Scattered Light: October 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Saturday Jam: Franz Shubert Valse-caprice

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Monday, October 24, 2011

Scriabin, Prelude, Opus 67 #2, Presto (piano solo)

Sunday, October 23, 2011

This Side Up - A Short Animation by Liron Topaz

Monday, October 17, 2011

Gimme Ten!

ten more 20x24, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

Double Portrait with Held Breath

Double Portrait with Held Breath, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

first published in BloodLotus

Desire

Desire, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

There’s the daylight in ruins,
and you here willing to be ruined too,
willing night to crawl across a city
full of men wanting to ruin you.
Here comes one now, ripe
with appetite and impulse,
without a clue of what it will take
to pull you out
of these details drowning
in orange and blue,
and into his own picture --
but you’re clear on that too,
transparent with buttercup hope
that this time will be different,
that this one will know how to see you.

(Blood Lotus)

jealous

jealous, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

artist with worried sister

artist with worried sister, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

she stands up
among her broken people

counting time on fingers
bent with it

her plane was a bed
contrived of shadows

full of salt wound in sheeting
now in shreds

like all ends of things
orange energy lifting her

into urgencies clanging yellow
hurrying her forward

away from the sister
who's always one step behind

(Bloodlotus magazine)

Examining Ophelia

Examining Ophelia, a photo by shivasarms43 on Flickr.

On hands and knees I’d crawl into his mind at the wrong time, just as he was drifting off (perchance) to dream. He’d slap his forehead, and shake his fists as if he was the only one enslaved, but he'd rise and light the candle for me. Circles of light paled the pen, signal and symbol, and the velvet curtain rose like some bird above the stage in his brain. He'd push me down between folds of parchment again, creasing me with his ravaged nib, filling me in, molding me into something I was not. In the morning, I'd feel grateful for the ink stains smearing reality revised to cast me in his image. A soliloquy in a pocket, the dance of another un-smooth course would have driven any muse mad.
There are ghosts afoot tonight, and under glass the old story looms large, as tangled as the weeds in my waterlogged hair.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Inspiration

Thursday, October 13, 2011

New! Janet's Pocket Portfolio

Theo Jansen's Kinetic Sculptures

Monday, October 10, 2011

In Lieu of Opium

Have you read Tim Buck's new collection of poems? It's called In Lieu of Opium and it's got all the breadth and depth and musicality and melancholy you could ask for in forty pages. Recommended.

Thursday, October 06, 2011

Fresh at Red Booth Review

We've got another poem & painting up at Red Booth Review Like?

Occupy Wall Street

Tuesday, October 04, 2011

Stan Getz-Autumn Leaves

Sunday, October 02, 2011

Review of Sheila Deeth's FLOWER CHILD

The Metaphysics of Connection

What is the nature of reality? How do emotions distort it? The liminal state between what’s known and what’s not is a threshold rife with the unfathomable. Begging readers’ willing suspension of disbelief, Sheila Deeth allows us to enter, through colloquial but poetic language and vivid descriptions, into the porous consciousness of her characters.

Flower Child explores the grief of Megan, who miscarries the daughter she names Angela for the angel she hopes she has become. But the child is in limbo, tethered to a place that recalls the Garden of Eden, a plane inhabited by angel-guardians who watch over babies until they are born. The babies who aren’t, (i.e. Ms. Deeth introduces a pair of siblings aborted in favor of a third baby) stay enveloped in flower pods, swaddled in greenery. “I was safe and secure, wrapped in my nest of leaves ‘til it was time to wake again” Angela says, just after being miscarried.
The story is alternately narrated by Angela and her mother, so intimately and intricately connected, but each is unsure of the other. Angela worries that her mother doesn’t want or love her, while Megan believes the glimpses of her little girl are dreams or hallucinations. To connect over such chasms of space and time seems impossible, but somehow they do—Angela, growing faster than a human child, goes through the usual stages of development on Megan’s watch. Like any mother, she becomes suspicious, judgmental, then panicked when Angela eats the proverbial apple.

Moving from temptation to temptation, Angela falls in love with Elisha, one of the triplets sacrificed for the health of his sibling. With his love, Angela “feels real”, but her mother is still in emotional limbo. In the climactic scene echoing the Passion of Christ, Angela struggles with her choice: self preservation or altruistic sacrifice; with the skillful tying together of theme and allusion across genres, Ms. Deeth has her act on her decision.

The metaphysical complexity of the conclusion, the conflation of the mortal and immortal, recalls Freud’s theory about the nature of reality -- the idea that though reality is intersubjective, this “collective hallucination” is experienced by people in both congruent and divergent ways. The shifting perspectives of Deeth’s characters underscore the dynamic nature of reality, and Ms. Deeth makes us believe in a character not of this earth as easily as her all too human mother.

Flower Child is catalogued as speculative Christian fiction; but like most labels, that falls short in describing a novella combining the lyrical and the literary with the quotidian and the extraordinary to make a unique and touching story that will be hard for any reader to forget.

Amazon

What They Say

The Blend of Visual and Written Art

THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.

Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory

and could not reconcile the break. I felt for

connection in blind corridors, whispering

Who's there? from within the room's glass

eye.

Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard

to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,

confused by what my reflection showed. The

glass distorted it and the fissure widened from

a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Prisoner's Dilemma:...The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashberry, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism. And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the book I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life. A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions. Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption. Not death. The immortal is the natural state. But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death. Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool. --Matthew Biberman

It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!...Tim Buck

There is something of Keats's “negative capability” revealed in this poignant story: it is a mystery to me how a female author can so perfectly inhabit the hurting corners of a middle-aged man's soul. And her striking turns of phrase bring delight to the reader, even as he squirms and winces in sympathy with Roger...Tim Buck

The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope...Rosy Cole

...This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE. ---Grady Harp

Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. (R.Cole)

"... Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems...A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal--
"Her work is dark,mysterious, seemingly drawn from the subconscious...Foreboding, regret, entrapment, longing and enigma vie for prominence while gestural, expressive brushwork gives the forms a supernormal tension and energy..."

Bob Grumman, Taproot--"Macabre, comic, mysterious, and subtly erotic, these fascinating drawings constantly flirt with disgust -- a perfect example of graphic black humor. "

"A series of charcoal drawings that go darkly anywhere via an expressionism that reminds me of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Snell provides poems for her illustrations that generally extend rather than just rephrase them-- ."

... varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives...Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review

Scattered Light