13: The UP Date
1. In 15 years of blogging, I only have four posts with the word “pizza” in the title: I’m Really Serious About My Dogtown Pizza, Buy Your Own Pizza and Be Yourself, Pizza Delivery and Dogtown Pizza Comes to Town.
2. I still can’t forgive the Scrabble Word Finders for adding the word ZA for Pizza to their dictionary. Too slang and lame!
3. All Those “I” Words HERE.
4. This week I published a post titled “This is the NEATEST Word I’ve Ever Played in Scrabble” and only realized that the word “Neatest” (which garnered 50 extra points for using all seven letters) was misspelled as “Neatist” when I noticed I spelled it correctly in title.
5. My poet’s thinking cap is a beret.
6. Moon Curves: Girdled moon / Cinched crescent / Loosens the tight fit / of its growing luminescence
7. “There is a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.” -Simone Weil
8. I’m learning about the word “sardonic” (expressing an uncomfortable truth in a clever and not necessarily malicious way, often with a degree of skepticism) and Southern Gothic literature after seeing a PBS special on Flannery O’Connor, “a Southern writer who often wrote in a sardonic Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters, often in violent situations. The unsentimental acceptance or rejection of the limitations or imperfection or difference of these characters (whether attributed to disability, race, crime, religion or sanity) typically underpins the drama. Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O’Connor said: “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” Wikipedia
9. She also said this: “I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”
10. This is a real thing that happens to me all the time: Semantic satiation- a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.
11. “I spent the pandemic in New York where I don’t know anybody except my wife so quarantine was no problem and after I got vaccinated I went home to Minnesota and had dinner with five people I’ve known forever or more, and it was a pleasure that’s worth getting old for. With old friends, conversation is simple: you open your mouth and there’s a big balloon full of words. With new people, it’s like a job interview. So I love Minnesota where those old friends are. And it’s a state that needs to be loved…” Garrison Keiller
12. A friend recently posted a memory photo on Facebook of a fun time a group of us were having at a 2008 Power of Poetry Symposium, and I found myself commenting, “We had fun! I’m so pandemic rattled that I don’t even know if I’d know how to do that now.”
13. Pizza Exclamation Point HERE.
_______Thirteen Thursday
March 24th, 2021 4:18 pm
That pizza looks delish !
March 25th, 2021 4:02 pm
I have been in and away from crowds for so long that my outing today was terrifying. And I fear we’ve lost Kezzela, and not in a good way. That makes me sad.
March 25th, 2021 8:21 pm
Sweet!
March 26th, 2021 12:01 am
Pandemic Rattled. I think we all have a bit of that. My sister and husband especially. Definitely couldn’t sit in a room full of people yet, even if it was for fun.
March 28th, 2021 1:41 am
Years ago, I read all the Flannery O’Connor I could find in the library ..I went through a stage of reading “Southern writers” , in what I saw at the time as some sort of effort to understand my southern-born mother. It didn’t help. But I discovered some great books. … I really should read her again now in my (much) more mature years.