IF ONLY THEY COULD TALK - WEEKEND ASSIGNMENT

Weekend Assignment #17: Through some unexplained miracle, your pet or pets gain the mental capacity for speech for exactly the length of a single sentence. What do you think that sentence would be and why? For those of you without pets, please use a former pet or the pet of someone you know. If you've never ever had a pet, well, first, you're kind of odd, but second, then just imagine what a generic dog or cat might say. Caveat: Don't say that they'd say "I love you." I mean, really. Of course they love you. You know. They know you know. You know they know you know. And so on.

Extra Credit: You get one question to ask your pet that (presumably) it would answer. What's the question?

This is our Only Cat at the moment.   Her name is Molly. We have had three at one time in earlier years.  When the last of those cats died, we were too heartbroken for quite some time to even imagine gettting another one.  Then one day....there was a notice on a board in the Ptown health food store.  With pictures. A guy was moving and needed homes for his cats.  We loved a cat who looked just like the picture of this cat. A friend of ours had her; her name was Madge and she was a darling cat.  So...we went to look at this one.  She was three years old, came purring to my lap. She was soft, had a black spot under her chin. She was round and sweet.  We said "we'll think about it."  And went on our way.  The next time we were at the grocery store one of us put a bag of catfood in the cart.  The other one of us came down the aisle with a bag of kitty litter.  We said:  "Okay, now let's go get the cat."  She's been with us ever since.  She rode up and down the Interstates with us during our long stretch of two-state living; she lived in a motor home with us for most of a year while we all slowly became psychotic; she moved to this big old house in Delaware, and has been very happy here.  She adapted to the ingress of a dog into our house and lives - letting him know with no nonsense, but also without violence, who was Queen of the House. She's almost sixteen now, and we already look at her with sorrow for the inevitable time when we will lose her.  She is the best, most loving, most expressive, most interesting cat we've ever had.  And between us we have had a raft of katzken. 

The sentence she would speak would be, I think, a question itself.  It would be something along the lines of:  "All I want in life is constant loving; why is it that you don't stay somewhere I can get on your laps ALL THE TIME?"  (That IS TOO one sentence; it's a compound sentence, or something, isn't it?)

And here is the answer to her every little furry prayer:  a darling little girl to brush her until she just goes berserk with the wonderfulness of it and bites her.  Which is what happens, she loves it so much it drives her crazy and ultimately she turns into Psycho Kitty and kicks with her back paws and bites.

IF I could ask her a question, and if she could answer me - it would be the same as one of justcherie's questions.  Because she is getting older, thinner, slower, and she limps going up the stairs, I would ask her is she is in pain, where is it, and how bad?  Is there anything I do that helps, and would she please let me know when it gets to be more than she can bear.  Because of past experiences with cats in inner agony, and because this is a cat that can make her needs known, I know she will let us know what she needs when she needs it.  And I hope the day is a long long time a-coming.

OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS THIS WEEK

Just wanted to let folks who drop by this journal know that about all I'm doing this week is watching the convention in Boston, reading about it, writing about it, and working with my political group here on various projects and activities.  So, no literary postings for now - though I did finish Plainsong, Kent Haruf's first novel in the High Plains books - and adored it. 

So, come on over to the windmills and join in the political commentary.  I know you're watching too! 

POETRY IN WARTIME

I've never done this before, but I am here posting today's entry from my Other Journal, thewindmillsofmymind, because I feel it also belongs in a literary journal and there may be some of my BiblioPhiles readers who don't read the windmills.  This is an entry I want universally read:  

        In late winter/early spring of 2003 I found a site called Poets Against the War.  I've talked about it before, but it's time to bring it up again.  It was started by poet Sam Hamill, and was a place where anyone who wanted could publish poetry expressing their feelings about this war.  I had a poem published there, as did thousands of people, unknown, slightly known, famous - people who wanted a public forum for their pain, grief, horror.  Later, an anthology of some of the poems was published in book form. Now, a documentary film has been made as a result of that website, called Poetry in Wartime.  You can find out about the film itself here, but I want to put in a few quotes and some information from the site, to pique your interest and get you involved.

"The right sentiment, rightly declared, whichever way your loyalties blow in the gust of the smoke-filled air. A country burns. The death-dealers deserved to die, you say. Death is easy to pronounce. It’s the smell of burning children that’s hard."   Sampurna Chattarji

"We read our mail and counted up our missions – In bombers named for girls, we burned The cities we had learned about in school till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among the people we had killed and never seen.”  Randall Jarrell

"We have to stop speaking in codes. Collateral damage is code for thousands of people being killed who are powerless to change their rulers."  Arthur Miller

"Six lines by a hero of mine. His name is Cameron Penny and he is in the fourth grade. He said:  'If you are lucky in this life, a window will appear on a battlefield between two armies, and when the soldiers look into the window they don’t see their enemies, they see themselves as children...'"  Marie Howe

As you can see, the film will feature poets both living and dead, from many countries, all ages, ordinary people and people you've revered since elementary school.  Poetry moves people at a level that only music can equal, I have great hopes for this film. 

About the Movie

(Release Date: August, 2004)

Wilfred Owen's Last Photograph

POETRY IN WARTIME is a feature-length documentary that looks at war through images and the words of poets – unknown and world-famous – to bring the experience of war into sharp focus.

Soldiers, journalists, historians and experts on combat provide diverse perspectives on war’s effects on soldiers, civilians and society. POETRY IN WARTIME also brings to life how poetry and war have been intertwined since the beginning of recorded history – from ancient Babylonia and the Trojan War up through the great conflicts of the 20th century and the current war in Iraq. The stirring words of poets throughout the film - Homer, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman and poets from Hiroshima and Nagasaki – sear the experience, emotions and sacrifices of war into our hearts and minds. POETRY IN WARTIME is a veritable chorus of poets from around the world, from the United States to Iraq as well as Colombia, Britain, India, Nigeria and Canada, whose view of war extends beyond the borders of countries to reach into the depths of our soul.

We will hear the first accounts of war, written down in verse.

The film will follow war and the poems it inspires from ancient Babylon and the Trojan War up through the great conflicts of the 20th century and into the 21st century invasion of Iraq. As war has changed, so has poetry. Once celebrating conflict, poets became increasingly disturbed by the growth of larger and larger armies and increasingly powerful weapons. By World War I, poetry had become a medium of revolt. Wilfred Owen, probably the greatest of war poets, led his men in desperate battle, scribbling his poems in the trenches whenever he could. From a haunting and personal perspective, his poems chronicle the human waste of war. Owen will be a central character in the film.

As will poets as diverse as Homer, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes. "Poetry in Wartime" will tell the story of the poets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who used their writing to alert the world to the dangers of nuclear war. It will also follow the grassroots global movement of thousands of poets that came together in early 2003 to protest the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The tone of the documentary will be questioning. The commentary will come from people of varying perspectives. However, in the end, "Poetry in Wartime" will always come back to the words of the poets. And to the deeper truths they express. Poetry from the past as well as the present, and poetry from everyday people as well as the world famous – will raise pressing questions of war and power at the beginning of the 21st Century.

If history and literature have taught us anything, it is that in the midst of trauma, violence and death, it is the poets who help us make sense of the senseless. In a world turned suddenly upside down, "Poetry in Wartime" can help to bring us together and lead us to a better place.

For more information, contact Kathryn Linehan.

 

RUINED BY READING?

My remark yesterday about the sense of duty I often have towards finishing books compelled me to search my shelves for this book: Ruined by Reading, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.  Schwartz is herself a novelist, her books are difficult complicated novels with a philosphical bent.  I have read three, don't know if there are more, but it occurs to me that I should check.  This little book is a memoir in reading, and I highly recommend it to other readers.  What I want to do here is share these paragraphs from the book's beginning with you:

     "...a recent New York Times piece quoted a Chinese scholar whole "belief in Buddhism...has curbed his appetite for books.'  Mr. Cha says 'To read more is a handicap.  It is better to keep your own mind free and to not let the thinking of others interfere with your own free thinking.'  I clipped his statement and placed it on the bedside table,next to a pile of books I was reading or planned to read or thought I ought to read.  The clipping is about two square inches and almost weightless, the pile of books some nine inches high, weighing a few pounds. Yet they face each other in perfect balance.  I am the scale on which they rest.
     Lying in the shadow of the books, I brook on my reading habit.  What is it all about?  What am I doing it for?  And the classic addict's question, What is it doing for me?  Mr. Cha's serenity and independence of mind are enviable.  I would like to be equally independent, but I'm not sure my mind could be free without reading, or that the action books have on it is properly termed 'interference.'  I suspect the interaction of the mind and the book is something more complex.  I can see it encompassing an intimate history and geography:  the evolution of character, the shifting map of personal taste.  And what about the uses of language itself, as well as the perennial lure of narrative?  But perhaps casting the issue in such large terms only shows how enslaved I am.  Buddhism aside, there is no Readers Anonymous, so far, to help curb this appetite.
     ...My addiction is to works of the imagination, and even if I became a Buddhist, I think I couldn't renounce them cold turkey.  Not after a lifetime, the better part of which was spent reading.  Was it actually the better part, though?  Did I choose or was I chosen, shepherded into it like those children caught out early on with a talent for the violin or ballet, baseball of gymnastics, and thethered forever to bows and barres, bats and mats?  We didn't know any alternatives; there was no chance to find them out.  
     ....What do I have, then, after years of indulgence?  A feel, a texture, an aura, the fragrance of Shakespeare, the crisp breeze of Tolstoy, the carnal stench of the great Euripides.  Are they worth the investment of a life?  Would my mind be more free without them?
      In truth I have made some tentative steps toward freedom.  Over the last ten years or so, I have managed not to finish certain books.  With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave:  ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. ...I had put aside books before, naturally, but with guilt, sneaking them back to the shelves in the dark.  It seemed a rudeness of the worst sort. A voice was attempting to speak to me and I refused to listen.  A spiritual rudeness. Since childhood I had thought of reading as holy, and like all sacraments, it had acquired a stiff halo of duty. My cavalier throwing over a book midway may arise from the same general desacralization as does the notable increase in divorce, marriage also being a sacrament and, once entered upon, a duty.
     So, like recidivist martyrs, I take up the new book in good faith, planning to accompany it, for better or for worse, till the last page us do part, but...it stops being fun."

Well, there you are. Clearly I could go on til I had typed in the whole book for you, but I won't.  Don't you like her?  I may from time to time drop in some of her thoughts from this delightful little book, especially when my own thoughts are running dry, as at the moment they seem to be.  I've just been on a library foraging trip, did get Plainsong, and will start it tonight.  One of my book journal friends has recommended Orson Scott Card as an author I would like, but I can't find the two books with which she suggests I begin my reading.  I'll have to put in a request, after I read what I gleaned today.

EVENTIDE, Kent Haruf

                          High Plains - Photo by David Nance

For longer than I care to think about I have been reading Eventide, by Kent Haruf.  It's not a long book, so I don't exactly know why it took me so long to read.  Maybe it's because I had a hard time with it for about half the book, thought I didn't even like it, kept reading out of that strange sense of duty I often feel to finish a book, and because G. liked it so much.  I read it without knowing that it is a sequel to Plainsong, but I don't think that mattered very much to this reading.  Now I am so glad that I persevered - this is a deeply human, lovely book. Here is a review from the Denver Post - I thought that the best understanding of this story might come from someone who lives close to its setting, which is the High Plains of eastern Colorado.  It's a glowing review, and I am in total agreement with its every word.  My next library trip will be to pick up a copy of Plainsong, and find out how Victoria Roubideaux came to stay with the McPheron brothers.

The novel roams over Holt, a small rural town,  the ranching country that surrounds it, and the lives of a group of people who live in these places,  much as a movie camera roams from shot to shot.  In fact, G and I both thought that it would make a wonderful movie, in much the same vein as The Last Picture Show, though it's told in a much kinder and gentler tone.  (There is much description of landscape, weather, details of life with cattle, including a dreadful scene of a bull gone out of control.)  It has the same feel of open, dry, bleak, but somehow beautiful (okay, yes, I find the dry open bleak spaces of West Texas beautiful, you wanna make something of it?) spaces, sky, the smallness of human life in this setting.  The smallness, but at the same time infinite preciousness.  The story weaves many characters' lives together, tells their stories in a slow rambling web that is much like life itself.   Somehow, when I was having trouble with the book, all I could see was the bleakness of many of their stories - the children in particular broke my heart, filled me with desolation.  There is kindness abounding however, and love, and goodness - and these elements reach out to fill much of the emptiness.

A little bit of what I mean about the landscape, in this passage from a chapter late in the book:

     "They drove on and passed through Holt and went west on US 34.  The highway stretched out before them, lined on both sides by the shallow barrow ditches.  Above the ditches the four-strand barbed-wire fences ran along beside the pastures in the flat sandy country, and above the fences the line of telephone poles rose up out of the ground like truncated trees strung together with black wire.  Hoyt rode with him through Norka and as far as Brush.  Then he got another ride and traveled on, headed west on a Monday morning in spring."

Another passage I love - with a little explication first:  DJ is a lonely 11 year old orphan, living with his grandfather.  He has finally made a deep friendship with another child, a girl named Dena.  Dena's mother is moving the family two hours distance away, and the children have just said their goodbyes.  DJ returns to the shack that he and Dena have made their own private clubhouse to make his real goodbye to what they have shared together:

     "The little wooden shed was dim and filled with shadows.  He lit one of the candles and sat down at the table, looking around at the dark back wall and the shelf.  The candlelight was flickering and dancing on the walls.  There was little to see.  The framed picture of the baby Jesus hanging on the wall.  Some of their board games.  Old plates and pieces of silverware in a box.  It didn't feel good in the shed without her.  Nothing there was the same.  He whistled through his teeth, softly, a tune he thought of.  Then he stopped.  He stood and blew out the candle and went outside and fastened the latch.  He stood looking for a long time at the old abandoned house across the backyard grown up in weeds, the old black Desoto rusting among the bushes.  Then he entered the alley once more.  His grandfather would be waiting.  It was already past the hour at which his grandfather wanted his supper."

DISJOINTED MUSINGS

Well, here's what may be my candidate for favorite stupid thing that's happened recently: Linda Ronstadt was boo'd off the stage in Vegas for championing Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11.  She had just sung Desperados - appropriately enough, when she began to talk about Moore and his film and his political views.  Several questions come to mind here:  When did Linda become a Vegas personality?  Please, no.  She hasn't joined the ranks of Wayne Newton and Tom Jones (wait, is he still alive?), has she? 
Why is she still singing Desperados?  That's from waaayy back in her career.  Doesn't she have some new stuff?   Okay, I have loved Linda since the beginning, since the Stone Ponys even.  We're more or less the same age, I don't think I'm washed up - and I don't want to think she is, either.  So, anyway, good on you Linda, for speaking your mind in front of a bunch of yahoos.  Let me know if you need a place to stay or anything, we have a lot of extra room here.

Continuing in the vein of movies that raise one's blood pressure - I saw "Outfoxed" on Sunday night, in the living room of someone I didn't even know in Milton, DE.  MoveOn.org organized house parties for groups of interested people to watch together.  There were a lot of people there, there were also four TVs playing the film simultaneously in different rooms of the house.  Imagine that.  I've written a little about this over at thewindmills too.  It was a real wake-up experience for me, as I have never watched Fox News in my life.  Watching Bill O'Reilly in action aroused my every deep feral instinct, bad things rose up in me and wanted to come leaping out armed with sharp weapons.  So, I know this is my book journal and not my political one, but please check out the petition to get the FCC to stop Fox from using the slogan "fair and balanced" on their outrageous propaganda channel.  This outfit is taking unprecedented advantage of the gullibility and credulity of a huge number of our populace - we who can read need to pay more attention to those who don't, and those who use them for their own nefarious (I just wanted to use that word, you know? It's a propaganda kind of word, isn't it?) purposes.

ELLEN GOODMAN SUGGESTS

A nice little list from Ellen Goodman, books to get you through the rest of the summer.  Peruse the article, enjoy - I've actually read a fair number of the books she discusses, and agree with her on all but Little Children, which I very actively disliked. 

A midsummer night's read

Ellen Goodman - Washington Post Writers Group

07.16.04 - CASCO BAY, Maine -- And now we turn to our summer reading list. OK, our mid-summer reading list. We are, blush, late with our report.

Indeed, we were reminded of our tardiness last week, when the National Endowment for the Arts reported ominously on the decline and fall of reading. Barely over half of Americans read any book at all this year. Was it something we didn't say?

Actually, we suspect that too many of the "big books" these days are political screeds instead of good reads. So herewith, as a public service, is a list neither blue nor red, but black and white and read all over.

First of all -- this should please the NEA -- we not only read books this year, we read books about books. The habit began when "Reading Lolita in Tehran" was still something of a cult activity. Azar Nafisi's literary and political memoir is about a clandestine reading group in Iran. In the midst of a cultural revolution that "had wrecked our lives in the name of a dream," seven women found a sanctuary to talk about literature and life. And to pursue another freedom: the freedom to imagine.

"The Jane Austen Book Club" is not just any novel about novels. Karen Joy Fowler pays gentle homage to the sense and sensibility of Austen lovers everywhere with her story about the members of an all-Jane, all-the-time book club where everyone has "her own private Austen."

More Jane? A couple of years ago, Paula Marantz Cohen wrote "Jane Austen in Boca," a gentle and dead-on satire that played "Pride and Prejudice" in a Jewish retirement community in Florida. She followed it up this year with "Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan," a loving and mocking story about a suburban grandmother's growing conviction that she was the "Dark Lady" of the William Shakespeare sonnets in an earlier life.

The "Old School" in Tobias Wolff's novel is one of those Anglophile boarding schools where the central sport is a writing contest and the prize is a meeting with Robert Frost or Ernest Hemingway. Wolff turns to fiction -- or is it? -- in his elegant writing about deception, self-deception and a writer's coming of age.

Now a book about a bookseller. Asne Seierstad, a young Norwegian journalist, has written "The Bookseller of Kabul," an undercover look at the family life of a man who is a Westernized liberal, even a humanist by Afghan standards. But Seierstad, who lived with the family, portrays a world in which this "modern" man's word is law and "the belief in man's superiority was so ingrained that it was seldom questioned."

This year I was drawn again to a rash of novels about family life. First was Tom Perrotta's "Little Children," an unusual, authentic take on parenthood and the loneliness of a stay-at-home dad and a stay-at-home mom whose days of peanut butter and playgrounds "melt together like a bag of crayons left out in the sun." He writes about the dangers unleashed by "their refusal to accept unhappiness."

Next was Anne Tyler's latest novel, "The Amateur Marriage," about the family created by a profound mismatch. "By nature," she writes, "Pauline felt entitled to spill anything that came into her head while Michael measured out every word." Tyler is the perfect chronicler of dysfunction.

What happens when a good marriage is detonated? In Elizabeth Buchan's tale, a wife loses her job as well as her husband to the classic younger woman. But this "Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman" isn't exactly vengeful. Her survival and their regrets are the best revenge.

Elizabeth Berg writes less about family wreckage than restoration in "The Art of Mending," a novel about the power of family secrets. "If you're careful," she writes, "the repair can actually add to the beauty of the thing because it is testimony to its worth."

"The Grandmothers" may be a family story in name only, but I was delighted to see that Doris Lessing hasn't mellowed in her 80s, only ripened. The four short novels work the themes of men and women, war and race, class and family that have been her trademark since she left South Africa for Britain half a century ago.

Monica Ali is a new British novelist with a classic outsider's eye. In "Brick Lane," she guides us through a rich, unexplored territory --the interior life of a Bangladeshi woman living in London. Her turf isfate and free will, and the choices facing a woman who was raised to believe she didn't have choices.

All right, so I promised a politics-free reading room, but how about some books that have more policy than partisanship?

Want to know why your family is struggling on two incomes when your parents made it on one? Mother and daughter co-authors, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, have written a bleak, eye-opening explanation of "The Two-Income Trap." Hint: it's kids and the price of that house in a good school district.

"Moral Politics" has the P word in the title, but George Lakoff's way of linking politics to child-raising philosophies is still the best take on the family values debate. The conservative worldview, he writes, is based on "the strict father" model; the liberals use the "nurturant parent" model.

For that matter, "A History of God" by Karen Armstrong doesn't take political sides either. Her exploration of the idea of God over centuries and through religions is as useful today as it was in 1992 when she first wrote it.

Then again, how about a history of American secularism? Susan Jacoby's "Freethinkers" is a lively reminder that we're a "nation founded not on dreams of justice in heaven but on the best human hopes for a more just earth."

Having said that, I think I'll stick my nose back in a book.

(c) 2004, Washington Post Writers Group

ANOTHER LOOK AT "THE NAMESAKE"

While perusing the latest issue of Bookslut I came across this conversation about a book I read and briefly discussed in an entry here last winter, The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Here four very literate South Asian women discuss the book and their reactions to it.  I didn't have time to do the book justice when I wrote about it in November, so if it's a book you've been thinking about reading you may find this discussion of interest.  As a total gringa my reactions are culturally different of course, and I found reading these women's thoughts to be an extension of the book.  I assure you, however, that you don't need to be from India or Pakistan to feel the universal appeal of family and coming-of-age situations that are the heart of this delightful book.

GOOD OMENS, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman

In my other journal I'm posting about my recent trip to Texas, with possibly way too many photos.  The only book I took with me (though I acquired several more on my journey, of course) was Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  Since I was occupied all day and most of the evening doing stuff with family and friends, I only had time to read a few pages every night before falling into a dazed coma.  I got about halfway through and finished it when I got back. 

Really though, I didn't WANT to finish it.  It was so deliciously, so -dare I say- fiendishly funny and arch, that I could have enjoyed it for many more pages.  It's the funniest book about Armageddon you'll ever hope to read.  Yes, those who are hoping for the End Time and the Rapture, etc, need to get a different view than Tim LaHaye's of this cataclysmic event.  One of the many things I love about Neil Gaiman is his view of humanity, in all its horrible nastiness, unprepossessing kindness, foolishness, stupidity, cupidity, openhearted love and goodness.  This book is populated by humans, both adult and child, witches, witch-hunters, angels, demons, and the Antichrist.  An angel and a demon are two of the main characters, both have lived on earth from the beginning, and have come to quite like living in human form, enjoying their own particular earthly pleasures - from rare books to vintage cars.  It has been their job to engineer the world's end, the Apocalypse, the Final Battle - by placing the infant Antichrist with a family, and when things are ready for it - precipitating the clash of angelic forces.  Even other-worldly beings can change their minds, disobey orders, follow their own wills, and it's what these guys just might decide to do.

The placing of infants goes awry and life events proceed in their own surprising way.  The Antichrist grows up loving his corner of this beautiful planet fiercely, and his place in it.  His name is Adam Young  (no symbolism there!), and I loved him and his gang of four - Who are mirrored in the Four Bikers of the Apocalypse late in the book, a wickedly delightful touch. 

Oh, just read it.  Gaiman and Pratchett know that the Mighty Powers of Heaven and Hell can't damage and distress us any more than we can one another and ourselves.  The demons are constantly surprised by how hateful humans can be; surprised and outdone, amazed.  And yet, this is a funny funny book about human love and earthly salvation.  Eat your hearts out, Left Behinders.

IF, I were still in school, and a Literature major, or even a Theology major (either of which I could be, just for fun), I would pull together the Phillip Pullman books in the trilogy, His Dark Materials, and all of Gaiman's books, and do a thesis on the theology/mythology/escatology contained therein.  There is so much, and there are so many parallels, though Pullman is serious in his fantasy, and Gaiman is....I don't quite have the right words for what I want to express here.  Not that he's not serious, but he's not the same kind of serious, no not at all.  Anyway, maybe someone somewhere is already working on this idea, for a thesis or a lit-crit scholarly magazine article, etc.  I just think it would be boatloads of fun.

SNAKU HAIKU

I'M BACK FROM MY TRAVELS, IN TIME TO DO THIS WEEKEND'S ASSIGNMENT.   IT'S AN ADDICTIVE KIND OF THING, WRITING HAIKU.  I'M ON THE SOUTH BEACH EATING PLAN, SO WHAT MOST PEOPLE THINK OF AS SNACKS ARE A THING OF THE PAST.  HERE ARE THREE HAIKU CELEBRATING THE NEW ME.  ALAS.

    Perfect by Itself

Look, Wasa Soya
crispbreads, such flat little boards
dense with fibrous crunch!

  Green Thoughts

I’m doing South Beach,
snacking on celery,
chips but the stuff of dreams.

    Small Packages

Oh yes, what a treat,
low-sodium V8 juice,
and yummy cheese sticks!