Nutty Week

I have had a plum beanless week!  I did not mean not to write but the days just tumbled over and over into themselves and now it is Thursday.  I have missed everybody!

So.  News:

Wonderfully sweet Melissa from My Reading Table gave me this fantastic award.  If you have not yet visited her wonderful blog, hop on you bloggy bike and pedal away pronto.

How lovely to wake up on a dewy Saturday and find a fresh cut, green grass scented award waiting for me at the plum bean.  And yet is Thursday... I am so disorganized.  Unexpected kindness is often the nicest variety, don't you think?  It is that swooping butterfly feeling of arriving home on your birthday to a long white box of buttered sunshine yellow roses.

Here's how this award works:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Pass the award along to 15 bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic for whatever reason! (In no particular order...)
4. Contact the bloggers you've picked and let them know about the award.

Seven things?

1. I am seriously superstitious: No new clothes on Tuesdays (that is a family one), no hats on the bed, no washing my hair on Thursday... it goes on.  I really believe in luck.  The outfit I wore to defend my Phd was entirely made up of 'lucky' clothes that had brought good things in the past.  I also drank lucky hot chocolate and ate lucky nachos.

2. I can't sing--at all. Ever.  My friends and family would prefer that I not try.

3. I love French bulldogs.  I stalk them on the street.

4. I am always in the midst of memorizing a poem.  It is a practice, a hobby, a belief.  Right now I am working on 'The God Abandons Anthony' by Constantine Cavafy.  It is a poem based on the moment in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra when Anthony hears the soldiers going over to Octavian.  Cavafy could do so much with so little.

5. When I am in a city, I walk hugely long distances.  I love it.  I walk and memorize poetry at the same time.

6. I have never ever worn make up.  It scares me.

7. I love lollipops.

I made the decision when I was writing that list to just go with whatever was true and once I began a thought, to follow it through.  The result is that I came off sounding like a superstitious, poetry spouting,  lollipop sucking, make up-less, walking nightmare.  Nothing to be done about it.

Fifteen people?  Is it alright if I pass it on to five and save the rest?  I can stash them in my rainy day awards cupboard.  

Stella at Ex Libris because her writing is translucently lovely.

Doctordi because her wonderful personality shines through her honest, beautifully wrought prose.

Grad at The Curious Reader because she is willing to drive through the dark of night to retrieve a book she loves.

Kals at At Pemberly because she revels in luscious words.

Whitney at She is too Fond of Books because her writing pulls us into her reading in such a lovely way.

Here is Cavafy's stunning poem.  He intentionally chooses poor epithets.  He leaves it for the reader to make up the space between.  "this kind of a city"--genius.

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

- Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)