Author Archives: Turff

“The arts are not a way of making a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio.

Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”themed pirate ship jump house

― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

In order to offset the inferiority complex generated by other “best” lists that I had little or no experience with, consider please NPR’s new list of 100 Fantasy and SciFi novels. What’s your count? How far down before you hit one you’ve not read? What do you think of the quality of the list? I’ll compile my response and add it in the comments.

The list is here.

I must confess, I”m not at all online slots sure how to process this.

My brother bought me a hoodie for Christmas. It arrived today. I would have posted on Dale”s site, had I the required permissions online slots 🙂

I think the photo says it all.

Please see the included image of the cards I received in trade for my own. One of them is Dale’s, but the rest originate from the creative minds of Dragon Con. A couple of these will be sent out to a couple of you, as the artist insisted I take extras to trade. I have a list of emails, should any of you wish to trade with someone from this group.

Jeff called me earlier tonight to share an inspiration he had while listening to NPR.  I’m certain I will mangle some portion (or perhaps all) of what we discussed, but I will make an effort to recount it with you just the same.

He heard a story of a group of folks that would get together and support projects by combining small donations.  This reminded him of a group he used to be a part of that would gather periodically, each bringing their own soup with them as a meal.  These concepts, along with a dash of Lichtenbergianism, inspired the idea I will now share.

What IF:

We met, as a group, at a regularly scheduled interval (say, once a month).  The location of this meeting would rotate amongst the ash-bound (as available anyway) to host.  Each attendee would bring 3 things: soup (or some form of self-nourishment), $10, and their attentiveness.  The latter would be used to consider the presentations of various artists with projects in mind that a small donation would help make possible.  At the end of the evening, those donating would place in a hat the name of the project they would like to support.  The top vote getter would receive the collected funds with the understanding that they would come to later meetings to share their progress.  In this way, we have an excuse to meet and a consistent way to act as microfinanciers of local artists.

Jeff, please correct any mistakes when you escape the technology void that is Mississippi.

What do y’all think?

Successfully registering a record on this site could, if properly done, be considered artistic. Furthermore, it could simultaneously support our efforts to postpone (and thus procrastinate) more meaningful work. What should our group record be?