Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 164

snow deer

In Japanese poetry, they compare the snow, melting and giving way to the brown earth of spring, to the spots on a fawn.

I was imagining. . . somewhere there are snow deer. They are winter-white, like arctic foxes and snowshoe hares and ptarmigans.



They have their babies in those cold times, fawns who are completely white to camouflage in snowdrifts.



As the snow melts, the coloring of the fawns change too, speckled brown and white, like the ground around them.



In the summer months, like other dee...

An hour with Junot Diaz

I had an opportunity to hear Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (which I haven't yet read, but want to read) and This Is How You Leave Her (which I read and liked very much) yesterday evening. He had a warm, intimate, humorous yet serious manner to him; it was just great.

He started by introducing himself as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic and saying that for a land of immigrants, America is extremely uncomfortable hearing about the immigrant experience, and th...

Opinion versus fact

The healing angel was talking to me about the problems with how they teach kids to distinguish between opinion and fact--something they learn in fourth grade, apparently (the healing angel is in ninth grade, but a conversation with a fourth grade teacher got him thinking about the issue). He said, "Basically, the way they teach it, kids end up thinking that true statements are all facts, and that everything else is an opinion. But some things aren't opinions, they're just false statements. If...

Kirsty Sword Gusmão: woman of awesomeness

So, you're growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, and you're taking ballet lessons, and you're pretty dang good at it, good enough to think about being a professional dancer, but you find yourself thinking, "You know . . . it's a bit narrow. And I am not sure I can live up to my bladey surname as a ballerina." You've always loved Indonesia--you learned your first words of Indonesian at four--so you study the language in college in the 1980s, where you also come to hear about the plig...

Debate in East Timor over the place of mother tongues

Linguistically, East Timor is an interesting place. Portugal was the colonial overlord for centuries, so Portuguese was the language of higher education and opportunity. Then from the mid 1970s through 1999, Indonesia occupied the country, and Indonesia was the language of classroom instruction. Meanwhile, there are several mother tongues spoken by different populations. Tetun (Tetum) is the mother tongue of a large plurality of people, but there are other first-languages spoken, too.



Source:...

batik shirts

... I was very late finishing some Christmas presents, but I did finally finish them. (Although there are still others that are not finished!)

I had had the ambition to turn this wonderful quote into a shirt for my sister, and I did . . . except--and I call myself a copyeditor?--I got the name of the woman I quote wrong (this is especially tragic/ironic in that she herself is a copyeditor), and I mangled the last line. The cadence of her actual words can't be beaten, but my stumble can be the...

Spirited away

Here is a sight that greeted me on the path on a snow-flurrying morning about two days ago:





No doubt the revelers drank to the health of the night, toasted the trees and the Milky Way . . . and then? Night-eyed, smiling visitors appeared out of the trees. The revelers, cheerfully intoxicated, offered the visitors some of their brew, and the visitors in turn invited the revelers to join in a mad race or a midnight dance--both things combined, maybe--round and round and round, faster and faster,...

Sunday Post No. 2: Foolhardy scammers

Ana Patricia works at the Boston Fed, where, among other things, she fights scammers who attempt to fleece people with fake offers for mortgage refinancing. One day, she herself received a scam letter. She and her colleagues in the Community Development section of the Boston Fed went to town, creating a video about the incident, starring Ana herself, and commissioning a one-page comic strip.

Comic strip here.

Video here.

Enjoy, and don't get ripped off!

Sunday Post No. 1: The Spoken Word

Let’s hear it for the spoken word, for words in the air as well as on the page, for reading aloud as well as in your head, for performances of stories and poetry, and for open-air debates as well as the fast and furious ones that take place online.

I’ve seen the benefit of reading aloud in both my personal life—I’ve talked about how much I’m enjoying reading A Tale of Two Cities aloud, and how reading it aloud makes complex sentence structures more comprehensible—but I’ve also seen it in my vo...

Who, and why?

Here is an attractive but dangerous bracelet:







Questions: Who might wear such a bracelet? And why would they wear it?