Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 139

Moths of the New World

erzebet put me on to this lovely short story, "Moths of the New World," by Audrey Niffenegger, the author of The Time Traveller's Wife.

The book had been published in 1928 in Minneapolis. She was exceptionally well illustrated, with many colour plates . . . She had 364 pages, all clay-coated stock, and was cloth bound in faded saffron buckram with her title stamped in silver on the cover and spine. There was some foxing. Her title was Moths of the New World.

Or: the book was a small-boned ligh...

eggplant body modification

Do you know what's beautiful? The contrast between the shiny purple-black of an eggplant's skin and its pale white interior. I was peeling one the other day, and thought, you could make great designs. I didn't make great ones because I was using just a paring knife:



Next time I'll use a zester and make all kinds of lines and swirls. Scarification for eggplants. It's the opposite of tattooing oranges or bananas: with them you're creating a dark design on something pale through the addition of c...

Wednesday reading

I read two short stories by Zadie Smith, because I haven't read anything by her since White Teeth, and I'd heard she'd written something science fictional. One of the short stories, "Meet the President!" was indeed science fictional, but I was equally taken by the other, "Moonlit Landscape with Bridge."

In "Meet the President," a fifteen-year-old boy of the rootless, world-travelling techno class tries to play his VR game (in which you kill the treacherous US vice president and, if you win,...

sense making, petition, tenacity

sense making
On edge today, for no good reason, with thoughts like moths around a light bulb. This observation and question: We value sense making; we couldn't survive if we didn't make sense of all the inputs we receive. In this way we make the world comprehensible. But what if we make too much sense of it? What if everything feels perpetually drenched in meaning? (All of the beautiful colors are very very meaningful) Then we've moved outside of accepted tolerances . . . It seems sense making...

A Woman of Independence

A Woman of Independence
Kirsty Sword Gusmão, with Rowena Lennox
Sydney: Pan Macmillan Australia, 2003

One curse of a life of intense action is that you may not have much time for reflection, not much time to take stock. You’re too busy doing. This certainly seems to be the case for Kirsty Sword Gusmão, who plunged into activism on behalf of occupied East Timor in the 1990s and didn’t emerge for air until—well, ever. There has always been, and continues to be, just too much to do.

A Woman of Inde...

and now for something completely different

Snow! (yes, I was lying about the completely different.)

This morning it seemed like it would be a clear day. Here is the vast wave of the snow, with sun shining on it.



(Here is our mailbox this morning. It is like a war correspondent: embedded.)



But now! Now it is thickly, whitely snowing again! And accumulating! Snow, go fall on California as rain--they need you there.

This has got me wondering what they did about snow in the nineteenth century. I know they used sleighs to get around, but even...

Jimmy Jimmy (Disco Dancer)

I knew that the Of Montreal song "Jimmy" that I had in the previous entry was a cover of an MIA song "Jimmy," but it was only after I had observed to the ninja girl that the MIA song sounded kind of Bollywood that she discovered that that was because the original song *is* Bollywood. And pretty addicting!



Popular around the world, if you look at the comments, which mention Kyrgyzstan, Russia, China, and, uh, Mars on this upload, and other uploads have shoutouts from Cambodia, Uzbekistan, Camer...

Pen Pal playlist, part I

(I've been meaning to put up a Pen Pal playlist for ages, but it. takes. so. long. to get all the items together--the music links, the pictures, the lyrics. But now, without further ado--the first half of the Pen Pal playist!)

These are some songs that I associate with various people, places, and aspects of Pen Pal. They’re limited by my own limited musical repertoire—but I’m always open to new suggestions (I think both mnfaure and cafenowhere have given me great Vigilante Espresso songs). Som...

there are worse places to be stranded

--than in an apartment in New London, Connecticut, overlooking the harbor.

I went to see csecooney in a play, but the weather was doing this:



So the play was cancelled. And the drive back to csecooney 's place was cancelled, too. Instead we stayed with a friend of hers in the apartment with this beautiful view, watching movies, learning to blues-dance, eating homemade pizza, and chatting.

(Her friend tells me the barge up there transports home heating oil. A very necessary thing, especially this...

just… doesn't … stop… snowing….

Second day off school for the healing angel, due to snow. Got up at 4:30 to try to clear the new snow and sleet that had fallen (and were continuing---and ARE continuing fall) so that the ninja girl could get to work for 6 am . . . Waka drove her in, roads were terrible, and her branch of Dunkin Donuts was closed and the manager hadn't bothered to call her and let her know -_-

So. Much. SNOW.

view from my window


10 am--now the sun is out