Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 52

what the street says to the wheels or the path to the feet that tread it

I was saying to malorys_camera that a switch has flipped in my brain and now I'm tired of thinking about COVID 19. The other day I went several tens of minutes without thinking about it at all, and that was great! (Don't mistake me; I'm not saying that it's not serious--not saying that at all--I'm just saying that having my thoughts chained to it feels like being Alex in Clockwork Orange when he's got his eyes stuck open and is being force-fed Beethoven's Ninth. You could be exhausted by...

Taint

(I was working on this earlier in the night. Believe it or not, I was *not* thinking of COVID 19; I was thinking more about moral purity or moral contamination--but then just before posting I read this poem that sovay linked to and thought, heh.)


Taint

dirty hands &
turbulent mind
body & soul
blotched bruised
inflamed infected
counter contra
devious double
greased palms
blind eyes
hangdog hangman

the brightest, purest sword
can’t sever sin from sinner
every chunk of flesh contains the germ

o drowning soul
if...

reading and related

The healing angel and I finished reading Hamlet aloud to each other today--we'd been working on it ever since I finished reading The Raven Tower and since I found out she never read it in high school. What a ripping good yarn, right? And so many good bits I'd forgotten, and over-the-top bits, and everything.

healing angel at the end: Wait, is Hamlet nominating Fortinbras to be the new king of Denmark?

me: Yup.

healing angel: What's wrong with Horatio?! How about a nice scholarly king... who's...

Corvid 19

So the novel coronavirus now has an official name: COVID 19.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks it sounds like CORVID 19.




"Corvid 19 says, 'Be sure to cough into your arm, and wash your hands frequently!'"


comments

Palate cleanser

I don't remember whether I've talked about Beautiful Day here before--it's a Rhode Island nonprofit that helps refugees gain job skills through working making granola. Granola, you may ask? Yes, granola. But now they have a youth refugee program:

"Trainees attend weekly classes where they learn the ins and outs of succeeding on a job. This is not as easy as it may seem. The American work world is complicated, even for those who were born here. It's not always easy to know how to respond to a...

car repair

Our beloved mechanic told us the cheapest way to fix the hole in the flex pipe of Wakanomori's cute little car would be to get a patch welded to it, and he recommended a place to do it. "I've sent lots of people there," he said.

So today, early, we were set to drive there. "I forget exactly where it is," said Waka. "But you lead the way."

"It's right near where we used to live," I said.

"Oh ... that place? I thought it was the other place [a stone's throw from this place], where you got that...

the leviathans gather

This story about 50 right whales (an eighth of the world's total population of 400 right whales) gathering south of Nantucket made me think again of the story on the beer label sovay dreamed about.

I mean, maybe they, like so many humans, simply like Nantucket. Possibly it's a whale vacation spot. But since Nantucket was home to [some of] the whalers that put them on the verge of extinction, it seems more likely that they're gathered to issue imprecations.

Or maybe they're caucusing. Hopefully...

Wednesday reading

I finished Embassytown, and I have to say, it did a thing I'm not sure any other book has done for me, which is alienate me for a good 45 percent of the book (from about the 45 percent mark until about the 90 percent mark)--such that I was writing frustrated, seething notes on Goodreads--and then, WOW, pull meaning and heart out of that mess in a way that really, really moved and impressed me. For those of you who've read the book, the thing that I loved more than anything else was Spanish...

and speaking of beer and art...

For sheer magnificence, nothing beats the art on this limited-edition (celebrating the brand's fortieth anniversary) can of Medalla beer. We had some on our trip to Puerto Rico and brought two empty cans back with us (but the photo below is not mine; all photos were swiped randomly off the internet). The artist is Alexis Días:



This can is just one in a series. About the series, Días says, "All the designs were made inspired by Puerto Rico, by its people and all that we are as Puerto Ricans. By...

"The label was red, the text white

sovay wrote about a dream she had that featured a bottle of beer:

I dreamed of reading a story printed on the label of a bottle of beer; it ended apocalyptically, with the ghosts of slaughtered whales and other, increasingly less identifiable leviathans passing in endless procession down the road to the sea. The label was red, the text white. I remember just the last half of the last line: "and watched the road burning, which was America."

I can't stop thinking about this. It makes me

(1) want...