Toot Your Horn

My favorite thing about myself is my reading voice. Trying to post a very short clip of it… very technologically challenged.     <a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/toot-your-horn/”>Toot Your Horn</a>

The Garden of Forking Paths

Just this past week, I was teaching the story “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges  to my university class on Modernity in Literature.  It’s a wonderful story  – a spy story wrapped around a meditation on time.   One of the main characters says this about time: “…In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer,

Yearning for Spring

Taken in my garden yesterday.  Temperature: 29 degrees.  The Weather Channel predicts a high of 60 today.   I hope! This has been , and continues to be, the second longest February of my life, due to the strife at my university. However, I remember the longest February, which was in 2009, when I was very very

World’s Best Widget

  Today’s Daily Prompt:  You’ve been granted magical engineering skills, but you can only use them to build one gadget or machine. What do you build? I have long bantered about this machine in casual conversation. I feel guilty and selfish and materialistic when I write about it here, given the need for a product

What Time Allows

I used to say, with the Rolling Stones song, “Time  …is on my side.” I don’t say that anymore. What I do still love, however, is Dylan Thomas’ poem  “Fern Hill” It’s a poem about childhood and innocence and Time. Here’s the whole poem: Fern Hill Dylan Thomas, 1914 – 1953   Now as I

My Name

When my parents married, he was 30 and she was 29. They were having trouble having a baby; she had several miscarriages. Sometime in there, they went on holiday to Quebec, Canada. While there, they visited the shrine of Saint Anne de Beaupre. My mother, a newly converted Catholic, made a promise to Saint Anne:

Second Time Around

Today’s Prompt: Tell us about a book you can read again and again without getting bored — what is it that speaks to you?   I have several books in that category, but the one that came to mind first this morning was   The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova I read this one back on 2005

Introverted, but not Shy

I can’t remember ever having stage fright. Even though I’m an only child, and a true introvert, I am not shy. Part of this must be that I am a Great Pretender ( see previous post) In high school, I had the lead in the senior play, and sang in a folk group. In college,

Voice Work

Today’s Prompt: Your blog is about to be recorded into an audiobook. If you could choose anyone — from your grandma to Samuel L. Jackson — to narrate your posts, who would it be? I couldn’t think of anyone at first. Needed a woman with an American accent. Then another blogger was talking about Sylvia Plath.

The Great Pretender

The Great Pretender Too real is this feeling of make believe… I’m eight, balanced on the bed clutching the mahogany bedpost posing in the mirror in my mother’s room. Framed with ornate curlicues of mahogany, it’s as tall as I am, like the mirror in Snow White. I’m a princess on a balcony. I clutch