Skip to main content

Liberty, Santa, Musicians, Clowns, Doves

Taste: a pasty, cooked kidney bean
Touch: Pain, scaled: Pain on a scale of one to ten with ten being the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life, the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life
Sight: A man dressed as the Statue of Liberty, in a sickly green robe, the shade of oxidized copper, jumping holding a sign with an arrow that says, "Taxes"; a shell pink sunset falling over the snow-covered mountains textured by evergreen trees into fluffy looking mounds like coral; a pale crisp moon in a sky the opposite of shell pink, depths of the ocean blue; a square of flat salt and pepper ceiling in the speckled corner of which someone has hung a translucent blue mobile over the place where the patients all look up waiting; blue shadows and black holes, an ultrasound; blood, the color of Syrah, in two vials
Smell: canned dog food like a stew that has sat out overnight
Sound: Tasmin Little's Naked Violin, Bach, the difference between her own 1757 Guadagnini violin and a 'Regent' Stradivarius of 1708 from the Royal Academy of Music; a vibrating whoomp, whoomp, the sound part of ultrasound; "Sorry," and "Just think of Santa Claus coming down the chimney."
Extra: jobs it is evil to pay people to do; and what does the foreign man see when he peers into the folds, staring at their secret history of endless encounters, a place where he does not belong and yet which is far less foreign than the city in which he lives; Said in a dream: "Things are safer with the appearance of openness than if we were to erect barricades."; cliche, an anemic vegetarian; this town survives on a tax base of pawn shops and tattoo parlors; on this block live from north to south: a pole dance instructor, an accordion player, a clown, a DJ at Muslim weddings, and a man who builds trebuchets; the word, "libertine"; "Having the eyes of a dove means not stopping at the literal meaning of words but knowing how to penetrate their mystical sense." — p354 The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Springy story review: "State Change" by Ken Liu

Why it springs to mind:  You'll never look at an ice cube the same way again. Where read: In the 2014 Hugo award-winning Lightspeed Magazine , August. Length: 5,194 words Summary: A woman has an ice cube for a soul. Memorable: How the story invites us to think about the shape of our soul, how it (or our perception of it) influences us and how it changes. What ordinary every day object would your soul be? A silver spoon, a beech stick? A great party conversation starter, this. Quote:  “All life is an experiment." Notable:  The protagonist Rina is an avid reader (always a good choice). Pairs well with: T.S. Elliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay Origin:  The story was written in 24 hours based on a writing prompt. (See Author Spotlight: Ken Liu ) About the author: Ken Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings , the first in a fantasy series The Dandelion Dynasty, is due out from Saga Press ( a new Simon & Schuster imprint ) in 2015.

What is Solarpunk? Good question, great answers from our community

What is solarpunk? My fellow Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers authors Commando Jugendstil and Tales from The EV Studio put together this video for the Turin International Book Fair . It features editors and authors from the solarpunk community sharing their thoughts. Together we're imagining optimistic futures based on renewable energy. My soundbite was: "Solarpunk futures are — green spaces with clean water that are pedestrian, collective, feminist, creative communities. And they include non-human animals. " Mary "solarpunk" Shelley cat did a great job (at 6:15) helping from her rather ridiculous cat tree which she absolutely loves. And what better time to wear this solar-colored "Veganism is Feminism" tee from The Herbivore Clothing Company . Seriously. I'm holding a stack of solarpunk books: Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers  edited by Sarena Ulibarri which includes my story "Watch Out, Red Crusher!".  Wings of R...

Springy story review: "Torching the Dusties" by Margaret Atwood

Why it springs to mind: Relevant thoughts about how we view aging and how we treat the aged in our society. In this story, young people protest the existence of old people in an assisted living facility for taking up resources. Not far from the callous viewpoint of people sometimes expressed in the national news. Where read: The last story in  Stone Mattress: Nine Tales   (2014) a collection by Margaret Atwood Summary: Wilma and her boyfriend Tobias escape an assisted living facility, Ambrosia Manor, that has come under attack by protestors carrying signs that say "Time to Go" and "Our Turn" who think the old people are just taking up space and resources. Memorable: the delightful use of Charles Bonnet Syndrome as a character trait for Wilma Quotes:  "We have to be kind to one another in here, she tells herself. We're all we have left."   "According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they're less capable of indignation and...