Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 141

Stone Telling 10 is here!

Lots of poems by poets I admire in here!

Originally posted by rose_lemberg at Stone Telling 10 is here!
Well, that took about forever, but we hope it was worth the wait.

It's a double issue with 23 poems, and they are all incredible.



Let us know how we did, please.

We are now reading for ST11, so if we've never published you before, please send us your work. If we have published you before, please nudge other poets our way!

guinea pigs never really appreciate Beethoven

wakanomori shared with me some of Lewis Carroll's crazy-complicated symbolic-logic syllogisms (these are all in the common domain--he saw them in Lapham's Quarterly, but you can find more at Project Gutenberg here). To wit:

Nobody, who really appreciates Beethoven, fails to keep silence while the Moonlight-Sonata is being played;
Guinea-pigs are hopelessly ignorant of music;
No one, who is hopelessly ignorant of music, ever keeps silence while the Moonlight-Sonata is being played.
Guinea-pigs ne...

the world's most metal job

. . . has surely got to be working in the sulfur mines in the crater of Kawah Ijen, a volcano in East Java, Indonesia. Stop and think a moment. Sulfur mining. In a volcano.

It's a world of fire, acid, and poisonous gases.

(There is an acid lake in the crater.)

Molten sulfur is blood red, but it burns with a blue flame. The photographer Olivier Grunewald took these photos, which ran in the Boston Globe on 8 December 2010. (Source for the entire photo essay here. ) (Hat tip to yamamanama for show...

Discussion of Ancillary Justice

Once she was the starship Justice of Toren, a two-thousand-year-old AI operating through hundreds of ancillaries—reanimated human bodies, retrofitted with the AI intelligence and other augmentations. Now she’s reduced to a single ancillary unit, and she’s out for revenge.

That was more or less my understanding of Ancillary Justice when I started reading it; that was what made me **want** to read it. I like revenge tales, and I like sci-fi looks at consciousness and its complications, especiall...

ice machetes, speaking elsewhere

Sometimes I drift to sleep, or drift toward waking, with the news on in the background, and the results are always strange.

The BBC was talking about the cold, and about the sea freezing from the top down (unusual, bad), and in my dream, Tokyo Bay was freezing--

--but this was manifested by men marching to shore, two by two, brandishing machetes of ice, which they banged against the ground, loud, ringing strikes, as they came.

Athena Andreadis very generously let me speak about Pen Pal on her bl...

Another message in a bottle

My cousin alerted me to this lovely message-in-a-bottle story from the BBC:

"Woman Gets Message in a Bottle Reply after 23 Years"

I love ten-year-old Zoe's message:

Dear finder, my name is Zoe Lemon. Please would you write to me, I would like it a lot.

I am 10 years old and I like ballet, playing the flute and the piano. I have a hamster called Sparkle and fish called Speckle.

The letter actually says a few other things:

(image from the UK Mail Online))

Her parents still live at the address she gav...

Josiah Naleworth Prescott to Addison Brooke (excerpt)

It appears that frost in this land acts, for reasons not yet know to me (though I have been told the local account, of an owl deity whose wingbeats, passing overhead, quickened the water crystals), much like herbaceous growth in our native land. You will see, in the first figure I include, what is in every respect but that of color a moss-covered boulder.

Snow Moss


The will to grow and spread on the part of the frost here is unnervingly strong: should you set down your pack or rest your walkin...

Exhalations

Because of Pen Pal, I pay attention to volcanic eruptions. Yesterday Mt. Sinabung, one of Indonesia's 130 active volcanoes, erupted. The Guardian has a photo essay here. Two photos from that set below:

Mt. Sinabung (Photo by Ade Sinuhaji)


Ash coats a motorbike (Photo by Binsar Bakkara)


Meanwhile, where I live, the land has fever-and-ague, going from deep, deep freeze to bursts of heat, during which it sweats and pants--not steam, though; just water vapor.



During this brief melt, the secret roads...

Persistence of Memory

In the wee hours last night, I woke with vivid images of a dream I'd just disentangled myself from--which I won't record here, except to say that in one part, I was wandering narrow, low-ceilinged, hot corridors and stairwells in a huge, brutalist building complex,and people--all men--were filing up and down the stairs. Is this a prison?, I began to wonder, and so I asked one of the men, who laughed and said, "No, this is ___ ___ ___"--a three-syllable name.

In my drowsy, newly awake state, I...

-15 F, -26 C

Friends know what that means--frozen soap bubbles!

One problem is that the bubble fluid freezes right on the stick:



Another, more major problem is that I can't both be blowing the bubbles and taking the photos, not easily or well, anyway, and not while not getting frostbite. Also, I just am not that clever a photographer. Enough of the protestations. Here is my best attempt to show how the frost spreads over the bubble:

see the mottled look? Each is a frost flower


Sometimes, though, they freeze c...