Shel Graves' Sensorium

Without spoilers, I could talk about Salma Hayek's deft acting, from her thoughtful expressions of serene openness and curiosity to the angry twitch beneath her eye. Or, I could compare this quiet film which takes place over the course of a dinner to  My Dinner With Andre . The problem is I left the theatre stunned by the ending. So that's what I want to talk about. I was curious about this film after watching the trailer, but decided I had to see it after listening to Mariann Sullivan and film critic Noah Gitell talk about it on the Our Hen House podcast. The film was written by Mike White. It was excellent to see a vegan protagonist on screen. Beatriz herself never mentions her dietary choices and is described as "vegetarian" by another character, but there are a number of tells (her rescued goats and, funnily, how at dessert she is offered sorbet — vegetarians can usually eat any dessert, but only vegans get offered the default dairy and egg-free sorbet). He...

Taste: garden tomatoes Sight: walking into the sea; crescent-shaped shadows Sound: cawing; "It just doesn't feel right." Smell: striking a match Touch: the weight of stones in your pocket Extra: The Confederacy of Dunce s; "The Okinawans call it 'Ikigai' and the Nicoyans call it 'plan de vida;' for both it translates to 'why I wake up in the morning.' Knowing your sense of purpose is worth up to seven years of extra life expectancy." — The Blue Zones   "Mother says push/forward, promise to keep/moving, seeking, dreaming,/imagine that there is something/left that we have to give." — "Please," Chloe N. Clark, Sunvault Anthology  "His gaze, forever blocked by bars, is so exhausted it takes in nothing else. All that exists for him are a thousand bars. Beyond the thousand bars, no world." — The Panther, Rainer Maria Rilke Grateful for: movies and books

Taste:  limewine Sight:  a black sheep; a drowned mouse; batons and riot gear Sound: braying; bleating Smell:  burnt coffee Touch:  woolly, sheep nose Extra: the grass is always greener; a portmanteau — two words blended to create a new expression; "We’re looking to bring back love. And we’re talking about real love. We’re talking about revolutionary love. We’re not talking about Hollywood love. We’re talking about motherhood, we’re talking about mother earth, we’re talking about loving each other and caring for each other like brothers and sisters. And if we truly care for each other we have to be willing to fight for each other. If someone says they love you, and they know your family is being destroyed, but they say, well it’s inconvenient right now, Game of Thrones is on, than that person doesn’t love you. So we would like to believe that white people love us, but so far it seems like a dysfunctional family. We would like that to change. White people mus...

Taste: grenache as remembered; peach Sight: moon jellyfish aurelia aurita ; farmer's market flowers - phlox, snapdragons and stargazers Sound: Safe and Sound - Dream Smell:  cinnamon peach, browned sugar, cumin, curry — mingled peach cobbler and malai kofta; lily Touch: head-banging Extra: the six-fingered place; not late but first in line for the plane check-in; will-o'-the-wisp, ignis fatuus, a delusive or misleading hope, a pale flame or phosphorescence sometimes seen over marshy ground at night Grateful for: opportunity, reinvigoration

newjimcrow.com An eye-opening must read : This book (read also Unfair by Adam Benforado ) shows the gross injustice in our criminal justice system, which creates a racial caste system, and it makes the case for ending mass incarceration and the War on Drugs. "You are now awakened to a dark and ugly reality that has been in place for decades and that is continuous with the racist underside of American history from the advent of slavery onward."  It also shows the need to extend compassion and care to all human beings and to stop using the label "criminal" to dehumanize and disregard people and then excuse the warehousing and caging of them. Instead, the author offers, "...a positive vision of what we can strive for—a society in which all human beings of all races are treated with dignity, and have the right to food, shelter, health care, education, and security." It was shocking and horrifying to read: How the prison system has expanded when i...

Taste: Bing cherries Sight: gothic food voyeur ; a sweat stain in the shape of Africa; the rising summer sun light bright in patches across the dry brown lawn; a peach galette; a floral apron; jellyfish Sound: hacking breathing wheezing sneezing Smell: smoke T ouch: a calm summer night — Sunset Place; it shall be hot; a donkey's soft nose Extra: a fearless writing hat; a fearless writing cat; in retirement being sure to watch each sunrise/sunset; motivated by hunger and fear, when you need to be hungry, when you need to be desperate, when you need to be sure; caregiving a messy act from which love arises Grateful for: twenty years

I read Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History from July 23, 2016 to July 24, 2017 as a slow reading project. In it, Galeano, Sept. 3, 1940-April 13, 2015, a Uruguayan journalist, draws attention to history (people, art, sports, events), progress, and the lack thereof. My first slow reading project was Peter Mattheissen's The Snow Leopard , a beautiful journal of his hike through the Himalayas in search of snow leopards and enlightenment. It inspired my interest in daily readings or reading a small portion of a book each day and in writing daily serials i.e. my Space Explorer 365 project and my work-in-progress on utopias and their mascots and monsters. I began simultaneously reading A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke and will complete it on December 19, 2017. Galeano's Children of the Days offered a profound daily reading experience. It brought beauty and layered meaning to each day. Every day, it pro...

Short story love! I've been on a short story binge and I've recently read three outstanding short story collections by Brian Stableford, Peter S. Beagle, and Chavisa Woods. One of these collections may well be my *2017 Best Book of the Year (although there's half a year of reading to go and I am reading some influential non-fiction, too) — I would love for it to be a story collection. Stableford and Beagle are prolific writers with huge oeuvres, but I hadn't been exposed to either writer's work (other than Beagle's The Last Unicorn ). After reading Stableford's story, " The Elixir of Youth ," in Lightspeed Magazine,  and being introduced to his contes cruels (cruel tales), I knew I needed more. I picked up Beagle's book because I was looking for some werewolf stories. Both books contained uniformly engaging stories. I didn't find myself skipping stories. Chavisa Woods is a newer writer on the scene by comparison. Her debut collection o...

PNWA 17: Best Birthday Present Ever!  I last went to the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference some years ago after taking a Fiction Writing Certificate course with author Pam Binder at the University of Washington. A group of us "Pam's Kids" went. It was a great time, but I also felt overwhelmed by all of the information about publishing, agents, and marketing. I decided I'd better focus on writing a good book first. Then I went and earned an MFA in Creative Writing, read a lot of amazing books, and my personal definition of "good book" skyrocketed. I applied bum glue and kept writing. Books were roosting like pigeons in my laptop. It was time to get out there again. My spouse sent me to the conference this year as an early birthday present. Returning to PNWA 17 was a fantastic experience. I had this wonderful, and not terribly common, feeling of social ease. It was fun to talk to other authors about their books and writing. I heard about a number ...