Poetry Friday

Poetically said of Georgia O'Keeffe:

She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in their tracks.

~ Marsden Hartley ~

Doors...

The shelves were supposed to be loaded with books--but they were, of course, really doors: each book-lid opened as exciting as Alice putting her gold key in the lock. I spent days running in and out of other worlds like a time bandit, or a spy.

~ Caitlin Moran ~

Tornadoes

Tornadoes can also happen at any time of day or night, but most tornadoes occur between 4–9 p.m.

~ NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory ~
Photo courtesy NOAA NSSL.

Don't Forget...

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more.

~ Edwin Way Teale ~
Photo by David Stokes.

Memorial Day Thought

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

~ Henry David Thoreau ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

~ From the The New National Reading Books. Infant Reader. (1885) ~

The Cult of Money

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

~ Pope Francis ~

Poetry Friday

Keep a picture in your pocket
And a poem in your head
And you'll never feel lonely
At night when you're in bed.

~ Beatrice Schenk de Regniers from "Keep a Poem in Your Pocket" ~







Illustration by Maurice Sendak from The Giant Story by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers.

Comfort

When things are bad, we take comfort in the thought that they could always get worse. And when they are, we find hope in the thought that things are so bad they have to get better.

~ Malcolm Forbes ~

Yuck!

Poultry is like meat, except when you cook it rare. Then it's like bird-flavored Jello.

~ P. J. O'Rourke ~

Childbirth

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

~ Gloria Steinem ~

Goodbye Bernard Waber

Frequent family moves made me the perennial new kid on the block with no prospect of immediate friends, so books became my friends. I borrowed insatiably from various neighborhood branches of the Philadelphia library.

~ Bernard Waber ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Lyle desperately wanted to win Loretta over. He tried flashing his sweetest, most toothsome smile at her to show how really friendly he was. But this only frightened the distrustful animal even more.

~ Bernard Waber from Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile ~
In memory of Bernard Waber who passed away on May 16.

Image courtesy threedonia.com.

Veggie Politics

The attorney general will not cast aspersions on my asparagus.

~ Louie Gohmert ~
Click here for video; quote at approximately 3:52.

Poetry Friday

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

~ Mark Strand ~

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

And Work Together!

We need to harness the potential of our entrepreneurial spirit and our abundant clean energy resources to create a more sustainable future.

~ Michael Bennet ~
Image courtesy Open Clip Art Library.

Happy Birthday, L. Frank Baum!

Floating In His Tin Can

I'm really looking forward to it, if you can imagine floating weightless, watching the world pour by through the big bay window of the space station playing a guitar; just a tremendous place to think about where we are in history.

~ Chris Hadfield ~
Photo courtesy NASA.

Over the Rainbow

Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it there.

~ Barbara Walters ~
Photo by paparutzi.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their "evil" look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.

~ Camille Paglia ~
Photo © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Breathing Is Good

What art offers is space--a certain breathing room for the spirit.

~ John Updike ~
Photo by renedrivers.

Poetry Friday

Prose and Poetry

You can be immersed in good prose, like swimming in a lake on a warm summer afternoon.

In poetry
the ice-cold moon
drops down
into the lake,
melts
to surround you,
and then
together
you fly back home
to the sky.

~ Eve Merriam from The Singing Green: New and Selected Poems for All Seacons ~

Photo by chrismek.

Diabesity

One in four kids have either pre-diabetes or diabetes--what I like to call diabesity. How did this happen?

~ Mark Hyman ~
Photo by Greyhawk68.

A Sad Truth

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

~ Karen Russell ~

Standardized Testing

...what started as a well motivated process to improve student learning has become an increasingly irrational high-stakes endeavor. Politicians may show short-term gains, but students, teachers, and the learning process are becoming casualties.

~ Howard Gardner ~

Today, It Appears That Education Is Losing

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

~ H. G. Wells ~



Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

It's a splotchy, blotchy
city cat, not pretty cat,
this rough little tough little bag of old bones.

~ Eve Merriam from "The Stray Cat" ~

Photo by vpickering.

Unleash the Artist in You!

Reading is an art form, and every man can be an artist.

~ Edwin Louis Cole ~
"Man Reading in a Park" (1914) by August Macke courtesy The Athenaeum.

Poetry Friday

Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects.

~ Lilian Moore ~
Photo by bayasaa.

With an Occasional Peek to See Where You Are Going

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

~ Theodore Roosevelt ~

Lovely!

Blossoms are scattered by the wind and the wind cares nothing, but the blossoms of the heart no wind can touch.

~ Yoshida Kenko ~
Photo ©Diane Mayr.

They're Both Beautiful In Their Own Way

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets.

~ Edna Ferber ~

Good One!

Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.

~ Chuck Palahniuk ~
Photo by t-bet.

Charming Gardeners

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

~ Marcel Proust ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Hiddlety, diddlety, dumpty,
The cat ran up the plum tree;
Half-a-crown to fetch her down,
Hiddlety, diddlety, dumpty.

~ Nursery rhyme ~

Photo by coreycam.

Arbor Day Kwote--One Day Late

I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.

~ Georgia O'Keeffe ~



Photo by Carl Van Vechten, courtesy Library of Congress.


[Note: O'Keeffe is standing next to a pile of firewood. I guess her idea of "enjoy" trees is to light them on fire! --KK]

Poetry Friday

Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing. A great Arab scholar, Dr. Salma Jayyusi, said, "If we read one another, we won't kill one another."
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
To start reading one another, pick up the anthology, The Space between Our Footsteps: Poems and Paintings from the Middle East, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

Names

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours.

~ James Joyce ~

Ha! Ha!

Coming September 2013, cover art courtesy StephenKing.com.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

~ Stephen King ~

St. George's Feast Day!

It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?

~ Bram Stoker from Dracula ~
Photo by David~O.

Moo!

The mere brute pleasure of reading--the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

~ Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
Photo by Anna Briggs.

Sunday's Kat Kwote

Oh, be honest, Tom cat, be honest, if only to yourself.

~ Mick Doyle from "The Adventures of a Tom Cat" ~
Illustration from Fun and Frolic edited by E. T. Roe.

Boston!

Boston may be your hometown, but we claim it, too. It’s one of America’s iconic cities. It’s one of the world’s great cities. And one of the reasons the world knows Boston so well is that Boston opens its heart to the world.

~ Barack Obama ~

Poetry Friday

Well, I think maybe people who write poetry are different in their thinking, to begin with, and how they translate what they experience into writing or maybe what they experience is somewhat different from what others do.

~ Lisel Mueller ~

How About Natural?

The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

~ Antonia Fraser ~

Nonfiction

All that non-fiction can do is answer questions. It's fiction's business to ask them.

~ Richard Hughes ~

Much Better!

Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

~ Buddha ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Poison Ivy

"Poison Ivy," written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller

Sunday's Kat Kwote

It may be remarked just here that the cat, although a passionate lover, is both modest and subtle. Dogs conduct their amours with little regard for public decency but a cat makes love at night in shady groves, sanctified by the natural odours of the warm earth, or in the hidden recesses of gabled roofs.

~ Carl Van Vechten ~
Photo by mahalis.greece.

Sometimes You Just Have to Watch This Stuff

This is a Brene Brown video. There's any number of good quotes in here, one of the ones I like the best is, "We numb vulnerability...the problem is that, and I learned this from the research, you cannot selectively numb emotion."

Poetry Friday

A final suggestion about bringing poetry into your lives: don't analyze it, don't ask others to analyze it. Don't deconstruct it or try to make meaning of it. Find the poems that wake you up, that make you feel as if you've submerged yourself in a mineral hot spring or an ice bath; find the poems that make you feel (almost) irrational joy or sadness or delight. Find the poems that make you want to roll around in them or paint their colors all over your bedroom ceiling. Those are the poems you want to play with--forget the ones that don't make sense. Find those poems that communicate with the deepest parts of your being and welcome them in.

~ Elena Aguilar ~

Consider Yourself Warned!

Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

~ Saul Bellow ~

What You Learn by Swimming Upstream

The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.

~ Woodrow Wilson ~

Much Too Busy

...we're too busy singin' to put anybody down.

~ Monkees' theme song ~

One More Reason, Beside Downton Abbey, to Support PBS

You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet.

~ Gwen Ifill ~

Sunday's Kat Kwote

The cat's a shadow-cat, an edgeless blur.

~ Ciaran O'Driscoll from "The Shadow Cat" ~
Photo by Max xx.

But, It Doesn't Mean You Have to Exercise That Right

In America you have a right to be stupid--if you want to be.

~ John Kerry ~

Poetry Friday

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

~ André Gide ~
What's not to love about this if you're a writer? It means you'll always have a job, and you're free to "borrow" from others! --KK

Knitting

It's like a woman's birthright to knit. It's primal. It's timeless. You don't need electricity to knit. You can do it with a candle, girls!

~ Tracey Ullman ~
Print by Mary Cassatt courtesy Library of Congress.

You Can't Have One Without the Other

To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.

~ Wendell Berry ~

Art

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

~ Herbert Read ~
"Hat Shop" by August Macke (1914), courtesy The Athenaeum.

Poet As Prognosticator

Opening of the baseball season: New York vs. Boston, c 1886

I see great things in baseball. It's our game--the American game.

~ Walt Whitman ~
Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Sunday's Kat Kwote (Women's History Month #31)

How do we know the Easter Bunny is a woman? Duh, chocolate!

~ Kurious Kitty ~
Happy Easter!


Photo © Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.

Women's History Month #30

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.

~ Helen Keller ~

Poetry Friday (Women's History Month #29)

A poem is land found, as if for the first time. If I already knew what it would hold, I wouldn’t need the poem, and if what it holds were knowable by any other words or way, I wouldn’t need the poem.

~ Jane Hirshfield ~

Women's History Month #28

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all--make us laugh, think, cry and cheer--preferably in that order.

~ Madeleine Albright ~



Photo courtesy U.S. Department of State.

Women's History Month #27

Selectivity of mass extinction events is sometimes linked with body size, ecological constraints and competition, while other times it could be related to just pure luck of the survivors.

~ Olja Toljagić ~
Photo by Kentaro Ohno.

Women's History Month #26

Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.

~ Elizabeth I ~




Portrait by Steven van der Meulen, circa 1563.

Women's History Month #25

Those of us who have participated believe it's important to have a process where candidates have to interact with voters one-on-one. In New Hampshire, as in Iowa, there is a very engaged electorate that is involved, looks at all the candidates and questions them about what their vision is for running for president. That's important for the process.

~ Jeanne Shaheen ~



Photo courtesy www.shaheen.senate.gov.