Art Np2

Of course, I expected the United States to be at the top of the list of having adults that can read and write, but according to the CIA, Andorra's rate is one percentage point higher.  The U.S. has a 99 percent rating and Andorra's is 100.   See list here.  My next thought was "where the hell is Andorra?"  Andorra is a wealthy European country located between France and Spain.   It makes much of its money through tourism.  It also has a very high life expectancy.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andorra Some of the countries with a higher literacy rate than the United States are Finland, Cuba, Samoa, Greenland, and Uzbekistan.  Catching up with The US are Bulgaria, Taiwan, Spain and Romania. America is tied with the Czech Republic, Canada, North Korea, Guam, and Denmark. 

Books A Million is closing some stores while opening forty-one others.  The closest location to me is Columbia, Maryland.  Daedalus , one of my favorite bookstores, is also in Columbia.  Looks like they are going to have some competition.  There is also a Books A Million store being put together in York, PA.  Publishers Weekly has a list of the new stores. http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/49282-bam-announces-plan-for-41-new-stores.html

“The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.”    Derek Walcott  Wiki Bio

List from NPR http://www.npr.org/2011/08/11/139085843/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books

http://www.detroitblog.org/

writing about Sula and I am but, my litcritsh*t is still not finished.  I will tell everybody about this struggle when I get finished with it.  In the meanwhile, I keep going to the library or bookstores and giving into passionate temptation.  This week I found The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta.  Okay, I went looking for it because I heard him being interviewed on the radio, and even though I have never read about the rapture or any Tom Perrotta books, this book did sound interesting. Then Chris Abani pulled my attention to the South African writer, artist, and activist Bretyen Breytenbach through one of the poems he wrote.  Click here to read.   Until I read the poem, I had never heard of him.  I "found" the book Return To Paradise in which Breytenbach writes about his imprisonment during aparthied in South Africa.  I don't know if I can handle reading about such a nightmare, but I will check it out.   Also, I've been...

I miss this girl!

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/12/141278273/national-book-awards-finalists-announced?ft=1&f=1001

Punctuation-Is-Powerful from Daily Writing Tips!

Image from Dancing The Dog by painter, writer, and activist Breyten Breytenbach  Dancing The Dog: paintings and other pornographies Breyten Breytenbach Bio  "Hanging in Egypt with Breyten Breytenbach" By Chris Abani There are stones even here worn into a malevolence by time gritting the teeth and tearing the eyes with the memory. Out in the desert, the wind is a sculptor working the ephemera of sand. Desperately editing steles to write the names of thousands of slaves who died to make Pharaoh great. It is a fool’s game. And we are like the blind musician at the hotel who tells us with a smile: I’ll see you later. The guard at the pyramid eyes me. Are you Egyptian? he demands, then searches my bag for a bomb. At the hotel they speak Arabic to me, don’t treat me like the white guests, and I guess, even here, with all the hindsight of history we haven’t learned to love ourselves. I cannot crawl into the tombs, and cannot explain why. How do you say: In my country they buried me...

This ain't no Sherlock Holmes detective story. ----------------------------------------------------- It air strange, it air," he was saying as I opened the door of the room where our social little semi-literary society met; “but I could tell you queerer things than that ’ere—almighty queer things. You can’t learn everything out of books, sirs, nohow. You see, it ain’t the men as can string English together, and as has had good eddications, as finds themselves in the queer places I’ve been in. They’re mostly rough men, sirs, as can scarce speak aright, far less tell with pen and ink the things they’ve seen; but if they could they’d make some of you Europeans har riz with astonishment. They would, sirs, you bet!" click to continue

"This landmark exhibition focuses on Edgar Degas’s preoccupation with movement as an artist of the dance.  Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement  traces the development of the artist's ballet imagery throughout his career, from the documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his final years.  The exhibition is the first to present Degas’s progressive engagement with the figure in movement in the context of parallel advances in photography and early film; indeed, the artist was keenly aware of these technological developments and often directly involved with them."  source:  http://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/degas/

Chris Abani is the poet for October and as I made known in my last Chris Abani post, I need to learn much much about structure, tone, meter, imagery and so many other things, so please feel free to help me if I am wrong about anything.   Please . ------------------------- "Hands Washing Water" Even in the falling a train breaks for the light. The tunnel the darkness-never sweeter. The body is not real. Yet living. This living body. There is a child. The blessed coolness of water. And hands ------------------------- I have established that title of the poem indicates that the poet or narrator wants the reader to see the natural world and human body in a new, unfamiliar way from the norm.  The human body is seen as good and a blessing to water as water is to the human body which is made of mostly water.  Read last post.   Now I want to look at the structure of the poem.   I had the hardest time trying to figure out if this is  Blank or Free Verse ....

Friday, September 30-October 5, 2011 Cook uses the world of reality blended with abstract brushwork to portray images of overlapping dreams and emotions. Veronica Cook creates photographic composites and collages. Her work is painted on board and overlaid with strange and familiar photographs that have been cut to create the desired effect. Veronica works with restored and collected family photographs and her collection of 35mm and digital photographs. The final collages have a swirling or circular pattern that draws you to the image evoking a sense of timelessness. These images are depictions of blended and imbedded human activity in constantly changing traditional and popular culture. Standing before the works of Veronica Cook, the viewer is overcome by mystery and allure. There is a strange sense of “familiarity with the unknown” combined into a journey of the senses; pleasure, pain, light and dark, seen and unseen events.

This song would put Bub to sleep when he was younger.  I wonder if it will still work.