people back from The Gap, the notorious cliff at Watsons Bay where hundreds have died or thought about taking their lives.

He helped save 500 despairing souls - usually with little more than compassion, a warm smile and a hot cuppa.

“Those who knew him knew he was a very strong person and a very capable person,” Mr Ritchie’s daughter Sue said today.

Federal MP Malcolm Turnbull, whose electorate includes The Gap, added: “A true hero, one of our greatest Australians. RIP.”

Born in Vaucluse in 1926, Mr Ritchie died peacefully at home on Old South Head Road, Watsons Bay yesterday.

The former navy seaman turned life insurance salesman was never one to shout about his exploits.

He helped because he could.

Ms Ritchie said: “It was just something that he saw and that he had to do something about.”

New South Wales Mental Health Minister Kevin Humphries recalled when Mr Ritchie was named a Local Hero in the 2011 Australian of the Year Awards.

“Upon accepting the award Mr Ritchie urged people to never be afraid to speak to those most in need,” he said.

“Always remember the power of the simple smile, a helping hand, a listening ear and a kind word.”

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Essay Daily Holler!

I subscribe to Essay Daily (you should, too), which is doing an advent calendar of sorts this season. Each day, subscribers receive a short essay about a short essay, usually full of links to the essay being reviewed, youtube vids, and other enlightening/time wasting fun stuffs. Ander Monson runs the blog, and two days ago they ran this shout out to one of my CNF heroes, Kim Dana Kupperman. Monson recommends her essay collection I Just Lately Started Buying Wings, and I strongly echo his sentiments. She's a fantastic writer, as is Monson, so you can imagine I'm pretty stoked about the following: 

       It's the little things! Which are often big things. 

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Michael's Looking at Zion project, and this facet of it, too, puts me in mind of this quote:

"[T]here is a fundamental dichotomy in contemporary photography between those who think of photography as a means of self-expression and those who think of it as a method of exploration." —John Szarkowski, Windows and Mirrors (1978)

Michael, where do you fall? Inquiring minds want to know!

Just started a very interesting collaboration with the stylist Katy Knowlton. We are photographing every single item in people’s food storage. It is probably the most tedious thing I have ever attempted photographically but I think it is going to turn out really cool and be a unique look at this Mormon tradition.

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                   Hunger Mountain, the literary journal of my alma mater Vermont College of Fine Arts, has published a tribute to the life and literature of James Baldwin. Baldwin is one of my heroes, one of those characters I'd put around my imaginary, ideal dinner table. If you haven't read any of his work, do yourself and soul a favor and check him out. I am honored to be a part of the tribute in a conversational review of his work. Be sure and check out the other fantastic essays on him that they've posted, as well! (Kim Dana Kupperman is a rockstar, as is my former advisor Robert Vivian and former VCFA-mate Sion Dayson.)

A JB quote to leave you with—

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”