Turkey Potpourri
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
11:21am Sunday 24Dec06

The turkey potpourri and roast beef potpourri have begun. Yippee! I managed to slap that Italian Sausage stuffing together and stuff my bird within an hour. There's enough for inside the bird and still more to fill a casserole dish, meatloaf size.

Was supposed to do this all yesterday but I still had a bit of running around to do and couldn't find fresh cranberries anywhere so I had to do the grocery store tour of downtown Toronto. Kinda sucked but it made me hit over 20,000 steps when all was said and done. Plus I bought a couple bags of pistachios at one grocery store and CHERRIES (!) at another store. The one place that I finally found cranberries must have known that everyone was out because they were charging almost $3. Bastards! I only bought one bag, obviously.

I don't really have to leave the house today but it's so nice and sunny I'll have to get out and make some steps. Just to make room for all that food I plan on eating. Got some cleaning up to do and of course this is a prime time to get laundry done since most residents have gone to their families cept for the polish immigrants who live here. They all stay.

I've been opening a present each day because I can. I still have the presents that I bought for myself.

Hey Grinny! I won a million dollars! ha ha! wouldn't that be fun? I'll have to scratch that ticket now, just in case. ha ha

Safari has been giving me troubles again so I haven't been able to access my blogs. Explorer is working but it can be iffy. Oh well, it smells like food in the house, can a girlfish who loves food ask for anything better?

EY

Is It Really Friday, Santa?
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Friday 6:29am 22Dec06

Every morning this week I've sat up in bed and said, "Fuck! It's only Monday, Tuesday etc..."
This bad boy of a week has dragged on like a mo fo. I don't know why I always believe that it's going to be a calm week at work and I'll be able to coast and hang out and crack jokes. ha ha! It never turns out that way.

Just got back from buying my turkey, roast beef and Italian Sausage for my Christmas meal. Tomorrow morning I get the veggies and cranberries and the other odds and sods.

Hmm and I also bought some reindeer antlers. I really don't know what happened this year. I'm normally not a Christmas person but this year I've been all gung ho. I've been listening to Christmas music since November 30th and worse yet singing the songs. I did a whole dance number to Baby it's cold outside in my apartment for my cats. I'm looking forward to the 5 days off, my time alone, my apartment smelling like turkey (turkey potpourri as I like to call it), and the presents I bought for myself. Oh yes and wine! I've got wine! ha ha.

Work today is our departmental party which is the best one of the year because I'm with my boys and my boss gets us great munchies and the contractors supply us with beer. Of the men in my life, I've only invited the object of my waning interest because he still makes me laugh the most.

I managed to catch about three Charlie Brown specials this week while lying in bed with my icky stomach, that was icky all week. I forgot how much I love Charlie Brown specials. Snoopy dressed up like Santa and ringing his bell. Rerun wanting his own dog and adopting Snoopy's brother Spike who carries his cactus with him from the desert. Spike's extra long whiskers. Charlie's sister Sally trying to remember her one line in the play, "Hark!" and then she says 'Hockey sticks' instead. It's just sweet humour and makes me giggle. I forgot that snoopy had so many siblings. And Woodstock and his siblings carrying help signs when one of the girls asks Snoopy if he's the real Santa where are all his helpers.

I'm going to have to get those specials on DVD. It's gotta be done.
I have yet to catch the little drummer boy. I haven't watched that one since I was a kid. The only version of that song I like is the Harry Simeone Chorale version which I still have to check itunes to see if they have it.

Yeah, it would be nice to have a main squeeze for some of my time off and Christmas cheer for the cuddle factor but other than that I'll be having a great time on my own. God! I've been looking forward to this. Just need to buy a stocking full of toys for the cats.

EY

Gonna lie down
Topic: WC - Daily Practice
Tuesday 19Dec06 6:24pm

I'm going to lie down early. My stomach has been bugging me for the last couple days. Luckily about three other people have complained about the same icky stomach. You know how it goes feel funny a couple days and think you have stomach cancer! All the bad news in the media will make me paranoid every time.

The object of my waning interest gave me a bottle of wine today, asked me if I've stopped loving him. sigh! Men!

I made plans for Thursday but can't for the life of me remember with who...

Told white guy that only likes black women and claims to love me that after all these years that he's been bugging me he has yet to buy me anything. "Buddy, if you were really serious you'd shower a lady with a gift or ten!" ha ha

Imaginary friend, AKA, beautiful eyes has become ever present. It's all too funny. Every time I think I'm going to give up a new one comes out of the wood work. My stomach hurts and so does my head come to think of it.

EY

New Orleans writers struggle to pen rebirth story
Topic: Writers in the News

By Jeffrey JonesMon Dec 18, 7:25 AM ET
Quirky characters, raucous music, jazz funerals, a warm climate and plenty of service-industry jobs made New Orleans an ideal base for writers and a rich backdrop for their work.

But, 16 months after Hurricane Katrina, the southern city that inspired Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, John Kennedy Toole and Anne Rice risks losing its unique place on the literary landscape. The city's recovery is plodding and many writers remain in exile around the United States.

"This applies not just to literature, but to music and all of the art forms that owe something to the character of New Orleans -- they're all going to be different," said John Biguenet, author and English professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

"When we talk about New Orleans culture, we're not talking about a place but a community. If the people who taught the next generation to make the gumbo, to sing the songs and sew the costumes for Mardi Gras don't come back, that's the end of that tradition."

Novelists, poets and playwrights are struggling to save and rebuild their scene in the city that was setting for classics like Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire," and Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces" and Rice's popular "Interview With the Vampire."

Some have launched efforts to provide housing assistance and other aid for basic survival so writers can chronicle disaster and recovery in what previously was an affordable Bohemia on the Mississippi.

Six weeks after Katrina, Dave Brinks invited fellow poets to his funky French Quarter bar to read for about 250 people.

The "Still Standing" event at Gold Mine Saloon went long into the night despite a curfew, an early sign the storm did not wash away the city's love for the written word.

"We just closed the doors and let things keep going," Brinks, 39, said at the bar one recent morning. "It was a beautiful exposition of how everyone felt at that moment."

At the event, he and his colleagues began work to locate more than 200 writers evacuated to cities around the United States with the aim of eventually bringing them back.

"We've got to get life back so the city can do what it does," said Brinks, whose own house on Canal Boulevard stewed in 8 feet of dirty water after the storm.

He still hosts Thursday night readings. But the Gold Mine also serves as a community center where his colleagues can get information on medical and psychological help and other needs.

HOUSING SQUEEZE

Relatively cheap housing in the city known as the Big Easy lured those who could no longer afford sky-high rent in other literary hotspots like New York and San Francisco.

But after the storm that flooded 80 percent of the city, homes and jobs disappeared, problems that still threaten the recovery as the population remains at half the pre-storm number.

Neighborhoods popular with the artistic community, like the French Quarter, Faubourg Marigny and Bywater, did not flood. But rents there have risen by 50 to 100 percent, said author Robert Smallwood, who is also executive director of the Louisiana Writers' Foundation.

"If writers were scraping by with odd jobs, they can hardly make it now," he said.

His foundation and Habitat for Humanity teamed up in an effort to secure lots and build low-income housing to assist writers and their families. It's a similar plan to the Musicians Village begun by Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis.

To raise funds, the foundation in November recreated Truman Capote's famous black-and-white ball, which was held at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966. The 2006 version was in New Orleans, the birthplace of the author of "In Cold Blood."

NONFICTION SHIFTS TO FICTION

Katrina is an unavoidable touchstone for New Orleans writers as they get back to their craft.

Since the disaster, it's been largely a subject of nonfiction, such as Douglas Brinkley's tome "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" and "The Five People You Meet In Hell: Surviving Katrina," Smallwood's tale of French Quarter denizens who stayed put while most citizens evacuated.

Now, the storm and its aftermath are fodder for fiction, said Biguenet, who lost 2,500 books when his home flooded.

"Rising Water," his play about a couple trapped in their attic after Katrina who must make their way to their roof, has attracted national attention.

Brinks' poetry is filled with explorations of life, family and death post-Katrina.

"Only now are we returning to our creative writing to try to comprehend what exactly has happened to us and our fellow New Orleanians," said Biguenet, 57.

He describes his city as a cultural island in America that managed to maintain its unique French, African, Spanish and Caribbean character as well as its love of conversation. That fostered its literary scene.

Said Smallwood: "It's important to save this, because this is part of the soul of the whole country, to be able to have writers and artists and poets exist and create and maintain our culture."

Copyright ? 2006 Reuters Limited.

Digging for Nuggets - Bio-mythography
Topic: Connections
Monday 6:02pm 18Dec06

From Remembered Rapture bell hooks mentions Audre Lorde's term for her autobiographically based work Zemi. She calls it a bio-mythography. "As I wrote, I felt that I was not as concerned with accuracy of detail as I was with evoking in writing the state of mind, the spirit of a particular moment.

Isn't it nice when some one comes up with a term for what you do? In my writing and my novel in particular, I always call it an autobiography of emotions. I want to convey how I felt but not necessarily what really happened.

Joe Kertes at the Humber School for Writers talks about a writer they had there as an instructor one year that told this story about finding out he was drafted and how he fled the states and came to Canada and went into hiding changing his name and the like. Of course his story was much more elaborate than that and he had everyone in the audience on the edge of their seats in anticipation. After he was done telling the story he said that the story was made up but the emotions connected to that story are what he felt. In fact he was really on the golf course when he got the news but there is no way to convey the reality of the emotions by telling a story on the golf course. There's no conflict for one.

It takes me back to my example about Maxine, her mother Aries and her boyfriend Leo and catching them in bed with one another. That is the only way I can convey how I felt when Aries and Leo were having their 'phone' conversations. It's not really autobiographical writing. But Bio-mythographical? That I like!

More from Remembered Rapture, "in her work The Last Generation, Cherrie Moraga declares: 'Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students - the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated - turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.' "

I originally played with writing because my older brother was such a talented artist that I couldn't bear to draw in his shadow. That was when I was 10 years old. So I say. But after reading the above quote I remember something else. The 1976 Olympics were in Montreal. Anyone that knows me knows that I love the Olympics. I remember the 1972 Olympics when Mark Spitz won all those gold medals. I remember that my mother had his poster with him in his bathing suit and wearing all those medals around his neck.

When the Olympics were in Montreal was when my full love for them came to being. I watched every possible sport that I could on television. We certainly couldn't afford to attend. I got into the clean and jerk competition and watched most of them with my brother. I marveled at the weight lifters chalking their hands, pacing with strange jerking spastic motions. I was stunned by their screams before they lifted the insane amounts of weight.

I looked over at my brother, "Why do they do that?"
"They're psyching themselves to perform."
"What does that mean?"
"Well, they are talking to themselves in their heads. They are convincing them selves that they can lift it and the scream is saying that they've hit that zone."
"Oh!"

I was fascinated. I stared at the TV with a focus that I can't verbalize. Something about it lit a fire inside me. I discovered a way to survive in my family. I never spoke up for myself as a child. I was raised to remain silent and my tears always betrayed me but my mouth remained shut.

As I started grade six that year I started to talk to myself in my head. I told myself things like when I grow up, I'm going to move away and live the life I want to live. In my head, I told my Step father that he wasn't fair or nice and one day he was going to regret every mean thing he'd ever done to me. I talked and talked in side my head until the words spilled out on the page in the form of love poems. Some how I knew that I couldn't write what was really inside me, for fear of punishment, so I wrote about a male/female love. As far as I was concerned the familial love was a write off. The male/female love was my future. That was my getting out of this situation. When I grow up I'm going to have love. I'm going to run off with my perfect man and have the life that I deserve to have.

Yeah yeah, it didn't exactly work out that way but it kept me sane in the meantime.

Psyching myself gave me my survival and writing gave me my life. And I realize that to this day, I talk in my head and sometimes out loud when I am writing.

And one last quote from Remembered Rapture: "Dorothy Allison shares: 'I had been taught never to tell anyone outside my family what was going on, not just because it was so shameful but because it was physically dangerous for me to do so ... I didn't start writing -- or rather I didn't start keeping my writing -- until 1974, when I published a poem. Everything I wrote before then, ten years of journals and short stories and poems, I burned, because I was afraid somebody would read them.' "

Which brings me back to my early love poems. I couldn't write that my step sister repeatedly allowed my step father and my mother to mistakenly blame me for some wrong doing that she'd actually perpetrated. I couldn't write that I felt invisible and unwanted and the worst of black dirt. If anyone read that? I didn't want to deal with the consequences of my true feelings being found out. I wrote love poems. I wrote about fantasy love affairs and imagined heart breaks. I wrote about a need to share my heart and a want for affection. I wrote over 300 poems from the time I was 12 until I was about 18 years old when I left and came to Toronto on my own.

I like to link my writing back to my ancestors like a cycle that is repeated but changes form with each generation . Black slaves weren't allowed to read because if you can keep a people ignorant you can keep them chained. The slaves that did learn to read had to hide that fact because they could be killed for it. I lived in a family of white people, the only black child, often feeling like the poor relation or worse yet the in house slave. There were different rules for his white children versus the rules set out for me. They were given privileges, I was strictly restricted. I had chores and duties. I had to be minded so I grew up knowing my place.

I wrote my poems like a slave learning how to read in the dark cover of night. I wrote my poems, my secret language, like the slaves sneaking to freedom by way of the underground railroad. I wrote my poems as my ancestors cheered for me and my life that I was saving.

Okay, really, one last quote from Rumi, of course... I dove into "the deeps into which your life takes rise."

Amen!

EY