ART

DENIAL?

/ janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments

Gary is downstairs listening to a CD from The Searchers, his favorite group from the 60s (they were still playing a year ago). I have spent several days working on a poem for a local event. (With my luck they will not like it, but honest, I couldn’t write a cheerful “pandemic” poem. Others will.) As I sent it off as an email attachment I had word that the gallery is taking down the show the end of the month. They did not sell anything of mine (or from two other people). Yes, disappointing. But the poem . . . here’s the first stanza:

 Birds fell from the sky this past
 summer, a warning as defiling as riots 
 and bloody marble, the risk of living 
 in dangerous times when all times 
 prove dangerous. 
Waves washed up into our hedge this morning, but it settled back for our afternoon walk.
Continue reading →

OPENING FRIDAY

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments
A few of my handwoven shawls will be on sale at the Hoffman Gallery in Manzanita beginning this week. The show also includes work by other artists: ceramics by Barbara Temple Ayres, paintings by Lisa Sofia, and fiber arts by Kyla Sjogren. 
Hoffman Gallery December Show
Open Fridays through Sundays | December 4-27 | 1:00-4:00pm
Free and open to the public
Hoffman Center for the Arts | 
594 Laneda Avenue | 
Manzanita, Oregon 97130
phone 503 368-3846
I weave three quite differently colored shawls on each warp, about 23″ x 70″ each. Each warp has many shades, tints, and hues. The weft, too, is widely variable. Altogether, I use at least a dozen yarns in each shawl, mostly handpainted merino wool with some hand dyed handspun yarns of merino and silk and alpaca sometimes.

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GOOD OMEN

/ janpriddyoregon / 10 Comments

I recognize that I have been complaining a lot lately. Mostly about shipping companies. So here is a good omen: “Soul Queen” arrived in near-perfect condition a couple of days ago, shipped more than five months ago, and presumed lost early in the summer. Gary wanted to calculate how many miles we’ve walked since then. He thought maybe we could have walked her here from Georgia.

I didn’t think so, and it’s not nice, and I am too lazy to go back and count up the total distance of our walks. (Do I really want to know?)

She’s here. That’s what matters. Our regular UPS driver was not even aware she’d been missing or anything. Insurance had paid. We’d all thought she was lost forever. And here she is. Good times.

It’s true that the space bar on my computer isn’t working so I have to stop and add spaces to my words and correct the Autocorrect (“to my” turned into Tony). And our property taxes . . . And one of our tenants is moving out in three weeks. And even the shipments from Finland and Estonia and Slovakia (music, music, and yarn) did not take this long. And I’d found two other paintings and paying again for “Soul Queen” was a painful pinch.

It’s also true that we both love her. Isn’t she marvelous!

So. Good omen? I am not superstitious, but I think: good omen!

“Soul Queen” by Jeanie Tomanek

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GRAMMAR again

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments

Some mornings there is really no excuse for fussing about grammar and I resist. On other days, it just might keep slapping me in the face. I am not a grammarian and often have to look up rules. My understanding of these rules of grammar is the result of determined study after the age of forty.

In my youth, my understanding of grammar rested entirely on what sounded right.

If the verb tense or sentence structure sounds right, I generally assume it is correct. However, sound is a reliable model of proper speech only if it’s what has been heard growing up or has otherwise become habitual. I used to tell my students that if they grew up in an English-speaking household that consistently used formal register English they had an unearned advantage over students who had not. They should be grateful for their “ear” but not smug.

My childhood was financially modest but linguistically advantaged—that is, thanks to the G.I. bill, my only aunt (on my mother’s side) and my father both went to UofC, Berkeley, and both eventually completed masters degrees though no one else in their families had previously attended college. My parents often quoted Shakespeare and sang Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics. I heard proper English spoken as a child in my immediate family. That’s my luck.

What sounded right to me generally was correct. As a result, I never learned the rules of grammar, never bothered with any of that. A mistake. [I have always been a poor speller. Maybe the bad spelling is somehow connected to this? Arrogance? I used to warn my students about my poor spelling, which was nonetheless better than most of theirs. “If you see me misspell a word on the whiteboard,” I told my classes early in the school year, “go ahead and correct me. I will not be offended.” I modeled looking things up. As an adult, I worked hard to improve my spelling, and I still make mistakes, sometimes because of my poor hunt-and-peck typing and other times because I am just careless. I struggle with overuse of commas, I think, as a result of reading too much Victorian literature, which revels in them.] I read a great deal. I took two years of Latin in a public school and should have taken a third year, but it seemed at the time that even Cicero could not repay me for an entire year of Caesar’s Gallic Wars.

These days I still look up words and grammatical rules. I also occasionally add to a modest file of published errors. Here are a few:

“A man was seen with a gunshot wound laying motionless on the ground in the area near where the opposing groups had fought and where mace had been deployed.“—yesterday’s The Washington Post [“laying” should be “lying” Laying refers only to an action done to something. e.g. I was laying down the book, while I was lying down to read.]

“Thompson performed a driving maneuver that led Lewis’ vehicle to crash and came to a stop.“—NPR, 17 Aug 2020 [“crash and came” should be “crash and come”]

“They can make a child too listless to pay proper attention in school or so sick she misses many school days.”—NPR [If the author wants to avoid the growing gender-neutral use of “they” as a singular pronoun, there is still an easy fix: “They can make children too listless to pay proper attention in school or so sick they miss many school days.”]

“Good morning. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris made their debut as running mates. The British economy sunk into its deepest recession on record. And the QAnon conspiracy theory has found its way to the mainstream.”—The New York Times [I am fairly certain it should be “sank” unless they mean “has sunk,” which would also work in this context. I looked it up to be sure.]

“Her three decades of high-stress nursing was behind her.”—Goodreads novel blurb [“was” refers back to “three decades” and therefore should be “were”—though I might be wrong about that: “High-stress nursing was behind her.” “Her three decades were behind her.” To my ear the “of” makes the “high stress nursing” a modifier, not the subject. Dreyer might disagree.]

“Gaudí’s ambitious design originally featured 18 towers, including 12 for each of the biblical disciples, but as the Associated Press notes, it’s possible that some of these spires will never be erected.”—Smithsonian [I am certain the author does not mean there are twelve towers for each of the disciples. Aren’t I? “…including a tower for each of the twelve disciples.”]

“Martin Gugino, a 75-year-old protester, lays on the ground after he was shoved by two police officers in Buffalo, New York. Jamie Quinn, via Reuters”—TNYT photo caption [again, should be “lies”]

I note these things because I paid for access to most of these typos, because news published in mainstream media should be able to afford a proofreader/line editor, and because I cannot help myself. No, that’s not right: I choose not to stop myself from pointing them out. I believe I have an excuse for my errors, but refuse to grant The New York Times the same tolerance.

[An applicant for a position as Head Secretary at my school twenty or more years ago failed to get an interview because the current Head Secretary did not like having her three grammatical and spelling errors pointed out to her. She tossed the application. She was most indignant when she told me this.]

Again, I will reiterate that I am not a grammarian and I make mistakes all the time myself both here and in conversation. I have worked to achieve a technical understanding of grammatical rules because I was an English teacher for most of my professional life. I believe people should care enough about their jobs to continually work to be better at them. [I know what a “comma splice” is, how to explain the concept to my students, and why it should not make college professors and high school English teachers scream in fury, but that it does. That’s why they should avoid them.] No one likes errors pointed out to them. Well, most people don’t.

Someone did yesterday.

In my daily life I cling stubbornly to what sounds right and what sounds wrong to my ear, but I have studied the rules of grammar and I am willing to improve. Even now that I am retired. [And, no, that is not a complete sentence—incomplete sentences have been one of the feature of modern writing that I have learned to adjust to. And ending on a preposition too.]

For example, the word “boughten” sounds wrong to me. I have looked it up after finding it in a novel. Webster insists there is such a word, but I cringe to hear or read it. Boughten? ouch

I rarely pick up feathers on the beach—there are so many in summer. But this little beauty caught my eye.

I will also note the I could not find a way to change the color of my text (which is why I used bold above) or to indent a block of text (the other reason I used bold above), but just now I discovered how to do those things and how to wrap an image with text using this new editor—though I may have to figure it out all over again next time I want the effect.

Machinery does not come any more naturally to me than grammar. I have to work at it until I can internalize the process and it becomes habitual.

This morning I learned that I won a free book, PR for Poets by Jeannine Hall Gailey over at her blog. Her blog is a pleasure. She is a kind person who speaks forthrightly about her health struggles and generously about her fellow poets. I rarely think of myself as a poet, but I do read poetry and routinely compose in my head, and I have published poetry.

Poetry, in my life, has offered a strategy for organizing and crystalizing my life experience. A revelation of truth and connection. Poetry allows the world to rest here, just between my fingertips, just at the edge of my understanding. A fluttering demand to be recognized. A rare flighting bird.

Gailey’s book might be just what I need to rediscover my off-and-on-again daily poem habit.

WORKAROUND

/ janpriddyoregon / 8 Comments

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The center panel is composed of eighty-one different patterned squares, crossed by twenty or thirty different black and white cotton. The split frame is of several purples, and these each change from step to step. There is also a pieced border.

There is more to this post—I figured out a workaround.

Above is the center panel with the border pieces, unsown and just separate pieces of fabric laid in place. Below is the border pieced without corners and not yet joined to the center—trust me, it evolved. It’s entirely sewn as of now, and today or tomorrow I hope to complete the border, trim the backing, and fold it all up so it’s ready for Linda Pinkstaff at Astoria Quilting to work her magic. We will carry them north in the next week or two. Perhaps by then I will know what I am doing next.

Yesterday I got stuck. We walked north to Arcadia Beach, two miles away. I made granola and peanut butter cookies that were mostly peanut butter, a riff on Maida Heater’s recipe. Gary liked them, and he’s always insisted he did not care for peanut butter cookies. I finished the dreadful novel I began earlier in the week, skimming the less savory parts.

What I did not do is work on this quilt, which now has a name: “Aurora Which Means Dawn.” That is a line from a Golden Book about Sleeping Beauty. So perhaps I should call this “Sleeping Beauty”? Except it’s not a sleepy piece but bright day. It is my fifth quilt during the past year. Can that be? I have not made that many quilts in a year before. Let me think. Why would that be?

Some people bath less often, some are drinking too much, some quarrel with or avoid their family, some have shifted their political priorities—perhaps a national healthcare system and stable income seem more reasonable necessities when the alternative is bumping into sick people who cannot afford to take better care of themselves?

Anyway, I’ve tried most of the above, and settled on rewatching favorite television series such as The Mentalist, Psych, and Monk while working with color. I must have a couple hundred skeins of Koigu wool, a fine, two-ply Canadian merino that is hand painted. I have hundreds (plural) of different batik fabrics gathered over the past twenty or thirty years. Some are were once lengths of a yard or two, but most were never more than a quarter yard, now reduced to scraps.

My work is not mere craft but neither is it great art. There is art in the design and craft in the making. There is pleasure in looking at the many patterns and rich colors.

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BAKING

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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My black plum upside-down cake. I made this yesterday morning and we ate the last of it this morning for our breakfast. The plate is from Rainbow Gate, a Santa Fe studio.

Bread is on the first rise downstairs and I meant to come upstairs and work on the new quilt. That was what I meant to do. I bake most days, and I do that because I enjoy baking.

I took up cooking and baking while I was a teenager partially in contrast to my mother. I saw it as an opportunity for creativity. My mother saw it as drudgery. My mother was skilled but unimaginative in the kitchen. Resistant. She was of the generation that produced syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) who wrote a series of satirical books about Midcentury Modern Life with titles such as The Grass Is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank and If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? Continue reading →

BEAUTY TOO

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

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This single-flowing pink rugosa rose has an intoxicating fragrance and set huge apple-red hips. I let the hips set each year hoping to make jelly, but the chipmunk gets them every time.

Two months ago I wrote here about beauty and about the storks nesting in England for the first time in a hundred years. It seems a long time ago.

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This lacecap hydrangea grows under, around, through, and over the windswept pine in our front yard.

Yesterday, for the first time in over four months, I ate a meal I had not myself cooked. It was a risk and we will not likely do it again any time soon. Most of our favorite places to buy food are closed (Ove NW and Pearl Bakery) or they have demonstrated a certain level of complacence or carelessness. And I am a decent cook and baker myself. Yes, I can bake a cherry pie starting with a hallock of sour cherries if I could get to the Farmers Market to buy them. I was baking sourdough before the pandemic. Usually by this time in the summer I have frozen pesto and huckleberries and the makings of pies. Instead my freezer looks barren. Continue reading →

HALFWAY

/ janpriddyoregon / 4 Comments

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Gary standing in the path he built (and has had to rebuild several times) through the rocks. We hope we will be able to turn the loungers around and safely enjoy a 4th of July fire on the sand. (We half hope someone takes these lounge chairs—one of which we found.) That’s a bit of beach trash in Gary’s hand, a length of plastic pipe he carries to poke at the sand.

Today is halfway through 2020 and it’s a good place to pause and take stock. For many human beings this has already been a tragic year on so many levels, so I feel I need to access my situation.

We are both retired so we’re doing fine as far as finances go. That is, unlike so many who are without income such as one son and both daughters-in-law, we still have Social Security. Everyone in our immediate family is healthy but several have continued working in essential services. We have been isolating since 10 March with one exception: our younger son and his two children visited for a weekend sixteen days ago. We are still healthy because they are still healthy, masking and taking other precautions. Other than that, we have the habit of weekly grocery shopping with the occasional extra trip out to pick up mail or deliver mail to the nearest mailbox.

At the beginning of 2020, I set a couple of goals that are still valid. We gave up seafood from our diet. In six months, no seafood, again with one exception: there is fish sauce in my pantry and I made an umami-rich sauce that I’ve used in bowls with fresh veggies and pasta or rice.

The other goal was to purchase no more than eight items of clothing the entire year. I have bought three garments from Eileen Fisher on steep discount (more than 60% off). EF is a highly responsible company and I am glad to support them. Do the two hair clips from eBay count as clothing? Does the replacement headband for the one I’d worn since the 90s but lost on the beach count as clothing? Either three or six purchases, either I am doing fine or this is not looking promising for the second half of the year.

In the past four months I have cooked angelhair pasta at least a couple dozen times (a simple one-pan meal cooked with vegetable stock and with greens, onions, and/or cheese), baked a couple dozen loaves of bread, made gibassier and waffles and spring onion pancakes. I have made curries and vegetable stews and spiced grains. I discovered that a rich soup can be made with leeks and water and salt and pepper—simple as that. Yum. We have eaten pounds of broccoli and uncounted bags of various greens.

Last month I killed my sourdough starter, but I have grown a new one. It tastes fine once it’s baked, but the smell is rather alcoholic than sour. That’s because the “All-Purpose Unbleached Flour” from Costco has barley mixed with the hard red wheat—I didn’t even notice until a local friend and I were comparing notes on our sourdoughs and she said her sourdough had gone rather alcoholic too. A step shy of beer, but . . .

One of my best discoveries is organic miso available at one of the stores we shop once a month. I now have both white and red miso in the fridge! Also, salad greens sauté well with pasta.

My root canal is still sore. I gained back the four pounds I lost. I am not running. sigh

Three packages that we ordered in May have not arrived and we assume now all three are lost. Gary’s CD of Estonian music and my handmade doll from Russia both vanished somewhere in the Baltic. They left their country of origin and never arrived anywhere at all. And the painting—Oh, that painting I love so much—UPS lost track of it at their hub outside Chicago and has issued a refund to the shipper. The refund has been forwarded to me, and I will do the responsible thing and set it aside toward our property taxes.

This year, I have ordered eleven skeins of yarn. I use fourteen for each warp and that much again in weft. This means that the four seven warps I have put on the loom since January have yielded nineteen and a half shawls so far. I am generally still weaving past 7pm. After six months work and subtracting expenses, selling them all might yield a couple weeks or even a month of minimum wage pay, but who’s counting?

I pieced the top and back of a quilt that is waiting its turn to be quilted.

Butterfly Fontanelle has gone through revision three times and I am halfway through reading it aloud again. Tiny changes this time, little corrections but since I am still finding things to repair, change, and move, I will need another edit when I finish this one. I am always in too much of a hurry to send out work. Did it this time too, but I have sent it to a slow responder that does not allow simultaneous submissions, which will ensure I do not send it out again until winter.

This morning I caramelized my last two onions to top macaroni and cheese made with the last of the Stilton, mozzarella, Parm, and with a scattering of dried cranberries because our taste has shifted to sweet and savory and salty all at once. I had only two cups of milk until our next shopping trip so cooked twelve ounces of pasta. It’s in the oven.

At our next shopping trip everyone in the state is required to be masked. Yeah, July 1st! (And about time.) But neither the local sheriff and nor the parks department plan to do a thing about what happens on our beach on the 4th. The one time we tried calling the fire department about a beach fire that was over twenty feet high (absolutely not exaggerating—it flew up another ten feet), the volunteer fire department dismissed our concern. The local millionaires are allowed. “With the rich and mighty, always a little patience,” according to Jimmy Stewart’s character in Philadelphia Story.

I read the news every day—NYT, WaPost, NPR, Guardian—even on the days I swear I will take a break. I study covid-19 statistics. Gary reads different news’ sources. Between the two of us we cover the world. Apparently we are much better informed than the President of the United States. That’s because we read. I have read 34 books so far this year, including nonfiction, memoir, poetry, and novels. Streaming (no cable) we are currently particularly fond of watching Midnight Diner (again) and we finished Somebody Feed Phil on Netflix, even though Phil eats so much meat! Detectorists remains Gary’s all time favorite. On recommendation of a friend, we tried again to watch it and decided we liked Shitz Creek after all. We look forward to Monty Don and Gardeners World on Friday nights. We paid to stream two current release movies and they each had their good points, but we’ve found better distraction and information and drama via our subscriptions.

The hall where I meant to paint is not finished, but Gary and I are scouring the house for set of essays written by a former student. Gary is not optimistic, but our search will be thorough. I was fond of those essays and kept them and still trust they must be here someplace . . . I hope. In the mean time, searching has forced us both to sort and clean. It wasn’t how we planned to spend the week, but it needs to happen.

There has been a lot of cleaning house going on throughout our nation. Statues of treasonous and racist men are coming down. Men who did nothing for our country other than attack it. Comment on national websites point out that even Benedict Arnold fought for our nation in several important battles, long before turning against our country, and no one celebrates him in a public statue or named a military base after him. Laws are changing. White people are taking long, difficult, honest looks at their own privilege and insisting to themselves and the world that we can do better. As hard as these days are for so many and for so many reasons, this is reason to think we might actually accomplish some good in our nation.

My husband and I still get along fine with one another. We are sad sometimes. We nap too much. We worry about our children and the world. Too much. Half of a year and too much has happened to claim anything except hope. There is hope.

We have rewatched the first seven and a half minutes of the pilot of The Mentalist a dozen times in recent months. “Seriously, it’s not as bad as it looks.” And every time, we laugh.

How could I forget making chutney and two kinds of jam?

 

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HOPELINGS

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

header+logo+2Bracken, the online journal from Washington, believes in hope to get us all by through with “love of the woods and its shadows.”

It is a beautiful magazine I’ve already recommended. Begin with Bracken’s main page because just now you do not want to miss another look at Amanda Greive’s art, and then click on “Coronavirus Hopelings” for a series of lovely offerings. I sincerely recommend the short piece from yesterday, called “Yellowing.” I’m there too.

P.S. I am a little embarrassed to ask, but I would be grateful if you “liked” my photo essay at Hopelings.