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AMY SMITH LINTON

Musical Selection: Accentuate the Positive

1/30/2018

9 Comments

 
Go on, turn the news off for a few minutes. 

Turn this up, dance around, make a list of all the things you love. 
Then, I dunno, maybe consider giving up expressing your outrage for a whole day?

Perhaps take stock of the way the air is moving outside?

​Or think about a song that YOU cannot resist. (And by the way, I want to know what song that is...)

Peace out.
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Writing Prompt: Gallop

1/26/2018

2 Comments

 
He probably needed to warm up before tortoising. Today's writing prompt comes all the way from the Galápagos.
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Pranayama

He tried to still his thoughts.

Circular breathing.  He counted in with the breath: one-belly, two-ribs, three-shoulders. He attempted to send his breath into the interstitial area, wherever that was––!  And then out again: shoulders-one, ribs-two, three-belly. And pause.

He was happy to pause. He could out-pause anyone. Not that it was a competition.

The instructor went on, and he decided to keep pausing. He'd hold still, he figured, and then nip back in next time.

Like Arlo Guthrie, he'd just wait for the chorus to come around again. Circular breathing was frustrating and difficult, but the practice was only forty minutes out of a day.

Ah, there it was: Inhale. He did, trying to make the breath open first his belly, then ribs, and finally, shoulders. Or what would be shoulders, had he any. Ribs? His ribs were fused into carapace, and everyone knew a carapace didn't –– shouldn't!–– flex. And what chance did his belly have against the dusty plastron? He lived inside a shell corset, and he might just as soon ask his breath to give him wings.

He recognized the monkey-brain resistance and focused on the air moving through his sinuses. He sipped the air in and ahhed the breath out. His eyes closed. In. Out. In.

The class finished and the day turned into night before he opened his bleary eyes again. The night was absolute, fog blotting out the yellow streetlights and the stars alike. Damn, he thought. How long was I out? I wonder what year it is.
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The Would-Be Farm: Mystery Plants

1/23/2018

6 Comments

 
Given that I am often looking to eat the plants at which I am looking, plant identification is more than just an amusement.  

There's a certain urgency in figuring out if it's wild carrot (puny, but tasty) or hemlock (deadly).


At the farm, I spend chunks of daylight bent over my reference books, or –– in deference to the small, specific spot of cell coverage –– sitting on a rock in the middle of the field bent over the iPad.

For the first time I can remember –– would that be a telling detail? –– I am having vocabulary troubles.

Plant identification, like most biology, starts with the correct terminology to describe any plant's growth habits. Is it a dicot or monocot? How do the veins grow in the leaves? How do leaves grow on the stem, what do the leaves look like?

Bracts. Pinneately compound whorled. Lobed petolate. Oval sessate...The words seem slippery, and I keep having to flip back to the definitions again and again.  
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During the all-too-brief week we spent on the Would-Be Farm in early July, I decided to postpone the research by getting clear (clear-ish) photos of the latest crop of mystery plants. This is not rocket science, but I am only just skidding into the new century of digital memory. 

When I was a googly-eyed junior in high school, being all moony and swoony over my equally googly-eyed boyfriend, our biology teacher, Mr. V. would shake his head at the sight of us two and mutter under his breath, "Two smarts equal dummy." 

​Oh, Mr. V., even just the one sometimes equals dummy!

Here's a few of the unknowns:
I figured I'd have tons to time to do the research during my months away from the farm. After all,  some of these plants are bound to be edible. So far, not so much research, but the winter is still young...
6 Comments

I Don't Always Waste Time On the Internet...

1/16/2018

11 Comments

 
But when I do –– oh heckydoodle, who am I trying to fool?  Whole chunks of time are left bleeding and helpless in my wake.
I'm not sure even if "waste" is a strong enough verb. "Ravage"? "Murderize"? "Squander"?

But there is so much see –– and do –– out there in the vasty dark of the internet. 

Such as, for instance, Google's Arts & Culture selfie app. Thanks a whole heck of a lot, NPR for featuring this on the Two-Way.

Way to lead me down a primrose path!

The idea is that you snap a selfie and then Google –– bless its mighty brain –– searches for matches among its many images of art.

It's nearly instantaneous, and you get a couple of matches, which are...

Huh. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt? O-kaaay. 
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, my sweet skipper was innocently trying to watch the World Championships of Darts on BBC America.  

Is anyone surprised to know that not only is he glued to the television, but he knows the rules of the competition?

And so his 65% facial match is to Robert Louis Stevenson, not an unattractive fellow who certainly shares a certain mustachey something with Mr. Linton.


And with no one else handy in the living room to help me slaughter time, I turned to the way-back files.

​I knew I've been scanning photos for a good cause...


​My sister the artist as a chilly young offshore sailor of course matches a lovely painterly portrait.

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And a photo from the Sunfish Worlds awards ceremony from sometime in the 1990s gives Jeff this match-up with a Union general who has a fantastic moniker: General Manning Ferguson Force.

I wonder if his buddies said things like "Oh, he's a Force to be reckoned with."?




I'd like to be bigger and better than this, but I just kept hoping to find a more flattering match for my own face.

Time, I will not pretend, was laid waste in the mostly fruitless effort.  

​Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepard, Sigh. Portrait of the Danish King Christian. Heavy sigh.
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Fine fine fine.  I didn't go so far as to put on make-up, which I hope explains why me and King Christian both look a little, um, fatigued.


Still, even when I went way, way, way back, to the passport photos that didn't turn into my first passport –– kind of a funny story. I was pretty sure I had been adopted after the passport office rejected my application MORE THAN ONCE –– guess who Google says I look like?
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And what does Eleanor have to say?  

I hoped she was the one who said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, sit here next to me."  

(Nope, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.) 

Instead she offers a non-piffling message from the wide reaches of Google herself.
Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering the strength to stare it down.  
From 
You Learn By Living, ​by Anna Eleanor Roosevelt p 41
11 Comments

Wicked Cover Game

1/12/2018

2 Comments

 
Is there a more 1990ish, MTV-flavored song and video than Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game"?  The gorgeous cinematography, a super-model, that twangy, throbbing heartbreak?

Pure pre-internet Anglo pop music.
Then along comes 2018, and a damn car advertisement uses Ursine Vulpine's cover. To sell an automobile. Even if it was Alfa Romeo, which I am not so sure it was. Thank goodness they stopped after fifteen or so seconds.
Of course, as it happens, Jaguar used the Chris Isaak version to sell their fine autos way back when, so I should shake off the old geezer cloak of crankiness.

Bonus:  For a solid dose of extra-suede trippiness, play them both at the same time. 

Groovah.


To complete the game, here's –– of course –– the James Vincent McMorrow cover used in Game of Thones' trailer, plus a version from young, differently-keyed London Grammar. I don't recommend playing these two against one another: way too wicked. 
2 Comments

Artistic Statements

1/5/2018

13 Comments

 
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My editorial life is about helping people tell their stories.  Helping them say what they are trying to say.  

The goal is to make the projects better, more useful, and pleasant for the wider world of readers.

Sometimes the job resembles therapy. 

One writer might need a hand to get past things that make him fearful or full of doubt. Another might require a subtle check on the runaway train that is her imagination.

My work might include diagramming the odd sentence, straightening misaligned metaphors, tidying structural messes, spotting spelling errors.  When I judge, I try to do it gently.

​It's a living.  
​
When I find something like this formal "artist's statement"?
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I'm torn. On the one hand, face-palm. Verbiage like this an affirmation for why there is a profession like mine.

​On the other hand, gently massaging my forehead, I am just grateful that this didn't happen on my watch. 
13 Comments

The New Year's Couch Issue

1/1/2018

0 Comments

 
The year comes to its tipping point: this week there are resolutions to make and thank-you letters to write and a fresh new expanse of days to anticipate with hope.

Even though Mark Twain said that resolutions were "humbug," and that "Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.*"

Even though thank-you letters are quaint.

​And even though the coming random number of  days are just as full of potential as the previous ones were. 

Happy New Year. 

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*The Works of Mark Twain; Early Tales & Sketches, Vol. 1 1851-1864, (Univ. of California Press, 1979)
But at the top of mind, there's the question of the couch. At least for me, anyhow, New Year's is a couch issue.  

It's like the pull of an annual migration, or whatever impulse that makes bears and porcupines wake up in the spring. Midwinter and its myriad festivals of light and sugar-cookies pass and I look around with a sense of urgency like a vulgar itch. It's time to rearrange the furniture.
My mom also did this, which is probably why I do. She was not a terribly physical creature, but she could pop a folded washcloth under the corner of a full china cabinet and hip-check that bad boy across the room in a jiffy.  

Like her, I find myself standing in the midst of disorder, asking the furniture itself where it wants to be for the next twelve months. "Whaddya think, rug?"

Mr. Linton was caught up into the maelstrom of cleaning and hip-checking this year. Held indoors by the damp chill of a Florida cold-front, he did not offer to answer in the voice of the rug about where to go. He did sidle off to the porch with the cell-phone a time or two, but he cheerfully lent a hand at my continual requests: "Will you shake this rug over the porch rail? Will you help me move this washing-machine? Will you carry this back to the car?"

Ideally, my primal impulse to redecorate results in a refreshed space. It's a blitzklieg of cleaning. And while changing things up will result in the odd stubbed toe, it also makes home seem strangely roomy and interesting. 
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At the literal end of the day this year, the living room is still in a bit of disarray. Turns out the little red chair and foot-stool were ready to retire. Ten years of service in a home-made slipcover? Okay, then, go on, thrift-store find, thanks for your service!  

Plus, the inexpensive IKEA rug I picked up to cover more square footage of the plywood floor is –– to the inch  –– the exact same inexpensive IKEA rug I have had for four years. Whoops. (A foolish consistency would be the hobgoblin of little minds, just ask Ralph Waldo Emerson, but this? This consistency shows unflappable design taste, baby.)

But the drive is wearing off. I think the impulse that kept me hustling around the house today is almost the opposite of a resolution: I make no promises for the coming year. The work is done, aside from returning that rug and a bit more cleaning. In the coming weeks, I'll be utterly guilt-free as I think less and less about the process. And by May, I too will have forgotten humbug promises and the shiny sense of a whole new year full of potential and improvement. 
 
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