oh Mexico! i love you so.

forestfeast:

The Forest Feast is on vacation this week! The Mr. and I are in Oaxaca for a few days for our friends’ wedding. This place is so colorful and incredible! Today we went to the outdoor market and sampled some local fare, like chilacayota, a drink made of blended squash with corn kernels floating on top. Unusual and delicious!  Chapulines (fried spiced grasshoppers) are a popular snack around here- there are women selling them from baskets everywhere. I haven’t gotten the courage to try them yet, but hope to before I leave! Mole is big around here so for lunch we stopped in at a little stand at the mercado for enchiladas drenched in the most magnificent mole. For more pictures from my Mexican adventure, follow me on Instagram, @theforestfeast. Buen provecho!

By Erin Gleeson for The Forest Feast

Source: instagr.am via Lumi on Pinterest

Have you heard of Lumitype? It’s a special dye process that allows you to print your digital photos on fabric, after developing it in the sun.

According to this article in GOOD, “The Lumi Process is the creation of Los Angeles dye manufacturer Lumi. Their chief product is a water-based, environmentally friendly dye called Inkodye, that develops photographic images direclty on fabric with sunlight. ‘We’re working to bring photogrpahy out of the dark room and into the sun,” says founder Jesse Genet, who’s been at work researching and building a company around the dye for the past eight years.’”

Fun!

Woot-woot, going to take my first-ever Skillshare classes in September! Skillshare just introduced Hybrid classes, which are online (with the option to meet in your town/city).

Perfect for my current nomadic lifestyle—and the price was so right: this Pinterest one is free for the first 150 students, and this humor writing class is on-sale for $12 for the first 50 to sign-up.

thelalatheory:

I’ve been enjoying “altering” some old books. I’ll have these pages and others like them for sale at the Philly Feminist Zine Fest on Sunday. For like two bucks!

A wonderful how-to on making poetry from things which have already been written. I love the idea of it ‘helping you develop a sense of irony,’ as Katie Haegele says.

Haegele references using an old Boy Scout handbook for a found poetry project. I’m thinking about the collection of ‘power 80s business books’ collecting dust in my parents’ basement. I wonder what a found poem would look like from, say, Dress For Success, circa 1985?

Awful Library Books has some excellent inspiration for found poetry. Till I can get at those books in the basement, these clips from other 80s inspired wardrobe guides could serve as stand-ins!

the-how-to:

by Katie Haegele

A lot of people I know feel shy about poetry. They’re not sure they understand it, they’re embarrassed of the poems they wrote when they were really young, and they think they couldn’t write anything good now if they tried.

I think one reason for people’s uneasiness is that the definition of poetry is so much more open than it once was. Formal verse is simpler in a way; a sonnet is always made using the same rules, so you know what you’re getting into with a poem like that. But free verse seems intimidating in part because it’s hard to define, hard to see the structure that holds the thing together. How can you learn to write a poem if you’re not sure what a poem is?

Well, people are still working in formal verse, of course, so you are encouraged to write a sonnet some time. But there are other experiments to try. Take found poetry. A found poem is made up of excerpts from a non-poetic text that someone else already wrote, like a newspaper article, a sign prohibiting littering, a science book for children, or the real estate section. Making found poetry has to do with learning a new way to look at the world, and then finding a different use for what you’ve discovered there. You know that Emily Dickinson line about poetry, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”? Once you learn to see slant, the poetry starts to assemble itself.

There are different ways to go about it, but here’s how I make a found poem:

Look at things. Really look. I learned what found poetry was a good few years ago and the effect it had on me was profound. I saw poems everywhere, in everything. That summer I visited my mother at her new house, which she had bought furnished. The very meticulous people who sold it to her had apparently kept everything they’d ever acquired, including the owner’s manual to the oven they bought back in the 60s. “Know Your Range,” the little booklet was called. Tell me THAT’S not poetry. Every day we are all surrounded by language — cheesy or manipulative advertising messages, overheard conversations, news headlines. So use it. Look for double meanings in words and phrases. It will help you develop a good sense of irony, which is never a bad thing to have in your back pocket. 

Copy. I collect old books and magazines and these can be wonderful sources of unintentional poetry. At a rummage sale I once found a copy of the 1948 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook, and I made a poem from bits of the Orienteering section. I photocopied the title, “Find Your Way” — which has a pretty obvious double meaning, if you’re looking for it — and cut out that and other lines I liked. It’s certainly not necessary to physically chop up the original text, but it is fun.

Paste. When I’m making found poems using that cut and paste method, I’ll sit on my living room floor and spread the cut out lines in front of me. This way I can rearrange them in a variety of combinations before I settle on the best version. One line from the boy scout book said: “With simple means and using your own personal measurements, determine a height you cannot reach and a width you cannot walk.” This writer was being literal, of course, warning the scouts to know their physical limitations before they braved the wilderness. But the poetic readings of a line like that go much deeper. I reassembled this and other sentences I liked until a strange little narrative emerged — a new one, which I kept in place with a glue stick. One of the lines goes, “Call loudly for help if you are alone, and keep on calling.” Good advice indeed. But when there’s poetry all around you, are you ever totally alone?

mollyrstern:

‎”I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot…and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that’s precisely why I succeed.” Michael Jordan

It’s easier to be mean than to be nice.

In response to the “Dear God, if you give us back 2Pac, we’ll give you Justin Bieber,” tweet, I will publicly admit that “Somebody to Love” is a favorite from my running playlist. What? It’s catchy.

thetuesdayten:

Celebrities read mean tweets about themselves. 

There will always be haters, especially on the internet. It’s important to not take them (or yourself!) too seriously. From Kristen Stewart to James Van Der Beek, celebs perform tweets written about them.  

I’m not sure where this photo was taken. But this sums up my experience of store hours in Spain.

Translation: We open when we come. We close when we go. If you come when we’re not here, it’s just that we didn’t coincide.

(via THE DORKY & JAUNTY)

I can see the argument in Salon article. Writing something that’s just fun—it feels liberating.  I love many books in the YA category, I just wish more of the uber-popular YA books were better written! They’re giving a bad rep to the beautifully-told ones!

danielledavisreadsandwrites:

“But YA’s relegation to prestige limbo has also liberated the many authors who find themselves exasperated, bored or intimidated by adult literature’s greatness sweepstakes. In prestige limbo, success and respect are not mutually exclusive. Setting out to provide your readers with pleasure, even the old-fashioned kind, is not automatically viewed as pandering. Your readers will not care if you got a MacArthur grant or what James Wood said about your book or whether it was well reviewed in the New York Times — or, for that matter, whether it was reviewed at all.

It turns out that a lot of adults like to read fiction written under those conditions, too. The best YA provides a holiday from the self-importance and intellectual anxiety that plague and often deform the world of adult literature. Occasionally, YA has transformed its humble practitioners into very wealthy women (and men), and without a doubt it can profoundly shape the minds and selves of its young readers. That’s enough for some people, even without the Pulitzer Prize.”

—

From Laura Miller’s article, “A Prestige-Free Zone” about women in YA fiction.

Beautiful last two paragraphs about the reward of writing pleasurable literature for kid readers who don’t care about prestige.

rule 6: make sure your hair is awesome

This photographic tour on how to achieve the best Glamour Shot made my morning.

I distinctly remember two of my aunts getting Glamour Shots—and thinking how beautiful they looked. The early 90s had us in a trance!

(via 12 Ways To Achieve The Very Best Glamour Shot)

what do you see when you see me?

(Source: charlycarrizo)

amar es combatir, si dos se besan
el mundo cambia, encarnan los deseos,
el pensamiento encarna, brotan las alas
en las espaldas del esclavo, el mundo
es real y tangible, el vino es vino,
el pan vuelve a saber, el agua es agua,
amar es combatir, es abrir puertas,
dejar de ser fantasma con un número
a perpetua cadena condenado
por un amo sin rostro;
el mundo cambia
si dos se miran y se reconocen,
amar es desnudarse de los nombres

(Source: geniodeilusiones)

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

(Source: thuntress)

(via Steal Like A Writer)