I guess that's it.

 

Dear Reader,

Well, you never know when that was your last transmission, do you?  It has happened several times; I am no longer writing to you here.  Why?  You might say:  What has happened?  Are you okay?  Are you unwell?  

We are all unwell, and I have not written to you because they said to me, when I was young and impressionable, a little duckling, imprinting on aphorisms that are the equivalent of Twinkies as nutrition, they said:  if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.  Let that ring, will you, in your years for a couple million minutes.

Are you ready?  Are you with me?  Are you going to continue to believe that if you tell people how you really feel they will not love you?  My work here may be done.  Or, rather, I may have nothing more to say.

On the other hand, I liked that saying- I held, I hold, dear the idea that we should not spread misery with our words.  I have known people that I began to avoid because they would only tell me of the terribleness, of the suffering.  They never had a sentence for the good things, of which there must be one or two.  I give you some right now:  Daffodils.  Titmice.  Sameness, a thread, in old old friends, a kind of reaching back to yourself in being with them.  I guess my question is this:  do we report only on the things that keep us going, or do we only sardonically allude to the things that kill us?  I want something in-between, but I don't know if there is a there, there.

It is just a riff on Silence is Golden, anyway, and I don't think silence is very useful between humans, because we have not worked much on our non-verbal communication skills in what must be a 100 thousand years now.  I will give it a try, now, to say something to you without words:

(this is now a pink air, a mist of light)

(listen to this quiet)

(I am setting my hand over yours, palm down)

(I am tapping out a slow beat with my foot; barely audible)

(let us now both notice the feeling of the pink air, the dampness of it, the smoothness)

(end transmission)

voice & notice

 

Buzzard, from Dog Ear series, Erica Baum, 2016.

Dear Reader,

Why, or how, are there voices in written words?  I was reading an article, and I recognized the voice, or maybe style?  It's not the one I hear in my head, it's not just the sound of my own lips moving.  I was taught to read silently, and not to move my head across the page- why the fuck, anyway, I wonder?

I am moving my lips like mad these days, and yes, I am pretty sure it is The Texbook Indication of The Right On Time Signs Of Dementia*, but what matters now is that I even catch myself making sounds- I have been a talk to myselfer for as long as I can remember... and when my brain talks to me, it says things like:  get a horse.

So, what gives a series of words, a sentence, a particular voice?  And another thing, I know you don't need me to tell you what the genius of a song is; I know you have noticed it too; so why tell you?  I guess because the verb to notice, the word notice as verb is a kind of affirmation;  I sometimes worry I won't get it all noticed in time.  In time, you know, to die.  It's a kind of weird and personal form of reverence, but for me, just noting it isn't as good as writing it, too, and what about the voice of that written noticing?  I wonder.

*  The Signs of Dementia is a pretty good band name!  "SoD" printed on the bass drum!

jumping out

 

Dear Looking for a Good Time,

Oooh, I found another one!  A sentence that leaps off the page and smacks you down flat with utter veracity and solid groove resonance.  Here it is, from Sido, by Colette.  

Her house resembled her in its untidiness and shared with her a grace denied to orderly places and people.

 

This is a description that I feel I am already partly embodying, and I intend to strive even harder than ever for disorderly grace.  Although, something tells me maybe striving isn't the way to arrive at it?  Maybe what I mean is I will remove all impediments to slumping ever further towards such a grace.  A kind of wilting, maybe?  

And you know, if you are going to read Sido, and I hope very much that you will, you might as well also read My Mother's House.  In the copy I read, they were very comfortably together.  I can't wait til there is a new translation, so I can read them again!  Or maybe, I will try to clobber through them in French, with my long ago college language classes and a really big dictionary.

the written word

 

Ed Ruscha

Dear So & So, and You & You,

I woke up wondering what in the world to bring to the potluck.  Roasted squash?  Gingerbread?  Cheese and crackers?  Shortbread?  Jello?  None of that sounds right. 

Next I wondered what kind of narrative a son or daughter would create of the deeds and words of a parent.  What story would one write:  My mother was a good woman.  My mother was honest.  My mother was a fish, she smoked, she vacuumed up my toys out of spite.  My mother was distant, on another planet.  She never had time for me, just her cases.  My mother had eyes in the back of her head.  My mother was an octopus.  My mother could fix anything.  My mother soothed with chocolate.  My mother always sprayed stinging medications on injuries.  My mother was vain, she obsessed over her looks.  My mother was heartbroken that she could not fit into the standards of beauty.  My mother never learned to drive.  My mother was confident.  My mother was controlling.  My mother worried too much.  My mother didn't care enough.  My mother let me down, she lifted me up, she put me on a pedestal and I could never live up to it.    

Why such a narrative in the first place?  Because people will ask you who you are and why you are.  You will be called upon to have to some answers, and people are accepting of the kind of answer that seems to contain causality:  I am this way because my parents were that way.

This is not all I woke up thinking about; I was also counting the books on the shelf, and thinking about writing.

When I was in preschool* they would write, on little lined sheets of paper, stories I would dictate.  I always supposed all 3 and 4 year olds narrated in this way; but now, I wonder.  I was inordinately pleased with these little sheets of loose paper.  Like the murky, magical workings of the world had been captured and made manifest.  Look at this amazing evidence of the invisible mind!  Look at how it can be read, over and over!  And so, maybe, everyone does "write" these stories in preschool, but maybe not everyone experiences their words on the page as a miracle.

* Preschool was my introduction to formal education, which, when we moved, was put on hiatus until I was 16; community college.  The other 12 years were spent in what would now be called "unschooling."

on being

 

The rain in Spain, and other things that go together.

 

Dear You,

There's so much packed into a word!  All the meaning there ever was for you, and then, all the meaning in the future, and the dictionary meaning, and also, the translation meaning, and all the meaning for another one!  It's very crowded inside words.  

There was a cloudburst, and that, means just one phrase:  Cloudburst at Shingle Street.   Your song for the day, and a teensy part of what can be carried in the word 'cloudburst.'

Until the clouds lift.

Losing track.

Dear Radio Dodo Listeners,

I may have sent you this tune, this song of the day, before; enjoy it again, or for the first time.  It's been a lot of years of sending you tunes, and I don't keep very good records.  It's funny about keeping records; all these saved letters and cards, journals and diaries, photographs, receipts, and lists; they become very thin, very pale, very tattered in time.  Like memento ghosts, because their substance has transmuted, and their original meaning is lost too.

Still, what memento shall I make today, so the dust of tomorrow will have someplace to fall?  How about this: a 4 by 4 foot cube of plaster, layered, troweled textures, planes shifting and truncating, overlapping.  Washed with a palest cobalt blue, and on it, I will write you some words, words that subvert themselves, contradict, and open out in vagueness.

Until my next transmission, be well, and be making.

terms and taxonomy

 

Dear Songs,

Oooh, you know what I love?  High context language and specific terms!  Wikipedia is packed with it, and I go there sometimes to look up one thing, and I find a delightful sub-genre or term.  Remember the Narcocorrido?  So great!  Check out this one:  The Power Ballad.  Nope, it's not what you think; it ought to be a story of my one true love going down to the river and falling over the damn, to be churned into electricity to light your night and run your radio.  What it is this, your song of the day!

the wind in the trees

     

Young Pines and Sky, c. 1935

oil on paper

88.8 cm x 58.2 cm

Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Emily Carr Trust

Dear Nature-Lover,

Maybe I should have addressed this to the "word-lover?" because my letter today is to give you this fine word, psithurism.  I got it from a young man that I met at my job, and I have been saving it for you for nearly two years now.*  

It means the sound of the wind soughing through the branches- sounds like sawing, but also sighing, so a kind of back and forth movement seems to be indicated in thinking of this word.  Psithurism also sounds when spoken like the wind in the branches.  It reminded me of another favorite of mine, petrichor, which refers to the smell of the rain.  Here is a very fine list of words, including petrichor and psithurism.  

And so to your song of the day, In the Pines.

*

That might seem funny, folding up a beautiful word like this one in a little scrap of paper, like a saved slice of cake from a party, and then waiting so long to give it to you; and it is funny, and even a little odd, but I am big saver of things, a hoarder, even, if you like, and I was saving it for The Right Time.  The time when I might add another little something to this offering, in this case, it's the song of the day.

the waiting

 

Dear Typists and Sketchbook Users,

My typewriter was out; getting cleaned and repaired.  It's back now, and I used it to finish up my sketchbook to be sent to the Brooklyn Art Library.  They have this great sketchbook project, see, where you can purchase a little empty book, fill it up, and send it back to their shelves where it can live, waiting for someone to look at it.  

It's a beautiful notion, and I hope someone will go and find my little book.  I put some velvet on the cover, imagining that would be nice for this person to feel when they pick my book up off the shelf.  I do wonder, though, if anyone will pick it up.  I mean, they have an awful lot of books there!  

It's enough, though, for me, to imagine it there, waiting, for someone's hands.  

out of the blue & tumbling from the clouds

Dear Wordy Rappinghood,

I have been dying to give you a little suite of words- phrases, actually.  I tell you, you could build an entire exhibition of large scale paintings around these charming phrases and their poetic connotations.  You could write a symphony on them, or a novel.  One hundred poems.  A pop song, that would begin with the line "A little bit left of you, I walked out into the night, with 200 bucks, waiting for a blow that would tumble from the clouds."   

Tomber des nues.

Out of the blue.

Wordy Rappinghood

Bonus Tom Tom Club

Etymology & Definition

 

Dear Everybody,

Well just who in the world wouldn't want this?  It's a site that lets you research what words were coined in specific years:  Check it out here.

When I am not reading about words, I am thinking about them.  For example, what are 'feelings'?  Are those thoughts that come faster than usual?  Or, does it mean the sensation of rough wool on your elbows?  Or, is it a construct of ideas and ideals, like the feeling word we use so much, 'love?'

Love is not the same as "I care for you," but it can include that action and statement.  F'rinstince, I love words and I love thinking about them, but, I do not really water them like plants, or make them a sandwich like I do my flat mates.

So, today, join me in thinking about what the word love and care mean, or, take a nice romp through the above website and find another word to think about, but, know that I love you and care about you.

Play to Me Only with Thine Straw.

Dear Project-minded,

Oboe, and I am not sure if I have already mentioned it to you, is one of my favorite words.  I also love 'bassoon.' 

Some time ago, I found this recipe for straw oboes, and just lately, I discovered a character making them in a book I am really loving:  Mrs. Miniver.   Which is how I knew it was time to send you the instructions for making the oboe.  In the book, a young character desires grown straw, but is in a place and time with the wrong kind of pasture grasses available.  (I wonder if the insides of our house of straw would have been suitable for making billions of oboes instead of walls?  I might hear some of their unmet potential if I listen carefully to my own walls talking).  As cultivated straw is unavailable to this young person, she gets a box of the manufactured kind of straws (as the book was written in 1939, I expect they were paper straws), and eventually gets the openings cut just well enough to play Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes, which shall be our song for today. 

Once the song is over, and the oboe is made, I encourage you to read Mrs. Miniver- it's filled with fabulous words I enthusiastically looked up:  minims, crochets, piquet, mesembryanthemum, tumbril, woodcraft, tourbillions, skewbald, pyridine, post-prandial, boak, tricoteuse, eupeptic, billeting, vieux jeu, subfusc, dactyl, widdershins, trochaic, secateur, and degringolade. 


Here is the book, right here, if you want to read it this very instant.  I think maybe you should skip all the stuff there at the beginning, just for now, you can read later about Mrs. Miniver and the author.  Go right on to the first chapter, and let them both speak for themselves, even after 80 years.

thinking of words to send you

Dear Readers,

The juice of a small white peach on my fingers rolled down my arm, almost, with patience, to my elbow.  The progressing drop decreased in size, leaving a transparent, shiny trail, a little like the beautiful track of a snail.

Our thoughts, ideas, and words head out from where we are, like an enormous army.  They keep on going and they will find sometimes a place to stay for a while, or even to die.  Or maybe they are more like seeds, many millions are blown from the spent blossom, but only a few find fertile soil.  But when?  Our words can sit fallow for many, many decades, and then, there you are, using some words that someone gave you a long lifetime ago.

I try very hard to keep the words, the thoughts, that people give me, but holding them is so difficult.  They just flow away like liquid, or dry up slowly.  And then, there you are again. 

It is the kind, praising words I want to keep the most- I repeat them, over and over, hoping to fix them very permanently in my mind.  I want to keep them for use on a rainy, diffident day; a day where a little sanative dose is needed.  Other words might stick around too long, and try as I might, I cannot get away from hearing them over and over. 

What shall we do with the latent power of our ideas and words?  Annie Dillard advises us to give the best ones now; don't save them up.  Spend it all, good and fast.

The Ruling Passions.

Dear Enthusiasts,

Things are in disrepair.  They usually are, but the first problem to tackle is the decision of what to fix and what to give up on.  It's clear from reading other pages here, and even from the words I used to write the previous sentence, that I am always sorry to have to give up on things.  I love repaired things; damaged things, even. 

The old rocking chair on the porch has a split cane seat woven in a complex pattern.  The stuff must be soaked, and then woven, and the oak of the armrests and the rockers is worn out of shape, and there are checks and splinters aplenty.  Repairing the seat and back will only be a temporary stay against utter uselessness as a chair.

Still, I thought we might try a webbing seat instead of the split cane, and so I consulted the Ashley Book of Knots.  With any luck, you have a copy already, because it is a really wonderful book, with beautiful illustrations and fascinating names and purposes for the many knots and plaits.

Whenever I look up a knot in this book, I also read the inside back flap of the crumbling dust jacket.  I look at this flap because it's where I begin straightening the paper tatters when I open or close the book.  I always look at dashing Clifford W. Ashley, and I read this sentence: 

     Clifford W. Ashley had two ruling passions all his life:  marine painting and knot tying.

I know you will love this sentence as I do, and so perhaps you will want to stop reading here now, and go forth into the future with your unique relationship to this arrangement of words.  I don't really think you need me to tell you how I feel about these words, after all.  If you did, though, wonder, after considering what they say to you first, I could tell you that I like to imagine my picture there, on the flap, and to think of what my life under two ruling passions might read like, to consider what the 620 pages would be filled with.  I never get too far imagining this before I find that two passions isn't anything like enough passions.  But then I allow as how these are not just any two passions, these, are the Sovereign Passions, and so maybe I really ought to be able to select two to be my Queen and King and to serve under them happily?

Lips v. Mouth

Dear Open-Mouthed and Willing Lipped,

This is a very compelling discussion of the meaning of words, which relates to some recent readings posted here at the Dodo.  It's got me thinking a lot about the *difference between lip and mouth.  Lips frame a mouth, but maybe not a message?  A word?  Voice is not lips, that seems sure.  Do you convince with your lips, your mouth, your mind?  Do you rule with your thoughts, your words, or your stern glance?  Shall woke women now use 'mouthstick' to avoid being doormats and wallflowers?








*Don't give me no lip.  Enough of your smart mouth.  Hmm. 





PS  This, on the history of the bottle cap opener.

Meteors & fireballs & bolides, oh my!

Dear Skywatchers,

Another exciting lexicographical discovery here at the Dodo:  An unusually bright meteor is known as a 'fireball!'  I have been calling unexplained lights in the sky fireballs for decades, without realizing that there was an official definition for the word.  I hope we can forgive my misuse of the term and get on with celebrating this wonderful word of meteoritic precision!

A little over a week ago I saw one of these wonderful fireballs and staff here at the Dodo discovered that I could 'report' my sighting.  You can report it too, right here at the American Meteor Society, and learn more about the bolides, too, if you like.

You'll be wondering why the people that tell us the weather are not the people who we report meteors to, and the answer is that Greek word meteoron from which meteor is taken meant 'something aloft,' or something in the sky.  Which means that the somethings that fall from the sky and are in the sky are rain and snow and hail- all classes of hydrometeors.








PS
Here's a little more on the meteorite collection in the Natural History Museum of Vienna.

Let me hold your hand.

Hand stencils, Sulawesi.

 



Dear Nearby,

I am trying so hard to funnel the goodness of my words into the touch of my hand.  I figure that if I say nothing, I cannot be misunderstood.  If I say nothing, I cannot offend.  If I say nothing, I cannot wound accidentally.

When you feel the light of the sun or the moon, do you receive the ages also?  Does that light shine on you with the force of all the world that came before?  The ancestral beings?  Are they also contained in the air we breathe?  My success in reaching you depends upon so much that I do not know.

Perhaps the life I have is actually in large part yours.  Perhaps all those people over there are responsible to us.  What we say here may matter very much.  Take extreme care and please use caution in speaking.

Eggcorns.

Dear Wordy,

I know you are going to adore these terms!  I just found some of them, others have been kicking around for a long time here at the Dodo.  Use them in good health!

Mondegreen

Paraprosdokian

Spoonerism

Dysphemism

The shadow cast by a drawn line.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Cassatt's pastels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Drawing,

 

I met an artist this summer who said (of herself ) she was "such a 19th century artist" with a little delighted chuckle at her drawing.  At least I think she said 19th, now I worry she might have said 18th?  In any event, I took it to mean that she had an affinity for drawing detail and realism.  Her drawings were convincing and filled with specificity.  Also, and this is where it gets interesting, a quietness.  How did that get in there?  I don't know.  One of her drawings was filled with people and cars, and a giant radio antenna tower, yet is felt as open and calm as meadow with a few cows.  Is this how the 21st century looks if you draw it right?

 

Which is related in the usual Dodo round about way, to the image above; of Mary Cassatt's pastel boxes.  What beautiful cylinders of color!  I have many boxes and sets of pastels, and watercolors too, and I buy little palettes of eyeshadow for the same joy in possessing the little slabs of color all in their places. 

 

Last summer, at the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, there were Ms.O'Keeffe's box of drawing things in a vitrine to be admired.  It was charming, and compelling, and even a bit haunted in all the best ways imaginable. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Georgia O'Keeffe's pastels.

 

 

 

 

Consider the etymology of the word pastel, and ponder with me it's relationship to one of the Spanish definitions of the word: cake.  Is the because cakes are also made of paste (ground flour say) or is it that the color of cakes is pale, or is it the shape of the French drawing crayon?  The Spanish pastel also can refer to el dibujo or el color (de tono suave).  All this puts me in a mood to bake a pale cake of great detail and calm, and then to draw said cake in pastel shades, like our old pal Wayne Thiebaud, except he never made the cakes he drew, which means, if you are inclined to be competitive, you can easily win this round of who's the most authentic draughtsperson* of desserts.,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wayne Thiebaud, Four Cakes, pastel on paper, 1996.

 

 

 

 

 

Wayne Thiebaud, Pastel Scatter, pastel on paper, 1972.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*  Yes, it would have saved letters to write drafts-  vs. draughts- but isn't it fun to dabble in harmless excess?