Yes, you read right. Some of Ston We e Mountain Art Center’s finest patrons and crew will be competing for the crown and the title of “Mistah SMAC 2010“. In 2008 we did this and Mister Peter Blue remains the reigning king. Come see our area’s finest men challenge him for his crown. have hand picked the contestants and they will not disappoint you, as they show you their talents, their strengths, their intellect, and well, their stuff! (sorry…no nudity). Come see them in their native garb of tool belts, carharts, overalls….and it’s all for a great cause. The guys who are willing to do this, are most likely your neighbors and friends. They will really need your support and of course so does the library!!!!! C’mon out for the fun ot it. The first Mistah SMAC we did, was one of the funnest and funniest nights we have ever had here at SMAC. My Jeff even built a runway for them! From an audience perspective the ladies will love it, and you men will be glad you’re not in it!! So please come out and support our little library and the select few men who are willing to embarrass themselves for a good cause. Tickets are $21 and $20 of every ticket will go to the Library.

for more info go to: http://stonemountainartscenter.com/ArtsCenter/Mistah-SMAC.html

Edition of 100 for Doctors without Borders You can buy now on the Haiti Poster Project website.

Toussaint L’Ouverture / Nobility of Spririt

Bradford Fuller/ Edge of Maine Editions

To Toussaint L’Ouverture

William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

TOUSSAINT, the most unhappy man of men!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—

O miserable Chieftain! where and when

Wilt thou find patience? Yet die not; do thou

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

There’s not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind.

Artist Blair Folts will be exhibiting at the
Edge of Maine Gallery on Main St.

Mongolia Postcard Project and Mongolian Journals

Blair Folts traveled across western Mongolia in August and September of 2009 and invited herders along the way to create postcards to send back to friends in the USA.  She then invited the recipients of these postcards to create their own cards to send back to the Mongolians.  “Travel was really remote and very challenging but the gifts were enormous.

Folts had traveled in Mongolia in 2006 and fell in love with the open landscape and friendly families.  She was drawn back to visit partly because of the beauty but also because of how connected the nomads are to nature. People still live nomadically and tend to move 4-5 times a year following grasslands as the seasons change  The landscape was harsh and less vegetated than even New Mexico.  There were 4000 meter mountains, fields of edelweiss, yaks, camels, goats, horses, sheep, and open and hospitable people.  She stayed only with local families and spent at least two nights with them.  Some families she stayed with as long as five days. This allowed her to participate in their day to day activities ranging from milking animals, making felt, learning how to slaughter and clean animals for food to making cheese and yogurt.  Even though the nomads do not have many possessions, they welcomed her into their homes and she slept on the floor of their gers with them.

Throughout the trip, Folts spent time sketching the surrounding landscape.  “For me, sketching is the best way to really capture what you are seeing and forces you to look at your new landscape in very detailed way—more than a camera which is so immediate. Sketching gives you the opportunity to just sit and stare at some amazing scenes and take simple delight in where you are,”  In addition to the postcards, Folts will also be exhibiting work on paper, paintings and small installations inspired by her journey.

To learn more about this project please visit these websites

mongoliapostcards.blog.com

www.blairfolts.com.

Glass’ interpretation, rendered in 1992 after the death of his young wife, Candy Jernigan, explores the dark romantic fascination with death and ruin embodied by the existentialists of post-Lost Generation France (Glass based his work on Cocteau’s film Orfée, c. 1950). Orpheus is a young contemporary poet who after having achieved great success has fallen out of style, as evinced by the opening scene at a party for his rival, a young poet named Cegeste. Drunk and reckless Cegeste is involved in a brawl, then runs out in to the street and is hit by two paranormal motorcyclists. Death, disguised as The Princess, then enlists the soul of Cegeste and her chauffeur Heurtebise (Hermes) in a ruse designed to ensnare Orpheus, with whom she has fallen in love. To pull him down to the underworld, Death takes his wife Eurydice “without orders,” while Orpheus is entranced by cryptic messages that are being broadcast on a radio station that is tuned to the other side. Orpheus deliriously interprets the surrealist jargon as creative inspiration. What’s novel about the Cocteau-Glass interpretation (besides the latter motifs of a spirit radio station, Death being the editor of a publishing company, etc) is that they are two among sixty six other versions that have happy endings, departing from classic Roman versions by Virgil and Ovid.

Review: Orphée Written by Philip Glass; Presented by the Portland Opera. November 12 & 14 @ Keller Auditorium
November 11, 2009 — PDXPIPELINE
Posted by Sasha Burchuk

click on image to watch on you tube

aster
1. A star-shaped structure seen during cell division.
2. A structure occurring in dividing cells, composed of microtubules (tubes made up of protein that are used to make structures involved in cellular movement) radiating from each pair of centrioles.
3. Any of various plants of the genus Aster in the composite family, having radiate flower heads with white, pink, or violet rays and a usually yellow disk.
asteria
A gemstone cut to show asterism or a star-shaped figure exhibited by some crystals by reflected light (as in a star sapphire) or by transmitted light (as in some mica).
asterial
Starlike, a fossil starfish.
asteriated
A description of a crystal that reflects light in a star shape.
asterion
The point on the side of the skull where the lambdoid (a dense, fibrous connective tissue joint on the posterior aspect of the skull), parieto-mastoid (bony process off the base of the skull that is composed of air cells), and occipito-mastoid sutures (a visible, so-called craniometric, point on the exposed skull, just behind the ear, where three cranial sutures meet).
asterisk
1. A small star-like symbol (*), used in writing and printing as a reference mark or to indicate omission, doubtful matter, etc.
2. In linguistics, the figure of a star (*) used to mark an utterance that would be considered ungrammatical or otherwise unacceptable by native speakers of a language, as in >I>* I enjoy to ski.
3. In historical linguistics, the figure of a star (*) used to mark a hypothetical or reconstructed form that is not confirmed in a text or inscription.
4. Something in the shape of a star or asterisk (*).
asterisked
Marked with an asterisk (*).
asterism
1. In astronomy, a cluster of stars (or a small constellation).
2. In mineralogy, a six-rayed star-shaped figure seen in some crystal structures under reflected or transmitted light.
3. Etymology: from Greek asterismos, from asterizein, “to arrange in constellations”; from aster-, “star”.
asterismal
A reference to or relating to asterisms or constellations.
asteristic
A statistic which requires further explanation or qualification, making it less valid.
asterite
A star stone.
asteroid
1. Any of numerous small celestial bodies that revolve around the sun, with orbits lying chiefly between Mars and Jupiter and characteristic diameters between a few and several hundred kilometers.
2. Shaped like a star.
asteroidal
A reference to a star-shaped object or objects.
asteroid belt
The region of the solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, where most of the asteroids orbit.
Asteroidea
A class comprising the starfish.

Also Dis-aster=loss of connection to the stars.

“He does not believe in the disaster. One cannot believe in it, whether one lives or dies. Commensurate with it there is no faith, and at the same time a sort of disinterest, detached from the disaster. Night; white, sleepless night- such is the disaster: the night lacking darkness, but brightened by no light. Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone, and indecipherable for oneself? If disaster means being separated from the star (if it means the decline which characterizes disorientation when the link with fortune from on high is cut), then it indicates a fall beneath disastrous necessity.”
– Blanchot

WRITTEN BY JOHN MOONEY
for Soldade Magazine

Just think, in prehistoric times some guy named Og was in cave drawing on a wall the goings on in his everyday life. You know, hunting mastodons, running away from saber toothed tigers, recording the mankind’s first ’hot foot’ practical joke and such. ’Og’s blog’ we could call it and ever since, humans have always had this penchant for interpreting life as he (or she) sees it. Whether beating on drums, sending smoke signals, carrier pigeons, printing presses, telegraph wires or radios we always felt the need to get the word out.
For me, my writing graduated from lined tablet paper to an Underwood manual typewriter weighing more than a Ford engine block and adorned with metal keys requiring fingers of steel just to plunk them down. And now fast forward to the 21rst century and the blogosphere. This electronic medium allows anyone with a computer and internet access along with a desire to write to reach an unfathomable amount of people in today’s global community. For those of you that have read some of my stories in Sodade Magazine I must tell you,
it has been a treat for me to learn about a music so totally different from the rock and roll, jazz and blues I was raised on. Add to that the chance to hang with some of Cape Verde’s most interesting artists and the word “rewarding” falls well short of what these opportunities have meant to me. So now I find myself blogging for Sodadeonline and with no delusions that billions and billions will migrate to this web site. Nah. It’s quality not quantity that counts and whether you are Capeverdean or have an interest in CV culture, that’s why you’re here. Welcome.
And unlike writing stories for Sodade Magazine, I actually feel free to use the first person, singular (for me, using it in a magazine article takes way from the story’s subject) and share with you the occasional thought, opinion or vignette. If you feel particularly attached to Cape Verde and furrow your brow at some of my musings, please remember I am coming at you with a ‘perspectivo Americano’ and an American who lives way off the beaten path. Whether it’s spending time in Cape Verde or living in the mountains of Maine, I have always enjoyed the road less traveled. And a lap top travels lighter than an Underwood so here we go.

Check out John’s Article on Hopi radio written for Sodade magazine:
Listen Live to Brother John on WMPG Radio Every tuesday morning on the “Gooveyard Shift” (6:30AM-8:30AM)

Author: Joshua Potter ()
Date:   2007-04-10 07:43:51.0

I hope you can join me for part of the day on Sunday, October 14, 2007 for our first try at a Big Sit!

The Big Sit! is organized by Bird Watcher’s Digest, and is in it’s 13th year. The Sit is a 24-hour bird survey from within a 17-foot diameter circle. Anyone is welcome to come help count for as long or as short amount of time during the 24 hours as they want.

We are setting up our 17-foot diameter count circle near the parking area in the Brownfield Bog in Brownfield, ME. I stopped by the Bog yesterday to scope out the best spot to spend the day, and while there I saw some nice birds that I hope will hang around for another week or so. Here is my list of species in about an hour’s time, from basically the same spot:

Double-crested Cormorant (4)
American Kestrel (2+)
Northern Harrier
Ring-necked Duck (1 male)
Wood Duck (8+)
Great Blue Heron
Belted Kingfisher
Gray Catbird
American Goldfinch
Dark-eyed Junco
Black-capped Chickadee
Song Sparrow
American Robin
American Crow
Thrush species

If you want to participate, or just come visit, give me a call at Tin Mountain at 603-447-6991 and I will give you the details

Team Name:
Tin Mountain Conservation Center
Circle Captain:
Joshua Potter
Circle Location:
Brownfield, Maine (United States)
Participants:
Joshua Potter, Tony Federer, Jeremy Bean
Comments:
Weather: Cold, windy, alternating between overcast and partly sunny
Location: Brownfield Bog (near parking area), Brownfield, ME
Time At Location: 4:45AM – 7:00PM
Some of our big misses included a lack of waterfowl (including a Ring-necked Duck that was there last week!), Northern Harrier, Belted Kingfisher, and any Nuthatch. Our highlight was most likely the Northern Pintail female that winged in with some mallards and black ducks to become species number 31. Lots and lots of Kinglets and Yellow-rumped Warblers. Two Eastern Phoebes kept us company all day as they hawked insects about 50 feet from us.
Anecdotes:
Three birders undertook a cold, blustery Big Sit in the Brownfield Bog on Sunday. I kicked it off at 4:45AM decked in many layers and a blanket, straining my ears in the dark hoping for a return of the Great Horned Owl I had heard the previous evening while setting up the 17-ft. circle. At 5:10AM, perhaps starting to nod off a bit in my Adirondack chair, I was jolted by a beaver tail-slap not 20 feet from where I was seated. Later I could hear him out in a clump of alder chewing on what I can only imagine was some tasty cambium. At 5:30 the wind that would be a companion most of the day kicked up, making owling a bit more difficult. Finally at 5:53AM the Great Horned Owl began asking me if I also was awake (barely). The call was initially so soft that I had to step out of the circle a little ways to make sure it wasn’t a distant dog. Within a few minutes though, he had moved closer. From then until 9:30, I rarely went 15 minutes without adding another species. By 12:30PM we would have 32 species, by 7PM, 33. I was thankfully accompanied in the circle for most of the daylight hours by Tony Federer and Jeremy Bean. This Big Sit thing is much more fun as a social enterprise. On the mammal front, we had beaver, red squirrel, chipmunk, and gray squirrel. And shortly after dawn a short-tailed weasel ran thorough the circle about two feet in front of my toes. A great event! Next year we may even put a second circle somewhere else in the bog to see how the diversity compares.

Maine’s Brownfield Bog feels like home to Bridie McGreavy.
The sun shone in the late afternoon sky and orange light filtered through long blue stem grasses. White clouds illuminated by a deep blue sky drifted high above and the air made my nostrils tingle with every intake of breath. On this day, I was walking in the Brownfield Bog with my mom and her dog Ned. The Brownfield Bog is a vast wetland system in Maine’s Saco River watershed, one that I have been exploring since early childhood. A single road cuts through the western edge of this wildlife management area, ending at a place locally known as Goose Pasture, although I don’t remember ever seeing geese here. An old red oak tree at the end of the road into Goose Pasture is a favorite destination on our regular walks, where we sit and watch the wetlands that surround the peninsula. We entered Goose Pasture as we usually do, breaking from the dark forest of poplar and striped maple into open fields surrounded by water.
Approaching the gnarled oak at the end of the road, I caught sight of movement on the sand and spied a shiny black and purple wasp with a long thin stinger. A brown spider with black beady eyes stood unmoving nearby in the sand, its front legs raised. The wasp approached the spider and darted its long stinger into the spider’s abdomen. Again. And again. The two were locked in a jousting match, the spider clearly on the defense against the wasp’s deadly lance. The wasp pierced the spider until its movements were barely perceptible and then the spider froze, paralyzed. The wasp grasped the spider between its forelegs and hauled it away through the grasses. My impulse was to follow, but I did not, leaving the two to finish the encounter unwatched.
Stories from the bog
At that moment, I wondered if there was more to the wasp and spider story than a simple predator-prey interaction. With every trip into the Brownfield Bog, I experience something that makes me pause and wonder. This experience was no different from the countless others. Like when I was nine years old and saw a turtle laying its eggs for the first time, perfect white spheres dropping into a half-dollar size hole in the dirt road. Two years ago, when I came face-to-face with a very surprised moose, which looked me straight in the eyes for 10 seconds, snorted, turned, and ambled off through the woods. The time I entered Goose Pasture and the old red oak had lost a limb, creating a dread in my heart that my tree will soon become someone else’s firewood. The time I watched two marsh hawks glide and dip over the leatherleaf bog patches, their white rumps flashing as they searched for mice and small birds. Over the years here, I have witnessed nature in its varied forms, repeating patterns and new refrains. The wasp and spider experience did not strike me as anything but another interesting encounter, and I did not give it much thought after leaving the bog. Until the following year on nearly the same date.
The day was again classic weather that fools you into thinking the afternoon will last forever. In the exact same spot, near the old red oak, I came upon the wasp and the spider locked in battle once again. My heart and head pulsed with excitement and confusion. How could this scene be repeating itself? How could I be so lucky to see this incredible interaction again? What does this mean? The term dejá vu does not even come close to describing my reaction.
This was not just an amazing natural event that I was lucky to witness two years in a row. This was the moment that I came to understand the power of “place.” At that moment, I felt the heartbeat of the Earth in perfect rhythm, a natural reverberation that is as old as life itself. A subtle pulse that you only become attuned to with repetition, experiencing the ebb and tide of the seasons in one place, until you know what to expect, but at the same time are constantly surprised by the newness.
A sense of place
What is “place?” Like the old red oak in the bog, place has roots that sink into the Earth, grounding us to the here and now. A sense of place grows with time, branching in new directions but maintaining the core, the trunk that supports its growth. You can branch out and grow to love other places, like Johnson Mountain, Holt Pond, the backyard of the house in which I now live. But the bog is home, the place I always come back to in my mind and body. The leaves of a tree provide a final metaphor for place. I find that like the tree, the sun fuels my connection to place. On a brilliant day, the bog is the place I long for.
I later learned the science behind what I observed on those two occasions. The wasp, commonly referred to as a mud dauber, is a species belonging to the family Ichneumonidae. Mud daubers hunt spiders and other arthropods, paralyzing them with their long, poison-tipped stingers. The wasp then drags the body to the nest it creates for its young. When the young hatch, they feed on the paralyzed, yet still fresh, spider.
This scientific explanation is fascinating. However for me, the real meaning in this encounter is in the awareness that I could have missed seeing it, twice. But I didn’t. I was there, present in my senses. And I was there because I love it, my home.
Bridie McGreavy is watershed education manager at the Lakes Environmental Association in Bridgton, Maine http://www.mainelakes.org. A version of this article appeared in the “Earth Notes” column in The Bridgton News.

© 2007 The Gulf of Maine Times

circinate ring-shaped; rolled inwards; spiralling
cochlear anything spiral-shaped; twisted spirally
deiform appearing like or shaped like a god
floriform shaped like a flower
oculiform shaped like an eye
penniform feather-shaped
phylliform shaped like a leaf
stellate star-shaped; starry
stelliform shaped like a star
strombuliform shaped like a spinning top; spirally twisted

Musician and critic David Was reviews the latest from singer/songwriter Carol Noonan
Click here for Review

Longtime resident of Brownfield, Joyce Peseroff is the author of four books of poems and editor of three additional collections. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Artist Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Reviews:

“Musical, contemplative, often wry, Joyce Peseroff’s rueful quietude can be fractured by a bravura wit that adventures with the layers of history, propelling the reader from the pastoral to the tragic world by denotations of language (see her adolescent self in a bikini: ‘Skin blistered pink, / you might as well have picnicked in the desert / under 3 or 4 nuclear tests’).”
— Gail Mazur

“… an unpredictable, colloquial poetry that adapts the casual, protective sense of a generation’s manners to the demands of art.”
— Robert Pinsky

“Joyce Peseroff makes a playful yet literally ominous poem called ‘Farmer’s Almanac’ out of a list of words and phrases from that venerable volume. Words are something she cherishes, and poem after poem has its tasty surprises: aleatory; cinquefoil, crimped, monicker, Selectric, waggle, woofing, zonked. Words themselves, of course, are not the whole story, and in this eagerly anticipated volume, much of it piercingly elegiac, Peseroff’s poems do what we wish all poetry would: make even sadness a source of pleasure, because her words always come alive, even (maybe even especially) in the process of lamenting what’s been – or is about to be – lost.”
— Lloyd Schwartz

Carnegie Mellon University Press
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Named after Asclepius, the greek god of healing, who emerged from a marriage of light (Apollo) and darkness (Koronis – one of the names for Asclepius’ mother), of heaven with earth.

Bob Thompson, when not interviewing and writing about the great literary minds of our century, reserves his halcyon days for Brownfield. Check out this web exclusive just out in the American Scholar.

www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-about-writers/

Meaning
Calm, peaceful days.
Origin

Halcyon is a name for a bird of Greek legend which is commonly associated with the kingfisher. The phrase comes from the ancient belief that fourteen days of calm weather were to be expected around the winter solstice – usually 21st or 22nd of December in the Northern Hemisphere. as that was when the halcyon calmed the surface of the sea in order to brood her eggs on a floating nest. The Halcyon days are generally regarded as beginning on the 14th or 15th of December.
Halcyon means calm and tranquil, or ‘happy or carefree’. It is rarely used now apart from in the expression halcyon days. The name of the legendary bird was actually alcyon, the ‘h’ was added in regard to the supposed association with the sea (‘hals’ in Greek).
The source of the belief in the bird’s power to calm the sea originated in a myth recorded by Ovid. The story goes that Aeolus, the ruler of the winds, had a daughter named Alcyone, who was married to Ceyx, the king of Thessaly. Ceyx was drowned at sea and Alcyone threw herself into the sea in grief. Instead of drowning, she was carried to her husband by the wind. The rest of the story is, in a translation of Ovid:
The Gods their shapes to winter-birds translate,
But both obnoxious to their former fate.
Their conjugal affection still is ty’d,
And still the mournful race is multiply’d:
They bill, they tread; Alcyone compress’d,
Sev’n days sits brooding on her floating nest:
A wintry queen: her sire at length is kind,
Calms ev’ry storm, and hushes ev’ry wind;
Prepares his empire for his daughter’s ease,
And for his hatching nephews smooths the seas.

quoted from the phrase finder