ByGD
The WordPress.com blog statistics helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 3,700 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 3 trips to carry that many people.
ByGD
Still waiting for this kind of day this season, but here is a bluebird day on Steven’s Pass a couple winters ago.
ByGD
Leonora Carrington
This is part two of the story of my recent foray into Surrealist fiction. Read Part One here.
Suddenly I remembered – Leonora Carrington was Remedios Varo’s best friend! (Okay, I confess. I googled her.)
A long time ago in a galaxy far away, I became a member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. I never made it to DC to visit the museum, but the member materials acquainted me with Varo, a Spanish surrealist who lived in Mexico. Her life was every bit as shockingly bohemian as that of her contemporary Frida Kahlo, but her art more closely resembled Hieronymus Bosch. According to my special-ordered copy of Janet Kaplan’s biography of Varo, she and Carrington
established an association between women’s traditional roles and magical acts of transformation…stimulated by the Surrealist belief in ‘occultation of the Marvelous’ and by wide reading in witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, Tarot, and magic.
They collaborated on plays, constructed elaborate hats, and victimized their famous art world friends with performance art/pranks that sometimes made their way into each other’s painting and writing.
ByGD
As we trickled into the room our yoga teacher commented on the cold. “Yes, and it’s so dark,” one woman replied, “It’s like the sun never even rose today.” Leaden skies are commonplace in Seattle, and December can be forgiven for freezing temperatures, but her words, like the echo of a prophesy, filled me with foreboding. What if the earth’s magnetic poles really had begun to shift, triggering a new ice age and plunging the world into darkness?
How did I, scientifically trained product of a Jesuit education, come to harbor such dark fantasies? It wasn’t just the sheep heads mysteriously scattered in my neighborhood the night before. No, the root of my unease stretched much deeper. It all started, as such things do, at the Nordic Heritage Museum.
ByGD
Twas the night before Christmas. The children were nestled all snug in their beds, under threat of holiday cancellation if they ventured downstairs. I in my hoody and daddy in his knit cap had just settled down for a long winter’s wrap. Read More