I could have missed it had I not 
mistakenly pulled my curtain apart when I noticed that the colour outside was not what it was less than an hour earlier. In any case, I’m glad I pulled back the curtain because the snow, even though not as much as in the other parts of the country, was a wonderful reminder of the seasons, and why it is called a White Christmas. I’m glad that we don’t have a blizzard. It’s little enough to impress, so far, and plenty enough to look like a real White Christmas. Here are a few of the shots.
Browsing the archives for the Art category.
I’ve never received so many cards and gifts in my adult life as I did during this Christmas season. The last time I felt this special, I think I was really very young. Reham bought me a very cool branded shirt. Yvonne a professor sharing my office got me a cordless mouse. At the office party last week, Professor Doug Simms gave me a very thoughtful Christmas card and a surprise monetary gift, among the many other things received from friends and colleagues in the mail. Yesterday, I received a chapbook from Richard Berengarten whose poem Volta I translated into Yoruba in November, along with other Christmas cards.
Here then is a collage of my Christmas greetings and postcards, some received, some given. Merry Christmas to you wherever you are. May the happiness go around.
With love from KTravula
I have a problem reading myself for a second time. I can barely read it for the first time at all. I write a piece of work, I try to read it again with an editing eye and I get strangely disgusted. I can barely make it through to the end. When I eventually do, I see only the things in my head, and not the words on the sheet, and I find that I have not edited it at all, but just endured another needless ordeal of re-reading.
I am lazy. With fiction, I fail with imagination but succeed somewhat with memory. I may thrive on details but sag on the fictive dexterity of their expression. I’m not a writer, and I know it. I am only a bearer of stories. With poetry, it becomes a little different. The muse descends, rides me roughly like the spirit in a possessed body, and leaves, leaving something pretty behind that I sometimes like to read again and again, although it scarcely leaves space to take full credit. So I can’t write a poem on the spot to save my life, or so I like to think. I will find out perhaps when there’s a gun to my head and an loud order to “Show me you’re a poet. Write something before I waste your brain on this concrete floor.”
Knowledge is for philosophers. Imagination is for writers. Only one of them changes the world, and -hint, hint- it’s not knowledge. Really. So as soon as I can exchange my junk of knowledge for liberty of imagination, I will be a writer. Until then, let me just be me, the quiet observing traveller in this American wilderness. Perhaps also, a bearer of stories.
(Picture credits: A fridge sticker at the house of Nigerian writer Ikhide Ikheloa, taken in Maryland on the 14th December 2009)
MARY: Joe, we’re gonna have a baby.
JOE: What? That’s impossible. All I ever do is put it between your thighs.
MARY: Well, I don’t know. Something must’ve gone wrong.
JOE: Who says you’re pregnant?
MARY: An angel appeared to me in the backyard and said so.
JOE: An angel?
MARY: An angel of God. His name was Gabriel. He had a trumpet and he appeared to me in the backyard.
JOE: He what?
MARY: He appeared to me.
JOE: Was he naked?
MARY: No. I think he had on a raincoat. I don’t really know. He was glowing so brightly.
JOE: Mary, you’re under a lot of stress. Why don’t you take a few days off from the shop? The accounts can wait.
MARY: I’m telling you, Joe. This Angel Gabriel said that God wanted me to have this baby.
JOE: Did you ask for some sort of sign?
MARY: Of course I did. He said tomorrow I’d start getting sick.
JOE: But why should God want a kid?
MARY: Well, Gabriel said that according to Luke it’s kind of an ego thing. Plus, he promised the Jews a long time ago, it’s just that he never got around to it. But now he feels ready for children he doesn’t want to just make them out of clay or dust. He wants to get humans involved.
JOE: Well, is he going to help toward raising the kid? God knows we can’t do it alone. I could use a bigger shop, and maybe he could throw a couple of those nice crucifix contracts my way. The Romans are nailin’ up everything that walks.
MARY: Honey, Gabriel said not to worry. The kid would be a real winner. A public speaker and good with miracles.
JOE: Well, that’s a relief. Anyway, now that your officially pregnant I cant start puttin’ it inside you.
MARY: I’m sorry, honey. God wants it to be strictly a virgin birth.
JOE: I don’t get it.
MARY: That’s right, Joe.
JOE: Don’t I get to do anything?
MARY: He wants you to come up with a name for the kid.
JOE: Jesus Christ!
MARY: Don’t curse, Joe!
END
Culled from When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops, New York Times Bestseller by George Carlin.
NOTE: Those familiar with the original text will notice that I have changed the last line, the words from Mary, for effect. You may head here to see the original text and decide which you prefer.
(Photo taken at the Nativity play by children at the Episcopalian Church at Edwardsville on Sunday)
In the dark corner of the hall,
perhaps forgotten by her mistress,
silent and dusty,
laid the harp.
So many notes slept in her strings,
as the songbird sleeps in the branches,
waiting for the snowy hand
that knows how to awake them!
Alas! – I thought – how often does genius
likewise sleep in the deepest of the heart,
and a voice, like Lazarus, awaits
to be told “Rise and walk!
Poem by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
and Clarissa, my Amigo Secreto.
NOTE: The game ended yesterday.