Loose Leaf Notes

1. A kayak is a type of Eskimo light boat, originally made from seal-skins stretched over a wooden frame.  The word kayak comes from the Danish kajak and the Greenland Eskimo qayaq and literally means “small boat of skins.”

2. A museum of 4 in the morning:  A new website devoted to pop cultural references to 4 a.m. is itself gaining a bit of pop culture status. John Rives, who created the site and calls himself an expert on the “worst possible hour” of the day, tells NPR that even Shakespeare invoked 4 a.m. (in four different plays). More HERE. 

3. One day, about three years ago, while kayaking down the Little River in Floyd, poets Jack Callan and Judith Stevens were struck by the presence of a large overhanging rock. It looked like a natural amphitheater, and they both thought it would be a great place to bring poet friends for poetry readings. They tested the acoustics, ideas started flowing and that was when the vision of the Little River Poetry Festival was born… -More on the LRPF’s inception HERE. 

4. Joe and I read poetry at the Little River Poetry Festival’s natural amphitheater on our recent kayak paddle float.

5. THIS cow looks suspiciously like Gene Simmons of Kiss.

6. THIS  artist used 66,000 cups of colored water to make a water mosaic as a way to raise awareness about access to clean water. The clip reveals the final image he “painted” with the cups of rainwater colored with vegetable dyes in paper cups.

7. The best article I read last week was on how accumulating stuff is to live like you’re not going to die, by Robert Wringham.  It starts, “This article is the second thing I’ve written today. The other was my will…” and ends with “Inanimate objects will not, in any meaningful way, survive us. It took me a while to notice but minimalism is strongly tied to death acceptance. Acquisition is death denial…”  – More HERE.

8. FoydFest archive at Radford University documents the event’s history:  Radford’s Archives and Special Collections, at McConnell Library, has been working with FloydFest organizers Across the Way Productions for more than a year to develop the collection. It features posters, stickers, ticket proofs and thousands of photos, along with audio and video of select performances over the festival’s 16 years, according to Aaron Spelbring, the library’s head of archives and special collections. – More HERE.

9. Joe’s river reading was of a poem by one of our favorite poets David Whyte HERE.

10. Joe was recently listening to an audio recording of a guided meditation that he gave at the Floydfest teen tent.  “You’re such a good tour guide,” I told him.

11. There’s a whole genre of photography based on out-of-focus or motion blurred photos, like THIS. 

12. HERE are some of mine. Give it a Whirl.

13. Midnight Moonlight Float: A crescent canoe / has fallen from the moon / Now it floats like a thought / down an unknown path / Like a needle threading myth / in a river of purpose / It shines like an arrow / in the quiet of darkness  – inspired by a Floydfest On the Water Blue Moon Midnight Float, 2015

________Thirteen Thursday