Thursday, June 29, 2023

Cat Thursday - We will never truly understand


Welcome to the weekly meme that celebrates the wonders and often hilarity of cats! Join us by posting a favorite lolcat pic you may have come across, famous cat art or even share with us pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! Share the link to your post with your comment below.






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Friday, June 23, 2023

Flare, Corona by Jeannine Hall Gailey - Review

I feel like I read quite a bit of poetry, and I'm always amazed by how much a new collection touches me. This is a wonderful collection. In her poems, Gailey shares her personal journey, touches on current events and nature (our dying planet). I loved the "Self-Portrait As..." poems. As a fan of speculative fiction, I appreciated the elements of science fiction, fantasy and even horror. I really enjoyed the nod to witches in "Grimoire."

I felt "I Can't Stop" in my soul. "I can't stop thinking of the Doomsday Clock, how close we are to spinning into the black hole at the center of the galaxy." Does she know me?

Oh my goodness, "A Story for After a Pandemic" is one of the most beautiful poems I've ever read. Maybe it's because the pandemic affected me (everyone) so profoundly. I'm just not the same person I was before the pandemic. A little more frightened, a lot less social. "After the pandemic, we will rejoin at the river's edge, at the waterfalls and seasides, like animals. Praise the ocean, the sky, the stars: what doesn't protect us, what remains, what holds us together." 

As I said, a wonderful collection of poems. Very highly recommended!

About Flare, Corona:
Against a constellation of solar weather events and evolving pandemic, Jeannine Hall Gailey’sFlare, Corona paints a self-portrait of the layered ways that we prevail and persevere through illness and natural disaster.

Gailey deftly juxtaposes odd solar and weather events with the medical disasters occurring inside her own brain and body— we follow her through a false-alarm terminal cancer diagnosis, a real diagnosis of MS, and finally the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The solar flare and corona of an eclipse becomes the neural lesions in her own personal “flare,” which she probes with both honesty and humor. While the collection features harbingers of calamity, visitations of wolves, blood moons, apocalypses, and plagues, at the center of it all are the poet’s attempts to navigate a fraught medical system, dealing with a series of challenging medical revelations, some of which are mirages and others that are all too real.

In Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey is incandescent and tender-hearted, gracefully insistent on teaching us all of the ways that we can live, all of the ways in which we can refuse to do anything but to brilliantly and stubbornly survive.

About the Poet:

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a writer with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of five books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist's Daughter, Field Guide to the End of the World, the winner of the Moon City Press Book Award and the SFPA's Elgin Award, and upcoming in 2023, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. She also wrote a non-fiction book called PR for Poets to help poets trying to promote their books. Her poems have been featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in 2007's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. She was awarded a 2007 and 2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for Poetry and a 2007 Washington State Artist Trust GAP grant. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares.



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Thursday, June 22, 2023

Cat Thursday - Sometimes mean, and great at hiding


Welcome to the weekly meme that celebrates the wonders and often hilarity of cats! Join us by posting a favorite lolcat pic you may have come across, famous cat art or even share with us pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! Share the link to your post with your comment below.





Check this out: 

Today I Learned': 15 Pawsome Fun Facts And Stories About Cats


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Friday, June 16, 2023

Classics Club Spin #34

And the spin landed on #13...The Werewolf by Montague Summers
I'm thrilled!



Failed miserably last time. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Motto of my life. 
  1. Mastering Witchcraft - Paul Huson
  2. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
  3. Where Angels Fear to Tread - E.M. Forster
  4. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
  5. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
  6. Murder in the Cathedral - T.S. Eliot
  7. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
  8. Vampires and Vampirism - Montague Summers
  9. Taras Bulba - Nikolai Gogol
  10. The Centaur - Algernon Blackwood
  11. The Collector - John Fowles
  12. The Devils of Loudon - Aldous Huxley
  13. Werewolf - Montague Summers
  14. Grendel - John Gardner
  15. The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
  16. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
  17. The Human Chord - Algernon Blackwood
  18. In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires - Raymond T. McNally, Radu R. Florescu
  19. The Witch of Ravensworth - George Brewer
  20. The House on the Borderland - William Hope Hodgson


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Thursday, June 15, 2023

Cat Thursday - Precious and silly at the same time


Welcome to the weekly meme that celebrates the wonders and often hilarity of cats! Join us by posting a favorite lolcat pic you may have come across, famous cat art or even share with us pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! Share the link to your post with your comment below.








We lost Alice two years ago on June 13.
Still missing her every day. 



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Thursday, June 8, 2023

Cat Thursday: Authors and Cats (120) - Jirō Osaragi


Welcome to the weekly meme that celebrates the wonders and sometime hilarity of cats! Join us by posting a favorite lolcat pic you may have come acros s, famous cat art or even share with us pics of your own beloved cat(s). It's all for the love of cats! Share the link to your post with your comment below.

The second Cat Thursday of each month is Authors and Cats Thursday. Each time I will feature an author, pictured with their/a cat(s), or guest posts by cat loving authors who also (sometimes) write about cats.

I apologize for not posting last week. I kid you not, by the time I remembered, it was already Friday! Guess it's time to set a weekly reminder. 


Jirō Osaragi

The Osaragi Jirō Memorial Museum in Yokohama, Japan is dedicated to the author Jirō Osaragi and features numerous cat ornaments as an integral part of its feline-themed decor. Osaragi wrote several novels connected to Yokohama, including Gento (Magic Lantern) and lived at the Hotel New Grand for over 10 years (in room 318). It's often said that the Shōwa-period author cared for over 500 cats throughout his lifetime at his home in Kamakura, Japan—which is sometimes open to the public. Visitors can lounge on Osaragi's terrace and sip tea while picturing the hundreds of semi-feral cats that once frolicked in the gardens.

Credit (including image): https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/77982-10-authors-and-their-cats.html


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