Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 41

Wednesday reading

I've been reading folktales from Amazonia. This beautiful picture book, The Great Snake: Stories from the Amazon, has block-print-style illustrations by Fernando Vilela, whom I now have the impression is Brazil's foremost illustrator, as he also illustrated a different Brazil-related picture book that Amazon (the company this time, not the region/river) recommended to me some time ago.




I love this image of manioc/cassava plants, how it's achieved by repeating the print.



But what I really love abou...

a song and a would-be novel?

I heard this song last Saturday, during the 3:00–5:00 Portuguese radio program on WTCC, Springfield Technical Community College's radio station. I liked the melancholy air, I liked that I could understand snatches of it, even though it was Portuguese Portuguese instead of Brazilian Portuguese, which is what Duolingo teaches. It's got the sort of melancholy abandon that really speaks to me right now (Nossa vida é bem curta e um dia se vai "Our life is very short and one day is gone"--so you might...

Atmosphere and sky

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Newe Yeare Lemon Pigge

The twitter account "Chaucer Doth Tweet" [image error] LeVostreGC had this fun poem on how to make a New Year's Lemon Pig:

A lemon as bright as the sun yn the skye
Two whole cloves bicom the eyes
A curly tayle of foil of tin
For legges push IV tooth-picks yn
To make the ears but folde the peele up
A shinye coin yn the mouth for luck
Cheer be brighte, dreams be big:
Biholde! a Newe Yeare lemon pigge.
(source tweet)

Irresistible! I made one:



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shadow cities and windows

I've photographed this before, but I keep doing it because I keep being fascinated by the image: the snow that's pushed up by the sidewalk snowplow casts shadows that look like marvelous city skylines. This one seems to have a dome in the center--a mosque or Eastern Orthodox church:



And this one has some impressive spires and minarets:



We went on a hike on Mt. Tom late this afternoon (there is another mountain called Mt. Toby ... it feels like a rather-too-familiar naming convention? I prefer moun...

"Come Water, Be One of Us," by Octavia Cade

This fabulous short story in Strange Horizons contrasts the personhood-under-the-law of corporations and rivers, and it is beautiful. It's also very short; you can read it in probably five or ten minutes--or you can listen to it ( link ). A few selected quotes:

Try convincing a corporation it isn’t a person now, see how far it gets you. There’s whining and litigation and they slouch down the street after you, cat-calling. “Look at me, bitch! I’m talking to you!”

...

We made the corporations people,...

winter mist

This morning was enchanting--the Fedex driver I encountered agreed that it was a fairyland out there.



... or a ghostland?



So **full** in its empty-seemingness



Don't let go of the guide rope!



And then everything became bright, tangible, solid--and that had its own beauty. Can't get enough of Jiji these days, lovely boy. We're so glad he's home.



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so--theories?

Okay, so I am interested in entertaining theories, from the realistic to the far-fetched, for the origins of the gold on the shores of the Venezuelan fishing village in the last entry. Other details you should know are that

the jagged coastline around Guaca, on Venezuela’s Paria peninsula, is punctuated with bays and islands that have long given refuge to adventurers.

It was on this peninsula, in 1498, that Christopher Columbus became the first European to set foot on the South American continent,...

a mysterious treasure

I learned about this story from amaebi , who said it's like part of a folktale, and she's right.

"Treasure Washes up on Venezuela's Shore, Bringing Gold and Hope to a Village,"
by Anatoly Kurmanaev and Isayen Herrera; photos by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez
New York Times December 12, 2020.

Such a story! All this gold, washing up in a poor fishing village. True to folktale form, the first thing to turn up was a gold medallion with an image of the Virgin Mary on it:

The fisherman, Yolman Lares, saw some...

Flashback, by Sonia Mendez

I have a writer friend who's had experience with incarceration, and sometimes she puts that in what she writes. She posted this to FB this morning and gave me permission to share. It says everything you need to know about imprisonment, abuse of power, and resistance in under a hundred words. And the way she lived that metaphor...

Flashback- I decorated my cell once with paper butterflies I colored myself. I made them 3D so their wings stuck out and appeared real. A guard walked by and was not imp...