amy in alabama

Escapes: Old House, Organic Farm

I love this story.  Rarely does the thought of knee-deep snow make me want to be somewhere I'm not, but this story inspires me to move, look, listen, and work.  

Beekman 1802

geophagia, or just tasting?

My friend Shelby showed me how to taste dirt.         

"I eat dirt," she said out of the blue.  I wasn't sure what she meant at the time, and waved off the statement in favor of a more tangible course of conversation.  But when she invited me out to watch a sawmill in action, I was inducted into the practice of tasting soil for it's composition and texture.

While she isn't a geophagist , although she admits to spooning red clay down her gullet in the past, when she was anemic, and still harbors a predilection for crunchy New York shale, Shelby looks for the aspects a good soil needs for gardening: clay, to supply good drainage, silt, which is rich in organic matter, and sand, which aids in drainage and heat retention.  In my Master Gardener class they taught us to look for these elements by massaging the soil in our hands.  Oh, but it's so much more fun to taste it!  

my found putty poem

My friend Rob recently gave me a green Silly Puddy.  "It's a stress reliever," he said.  

I've been using it all week as I struggle to finish a final draft of a story I've been working on for a long, long time.  This evening I'm very close.  This afternoon, when I was close, I sent Rob an email thanking him for my Silly Puddy, and he sent this back:  

"My God, that's a found poem!" 

Found poetry is taken from already existing text and re-shaped, re-designed into poetic stanzas, often without the poet adding a single word.  T.S. Eliot is noted to use this form in The Wasteland.  Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are also noted to have worked in the genre.  I share my Silly Puddy poem with you, as originally written and misspelled, but re-formed into poetic lines by practiced published poet friend, Rob.  Kumquat Meringue  is an inside joke (and also a magazine).  I'd share the joke, but it's not that funny.  

Kumquat Meringue! 

by Amy Collins

I love my green Silly Putty!

It helps me think and write.

I play with it all the time.

I can't stop touching it.

 But I dropped it on the carpet

and now it's all fuzzy.  

Here are some found poems from our former Secretary of Defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, as re-printed by Slate Magazine.

The Unknown

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns,

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Glass Box

You know, it's the old glass box at the—

At the gas station,

Where you're using those little things

Trying to pick up the prize,

And you can't find it.

It's—

And it's all these arms are going down in there,

And so you keep dropping it

And picking it up again and moving it,

But—

Some of you are probably too young to remember those—

Those glass boxes,

But—

But they used to have them

At all the gas stations

When I was a kid.

—Dec. 6, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing

A Confession

Once in a while,

I'm standing here, doing something.

And I think,

"What in the world am I doing here?"

It's a big surprise.

—May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

Try your own found poetry                    

and post it 

here 

under comments!!!

How To: clean a chicken stomach

Last Fall my friends Bill and Shelby invited me out to their farm to learn how to kill and gut chickens.  Oddly enough I was elated at the idea of learning a skill I never in a million years would need to know.  And I may not.  

I had just finished reading all of Michael Pollan's books and The Omnivore's Dilemma was particularly fresh in my mind.  The book chronicles Pollan's journey to discover exactly where his food comes from, including an in-depth look at corn, tracking steer number 534 and its unnatural diet of corn, and a stint with Joel Salatin on his uber-organic, fully sustainable, days-of-yore pastoral farm.  It was the Joel Salatin experience I was after.  

Unlike Pollan I did not feel queasy during or after the experience.  I found it liberating to know exactly where my dinner was coming from and that I, not some far away, indifferent line worker, slaughtered and cleaned the animal.  These chickens were raised naturally, and the distance from live bird to what looked like a store-bought chicken that I recognized (only cleaner and better smelling) was not that far. 

We recorded three hours of footage that day, but I like this short tutorial of Bill explaining a chicken's stomach.  The quality is a bit crude, but so were the day's events.

Nothing to Lose

My friend Ayana sent this link to me, and suggested I watch the video when I feel lazy and disinterested in writing (working).  There is nothing more tangible in life than the present and the present is exactly what we do with it.  I find inspiration in this woman's very real, very present condition.

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/02/11/multimedia/1231547593665/a-paintbrush-and-nothing-to-lose.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

the impetus

How could I forget the impetus for the commune conversation?  We're not going separatist or lesbian, but maybe half and half.

My Sister's Keeper

Alapine isn't far from where I live.  Is that irony?

Trashing the Fridge but Keeping the Spa Tub

If you're not Going Green these days you might as well consider yourself heathen.  If you take your own cloth bags to the supermarket and eschew environmentally incorrect plastic baggies, worm compost (even in your tiny no-outdoor-space apartment), buy products made from recycled materials, or eat locally grown organic foods, you're doing something.  Everyone is doing something.  These eccentric folks are pushing the parameters by throwing out their refrigerators:  Trashing the Fridge        

A friend, and my mother and I have been casually talking about establishing a sustainable commune, only more like an old school neighborhood where everyone helps everyone else.  One mower might sustain the lawns of three families instead of one per household (of course I'm all for eradicating cookie-cutter, unnaturally established lawns and replacing with native plants and grasses).  In our commune we grow all our own veggies and fruits and a few grains.  We have dinner together, but each have our own space - secluded and respectfully private.  We are not converting our vehicles into decorative planters or trading in for a horse and buggy.  Lure of Rural Living Draws City Couple 

We'll keep chickens, cows, goats, and self-gorging geese for foie gras.  We'll have DSL, a cooling unit, furnace, and spa tub in every yurt.  Yes, we'll live in yurts.  Colorado Yurt Company photos page

Now that my iPod is re-charged, I have to get back to watering the leaf mulch.

Visit the Prado from Home via Google Earth

There's no argument Google Earth is pretty damn cool.  Mapquest might get us driving directions (albeit not necessarily the most efficient route), but 3D Technology allows us to experience an actual image of an office building where we have an upcoming appointment, or someone's house we've never visited, from our home computers.   Providing visual landmarks alongside those mile by mile directions, the detail of these images are astounding, if not a touch voyeuristic.  Is that my host pacing naked in the front window?

Introducing High Art: The Prado Museum in Madrid is the first to launch an online collection via Google Earth.  View 15 masterpieces, including Rueben's The Three Graces, Goya's The 3rd of May 1808, and Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.  You couldn't get closer if you were standing in front of the painting.

Check out the short video on how they make this possible, too.  If you already have Google Earth, open the application and in the Fly To box, type museo del prado.

The Prado in Google Earth  

NY Times Escapes - Green Heat

It's nice the Times can comfortably print articles focused on second homes.  And a sign the country hasn't completely gone into penny-pinching, is it not?    

More interestingly, this article looks at various ways of heating your home when making energy efficiency a priority.  My new neighbors, who've just built and moved into their retirement home, installed a heat-from-the-ground system like the one mentioned in todays Escapes section.   

"He added: “It has a water-pipe loop that goes into the ground and comes back up to actually use the earth as its heat sink. So even though it might be zero degrees outside, the earth temperature is still at 65, as soon you go down a couple feet.” Since the pump uses nature to do the heating and cooling, you can cut down on the electricity you use for those functions by 30 to 40 percent."

The article discusses other ideas as well.

Staying Warm, Staying Green: your second home/heating systems

Organics in the Wine Industry

When I was selling wine in New York, organic wines, namely wines made from organically grown grapes, increasingly became a concern among my retail buyers, and naturally, their customers.  And why not?  As consumers grow more concerned about where their food is coming from and why more of it isn't grown, harvested, or packaged in a more ethical fashion, shouldn't we be just as concerned about our imbibing vice?  Wine, after all, is a living entity.  It breathes, it changes in the barrel, the bottle, and your glass while you sip between bites.  When you drink an organically, ethically produced wine the mind can rest knowing your pleasure has not left the earth unnecessarily abused.

This is a great new website, with a posting from my friend Lyle Fass:  

Organic Wine Journal