“I tended to avoid grey, which made me look like I’d been inexpertly embalmed.”
(Claire in Echo of the Bone by Diana Gabaldon)
This phrase made me chuckle, as it’s so true.
Colour is such an important key to self-esteem. If you walk around in colours that don’t match your complexion, you tend to look rather sickly. While Claire, with her golden glow, amber eyes, and brown hair, avoids grey. I avoid brown, and choose shades of grey as my neutral colour of choice.
How about you? What colours make you shine? Which make you look ill?
There is so much to be done, there is so much that can be done. One person — a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, Jr. — one person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
Here’s a passage from Sylvia Taylor’s The Fisher Queen that particularly struck me:
Everything was bare and spare and hard. Couple that with almost constant lurching, bouncing and bangs , and enormous amounts of water and slime, and you had a perfect studio for hematoma art with you as the canvas. Each technicolour lump was brushed with colours from hell’s sunsets: obsidian, aubergine, vermilion, puce. They were war wounds and medals to display and tell stories about on harbour days. One thing for certain, fishing was not a good vocation for a hemophiliac or people with bird bones. (p. 100)
Bird allusions aside, I frequently sport technicolour skin just from walking through my house, let alone bouncing on a rocking boat.
The remark about haemophilia reminded me of a photo I found quite amusing back when I was an exchange student. It’s of Czar Alexander fishing at his country house in Langinkoski, which was a few blocks from my 4th host family’s house. Alexander’s grandson, the famous haemophiliac Alexsi who was under the care of Rasputin, probably could have handled fishing this way. (Alexander is busily fishing there on the left of the photo… 😉 )
Filed under: book reviews — Shawn L. Bird @ 11:35 am
The summer I was 23, I was nursing a new baby in an apartment in Calgary’s Hillhurst-Sunnyside while my husband studied at U of C. I battled sleeplessness, waves of people on the LRT, and high prices at the Safeway across the street. It was a joy filled adventure, where beauty was in baby’s smile.
The summer Sylvia Taylor was 23 she nursed drunken fisher folk, studied the ways of the ocean, battled sleeplessness, ill-fortune, killer waves, the high prices of goods at the fish camps and the low stocks of fish that were to pay those bills. It was a joy and terror filled adventure, where beauty was in sea creatures and unexpected kindnesses.
Sylvia’s story of determination and survival, hard-work and discipline, failure and success as one of the few female deckhands in BC’s commercial salmon fleet is likely a fascinating read for anyone who’s ever spent time on a fishing boat, but it’s both intriguing and astonishing for someone like me, who dislikes everything associated with ocean. I am astounded by Sylvia’s pluck and wild adventures. You wouldn’t have caught me on that boat for love nor money (and she got neither for her efforts).
I don’t envy her the experience, but I was glad she shared it with me.
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Here’s Sylvia herself, reading an excerpt. You’ve got to love that sultry voice! 🙂
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PS. Well, okay, I do kind of envy the experience with the dolphins. 😉
My Christmas wish list included only one item this year: a kantele.
A kantele is a traditional musical instrument from Finland. It’s a psaltery type stringed instrument. When I was in Finland the last couple of times I looked for one without success. Now through eBay I’ve found a company, and I have the most basic version, a little 5 string, on its way from Melodia Soitin of Finland! If you visit their site, you can hear the sound of a larger kantele. The wire strings make a sound quite different from my harps which are nylon strung.
Here is a youtube video of a lesson on how to play and tune this size of kantele:
Damn. I just found out that today is International “Pretend to be a Time Traveller Day” and I’m feeling quite irritated that I didn’t know in time to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity to prove that I’m a nut case or to send my Acting class out on assignment. 😉
I love books about time travelling. I think the first one I read was Lynne Ellison’s The Green Bronze Mirror. She was fourteen when she wrote it. I had just turned thirteen when I read it, and I was desperately impressed (and more than envious) that she had been published at such a young age. It has recently come back into print as an ebook, and while it definitely reads like something written by a 14 year old author, I see what I enjoyed about it.
I love Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series with a slightly obsessive passion. I ws tortured reading Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveller’s Wife. A Hallmark movie with Christopher Reeves (swoon) and Jane Seymour called Somewhere in Time (based on the book Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson) is terribly romantic. Another great Young Adult book is Your Time, My Time by Ann Walsh. That one is set in BC’s Cariboo town of Barkerville. I could never walk past the graveyard without a sigh after reading it.
Here’s a good website listing all sorts of books on the theme, though only one of my favourite is listed. Go visit Charlotte’s Library. If you can’t get out to do your own time travelling today, there are lots of options to stay home.
If you can get out today, don some ‘out of time’ clothing and head into town, making poor attempts to blend in. Be sure to come back and tell me how people respond!
One of my students was telling me today about how when his mom went through chemo, she made herself amazing wigs from multicoloured yarns. I was enchanted with the concept, and was just looking online to see if there are patterns or pictures of yarn wigs.
I was delighted to come across Hair Flair for Hope, an organization that makes and provides exactly this kind of fun hair alternative for children or adventurous souls undergoing chemotherapy. They have workshops if you want to make some to donate. I think it’s quite brilliant! 🙂
“Notice if you are holding your breath after inhaling, and if so, what are you afraid of letting go. Or are you holding it after exhaling, and what are you afraid of letting in.”
Is university too easy? Is high school too easy, so kids aren’t prepared for the rigour of university?
Margaret Wente has an interesting piece in the Globe and Mail today. She asserts that university is being dumbed down because kids have no work ethic or self-discipline. Knowing that my English 12 class has a phenomenal average (although there are 23 girls to 6 boys, and that definitely has an impact), I know that most of my students work hard and are able to think critically.
I am always surprised that my grade 9 students don’t know some basic things like grammar, sentences, etc. When I taught at a Middle Elementary school a couple years ago, I was intrigued to see that the kids are taught the skills repetitively from about grade 2. I don’t know why the kids think it’s new every time, but I’m sure there is some brain theory at play. Do people dump previous learning whenever they move from one institution to another?
My students know how to write sentences, craft paragraphs, and properly organize a research paper. I hope they remember when they get to university! In the last couple of years I’ve received notes from past students relaying compliments they received on their essays, “You must have had a good English teacher in high school.” 🙂 I hope they all have the same comments on their papers!
What do you think? Is high school or university too easy these days?
I confess, one of my simple joys is that come December, it snows on my blog. I love how the little white dots drift through the post, in serene ambivalence of the topic or tone of the blog entry itself.
I love that it happens every year without me doing anything. I put it in my settings back years ago, and now, like winter, it comes whether I am ready or not.
This year, December first arrived as a welcome relief to the furious writing frenzy of November’s NaNoWriMo. It was a delight to look onto the blog, and see the peaceful ‘flakes’ drifting across my posts. Tranquility amid technology.
Shawn L. Bird 
colour December 19, 2012
Tags: colour, Diana Gabaldon
(Claire in Echo of the Bone by Diana Gabaldon)
This phrase made me chuckle, as it’s so true.
Colour is such an important key to self-esteem. If you walk around in colours that don’t match your complexion, you tend to look rather sickly. While Claire, with her golden glow, amber eyes, and brown hair, avoids grey. I avoid brown, and choose shades of grey as my neutral colour of choice.
How about you? What colours make you shine? Which make you look ill?
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