Pansies on a sunny day

I couldn't resist photographing these bright flowers.

Poet Jason Labbe recommends daily writing discipline

Waiting for inspiration won't help you find some, according to Jason Labbe, who read at Wednesday Night Poetry last week at the Blue Z Coffeehouse in Newtown.

It's important to write every day, and out of that discipline discoveries come, he told the Wed. Night Poetry crowd during the Q & A following his reading. (I think that might be good advice for practicing almost any skill or art form - a discipline of playful, purposeful exploration.

Labbe has an unassuming, understated reading style. His work is evocative, surreal, yet somehow spare and stoic. I really enjoyed his featured reading. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Vigrinia and a chapbook called Dear Photographer (Phylum Press, 2009) which is out of stock already. He's also a musician and drummer actively involved in performing and recording. Visit his website for details of his doings www.studyinblue.com (If you run the cursor towards the top of the page a menu will appear.)

Tom Flynn of Free Inquiry Magazine spoke on statistics of unbelief

When someone rattles off statistics 
ask about source and method

Information - on the demography of unbelief -was exactly what Tom Flynn (shown in my rather blurry picture) was sharing at a meeting of The Humanist Association of Connecticut this past Monday evening. Flynn is editor of Free Inquiry magazine, and executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism. Flynn is a lively speaker and gave a very interesting talk with lots of laugh lines as well as some terrific insights into the meaning of statistics. He looked at multiple sources, and also looked into their methods.

I came away with two things: 1) the number of unbelievers is indeed growing and 2) comparative statistics don't mean anything unless the methodology by which they were created is objective and consistant. This brings to mind a story I've heard from a administrative assistant for a statewide organization whose representatives were sometimes called on to speak before local civic groups. After typing up a speech for one - this admin asked where his statistics came from. "Oh I just make them up - people don't question...."  he said adding he'd never been challenged. The lesson is when someone, even someone who should know, rattles off statistics:  ask about their source and its method.  People are free to say whatever they like - that does't make it true.

Thanks to Tom Flynn and to HAC for the opportunity to hear him speak.   Flynn is author of a number of books, among them a debunking of modern Christmas traditions called The Trouble with Christmas and two science fiction sagas: Nothing Sacred and Galatic Rapture. He is also editor of the New Encyclopedia of Unbelief.

BOOKS: The Road To Wellville by T.C. Boyle

don't rock the boat, fish quietly while it sinks

fanatics, followers & blind  belief

Pompous quacks, big business chicanery, na'r-do-well sons, accidental electrocution, nudist picnics, infidelity, arson and the unrepentant human willingness to believe, no matter what - The Road To Wellville T.C. Boyle's hysterical historical fiction work has it all.

On The Road To Wellville, it is not only the characters but also the reader who must sustain a “suspension of disbelief,”  in order to continue page to page, enjoying this wild and crazy saga - all the more unbelievable because it is based in a true story.  Major characters and a number of minor ones are all being duped by someone. And they are complicit in the deception. Ask any con man, the mark wants to believe. And when someone offers us a path to good health - we want to believe that too - to hell with the evidence. (Otherwise no one would be selling homeopathic remedies these days.)

In fact, -- the road to human well-being is most certainly not found on the road to “The San”  the Sanatorium in Battle Creek.  – it's the Kalamazoo  Road that the emergent and unlikely hero Will Lightbody impatiently traverses to finally take action, to stand up for himself, his wants and his wife - that is the road to heath and sanity.

As his name would suggest Mr. Will Lightbody, Eleanor's “gawk” of a husband, is a lightweight in the will department, choosing repeatedly to ignore things that would send most sane folks running for safety or at least for to the phone to call a good litigator.  Mr. Lightbody allows himself to be ignored and put off by his wife, literally starved and cowed by Dr. Kellog and his variously persuasive nurses, despite the mounting list of mishaps.  After a truely bizarre electrocution scene in the sinusoidal baths, Lightbody immediately forgets his own courageous action in saving Alfred Woodbine the attendant.  His own quick thinking and courage are set aside, and the whole event  frightens him enough to inspire a drinking bout and a meat-eating rebellion.  Yet, even after pointedly rubbing Dr. Kellogg's nose in the messy fact of Praetz's death, Lightbody still, unbelievably, allows this self-righteous socialite quack to send him for an indefinite punitive mechanical enema:

"A blister, swelling and swelling till it bursts – that was Dr. Kellogg. He was blind, he was deaf, he was a god on a cloud: the name of Homer Praetz had never been uttered. Such impudence didn't merit  responses.[...] “put him [Will Lightbody] on the enema machine until further notice.” 

A little later Lightbody lets Kellogg send him under the knife - intestinal surgery to remove an imaginary “Kellogg's Kink” !

Yet no one, including the great doctor Kellogg is immune to the need to believe the improbable. He never once suspects that his son George burned the  first Sanatorium building years earlier, and he immediately has faith in glowing scientific reports of radium, (never mind if a patient or two keels over), and he believes his own overblown public reputation. He is also duped by fellow vegetarian fanatic Badger and The Manipulative Therapy doctor as are quite a number of satisfied women, including Eleanor Lightbody.

Besides The Manipulative Therapy nudist picnic, one of the most interesting sideshows is George Kellogg, the filthy, drunken adopted son, the “err”' apparent. He is the salient inconvenient consequence of “Dr. Vegetable's” actions and philosophy. George, the ugly underside of the “Dr. Anus” is the potential terminus of some rather lucrative illusions.  Supposedly the bad seed, his need for, and to torment the Doctor is acute; the essential quality of their relation is blame rather than deception.

George's opposite is the aspiring Charlie Ossining, son of the gatekeeper, taken in by the wealthy Mrs. Hookstratten.  He wants so desperately to be an entrepreneur that he is duped endlessly by Bender despite  an incredible array of evidence that the man is a shark. Bender dupes Ossining into duping Mrs. Hookstratten and Will Lightbody.

Yet in the end, Ossining persists and eventually succeeds in business. His wealthy Auntie Amaelia Hookstratten was after all, a reality “hook” for straitening out the young Ossining. Her prodigy, though estranged, finally succeeds and makes the perfect tonic. George, (Kellog Jr.) the perfect ingrown hair does not.

The last meeting between Dr. Kellogg and G. Kellogg Jr - with fire, white wolf, chimp, torn clothing, insults and  bottled excrement unleashed - is pure slapstick melodrama. No wonder they made a movie out of it. George's death is also the perfect METAPHOR for what the Dr. is doing to his patients: drowning them in stinking, slippery fanatic unfounded so-called-truth. They, like George could have escaped, but they prefer  blind belief  to figuring it all out for themselves.

--- M.M. (Mar) Walker
author of Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding,
editor and writer at The Metaphor.atorium
and former editor of Bent Pin Quarterly.
originally written in November of 2003

Strange reflections - optical oddities

Occasionally in some unexpected spot, some skewed individual like myself is right smack in the way because they have stopped to take a photo. Usually the camera is pointed a some unsuitable subject like a car fender, a puddle or a hubcap or the edge of a window.

Quite often it is nothing, nothing as in something that is reflected in something else. The odd squiggles in the photo to the left are  not a contortionist zebra. They are Venetian blinds reflected in the plastic cover of library book which is propped open on a flat surface. From most angles you can't see anything. I guess there are wrinkles in the plastic that are bending the reflection.

Or take the photo on the right, which was taken at the Freight Street Gallery. There appears to be an angry woman hovering in the frame.  Nope it's NOT a ghost. (No proof for ghosts, just a lot of  human imaginings....)  It's a reflection of a painting that is on another wall, quite far away from this nice sunset painting. It's not directly across from it, but on wall that forms an L with the wall where this paining hangs. I really don't understand the optical mechanism by which it is reflected here but -  like I said, optical oddities.

OIL SPILL - an article worth reading

Where profits are concerned what companies and whole industries appear to learn from environmental disaster is how to cut corners to get back to business as usual, with the least amount of change or reform and without shouldering blame or responsibility - either for the disaster or for reforming corporate behaviors. This is a sobering article called Lessons From The Exxon Valdez Spill:

http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/2010/05/02/lessons-from-the-exxon-valdez-spill/

PAINTING: Tulips by Alexander Couard

This lovely little watercolor painting is by an artist named Alexander Perot Couard. When my parents got married in 1949 Mr. Couard himself gave them this painting as a wedding gift. Mr. Couard and one Miss Burgoyne lived a few houses down the road from my grandparents. When my mother and my Aunt Florence were young children in pigtails, he came to the  house  and took photos of them to reference for various paintings he was working on. (They still have the photos...)

One of the interesting things about this work is that it is all about reflection, It features cut tulips with a oval mirror behind them, which reflects partially opened French doors, and the landscape beyond.

This beautiful work has been on display in my parents house all of my life. I have been looking at this painting for almost 60 years. It may be why I paint.

NOTE: This painting was photographed with a phone through the glass in the frame. 

POEM: Mote in the eye of the cosmos

Mote in the eye of the cosmos

a dot, a speck of dust
one electron circling
a nucleus in a Macro-Atom,
the punctuation at the end of
the longest sentence,
a split infinitive:
to maybe cool to a dark cold rock
like so many others
or a hot dry gumball
or broken into asteroids,
or dust, melted to plasma.

But - we are here now - alive...
ALIVE. Shout it!
Live it! Here!
Right here
on this
speck.

- Mar Walker

This poem was inspired by this

Our speck in space (thanks to NASA, Carl Sagan & @Monicks)

Today I saw a version of this picture with this quotation and was in awe once again, of the vastness we move through every day on our small blue orb. And how speck-like and innocent it seems.  The picture was posted on Twitter by a person named @Monicks but the printed quote was a part of the picture and the text was hard to read to my old eyes. So I hunted up a different version of the photo (found at WikiPedia) and the quote to go with it, so I could share it in larger type So Thank you @Monicks for inspiring me. This picture was taken by the Voyager 1 as it left our solar system in 1990. The little speck inside the circle is Earth seen from close to 4 BILLION miles away.  Here is what Carl Sagan said about this picture:

"Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." ---- Carl Sagan

This inspired a poem

"Aspects of the Self" – at Freight Street’s May Day show

This pencil drawing of mine called "Aspects of the Self," is in the Freight Street Gallery's May Day Festival show which hangs at the gallery through most of May.( I pick it up on May 23). Scroll down on the linked page for a list of artists. There are a lot of really interesting  and colorful pieces in this show in many mediums. If you go, be sure to view the items in the hallways as well as in the main room.   During the opening quite a few musical groups performed. I was there for about an hour and thoroughly enjoyed the spacey musical creations of Martin Ear and Evan. At some point a guy with, what looked like it might be a digery do joined them for a number. Their music really lent itself to the mood of the artwork.   Many thanks to Mike and Dustin Byrne for putting on the show.

This is the first time in two decades I have displayed my work  (other than promotional  posters) in a physical rather than digital sense.

I drew this during a graduate drawing class at Weselyan. The subject is looking inward - and what she sees is various parts of her self as well as her rejected shadow-self. Note she is holding on to the shadow-self rather tightly, so though the shadow is hidden, she is not rejected....

This photo is in black and white. In the drawing itself the paper has a more yellowish color not show here.  One of the techniques I like to use in drawing, is to make a very heavy mark with a soft pencil, then draw back into the marks with an eraser.  That is a technique used in quite a few areas of this drawing. This drawing also appears on the new cover of Inverse Origamii - the art of unfolding, my first poetry chapbook.