Speaking of Side Street Espresso, here’s a photo of one of its owners, George Gee, courtesy Jim Gottstein of TouchnGo.
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Side Street’s George Gee
Side Street Mel
It’s not imitation. I’ve been writing at cafés since about 1994 when, preparatory to entering the MFA Creative Writing program at UAA, a group of us began meeting weekly on Sundays at a little café on G Street in Anchorage, Side Street Espresso.
The writing group gradually broke down as people got busy on Sundays & didn’t turn up. But I did. If no one else came, I wrote. After awhile, that became the entire reason for going there — not to meet, but to write. I wrote a good many of my poems & reading journals at Side Street, & most of my master’s thesis. After I graduated & some private stuff exploded in my life, I went there to write my way through it, to sort it out. Then, on a list, I started up a shared story, which later transformed into a novel-in-progress, Mistress of Woodland, & I went to Side Street to work on it.
I don’t write much at Side Street anymore, mainly because George & Deb, the owners, haven’t been opening it on Sundays the last couple of years: economics, & the desire on their own part to have a day off. And I just don’t go out to cafés (or for that matter get much writing done, dammit) on other days. It’s been Kaladi Brothers at Title Wave Books, or Café Felix at Metro Books & Music, or the café at Barnes & Noble.
But Side Street is still my writing home. For momentum’s sake, going out writing on Saturdays, too, would be a good thing. Instead of Side Street Sundays, then, Side Street Saturdays? Might be a very good idea. And I miss George & Deb.
Bus 3N to Downtown
People Mover bus at Providence Drive bus stop, University of Alaska Anchorage. Anchorage, Alaska. 11 Nov 2005 (abt. 8:00 AM).
We’ve been riding the bus a lot to save on gas & pollutants. Last Friday, I took a lot of piks on my way in to work on the outbound 3. This was after I’d hopped off my bus at Providence Hospital & crossed the street to UAA, and caught this inbound 3 at the bus stop. “3N” means it’s a 3 that goes through Nunaka Valley, “3C” that it goes through Chester Creek Valley.
Wild rose
Wild (prickly) rose (Rosa acicularis). Fort Richardson Military Reservation, Anchorage, Alaska. 7 Jun 2004.
I’m busily tring to figure out the difference between this rose & two relatives, Nootka rose (Rosa nutkatensis) which is also indigenous to Alaska but in a more limited area, and Sitka rose (Rosa rugosa — or, as its known elsewhere, Rugosa rose — which is a native to China, Korea, & Japan, but was introduced to Alaska in 1902.
Wild/prickly rose itself is found throughout most of the circumpolar north. I was interested to find that in Finland its common name is Karjalan ruusu which means Karelian rose. Karelia is in eastern Finland and northwestern Russia, the Russian part having been stolen by the Soviet Union by means of war (the famous Winter War of 1939-1940).
Bush flyby
I see Bush was uttering his crap on a passage through Elmendorf AFB in Anchorage this morning. There are probably even some people in Alaska who still believe him.
Bush Fires Parting Shot at Iraq Critics
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent
Monday, November 14, 2005
(11-14) 09:12 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) —President George W. Bush is firing a parting shot at Iraq war critics as he heads to Asia with hopes of improving his image on the world stage.
Bush was stopping in Alaska and speaking to troops at Elmendorf Air Force Base during a refueling stop for Air Force One on the first leg of an eight-day journey to Japan, South Korea, China and Mongolia.
He was expected to defend himself against Democrats’ criticism that he manipulated intelligence and misled the American people about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction as he sought grounds to go to war against Saddam Hussein in 2003. In a speech on Friday, Bush said his critics were “deeply irresponsible” and were making “false charges.
Iraq and a host of other problems, from the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina to the indictment of a senior White House official in a CIA leak investigation, have taken a heavy toll on the president. Nearing the end of his fifth year in office, Bush has the lowest approval rating of his presidency and a majority of Americans say Bush is not honest and they disapprove of his handling of foreign policy and the war on terrorism….
The shame is that anyone ever credited him with being honest or having even the barest smidgen of integrity.
I hope we’re on our way out of this.
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Self-portrait in a public restroom mirror
Student Union, University of Alaska Anchorage, Anchorage, Alaska. 12 Nov 2005.
Take your camera with you everywhere. You never know when you might want to take a picture of yourself. Or of something else.
Posted in Eyes Remain Open
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Melzblog central
I’ve been a busy little bee & added blogs for several purposes. These are all available from my complete profile, but a description here of each blog seems apropos.
Henkimaa (the blog you’re at now) is my central blog, a somewhat random personal blog. More specifically, it’s also about the search for, & the occasional finding of, what puts the cool breeze in me — what gives me a sense of ease in life. See more about in the posting What Henkimaa is.
Henkimaa 360 is a private blog for my friends only at Yahoo — those who also have Yahoo 360 pages, anyway. If you’re not listed as a friend there, you’ll get other content from that page (some feeds, & a link to Flickr photostream), but no blog.
NoWay Way is philsophical. Political. Something something something. Hard to describe, eh? The description at the blog puts it best:
In the spirit of Coyote and Raven, with their “no way” ways, and of “the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao,” and of “there are as many ways as there are people to follow them”: this blog is about whatever comes into my mind about
how to be, which way to live,
in this evil age
with time running out
—(Kalevala)Or is it this a really terrific age, with all the time in the world? Kinda doubt it….
Field of Words is about my reason for existing: writing. It will include snippets of writing , along with notes on the writing process, my own progress writing, & such stuff as words are made of. It takes its name from one of my poem’s, which you can read here.
Eyes Remain Open is a photoblog, populated chiefly by images from my Flickr photostream. See the story behind the name of this blog here.
Serkun serkut honors my ancestors — a family history & genealogical blog. More about it in the post Serkun serkut: Serkun serkut: A family history blog.
Finndex is my repository for things related to my interest in Finnish language & culture — an interest deriving from my maternal Finnish ancestry.
Terve.
Addendum 6 Jan 2006: Speaking of terve, which means “health/healthy” — I’ve recently embarked upon some changes towards improving & maintaining my health. And so, I inaugurate another blog: Terveys, toward that purpose.
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Field of Words
On top of all the other blogs I’ve added to Blogspot, it seemed appropriate to add one especially devoted to my whole purpose for being on this planet: writing. I expect to share occasional snippets of writing here, along with notes on the writing process, my own progress writing, & such stuff as words are made of.
The name of this blog comes from this poem, which actually had nothing to do with writing per se when I wrote it — but guess it does after all, hey?
[Update 2009: Now rather than a separate blog, a category on my website/blog at Henkimaa.com.]
Field of Words
Today in the field of words,
beside the lake of possibility,
today I am speechless.
All the words, all the words
proliferating in my hands,
little concretions of meaning
plucked from the ground one by one…
cowardly little stones:
they won’t be thrown
in the lake, where all the words
I’ve ever cast lie
layered upon each other, each
a decision, each a change
made in the world.
But these, now, these —
cowardly, spilling from
my fingers, back to the ground
unspoken, unthrown.
(published in Ice-Floe, Winter Solstice 2002)
What Henkimaa is
I took this photo on a photo safari with my friend Chris back in April 2003, late in what Alaskans call “break-up” — when the ice in rivers cracks and flows away, the snow melts, spring is not far away.
That’s not what’s happening now, of course. We’re in the dark of the year, when I see sunlight only on weekends, or through the window of my coworker’s office if he’s there & his door is open. Or if I venture out during lunch (which is rare).
But just looking at this picture, which also has been on my website for a couple of years, puts the cool breeze through me: what this word means to me, a coinage of my own (I think) from Finnish, henki meaning wind, breath, spirit, & maa meaning country, land.
That’s what this blog is really supposed to be about: what puts that cool breeze into me.
So… start again.
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Sci-Fi Channel is to Earthsea as Bush is to the U.S.
Note: The image to the left comes is a cover from one of the books, not from the really lousy movie.
At Blockbuster’s the other day, my eye was caught by a DVD of “Earthsea.” I love the books by Ursula K. Le Guin—I’ve read & reread them periodically since I was 13—so of course I looked at the thing. Sci-Fi Channel. Oh. I’ve seen some of their productions before, & have not been impressed. The packaging told me I wouldn’t be impressed with this production either: most of the actors were white, when most of Le Guin’s characters were of color. But we rented it anyway: call it my amateur anthropological interest in how Hollywood could screw up something that was really quite wonderful. Wow.
It was almost entertaining in its atrociousness. Poor screenplay, stupid plot, poor direction, some good acting, some poor acting, uneven special effects, clumsy borrowings from the Harry Potter movies (the school on Roke has never looked in my imagination anything like Hogwart’s)—oh my, it was bad bad bad. Today I decided to see what Le Guin herself thought of it. Not much. Here’s an index from her website of stories about the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries with links to the relevant site. A paragraph from her article at Locus, “Frankenstein’s Earthsea“, summarizes it nicely:
When I saw the script, I realised that what the writer had done was kill the books, cut them up, take out an eye here, a leg there, and stick these bits into a totally different story, stitching it all together with catgut and hokum. They were going to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a silly plot based on sex and violence.
No kidding. Did I mention the the plot was really stupid?
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