- Reverse commuter

Do you know the work of the contemporary poet Deborah Garrison?
This one, in particular, is something I read out loud to myself every year, in the fall around this time.
I Saw You Walking
I saw you walking through Newark Penn Station
in your shoes of white ash. At the corner
of my nervous glance your dazed passage
first forced [...]

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- Secret room nightmares

She doesn’t have secret room dreams, like I do. Lucinda Williams, as she told the New York Times (see today’s magazine section), has secret room nightmares:
Sometimes I dream I am in a house and I am afraid to go into a part of the house, because there is a ghost or demonic force. It’s always [...]

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- Only the rain has such small hands.

Althea Crome Merback knitted Coraline’s sweater. She knitted these gloves, too.

In this short video on her work, Merback calls herself, as far as she knows, the “only person in the world who knits conceptual sweaters and garments on such a small scale.”
Seeing these gloves for no hands reminds me of a conversation I had last [...]

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- Chalk and mallet

I envy sometimes that intense aimlessless of children, which prompts them, on a sunny and windless day, to overturn a bucket of chalk, find the family mallet, and experiment with the chalk’s friability. Just because one can draw or write with chalk doesn’t mean that one must only draw or write.
A person could, for example, [...]

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- On the first day, magic

Last night, on the first calendar day of the new year, we saw Aurélia’s Oratorio at the A.R.T. Without dialogue and obvious plot, it’s filled with dance, music, visual tricks, acrobatics, puppets, black, white, red, gold, and weird beauty.
What is the show about?  Hmm.  During one scene, Grace whispered to me, “Ah, the dance is [...]

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- Freaks, inside or out

In The Family Stone, a movie that Jimmy and I saw together and (dis)liked differently, the Luke Wilson character exhorts the straight-laced Sarah Jessica Parker character to fly her “freak flag.” Yeah, I loved that. I also cried when the Diane Keaton character died.
In praise of freaks of all kinds (and aren’t you, whether secretly [...]

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- Writing in bed

I am reclining with the heating pad under my shoulder. It’s only 7 o’clock in the evening. With me is also Everyman, which I am finishing, and my iBook.
Jimmy walks in and says to me, “You know, a lot of writers wrote in bed.”
“Really?” I ask, which does not express doubt, but is just the [...]

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- Needles and activism

The knitters at Stitch for Senate are making helmet liners for every member of the U.S. senate in order to engage “with public officials about the war in Iraq.”
This puts me in mind of Eyes Wide Open, an exhibit of boots and shoes, representing military men and women killed in the Iraq War, that we [...]

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- Crow season

Jan sent me a link announcing new work by Vermont artist Carol MacDonald, in which she “examines the tradition of knitting through a variety of print-making techniques.“  I love it, especially that the featured image is “Red Skein I.”  (What is it about red yarn?)
I looked deeper into MacDonald’s portfolio and found even more that [...]

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- Best brief bio

Yes, I do read the “Contributors” section of magazines and journals and study the array of author and artist credentials, which are always publications, prizes, occupations, affiliations, and educations. Here’s one that stands out from all that:
FELIX SOCKWELL is a designer and illustrator living in Maplewood, New Jersey. The illustration on the cover [...]

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