Author: <span>Carrie</span>

I am an April Poetry Fool
Published April 1, 2015 by

I am an April Poetry Fool

Website-Badge-1April is National Poetry Month.  I have been writing and reading a honkin’ lot of poetry lately – more than any time in my life except my angst-ridden teenage years and the first years I spent in Wyoming in the late 90’s.

To keep challenging myself and develop new mad skills, I signed up for PoMoSco.  This is a month-long project sponsored by The Found Poetry Review.  As a participant, I get to call myself a Poetry Scout, and I pledge to complete at least 50% of their 30 poetry prompts during the month of April.  This means I gotta write at least 15 poems.  And not just poems, but found poems – crafting them from outside texts or audio sources into word collages, using erasure, white-out, clippings, overheard conversations – it’s pretty wild, man.  And not something I have ever done before.  For every prompt I complete with a poem, I post my work on the PoMoSco site and earn a badge.  It’s like being a Girl Scout again!

So I’ll keep you posted about the ups and downs of hardcore poem generation.  I am hoping to create at least a few good’uns. You can read all my poems as I post them (hopefully daily) by going to my profile page.

In the meantime, go read lots of poetry!

 

“Sonnet TP and dedication 1609” by William Shakespeare, Thomas Thorpe – Shake-Speare’s Sonnets, quarto published by Thomas Thorpe, London, 1609. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons  

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“Smokenstocks” published at Words Dance!
Published March 31, 2015 by

“Smokenstocks” published at Words Dance!

I wrote a poem about what it’s really like to be a cafeteria cashier and cook at the Grand Canyon.  It’s called “Smokenstocks” and it’s now published at Words Dance!  That’s right, for your reading pleasure, my post-college employment and my English degree hooked up and soon gave birth to a poem about smoking, Birkenstocks, smoking, cigarettes, smoking, and low wage jobs in beautiful places.  This poem is about tobacco smoking.  Some day I may follow up with other poems about…other smoking.

I’m super psyched to be published at Words Dance.  Look for my poem “Texarkana Tap Water,” coming up in May.

Hazy blue hour in Grand Canyon. View from the South Rim.  Michael Gäbler [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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2015 Documentary Watch Project: Particle Fever
Published March 31, 2015 by

2015 Documentary Watch Project: Particle Fever

Science documentaries are my favorites. They’re the most difficult to watch, and I usually have to digest them in small chunks, but I love ’em.

Particle Fever is a 2013 documentary that follows a handful of the many physicists and smart folk working on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN from 2007 to 2012, when their work culminated in the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. Maybe you’re thinking a movie about physicists couldn’t get more boring, but not true! There’s a reason this film’s got “fever” in the title. It’s refreshing to see scientists as real people – excitable, fallible, harried, rumpled, laughing.

So what are these hefty brains – 10,000 of them from all over the world – doing with the biggest machine humanity’s ever built? Well they’re trying to find the answers to the megaquestions, like the origin of our universe. I say our universe, because there’s a possibility this isn’t the only one. The multiverse theory versus the supersymmetry theory. I’m not fully comprehending any of it, but it ain’t make believe. And it’s oh so fascinating; especially the sequences that delve deep into the physics. The film’s director Mark Levinson, sound editor for the film The English Patient and a Ph.D. in particle physics, doesn’t gloss over difficult concepts – the science is illustrated and explained visually and delightfully by the brilliant and personable David Kaplan, Savas Dimopoulos, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Monica Dunford.

What is a Large Hadron Collider? It’s a particle accelerator – a 27-kilometer ring of powerful magnets built deep underground in Geneva – construction began in the late 1980’s, when I was far more interested in Kiefer Sutherland than Physics. To me the LHC looks like a fancy electronic pipeline with a lot of wires and shiny bits but costs several billion dollars and has to be maintained with liquid helium at temperatures colder than space. Colder than space!! It’s designed so that two opposite beams of protons can be fired around the ring at almost the speed of light (almost the speed of light!!) – so fast that the protons collide. The goal is to convert that high energy collision into particles with really heavy mass – the kind of particles that aren’t normally detectable. Then the four detectors around the ring can record the results, and the science teams can measure and analyze the huge amounts of data and debris, because at the subatomic level this is how it’s done. It’s a way to recreate the conditions present just after the Big Bang, in order to study the laws of nature.

But mostly, when the first beam was fired in 2008, they were looking for the Higgs boson particle. “The Higgs” is named after Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who first theorized its existence in the 1960’s, and in the words of David Kaplan “it is weird and we do not understand it.” Ha! Maybe it’s the lynchpin of the universe.  Maybe not. But, that’s the point. I thought my favorite part of the documentary would be the moment when the LHC “works” for the first time: the scientists and technicians gathered in the control room erupting into joyous applause, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony roaring as rivers of data flood the supercomputers and images stream across the viewscreens like fireworks. But no, I was rocked by the more formal (though no less thrilling) announcement, four years later, that two of the four experiment teams – ATLAS and CMS – both measured a Higgs boson particle, and it’s mass is neither 115 GeV, like the supersymmetry theory proposed, nor is it 140 GeV, as predicted by the multiverse theory. It’s about 125. Right in the middle. Dude. Chills. Where do we go now?

Why do we need a Large Hadron Collider, especially when it costs sooooo much money? I understand the stance that this is a waste of funds that could be used for other humanitarian/environmental/insert-your-crusade-here purposes. Sometimes I agree. Mostly I don’t. For one, there are great benefits from the work that’s being done at CERN. For another – are you kidding? I want to know where I come from. I want theories and ideas and questions and then I want to test them and test them and test them until there’s no doubt about the answers. Let’s knock some atoms around and get to the heart of things, the dark matter of things. I have particle fever.

 

“CMS Higgs-event” by Lucas Taylor – http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/628469. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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Silver Blade publishes “Wool Rider”
Published March 29, 2015 by

Silver Blade publishes “Wool Rider”

Issue-252-773x1024I’m really pleased to announce that my novella “Wool Rider” has been published by the online speculative magazine Silver Blade!  It’s in the February 2015 issue, and you can read the story here!  A special thank you goes out to my friend Anita, who told me all about mutton bustin’ one night over burritos at Chipotle.  If you’re asking yourself, what the heck is mutton bustin’?  Well, read the story.  It’s mostly true.

 

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Spring is On in the Tetons
Published March 28, 2015 by

Spring is On in the Tetons

IMG_2838I know Spring is here, because April and my list of poetry month projects loom large, the redwing blackbirds are conk-la-reeing all over the place, every pair of shoes I own is caked with mud, and the Teton Park Road is plowed and open for non-motorized access.  Also today I saw a mountain bluebird while I was out walking on the aforementioned road, spring wind blasting across the melting snowfields.

Driving home, there were seven moose (maybe more but I didn’t want to run off the highway trying to count) hanging out in the sage flats and getting harassed by paparazzi.  And lo, a group of bison just on the other side of the Elk Refuge fence (mercifully on the other side of the fence, since everybody was right up against it, ogling those one-ton beauties).

IMG_2831For several mornings now, a herd of elk has visited the field south of my house.  And yesterday while I was walking along the Snake River, the two bald eagles who nest along that stretch indulged themselves in some graceful, and I hope fun, soaring above the braided channels.

So yeah, I am totally bragging.  Wyoming is some kinda sweetass awesome if you’re into Nature and stuff.

 

Mountain Bluebird By Jesse Achtenberg (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service WO-2283-CD60) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Teton National Park and Snake River photos by me.

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Voyaging with Darwin
Published March 24, 2015 by

Voyaging with Darwin

HMS_Beagle_in_Straits_of_Magellan

If I think about it, I can’t believe Charles Darwin was only 22 years old when he embarked on what would be a five year circumnavigation of the globe aboard a British survey ship named after a dog breed.  When the HMS Beagle embarked on her second voyage, she left Plymouth, England two days after Christmas in 1831, and Darwin was on board as ship’s naturalist.  Darwin and the Beagle would return some 40,000 nautical miles later, with over 5,000 collected specimens from as far away as South America and Australia.  This was almost two centuries ago, I remind myself.  No GPS.  No helicopter rescues.  Five years.  No refrigeration and no iPods playing Taylor Swift.  Just hardtack and scurvy and horse latitudes.  Hardcore and survey and new attitudes.

Of his sea voyage on the HMS Beagle, Darwin said that it was “by far the most important event in my life.”  He felt it had determined his entire career.  Not surprising.  He traveled for three years and three months on land, and eighteen months at sea.  He saw more along the coasts of South America alone than most of us will see in a lifetime.  This was boots-on-the-ground science; Darwin catalogued the workings of nature in all her forms firsthand.  He rode with gauchos on the Pampas, witnessed the 1835 Mount Osorno volanic eruption and a devastating earthquake in Concepción, Chile, and predicted the eventual exctinction of the foxlike warrah in the Falkland Islands.

1024px-HMS_Beagle_by_Conrad_MartensDon’t misunderstand me though – Darwin wasn’t the first on the scene talkin’ ’bout evolution.  He finally nailed the how – natural selection.  But I’m not forgetting Thomas Malthus, or Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, or Alfred Russel Wallace.  Wallace too, decided to travel abroad in his twenties, leaving for South America in 1848 and ending up in the Malay Archipelago in 1854. His independent writings about island biogeography and evolution were the kick in the pants Darwin needed to publish The Origin of Species in 1859, but not without giving Wallace his due (well, that’s what I heard – more on this later).

And there’s Charles Lyell, James Hutton, Stephen Jay Gould, and all the scientists who’ve helped us understand the timescales of Earth’s geology and paleontology.   Like James McPhee, whose books – however bedrocky they may be – about North American geology inspire my own poems about Wyoming.  Darwin and his predecessors didn’t leap to the evolution conclusion on a whim.  They worked for it.  They put in years of effort, observation, and questioning.  They doubted, they tested, they scrutinized evidence, and they suffered setbacks.

Beagle_Chronometer_V_frontOh heck, I may need to read The Voyage of the Beagle, The Principles of Geology, and The Song of the Dodo before I read The Origin of Species.

The truth of 4.55 billion years is as big as the planet.

 

 

“Voyage of the Beagle” by © Sémhur / Wikimedia Commons

“HMS Beagle in Straits of Magellan” by illustrations by R. T. Pritchett 1828-1907 – http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/d/darwin/charles/beagle/ – Text and illustrations derived from the John Murray edition of 1913 titled A Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

“HMS Beagle by Conrad Martens” by Conrad Martens (1801 – 21 August 1878) – English Wikipedia (13:42, 15 October 2005. User:Dave souza 1235×821 (73563 bytes) (HMS Beagle in the seaways of Tierra del Fuego, painting by Conrad Martens during the voyage of the Beagle (1831-1836), from The Illustrated Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, abridged and illustrated by Richard Leakey ). Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

“Beagle Chronometer” By Graeme Bartlett (self made photograph) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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Currently (Eternally) Reading: Darwin
Published March 21, 2015 by

Currently (Eternally) Reading: Darwin

On December 15, 2013, I added Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species to my “Currently Reading” list on goodreads.

It’s still on there.

I assure you, this is not an oversight, and it’s not for lack of interest or because I can’t admit defeat.  I’m completely down with Did Not Finish when it comes to any book that annoys me (The Goldfinch…I’m lookin’ at you).  Darwin decidedly does not annoy me.

In the past two years, I’ve read countless articles, scientific papers, blog posts, and Wikipedia entries about evolution.  I’ve watched six Yale Lecture Series videos on Evolution (trust me, six is a LOTTA Yale to digest when you only have an English degree), and scoured the entire University of Berkeley evolution website.  I read Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, and well…you get the point.  I don’t have that much Darwin street cred but I do have a wee bit.  It’s just not…Darwin himself.

I want to read Darwin’s seminal book – and I have, in fact, read the first three chapters.  Why am I doing this?  Because I once proclaimed to a circle of friends, rather obnoxiously and almost tearfully, that I am a Darwinist.  At the time, I had no idea what the hell that meant.  But I…thought I….meant it.  Even though I’d not read a word of Darwin and I had no solid understanding of evolution at all.  I still seem to be skimming the surface of evolutionary literature without really deepening my understanding.  Which ain’t right.

Well, now I officially start My Darwin Project.  Because those first 3 chapters of The Origin of Species are incredible.  They, and the subsequent twelve chapters, deserve more from me than a cursory reading and a move to my “Read” list on goodreads.  Darwin is the hub of this wheel for me; the driving force; my evo-co-pilot.  But I’m ready to dig in to Darwin’s predecessors as well as contemporary science writers, too.

Because hey, why do Darwin straight up, no chaser?  The Origin of Species is over 150 years old!  I need reading guides, supplementary literature, videos, poems, podcasts, Pinterest boards, a genetics primer, blogs, art, popcorn (best with olive oil, salt and nutritional yeast), photographs and diagrams, the Crosby Stills Nash & Young box set, long walks, and possibly reading glasses before this is over.  And I plan to share all of this with you (Except the popcorn.  Go pop your own.)  I may even tweet about this spectacle.  I’m not saying I will ever know what I’m talking about, but I will surely give this a go.

You can find a partial Bibliography of Evolutionary Awesome on my goodreads profile (along with my horror, pirates, and magicahhh book lists – wait come back here, don’t get distracted!)  AND also check out Darwin’s Entangled Bibliography, my supplementary resource list, or as I like to call it, Somebody Tell Me What Darwin Just Said.   To be updated regularly, and to include a bunch of other Darwinian and evolutionary treats.

How do we start this voyage?  On a ship, of course.  The HMS Beagle.  Pack your bags, we set sail soon.

“Darwin panel” Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

 

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13 Great Horror Movies on Netflix Now
Published March 6, 2015 by

13 Great Horror Movies on Netflix Now

I grew up watching both good (Alien) and bad (Mausoleum, anybody?) horror movies.  And reading horror novels – King, Koontz, McCammon, Barker – the big dawgs.  As I’ve matured (Ahem…I really have….matured.  I swear), I am still as picky as I was in my youth.  I can’t handle torture-porn slasher movies, but I do like to be scared shitless for weeks after seeing a well-done frightmare (Insidious I’m thanking you…but not your sequel).

Why do I watch horror movies?  They’re better than caffeine if you need to stay wide awake all night because you’re writing a novel or trying to finish some bookkeeping projects.

And also, because horror done right – whether it’s a gothic ghost story or a full-on terrorfest – sure is cathartic.  I like my horror best served with side dishes of humor, smart n’ feisty heroines, jump-scares and twisty plots.

Here’s a list of the top scary movies I’ve seen in the past year, all streaming on Netflix.  If you don’t have Netflix you can usually watch on Amazon Instant pretty cheap – just click the pics.

Housebound  The reason I wrote this blog post.  Never have I laughed out loud so hard and been so wigged out at the same time.   Best line:  “You can’t punch ectoplasm in the face!”  Thank you, New Zealand!

 

 

 

 

Tucker and Dale vs Evil   Outrageous.

 

 

 

Hellraiser  This one was a rewatch – because of course I saw it immediately when it came out in the 80’s.  Still great, still gross.

 

 

 

Pontypool  Here’s a prime example of indie budget horror that hits all the right crazy buttons – a virus that transforms people into imploding gibberish-talkers, and it’s transmitted by human speech.  Where else should a spectacle like that unfold, but at a small Canadian radio station in the dead of winter?

 

 

The Machine  I’m putting this in the horror bucket because even though it’s sci fi, the mood and tension had me bouncing off the walls.  Caity Lotz deserves more leading roles.

 

 

 

Banshee Chapter   I was totally surprised by how much I liked this X-Filesy extra-dimensional beings paranoia-fest.  And I was completely freaked out.  The washed-up guru character played by Ted Levine is worth the whole movie.

 

 

 

Oculus   Absolutely riveting ghost-busty first half, with smart, obsessive Karen Gillan getting ready to avenge her dead parents and defeat a malevolent mirror.  The second half descended into predictability, but watch it anyway.

 

 

 

Absentia   Another low budget indie horror film that deserves to be seen.  A pedestrian tunnel in a suburban neighborhood becomes a portal for doom.  Unsettling and almost too real for comfort; highly original.

 

 

 

Grabbers  As I said, I like a splash of humor in my horror.  What could be better than a bar full of drunk Irish fighting off tentacly sea monsters?  F’ing brilliant.  And Richard Coyle.  Yes, please.

 

 

 

The House at the End of Time  One of the best supernatural thrillers I’ve seen.  This Venezuelan ghost story does everything right, taking what seems like a conventional haunted house tale and recrafting it into a spooky mystery that’s also a poignant family drama with a twist ending and a tribute to motherhood.

 

 

 

The Innkeepers/The House of the Devil   People either love filmmaker Ti West or ignore him.  He’s never let me down.  Ti one on and enjoy a double feature.

 

 

 

The Returned  I’m referring here to the film, not the also-excellent French television series.  Here’s a classic example of how a “zombie” movie both utilizes and transcends tropes to come up with a suspenseful and meaningful story.  Also – it stars everyone’s favorite werewolf (or at least, mine) from Lost Girl, Kris Holden-Ried.  AND Shawn Doyle.  What!?  I know.  2 fer 1.

 

 

 

Spooky Trees Photo from Unsplash

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Broadcasts From the Far Side #3: Moon Called
Published March 3, 2015 by

Broadcasts From the Far Side #3: Moon Called

Hello audiobook lovers, it’s time to announce my 3rd review for Luna Station Quarterly!  This one was truly rewarding.  Moon Called is the first book book in Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series: urban fantasy centered around werewolves, shapeshifters, fae and vampires.  It’s adventurous, suspenseful and funny and as always, great to see a female character in the lead role.  AND – Lorelei King, who narrates all the books in the series, is fabulous.  Polished voice, vibrant personality, and she took time from her busy life to give me some wonderful answers to my interview questions.  Please go check out the review at Luna Station, and then go out and find yourself a great listen!

 

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Photo “Moon” by OldakQuill – Self-photographed. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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2015 Documentary Watch Project: Twenty Feet From Stardom
Published March 1, 2015 by

2015 Documentary Watch Project: Twenty Feet From Stardom

Nobody told me February has only 28 days, so uh…that’s why this blog post is a little late.  I did watch Twenty Feet From Stardom (my February choice in my planned 12-Month Documentary Watch Project) last night, which has to count for something.  And I’m still thinking about it this morning.   That’s definitely a sign that a film has affected me.

I feel like everyone but me has seen Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet From Stardom and I’m late to the party, so for those of you who watched it when it came out in 2014 and cheered when it won the Academy Award for Best Documentary – I think we both know where I’m going with this.  This what?  I hesitate to call this a review (or to call any of my Documentary Watch Project posts “reviews”) – so call it an After-Party.

Quite simply, this is a documentary about backup singers.  And of course, it is so much more than that.  It’s a fiery, tearful, rollicking portrayal of a gifted group of artists – mostly women – who have given their lives to music.

I keep imagining that one day I’ll have to convince someone (a friend who avoids documentaries, an acquaintance who’s “not really into music that much,” someone who’s just too busy) to watch this film.  I’ll start with the music.  How pretty much everything good in the worlds of Pop, R&B, Blues, and Rock and Roll is rooted in the power and glory of gospel.  I’ll say, if you love the girl groups of the sixties and Ray Charles and The Rolling Stones and Talking Heads, then you should see this film.  And then I’ll realize that’s not what I meant to say at all.  What I want to say is, if you’ve ever listened to a song that moved you like being lightning-struck, chances are it’s because of the background vocalists, and here, go watch their stories, watch them sing their hearts out because they deserve your full attention.

I’m talking about:

Merry Clayton telling the story of how, hair in curlers in the middle of the night, she recorded her shattering howl of an aria that made the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” the timeless song it is.  How, in her own words, she sang the crap out of “Sweet Home Alabama,” and then went on to record Neil Young’s “Southern Man” with bluesy, life or death gusto.

The Waters Family, sitting around a kitchen table singing an impromptu, a cappella rendition of “Up Where We Belong” and blowing the roof off the house.

Darlene Love talking about how she’s actually the signature vocalist for not just one but two songs that were attributed to The Crystals (“He’s a Rebel” and “He’s Sure The Boy I Love”).

Lisa Fischer, whose voice surely is powerful enough to be heard in Interstellar space.

You’ve never heard of any of these singers?  I hadn’t either, but we’ve all heard them.  In the background.  What a joy that this film grabbed ahold of the spotlight and aimed it away from the foreground, if only for a while.

Twenty Feet From Stardom is a celebration of music, but of course like any industry it’s about work and survival.  The struggle for fame, and failure despite extraordinary talent.  Claudia Lennear, who performed with practically everybody and danced like nobody’s business right next to Tina Turner for years, is now a Spanish teacher (and yes, who’s to say that’s not as, or more, meaningful).  Darlene Love was finally inducted into the Music Hall of Fame in 2011, but so many of the background singers portrayed here have dreams of making it big by going out on their own.  There are the solo albums with rave reviews and little commercial success.  I have to say I admired Lisa Fischer so much because she can blend her voice into a backup group as is necessary, but still assert her own musical identity.  And, if there’s just a hint of melancholy about her, she carries on.

I think that’s the most difficult part of being an artist, and it’s my takeaway from this film.  So many of us who want to do art – be it music, writing, painting, photography, sculpture, dance – so many of us are never going to “make it.”  We will have day jobs in the background for all our lives.  But we keep going, because it’s worth it.

In Twenty Feet From Stardom, there’s a moment I almost missed, when the singer Táta Vega says, softly and humbly, I just loved music is all.  It’s all I wanted to do.

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Stage photo from Unsplash

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