Midori Snyder's Blog, page 67

Double Unders: Fast Feet, Faster Wrists

I am a Crossfitter and among the challenges of this arduous style of training is the double under -- that's when the jump rope circles twice around under the feet for each jump. Athletes who have skill down pat make...

Camera Obscura: Magic in a Dark Room

Oh, how to take your breath away sitting in the dark with just a pin hole of light to bring the world inside like the fragments of a dream. The camera obscura is really one of the most amazing and...

Googies Coffee Shop

I love this menu for Googies Coffee Shop -- one of those funny, energetic designs of pop culture from the 1950s. I wish they still looked like this! Of course it started in California -- and in the decade of...

Madeleine and Bohemian Paris

This has been such a fertile time looking toward the past. Daily, thanks to my cousin Earl (an amazing genealogist) another chapter in the narrative history of my family opens up. I should write a novel -- well maybe novels...

Pierre Ménager: A Portfolio of Six Block Prints of Old New Orleans Characters

The internet has been very good to me lately. I think it's an electronic version of Hades where in the ancient world the living, depressed and uncertain, could slip down to it's muddy banks to search for help among the...

Falling From the Sky And The Art of Javier Pinon

I was quite astonished to see this wonderful mythic and western art of Javier Pinon -- the unusual combination of cowboys and Greek myths. This is a collage of Icarus Falling -- and it struck me so much because it...

Flannery O'Connor: Writing Habits

"Do you have any books the faculty doesn't particularly recommend? Flannery O'Connor gives simple but commonsense advice on the practice of making writing a habit: "I'm a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may...

Fernand Dumont: Treaties on Fairies

"6. After searching for entire nights without knowing it, beyond sleep, beyond exhaustion, having traveled forests of lucid insomnia, you will reach a great deserted clearing where, holding your breath, your ear against the ground, you can hear the very...

Mythic Moments: The Arrival of the SS Excambion at New York Harbor, January, 1941

Can you imagine the most mythical moment of your childhood? That moment when everything changes and you know that going forward you will be profoundly different, that your life as you once knew it would be over. My father Emile...

Emily Dickinson: Poetry on the Back of a Coconut Cake

In addition to writing sublime poetry, Emily Dickinson was also an excellent cook and baker. She often baked sweets and cakes for her neighbors and the neighborhood children. But poetry was never far from her mind and she combined her...