I don’t care. Really, this time. I do. Not. Care. And I hope you don’t, either. I don’t care about the latest earthshattering crisis in Qatar. I don’t care about Qatar. I don’t care if the whole bloody Middle East (with the exception of Israel) devours itself in fire and brimstone. I don’t care what “covfefe” really means. And I don’t care that covfefe was last week’s craze and mentioning it now shows I’m hopelessly out of step with current events. I don’t care if the Russians hacked the 2016 presidential election — any more than I care about who…
Author: Claire
I promised (or for those of you uninterested in art, perhaps I threatened) to make a post on the details of painting a religious icon. So here goes. If you want to skip the longish intro, there are lots of pictures and short descriptions of the process below. In the beginning For those coming in late, I spent the first full week of June at an Eastern Catholic monastery, courtesy of a friend who dared my non-religious self to do it and courtesy of that friend and others who generously funded the expedition. Though I didn’t experience the leap of…
That name might not ring bells with most of you. Peder was the publisher at Paladin Press (which took over my titles when Mike Hoy closed Loompanics and which later published one of my lesser-known books). He died suddenly on June 3 while vacationing in Finland — which I suppose is a good way to go if you gotta go. But it left his traveling companion (and longtime wife? partner? co-worker) Sheila with the terrible necessity of dealing with both the U.S. and Finnish governments to get his body home. And of course it was a jolt to all the…
It’s January in June again here in the NorthWET and all the way into the mountains of California. Wind, hard rain, perhaps even snow in the upper elevations. A good day to huddle inside, read and think. Congressman Barry Loudermilk seems to understand that guns save lives back in his home state of Georgia. But (how predictable can these people be?), in D.C. he’s all in favor of only the special people being “allowed” to bear arms. OTOH, another congressguy who was also on the shooting scene performed a hellova lot better. Damnfine statement. Here it is in writing. The…
One day while staying at the monastery, I left to run errands and came across this strawberry stand. That’s all it sold. Just strawberries — straight from the field behind the tiny booth. On the outward leg, I noticed the place was mobbed. Half the residents of the area seemed to be there, not just buying pints but flats and flats. On the inbound leg, all the local residents seemed to be there. It took five or six clerks crammed inside the tiny stand to wait on everybody. I stopped and picked up a half-flat for the nuns. When they…
So. We have this big hit superhero movie. Directed by a woman. Staring not only a woman but a minority woman. And everybody loves it. Audiences flock to it. It had the biggest-ever opening weekend for a movie by a female director. Critics lavish praise upon it like relish on a summertime hot dog. And DC Comics breathes a huge sigh of relief that their otherwise dismal movie franchises are suddenly revived. By Wonder Woman You’d think the Speakers of the Feminist World would be over-the-moon delighted. That is, you would think so if you did not already understand that…
… I returned to discover that the hottest news during my absence was a peahen getting loose in a California liquor store and wrecking the place. Or maybe it was some story about one political liar lying about another political liar Comey and Trump. Or North Korea testing more missiles. But the peahen story was definitely more relevant. (Though will somebody please tell the “journalist” who covered that one that even in this day of trans-anything, “female peacock” is still not an actual thing?) In other vital news of the day, J.R.R. Tolkein has just come out with another new…
… is coming home. More over the weekend when I’m recovered. But for now, I’ll just say that at the monastery I was well-fed, well-accommodated, enchanted by beautiful (though incomprehensible) church services, in excellent company, and very well-satisfied with being a student iconographer. Thank you for making it possible.
This afternoon, or perhaps tomorrow morning depending, I head off to the long-awaited iconography workshop. I’ll be staying at a monastery for nearly a week. Though I will take the laptop, I have no idea whether there’s wifi in the vicinity. Under the circumstances this is a question I’d feel really off-point asking. So if I don’t blog until next weekend, don’t worry. I haven’t been kidnapped by agents of the Deep State or taken up into an alien spacecraft and subjected to anal probes (but I repeat myself). I’m just studying icons and enjoying away-time, courtesy of the retreat…