Dare to See Beauty

I have often propounded – in writing and in conversation – the belief that art teaches us to see beauty. More, this is the main purpose of art.

I have talked, quoted, referenced, scribbled, and thought.

But I have not acted.

So this video felt like a punch in the stomach. This is a fashion photographer who saw photo of disabilities and physical differences in medical textbooks, and was horrified by the ugliness portrayed. He instinctively recognized that those photos, that strangeness, does not show respect for the human person. In fact, most photos of say, down syndrome, make the condition look terrifying.

And rather than just think about it, Rick Guidotti acted on it.

He frames his work in terms of “thinking outside the box” and “redefining beauty”, but his work is much, much more. His enthusiasm and love and recognition of beauty are infectious: he sees the beauty of human life so clearly that makes it visible to everyone in his photos. He is an artist.

I have always been under the impression that the fashion world makes the heart mind and soul small and closed. Silly prejudice. But Guidotti’s work made him better able to see the joy, life, and love that are the real components of beauty. He began with albinos, and since then has been photographing people with chromosome 18 syndrome, marfan syndrome, et al.

This video cannot be imbedded but please click here to go watch!

He closes with the challenge: “Dare to see beauty! Once you see it, it will overwhelm you!”

“People say I reveal the ‘inner-beauty’. Nonsense. There is no inner-beauty. There is just beauty. Dare to see it.”

Regency Remix

Having made it through Monday by the skin of my teeth, I wanted to share around this video in hopes that it would start Tuesday off on a better foot.

I would draw your attention, in particular, to the timing of the chorus, 1:16, 2:10, and 2:19′s “Tell it how you feel.”

Thanks for that warning, ladies.  Er, gentlemen?  Either.  BOTH.  REVEL IN THE AMBIGUITY.  Revel in the DANCING. 

Revel in the Austen!!

Clearance Cairn

We often compare the mind to a computer, nowadays: we process information, we save information in our hard drive, our neurons form a network…and should we find ourselves burdened with trivia, we attempt to delete it.

But one of the more traditional metaphors was that a mind resembled a field.  It was cultivated, like a garden, and ideas sprang up from the fertile soil of an imagination well-watered with reading, observation, and life experience.

There has been nothing to harvest from my mind-field of late, no matter how I rack my brains for it, so I reckon that something is preventing proper growth: neglect of planting, poorly chosen seed, stony soil, lack of light or water or air…hence this post, wherein I dig out a few rocks, hopefully, and assemble them into a heap of stones, and perhaps aerate this fallow field a bit.

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To the great amusement of my housemates and friends, I occasionally issue myself orders out loud.  Sounds mad, a bit, but since orders must be direct and succinct, they almost always work.
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I went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness again last night.  This is atypical; it’s odd enough for me to see a movie opening week, much less twice, much less thrice.

My roommate and I keep wondering why anyone lets Jim Kirk be in charge of anything.  He’s even more of a Gryffindor than Harry Potter.

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Last weekend was my first comic-con.  Tomorrow is my first steampunk expo.  Tonight there shall be hasty costume-fashioning; fortunately said comic-con outfitted me with goggles, and as everyone knows, that fulfills the second law of steampunk (right after “slap some gears on it”).

Huzzah for the Salvation Army, and how much easier it makes the costuming process!

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On reflection, this was sort of a nerdy week.

I love it.

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Work, on the other hand, is going quite slowly this week, so slowly that I started a phone log out of boredom.  Each day I’ve answered, on average, 38 calls.  Most are dull, but this one wasn’t:

Can I talk to an attorney?  What’s the issue?  Well, it’s complicated.  Okay.  My in-laws own a house right next to theirs.  They added one of their sons to the deed many many years ago because he wanted to fix the house up, and he needed it for collateral – he was supposed to fix it up and pay rent.  We just found out that he didn’t do any fixing up at all - they don’t even know what he was using it for.  His ex-wife was helping him by getting a friend of hers to notarize it – and he abandoned his 19-year-old son in it with no electricity, water, or food.  The son went psychotic: he set the woods on fire, he set a Bible on fire, he said that the voices told him to do it.  He needs psychiatric help and someone took him to the hospital for treatment.  The dad wants to say it’s his house.  The grandparents are still on the deed; they never gave him the house – and the father somehow lied to the psychiatric hospital and got his son back and put him back in that house with no electricity or water.  He’s just in there alone with a pit bull the dad feeds gunpowder to, and we’re just wondering what rights the grandparents have with respect to the 19-year-old…

My first response is “Well, our firm can help with your questions about the deed, but I’m not sure we’re qualified to answer questions about psychotic breaks or pit bulls.”

My second response is “Kyrie eleison.”

My third response is something like “Ummmm, 19-year-old?  No matter how psychotic he is, he’s passed the age of majority.  Americans 18 and older are legally adults, but it sure seems like there’s this effort to keep ever-older people in a state of adolescence.  … …I wonder if the laws will change in the next decade on account of it.”
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My youngest brother gets married a fortnight after tomorrow.  For all that I’ve been willing and waiting for this event for years, I am not ready.  For all the weddings I’ve gone to before, none of them increased my own family at the end.  I feel as though there is something I’m meant to say to them on this occasion, something significant, a poetic farewell to the single years before it, a greeting of the coming years of married life.

So of course nothing comes to mind.

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3; 4.75; 3.85; 4.68; 1.60; 3.34; 2.78; 4.06; 3.6; 3.3; 3.4; 3.91; 3; 2.51; 2.15; 4.21; 4.21; 3.35; 4; 5.64; 5.75; 7.54; 4.37; 2.84; 3.15; 2.85; 2; 4.47; 4.38; 2.85; 5.19; 3.73; 3.13; 3.56; 5.12; 3.42; 2.92; 2.31; 1.88; 2.5; 6.82; 6; 6.13; 3.81.

This may look like a string of random numbers, but it is in fact amounts spent on each serving of a lunch made from scratch over the past few months.  The average cost of these 44 meals is $3.82; the six meals (not listed) with partly pre-made ingredients from the store averaged $5.04; and the average restaurant or takeout lunch cost $6.69.  As you might guess, I delight in rather anal-retentive precision.  Even if it’s generally accepted that making your own food costs less than having someone else make it for you, I like to have data to back it up.
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Sometimes while driving I am gripped by wonderment and horror that I’ve been entrusted with two tons of metal, to drive when and where I will.  Not that I am a big fan of the TSA, or in favor of further government intrusion into daily life, but I don’t recall the licensing process as being that thorough.  Considering how much time I spend on the road, they hardly vetted me for this!  Good heavens.

In my less generous moments, the horror and wonderment focus much more on the other drivers who have been trusted with so much with so little cross-checking.

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Neither need you tell me that we must take care of our garden.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

A Rule for Life.

As a responsible citizen, I must ask Terpsichore to clarify before I begin wildly neologizing. I would like to set this forward as a rule for all responsible creative brainstorming as well as for any discussion and debate.

Define your terms! Shout it, if you’re talking quietly, and whisper it if you’re yelling. It will catch the attention and you’ll have a much better time communicating. Define your terms.

So, darling Terpsichore, in this instance, preceding a hilarious evening at the word mint coining, do you want a word for:

A) The act of breaking beautiful things as experienced by villainous Cumberbatches

b) The feelings of the mayor of the town/potentate of the principality upon beholding the fair things gone.

3) The feelings of the Hero who couldn’t save the breakage from breaking.

iv) Something else entirely.

And then shall we begin. mwahahaha.

A Word for Breaking Things

On Friday evening, I joined some friends to go see Star Trek: Into Darkness.  On Saturday evening, I set out to see Iron Man Three.  On Sunday, I did not watch any films, but found myself still searching for a word.

If you’ve seen either of these movies, or the trailers for them, or any of a hundred films similar to them, I think you will recognize the phenomenon: some explorers with tremendous firepower – or masked/unmasked heroes, or freedom fighters determined to mess things up – get in some kind of chase or brawl, and every object around is subject to be collateral damage.  These fictitious cities always have a heck of a cleanup job, and we rarely, if ever, see any of it.

Their souls were drifting as the sea,
and all good towns and lands
they only saw with heavy eyes,
and broke with heavy hands.

I need a word for the distressed wince that accompanies the destruction of something fair to see, whether it be a bank, a home, a car, a spaceship, a monument.

Portmanteaus are getting me nowhere (pulcringitude? fairecoil?); attempts to find an already-existent term lost me in the wilds of TvTropes for an hour.  Rereading of Eldred’s sorrow for the things that had been fair helps with quiet meditation but not with neologizing.

Like Thalia, I open the floor.  What would you call it?

Other than “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”

 

Magpie’s Nest

Last week, David shared a story he’d written, the prompt it was based on, and the contest that he won with it (well done, David!).  I read his story and the runner-up, but not before taking a look at the prompt and coming up with my own explanation for it.  It’s been too long since I’ve written stories (so please advise if it doesn’t make any sense), and it’s clearly too late for the contest, but I thought I’d share a little bit of flash fiction around.

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“Tell me again what we’re looking for.  And none of that ‘you’ll know it when you see it’ rubbish, please.  Remember I’m just the ride – there’s no way I’ll know it.”

“You will, though.  It’s a magpie – do they ever collect stuff that’s easy to miss?”

McNally shook his head, more in disbelief than disagreement, nearly tripping over the jutting roots of a corded elm.  “Remind me when the Prince told you all about his precious signaling magpie?  I suppose a service magnate’s son thanks the lowly spiders when he remembers who keeps his empire together, eh?”

Danny grinned ruefully; laying cable wasn’t the most glamorous job, but it’d made him privy to confidential discussions more than once.  Even in the castle – just last week he’d silently witnessed a tête-à-tête between Princess Annette and Corino, the vaguely princelike fellow from the odd country two quadrants over.  While he strung the replacement for Annette’s chewed-up wiring, she’d shown Corino the rabbits responsible and wrinkled her nose at his defense of bird ownership.  “I don’t care if it’s royal tradition,” she pouted, “they’re noisy and smelly and always try to bite me.”

“It’s not royal tradition in my quadrant; we’d never turn your rabbits away,” he’d smiled, sympathetic and condescending at once.  “But we are rather fond of birds and birdlore, and I imagine they’ll always be a status symbol of sorts.  We’re very careful how we pick them, as the choice is terribly significant.   Suggests what direction a man’ll go.”

What direction a man’ll go.  What direction will he go when he’s not quite of age, throwing off his official tech to test his homemade devices more thoroughly?  The green shadows of the Reserve, obviously, the same place he’d find and raise and train his secret pet to do curious things with technology.  The same place he’d hide from the power and the responsibility soon to weigh him down…the same place that…

Danny stopped short.  McNally carried on a full dozen yards before noticing he was gone, and swung around to see his friend staring at a mass of colorful cords, curious metal brackets, and mysterious sockets scattered in the brush.  Danny’s eyes stayed fixed on the debris, as though to avoid the cracked egg and the single bloody wing a few feet away in the undergrowth.

“Dan?  Danny, hey, talk to me.”  McNally grabbed at his shoulder, but Danny remained frozen as he tried to discern what it meant.

He knew the prince was concerned about his new position come the Service Lord’s abdication to return to his workshop: those whispers had gone around for weeks.  More sinister voices whispered that such a young magnate would be an easy target for packet thieves and pirates, and less shadowy foes besides.  He’d seen that the prince was obsessed with his flying hotspot of a bird, loved it enough that he’d do something truly stupid before letting it suffer harm.  Said hotspot and its bizarre nest of wires had been ripped in pieces.

And the broken egg beside it looked to be none other than a cuckoo’s.

We are rather fond of birdlore…

Danny cursed the qualms that had kept him from more effective eavesdropping.  Not that Corino would have boasted of choosing a brooding parasite as his status symbol, especially to the girl who could prove a vehicle to pushing her brother out the proverbial nest.

McNally’s eyebrows flew up as Danny bent to pick up the bloodied wing.  “Cuckoo attack,” Danny murmured.  “The magpie could tell that wasn’t her egg, and the adult cuckoos – they – well, you see what they did when she rejected it.”

…the choice is terribly significant.

“Let’s go,” Danny said dully, turning to go.  “We’ll have to tell the Lady.”

“Tell her what?”

“To be careful what she says to Corino if she doesn’t want her webs to go the way of the magpie’s nest.”

The Consolation of Mediocrity

Sometimes, it’s overwhelming to look at the mountains which other authors, past and present, have scaled.  There are heights of prose I will never reach, beautiful stories which I did not write, and twists of thought my mind would never formulate.

What is perhaps the best response is the difficult one: to read more, to write often, to practice the craft, to risk saying something that will upset others, to confess what will tear at my own heart.

But the easy response is to find someone who wasn’t necessarily very good at composition, and kept doing it anyway, and console myself that so long as I do write, I can’t possibly be worse.

With that in mind, let me present William Topaz McGonagall.  He was a Scottish weaver, born in 1825 or thereabouts, who at age 52 felt led to begin writing poems.  Some he recited as entertainment for his friends; some were published on handbills or in books; some got him thrown out of a pub for their quality.  His slavery to masculine rhyme, repetitious vocabulary, wretchedly wrenched syntax, and terrible rhythm contribute to the extreme badness (I wish I had a stronger word!) of his verse, and all this does not take into account the themes he favored: disasters, deaths and funerals, temperance, moral tales, and the like.

I’m a bit surprised he hasn’t been mentioned before here at the Club, as Thalia first introduced me to his work, and his 200 Poetic Gems remain as entertaining now as they were to contemporary audiences.  See McGonagall Online for further information, if you like, or just try reading the following aloud with a straight face:

Women’s Suffrage

Fellow men! why should the lords try to despise
And prohibit women from having the benefit of the parliamentary Franchise ?
When they pay the same taxes as you and me,
I consider they ought to have the same liberty.

And I consider if they are not allowed the same liberty,
From taxation every one of them should be set free;
And if they are not, it is really very unfair,
And an act of injustice I most solemnly declare.

Women, farmers, have no protection as the law now stands;
And many of them have lost their property and lands,
And have been turned out of their beautiful farms
By the unjust laws of the land and the sheriffs’ alarms.

And in my opinion, such treatment is very cruel;
And fair play, ’tis said, is a precious jewel;
But such treatment causes women to fret and to dote,
Because they are deprived of the parliamentary Franchise vote.

In my opinion, what a man pays for he certainly should get;
And if he does not, he will certainly fret;
And why wouldn’t women do the very same?
Therefore, to demand the parliamentary Franchise they are not to blame.

Therefore let them gather, and demand the parliamentary Franchise;
And I’m sure no reasonable man will their actions despise,
For trying to obtain the privileges most unjustly withheld from them;
Which Mr. Gladstone will certainly encourage and never condemn.

And as for the working women, many are driven to the point of starvation,
All through the tendency of the legislation;
Besides, upon members of parliament they have no claim
As a deputation, which is a very great shame.

Yes, the Home Secretary of the present day,
Against working women’s deputations, has always said- nay;
Because they haven’t got the parliamentary Franchise-,
That is the reason why he does them despise.

And that, in my opinion, is really very unjust;
But the time is not far distant, I most earnestly trust,
When women will have a parliamentary vote,
And many of them, I hope, will wear a better petticoat.

And I hope that God will aid them in this enterprise,
And enable them to obtain the parliamentary Franchise;
And rally together, and make a bold stand,
And demand the parliamentary Franchise throughout Scotland.

And do not rest day nor night-
Because your demands are only right
In the eyes of reasonable men, and God’s eyesight;
And Heaven, I’m sure, will defend the right.

Therefore go on brave women! and never fear,
Although your case may seem dark and drear,
And put your trust in God, for He is strong;
And ye will gain the parliamentary Franchise before very long.

Confession

I have been thinking about writing lately.

Thinking, but not doing. I have a great many things that need writing: letters, emails, my thesis, this blog. Yet I cannot summon the will to write anything. Which rather defies the first purpose of this blog –  to practice writing regularly.

But last Tuesday my students shamed me into writing.

We had been working on a “reasoning” worksheet using the book we are reading; Number the Stars. The students had to construct an argument proving that the main character, Annemarie, was courageous. The worksheet required a list of way that know things about a character, (description, actions, words, what other characters say/think, etc.,) a definition of courage, 3 example from the book (with page number!) that proved Annemarie’s courage, any example that might be used against our argument, and a final judgment.

Do you see where I was going with this worksheet?

The kids did not.

Worksheet completed, I had them each hold his in the air, touch his nose twice, turn around three times, and clap.

Voila!

The simple worksheet had changed into everything that was needed to write a kick-ass 5-paragraph essay!

(NB: I did not say kick-ass. I said awesome.)

They groaned. They tried to reverse the magic by doing all those calisthenics backwards. No luck.

So we started the in-class essay on Tuesday. I asked for an introductory paragraph, one that would make ME, the intended audience, want to read it. We discussed opening sentences, how to grab interest, and how to clearly state the purpose of the essay. They had 25 minutes to write.

At the end of the 25 minutes, eight of them had written the entire thing. EIGHT. Out of 23. Wrote a 5-7 sentence per paragraph 5-paragraph essay.

And these were not slouchers, either. Most had 3 whole sides of paper covered. They had even thought to ask me how to cite page numbers, and then did it perfectly.

My ten-year-old students can write faster than I can.

Shame.

And, their essays are pretty good. No incomplete sentences, and neat, if mechanical, transitions. The organization was mostly furnished by the worksheet, and they had the sense to stick to it.

I had to sit down and do a self-examination. Just because I don’t have a teacher prowling the edges of the room doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be writing. I am supposed to be writing more than my students! For example; I started this post last night, but took 45 minutes this morning to finish it.

Shame!

What I do instead? Er, grade. Eat. Make paper roses. Lesson plan. Etc.

I will go look over my thesis now. Bye-bye!

 

For Mother’s Day, I taught my kids to make these. I had to learn how myself first, and this is the result. Enjoy!