I’ve added new folders to The Galleries this week to feature relatively new renders. The “Recent Work” folder collects images from the past few months while the “October 2005″ should be self-explanitory. Let’s see how well I keep these folders in order.
Grand intentions. I began this Bloq at Sophie’s Woods with the easy promise of posting at least every couple of days. Then almost immediately I broke my right foot and right heel at work. The best part of summer spent with my leg suspended and the Lab Pup looking mournfully out the window much of the day. My wife is willing to do walks around the block, on sidewalk, in sunshine. She is not a believer in leaping over swollen creeks during a rainstorm.
You would think the limitations of being bedridden would compel more posts, but in truth the only cheer I found was gathering a nest of books around me and exploring inward.
Eventually my foot healed enough for therapy, then cautious short walks around the neighborhood with a cane in one hand and a leash in the other. Finally today we entered the woods from our favorite vantage and trekked along in the tread of deer prints to one of our favorite meditation points. I sat on a rock and watched the leaves falling in the breeze while Sophie would vanish and reappear from several directions. We are healed and whole again and eager for our favorite season to begin.
Reworked the presentation of The Galleries this morning. I stumbled across a free program, JAlbum, which offers a generous assortment of templates and options. It is an excellent alternative to the much more limited (pay) program I was testing which would have cost $49 to purchase. With time running out on the trial version of the previous program and hopefully hundreds of new images to come, I’m very pleased with the new pages from JAlbum and suggest the program to anyone else interested in generating web galleries.
I also did some tinkering at Wikipedia the past few days, uploading my picture of Raymond Carver to the sites entry on that author and adding a link to the review with Ray on my website. This is not motivated by hubris, but rather my sincere admiration of Carver’s work and a desire to make his comments from that period available to a broader audience.
The process of building a homepage from scratch is daunting enough for a middle-aged man who hasn’t written any HTML in years. Gathering the art and articles of 40 years is even more exhausting. Combining the two problems could exhaust the heartiest soul and I’m grateful to family and former editors for helping me blow the dust off the years and reaccumulate a life’s assortment of chimera.
If you are one of the few who have checked on my early progress you might now note that in addition to the galleries, I have uploaded an early chapbook of poems, The Butcher’s Daughter, which contains some work I am very proud of even after years of distance. The title poem won the Iowa Poetry competition in 1979. Poem For The Tenant
was the Mademoiselle Prize Poem a few years prior, and I have always
considered Drought and Wedding my favorites from that block of years.
I have also begun to fill in the “Interviews” section with an upload of a conversation I was fortunate enough to share with the late Raymond Carver. I was quite the Carver promoter in college and purchased dozens of copies of his collection, “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” for distribution to my fellow Writer’s Workshop students. (This when I was living on a Ramen Noodles budget.)
My goal over the next few weeks is to get some content up on every section of the site and to make regular uploads to the blogs. I need the writing discipline as well as the content to justify my web hosting expense.
cheers,
David
The pup is sleeping by the front door, feet twitching as she runs through whatever landscape her mind has opened. Today you can almost hear the mermaids singing in the deep pools of the creek
in Sophie’s Woods. Mermaid tails, or maybe trout breaking the surface of the water. Mayflies darting in the warm air. I picture some old centaur fishing that same creek, casting his line from shore while pixiemoss blooms in the damp shade of the sugar maples.
The lab pup is yipping softly, chasing something, happy. Still spring in Illinois and already the corn is well past a grown man’s ankles. No sign of the Japanese beetles that have been a plague the past few years. The promise of a bumper crop for squirrels and deer.
In my own dreams the centaur’s line jerks taut, he steps back toward the trees and takes quick measure of the arc of rod and string. A quick flash of rainbow scales in the sunlight. A quick movement of his hands.
The scent of lilacs in the breeze.
The Lab pup, Sophie, insists we patrol our small corner of our small neighborhood in our small town at least twice a day. The first shift begins before the sun has properly cleared the cornfield, or if it is an even numbered year, the soybeans in the field which borders our backyard. She has learned to earn my trust to let her run unfettered along the long expanse of grass beside the street, to wait at the corner for her leash or even better, for a nod to turn toward the state-preserved block of forest only a few ranch-style homes distant to the East.
Entering the woods from this unauthorized direction is what we both enjoy best, and the magic beyond that first almost collapsed bit of barbed wire fence must be experienced first hand to be appreciated. Still, over the past few years we have strived to record our impressions on film, on the free electrons of digital media cards, inadequately in words.
Finally we have taken a plunge of a different sort, have claimed a very small corner of the internet for ourselves, for the opportunity to share with you gentle reader the miracles Sophie and I are privy to every day. On our web page at Sophies Woods we intend to share our history of this wonderful world we have found, images we have managed to capture or recall of some of the hundreds of inhabitants, those stories we have been able to coax from them and assemble into a reasonably coherent recollection.
Centaurs, Faes, Unicorns and Dragons are the most ordinary manifestations of any morning. Regal Succubi and elves can be seen by twilight in these woods.
Whether this is a world outside of our own or merely a passage between the commonplace and the exceptional is unclear to the pup and me. We scout, we walk the paths of deer or dragons, we strike up conversations when we can with other travelers. And now we bring these stories home.