I wonder why more people here don't do their Christmas shopping at night. I was forced to go out during the day several times this week and was incredulous that anyone could prevail in such conditions.Maybe that's why shoppers brave the psychological elements: achieving even half of one's goal seems like a miracle. For my part, I start to get light-headed in such close quarters. I'd much rather roam the deserted aisles.

i_hope_that
For many of us, the holidays can be kind of rough. If you're searching for a network of understanding friends, this ultra-nurturing community encourages you to express your heartfelt wishes and offer other members encouragement and acceptance. Not for the terminally snarky or emotionally-challenged, this is a good-spirited place to lend comfort and support.

Tags: i_hope_that, support, wishes

diygifts
Feeling crafty? If you've got a few last folks on your holiday gift list, this is a great place to seed your creativity and generosity. You'll also discover wonderful DIY tips to decorate your home and entertain guests. Offering a no-frills-no-skills attitude that welcomes the cash-challenged and arts-phobic, you're sure to get ideas and make friends in the process.

Tags: crafts, diygifts, do it yourself

cooking_club
A fun and friendly community dedicated to those who love to cook, whether you're a meat-and-potatoes type, an aspiring gourmand, and/or a vegan. In search of a brilliant dish to use up those weekly leftovers? Post your ingredients and you'll be whipping up a feast by dinner. You can also share favorite recipes. For Type A chefs, you can spice up your culinary repertoire with exciting cooking challenges.

Tags: cooking_club

Tags: autobiography, music, photography
Current Location: 85704

I still haven't caught up with a world in which people post their wish lists online and actually get a meaningful response. But since nobody asked, I thought I'd give a rundown of my own special desires:

• A six-pack of Jever pilsener that hasn't gone skunky with age
• A large bag full of real sour cherries
• The smell of a sugar-free Monster drink, the sort in the blue-and-black can, on a cold December night
• That Big Red Book of Carl Jung's, recently made available in English
• More friends who are up, literally and figuratively, for indulging my only-after-10-pm night life
• A good showing against Kansas on Tuesday
• A whiff of yatagan
• Credit where credit is due
• A DVD of Germany In Autumn
• The sound of a burbling stream
• A turntable that has both analog and USB outputs
• The discovery of previously suppressed Jean-Jacques Beineix films the equal of Diva
• A human touch
• The use of an apartment in Berlin for a month
• A case of A-Treat red cream soda
• A DSLR worthy of my photographic ability
• The Lego Hogwarts Express
• Coffee with Adam Phillips
• The chance to perform in an avant-garde staging of J.G. Ballard's Crash
• A complete set of the recordings, including outtakes, that Rainer Ptacek made in the last year of his life
• Dinner at the old Café Terra Cotta, at Campbell and River, circa 1997
• My Olympus portable digital recorder, together with its contents, inexplicably vanished sometime in 2008
• A weekend in Mendocino
• That enormously comforting sense of having begun in earnest
• A patron, individual or institutional, to pay me for my writing and editing
• Three hours at The Shelter
• A reason to get the Lox platter at Saul's, sometime in the late 1980s
• The Matchbox Pontiac GTO, #22, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in purple and with the faux-metallic hubcaps on Superfast wheels
• A surefire regimen for improving one's vertical leap by about six inches
• That spot where the back of the neck becomes the side of the neck
• The strength to pursue my passions now, instead of deferring them to a future that may never come
• A hug

Needless to say, the list could go on longer than a Henry James sentence. But that will do for the moment. If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Tags: analysis, autobiography, everyday
Current Location: 85704

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.

Get to know My Guests. Want to know who's checking you out? You can now view the 100 most recent, logged-in users who visited your journal during the past 30-day period with My Guests. For those who prefer to fly under the radar, you can update your My Guests privacy setting here.

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Tweaks and Enhancements

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3. TMI, dude: We've added some fun FREE sponsored vgifts! You can send up to 50 TMI vgifts to mutual friends (btw, you cannot send free vgifts to communities). If you're a Paid/Permanent user and you want to view sponsored gifts, click Show sponsored gifts on your homepage or visit the sponsored gift page. These vgifts will only be available through Wednesday, December 23rd.

You can view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Until next time, stay snug!

Tags: holiday promotion, lj_photophile, ljlimericks, my guests, my stats, sponsored vgifts, whitelisting, yandex

Tags: everyday, holiday, home, photography, tucson, weather
Current Location: 85704

I was reading through my copy of the UC Berkeley poetry journal Occident's 1990 edition, its Palmer/Davidson issue. I love the presentation of those two Michael's poems, together with emotionally and stylistically proximate criticism of their work. For that achievement the journal's editor at the time P. Michael Campbell -- someone who always struck me as extraordinarily friendly and welcoming, without any Maude Fife Room airs -- deserves great credit.

The rest of the issue, as is typical with such university-sponsored productions, contains a lot of "in house" contributors, including work by a former professor of mine, undergraduate and graduate poets I'd heard about from my friends and some by people I was close to myself. Interestingly, though, the poem that resonated most for me tonight was Julio Vinograd's spare vignette.

Because she wandered the streets of Berkeley, especially in the vicinity of People's Park, hawking her low-budget chap books and blowing bubbles, Vinograd was looked at askance by many of the folks I knew with aspirations to "lit-ra-tchur", as if she were degrading the brand of poetry by selling it too cheaply on the street. Personally, I always liked her poems, even if they trod the same sonic and thematic landscape. But, because I wasn't an expert like the poets I spent time with, I kept this judgment to myself.

That's why it delighted me to learn, shortly after this issue of Occident came out, that her street poetry had been shaped by a stint at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. Not that such a distinction guarantees quality, mind you. Knowing she had come through that rather industrial program confirmed for me both that she knew what she was doing as a writer, even if she did choose to spend her days blowing bubbles on Telegraph, and that the aspects of her work that I wearied of when I read more than a few poems at a time were, in fact, characteristic of Iowa poets in general rather than any specific limitations she might have.

Anyway, the poem I found tonight showcases what she did best, telling stories of the people she encountered out on the street with a cool detachment that demonstrated that, even though her heart was in the right place, her mind was always off to one side reflecting on the scenes in which she invested her compassion:

Just Out of Jail

"Write about me," he stops me on the street.
Bright colored Guatemalan shirt,
luxurious cigarette, husky voice, insistent.
"Tell them I just got out;
I was 3 years in jail."
He takes a deep breath, hesitates,
this is important:
"Tell them I hated being locked up,"
he bursts out indignantly
and then shakes his head
because the words don't say it.
He looks at me doubtfully. It's spring.
Some angry sparrows fight over pizza crumbs.
There's a cardboard box full of free puppies
with their eyes still filmy.
A pretty girl talks to her friends
and doesn't notice her strawberry yogurt's
dripping to the sidewalk,
then she does and squeals.
How could I possibly understand?
3 years.
"Try anyway," he says,
"you've got to tell them;
you've just got to."

While the use of contrast here is probably too pat for most "educated" tastes and the self-reflexivity comes too easily, I am still awed by Vinograd's capacity to craft "poetry for the people." That slogan, taken up by June Jordan and her students, still fires me up. In the end, though, I think the best poetry for the people is less likely to be the overtly engaged sort that tended to come out of Jordan's classes at UC Berkeley than the wry musings of Vinograd's participant observer.

Tags: poetry
Current Location: 85704