Girly Bulletin Board

In my ongoing aspiration to be more like Laura, I made some of the embroidery-circle cork boards she blogged about. She was right—cheap and easy (and fun) to make! I assembled them while sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching Magnificent Obsession last night.


I divided my time between sawing through foam core with an x-acto knife and wondering just what was going on with Jane Wyman's hair. Is it short? Is it an updo? She's only 37 in this movie—why does she look so much older to me? Is it the hair, or is it that she's forever imprinted in my mind as the Falcon Crest matriarch? Or is it that her leading man Rock Hudson looked like he was about 18 in this movie?
Anyhoo, I want to Netflix another melodrama and make a couple more circles, to fill out this space above my desk. Also, I suspect the process is slightly addictive. Tennis elbow has kept me from knitting and sheer laziness has kept me from sewing—embroidery-circle cork boards could become my métier.

Gorgeousity

I finally took in my über-talented friend Amber's letterpress broadside to be framed, after years (years!) of planning to do so someday. I had two copies, so the title page/back page is on the left, and the inside of the booklet is on the right. The poem is one of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, next to an English translation by William Gass.

I love the poem:

Anticipate all farewells, as if they were behind you
like the winter that's just past, for among winters
there will be one so relentlessly winter
that in overwintering it your heart will be readied to last.

Remain with Eurydice in the realm of death—rise there
singing, praising, to realize the harmony in your strings.
Here—among pale shades in a fading world—
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be—but nonetheless know why nothingness
is the unending source of your most fervent vibration,
so that this once you may give it your full affirmation.

To the store of copious Nature's used-up, cast-off,
speechless creatures—an unsayable amount—
jubilantly join yourself and cancel the count.