Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 160

Two books, part 1: A Cup of Smoke

So I have two books that I'd like to share about. One is A Cup of Smoke, which I've mentioned before--a collection of short stories and poetry by Rachel Manija Brown. The other is The Other Half of the Sky, a collection of short stories featuring competent women in outer space, edited by Athena Andreadis. I'm dipping into both volumes, and I thought I'd share my findings as a way of encouraging you to give them a try, too.

From A Cup of Smoke, I decided to read the title story first. From The...

The air itself golden

The air itself was golden yesterday evening--living gold. "The fields arrayed in living gold"--no, the air itself. Shimmery--all your molecules are excited to move through it, your lungs are happy to inhale it.



And this May Day is a golden day--a nature's-first-green-is-gold Day






On my walk, on a piece of lawn owned by . . . the town? the supermarket? crazy, contorted dandelions. They were gasping and dying: you could tell by their wilting and twisting, thought it took me a moment to realize t...

Other scenes from Saturday

At the Harvard Science Center, Hermes signs the Boston Strong boards.



True Art?



Symphonic skies on the way home.

Only one T story

I wonder what other stories I thought I would tell you; I can only remember one, right now.

Boston's Mass Transit is known as the T. T for transit? I think. The lines are color coded. In one direction, the Blue Line's destination is Wonderland. Isn't that great? The train to Wonderland. That's the line you take to get to the airport.

There's a park at the airport stop, and from it you can watch the trains go by . . .



(You can also watch them from the station platform, of course...)



But I promise...

In Cambridge for the morning, and look who now has a Camb...

In Cambridge for the morning, and look who now has a Cambridge Public Library card, and is typing LJ entries on a Cambridge Public Library computer. Next mission: find out the location of this thing and that thing in town (things I used to know the whereabouts of, but establishments move around and put on new clothes if you're away for a decade or more), so I can entertain the ninja girl when she's finished with her job interview (not here; I took the T here after dropping her off).

I have a T...

Wittgenstein's birthday and other trivia

The Writer's Almanac informed me this morning that today is Wittgenstein's birthday. Of course I thought of sovay , occasional sufferer of the morose whisperings of a tiny, shoulder-sitting version of the philosopher.

Did you know, though, sovay , that not one, not two, but three of his siblings (he was one of nine children) committed suicide? So there was something in the Wittgenstein family well that was not doing anyone any favors.

Today must have been a good day for philosophers, because it i...

The Crocodile Twins (a folktale from Mermaid's Hands)

(I'm thinking if I create a website for Pen Pal, this will be the sort of thing I can put there.)


Sister Twin in the Crocodile's Mouth


So you want to hear the story of the crocodile twins, do you? Settle down, then, and I’ll tell you about them. The first thing to know is that they weren’t crocodiles, no. They were people like ourselves. And the second thing is that for most of this story, they weren’t “they.” They were just “she.”

Oh, they started out as “they”: two newborn babes, her with her...

Quote of the morning, from yamamanama

We used science to determine that coconuts are mammals because they have milk and hair.

Deluge, by Nijla Mu'min

Last year, cafenowhere alerted me to an independent movie in search of funding: Deluge, by Nijla Mu'min. Now the film is completed. From the website :

After witnessing the mass drowning of her friends and struggling with the decision not to jump in, 15-year old Tiana must decide if she will join the order of black mermaids that protect the waters where her friends rest. This film is partly inspired by the 2010 mass drowning of six black teens in a Shreveport, Louisiana sinkhole. None of them co...

Reaction to "Alias Ruby Blade"

I enjoyed the documentary very much! There was a lot of unusual footage, like of Xanana Gusmão, revolutionary leader (and current prime minister) in prison, or of Kirsty Sword Gusmão's first visit to East Timor, back in the very early 1990s. The things I was most surprised to learn were tangential to the main story: Cipinang Prison in Indonesia was nothing like what I would have imagined, and the degree of corruptibility of the guards was amazing. Some half-dozen of them were essentially in t...