Love these PSAs for Literacy! So clever. This was totally how I felt about books when I was little. The OZ, Narnia, and Alice books were my favorites.

See the other Penguin-style web services covers on Flickr.

I’m not really a huge champagne person, but I really love Veuve-Clicquot. The champagne gets its name from “La Grand Dame”, a young widow who took over her late husband’s struggling wine business and turned it into one of the most successful wineries in the world. She is responsible for that fizzy sensation we all associate with champagne. Without her, champagne would taste more like sugar-syrupy muck. She was a strong, powerful woman at a time when it was hard to be a powerful woman.

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It came out about a year ago, and I can’t wait to read it. What a great Christmas gift idea– a bottle and the book.

Also see Cool Hunting’s tour of the winery during the 2009 Grape Harvest. There are some really great photos and a description of the entire wine-making process.

After ten years, I have finished off Jane Duncan’s Reachfar (aka the “My Friend”) series. I started the books when I was in junior high. I was at the library to pick up some books, which, as it turned out, the library didn’t have. I was wandering through the stacks when a couple of shelves caught my eye. The “My Friend” titles and their typeface, the Virginia Smith cover illustrations– the books were hard not to notice.

On a whim, I picked up the first of the books, My Friends the Miss Boyds. I finished it quickly– easy reading so enjoyable, I couldn’t put it down. The semi-autobiographical books chronicle the life of a Scottish woman from girlhood to middle-age. You start off with Janet as a young girl growing up in a small Highland town at a farm called Reachfar. You then follow her through her stints as a personal secretary, then during WWII in the WAAF, her marriage and subsequent move to St. Jago, and finally her return home as a widow. Each person (or should I say “personality”?) you come across is so vivid and full of life. After reading these books, growing up with them, I feel like I know Janet and all the members of her family, her friends and acquaintances.

I had taken a break from reading the books through my latter years of high school and through college, as I didn’t have the time and few copies existed in the NY public library system. Sadly, the books are out of print (time for a reprint, MacMillan/St. Martin’s Press?), so they can only be found at certain libraries, and almost never in their completion. This meant I’ve spent my time hopping from library to library to check out the next book in the series, also struggling to beat out the library staff before the books are retired to the archive or beating out book collectors stealing them off the shelves. Hopefully, one day, I’ll have collected them all myself. For my thirteenth birthday, my cousin bought me the Miss Boyds, so I only have 19 more to go. I would hate to think I could never revisit them.

Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss…
-Pablo Neruda, Sonnet II, Cien sonetos de amor/100 Love Sonnets

I’ve been doing quite a bit of catch-up reading, trying to consume all the books I never had the opportunity to during college. I’ve been working on finishing Jane Duncan’s “My Friend” series, which I hadn’t picked up since high school. The books are hard to find since they’re out of print, so I have to go library hopping until I can afford to purchase them myself (I received the first, My Friends the Miss Boyds as a gift). I love the author to bits and I’m considering doing a fan site and maybe some research about her. I’m a little over half way through the series now, just finishing up My Friend My Father, which actually had me tearing up (unfortunately, it seems, I am such a girl).

I’ve also come back to P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves series. The series goes on forever, so I take breaks between books with a different selection. They’re so amusing though, I find myself laughing out loud. I think I’ve mentioned so once or twice before.

I bought 100 Love Sonnets a few months ago because I’ve been meaning to read more Pablo Neruda poetry since I first read a selection of his 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair during college. I love the edition I purchased because it has the Spanish and English translation en face, as they say. While I was reading the sonnets, I watched the Italian film Il Postino, which was so much fun. It’s always nice to watch Italian movies in which the actors talk slowly enough for me to understand some of it. It made me love Neruda all the more because I think the actor really captured him and the story was so believable, although total fiction. I’d love to read the novel, but it’ll have to go to the bottom of my list (I swear I will get through the entire list, if it kills me). The next poet on my list to read, I think, is Octavio Paz, another poet I read during college. I guess I am in the mood for Latin American poetry after reading so much French Surrealism and, prior to that, British poetry (I love my Sydney).

Sometimes I get so busy with work and then I come home and I’m sometimes too tired to do anything but sleep, that I don’t get to read. But when I do, it’s just so rewarding. It makes me happy. I’m trying to fit in some time during the week at lunch, since I’ve been going out on weekends so much. As you can tell by my frequency of blog posts, I’m still trying to work out a happy medium. I haven’t written any new poems since after I had one published, and I don’t know if i will again any time soon. I’m just not emotionally in that place right now. I’m hoping that since I’m doing more design work, I’ll get into that creative flow and create more art and write more. Time will tell.

Well, I figured I’d put it out there– one of my poems, “Panopticon Dream” was published in the Winter 2009 issue of The Minetta Review. I wrote the poem in 2008 after a dream I had, and that’s about all I’ll say about that.

The issue’s design theme is occupation, after a protest against NYU’s budget and (lack of) financial aid, and is filled with some great photos of the event. Of course nothing came of the protest, but with my nearly $90k in student loan debt, I’m not surprised. Thanks, NYU!

You can find Minetta in pretty much all NYU buildings, as well as local coffee shops and bookstores like St. Mark’s and Think Coffee. Pick up a copy if you’re in the New York area. Thanks to Treasurer Sida Li for sending me a couple copies. I guess this means I should start submitting my work to other publications…

I want to give a big shout out to FKDL for stopping by my blog after catching this post I wrote on his collages. He sent me this awesome limited edition book of his work all the way from Paris. You can buy a copy on Prescription Art. It’s really beautiful stuff. Check out some of his work on Flickr.

Found these two collages on NYTimes.com. Needless to say, I want the book.

Fou is an online poetry magazine that was created by a former student of my friend and former instructor poet Elaine Equi. Their second issue has been out for several months now, but I came across it again and I was still amused and in love with its layout. No. 1 also had an illustrated layout, but I think the scrolling illustration on No. 2 is so clever. Check it out– there’s some great poetry in there too.

I had read Wordsworth’s poetry in high school and college, like most everybody. My instructors were always enamored of Wordsworth and discussed Romanticism and whatnot. His poems were nice, but I wasn’t all too impressed by them. Today I was listening to this podcast I just discovered– Classic Poetry Aloud– and listened to “Upon Westminster Bridge” (see below).

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky,
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

I distinctly remembered discussing it in class back in high school, but my interest in it ended there. You see, I’ve now figured out exactly how I feel about Wordsworth (and for the most part, Romanticism): For me, a Wordsworth poem is like a Thomas Kinkade landscape. It’s nice maybe for a fleeting glance but not for a long-term gaze.