Transmissions from the Northern Outpost

Category: The Sunday Salon

  • Staying calm, cool, and collected

    Above at left is a screenshot of the homescreen on my phone, designed and organized with the minimalist phone app, available on Android phones. At right are screenshots of the dropdown menus.

    This past week my wife introduced/reintroduced me to an app, minimalist phone, for our homescreens to help us minimize the time we spend on our phones. I say “reintroduce” because I tried earlier in the year, but at the time, I was too attached to the theme I had on my phone for several years through Smart Launcher. I had folders organized by icons for apps I grouped by theme, e.g. planning, reading, writing, and listening to music. Now I’m ready for, and welcome, the change.

    I’m sharing with you not necessarily as an advertisement for the app, but as a different way of thinking about how we interact with our phones. For me, this is what works…for now, anyway.

    I chose the phrase “calm, cool, and collected” to tie it altogether as a reminder that that is my daily goal: to stay calm, cool, and collected. I also know the phrase can be, and often is, “cool, calm and collected,” but I thought “calm, cool, and collected” sounded better and my wife Kim agreed when I asked her feedback on which one to use. Plus “calm” is a good place to start each day.

    At the top are the time and date, which when I tap the circle, that also indicates battery life, it takes me to the TickTick app that I use for my to-do list and calendar.

    On each word is a dropdown menu for two apps each, which I have renamed.

    Calm

    The two apps I have here are:

    • Podcast Player (Listen) for podcasts I am subscribed to, mostly mindfulness podcasts including from Tara Brach, Dan Harris, and Eckhart Tolle
    • and Insight Timer for meditation (Meditate, obviously).

    Cool

    The two apps here are:

    • Mixcloud, which has deejays from around the world I listen to, mostly chillout music hence the title “Chill Out.”
    • YouTube Music that I renamed “Wind Up” for music to get motivated.

    Collected

    The two apps are:

    • Libby (Browse) to search for books I might read.
    • Kindle (Library) to see what books I have collected to read. However, I usually read on a Kindle Paperwhite, especially if reading poetry so I can turn the screen to landscape and have the line breaks the way the poet intended.

    As for access to other apps, I can search a list by swiping left. The minimalist phone app also allows you to set an app timer for individual apps and ask you before opening the app if you really want to open. Then if you do, you can set how much time you will spend on on the app.

    I didn’t include links to every app because I figured if you were interested, you could look up on your own. I also didn’t want to clutter the post with links. Today’s post also is part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz.

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  • Waiting To Become Bait

    For National Poetry Month, I’ve been sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written, usually followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day. Today, however, I’m just going to leave you with my poem – and also end my sharing of poems for National Poetry Month early, because this seems like a good place to end.

    Today’s poem is another one about one of my grandfathers, my paternal grandfather, Grandpa Robinson. Like others about my grandfathers, it involves fishing.

    I saved this one for last because it is my mother’s – and sister’s – favorite poem of mine. It is one I couldn’t find on the external hard drive that holds most of my old poems. However, my sister texted me a photo of the poem that my parents have in a picture frame, that I gave to my late grandmother. The house they live in also was my grandmother and grandfather’s house. Thank you, Lisa, and also you, Mom, for encouraging me to include this among the poems I shared this past month.

    I mentioned to my mom in a phone conversation that I thought the poem was too sentimental, but after my sister sent it to me, I re-assessed that view and realized why it works, not only for them, but also for me – and hopefully for you.

    Waiting To Become Bait

    We fish until dusk flits its wings like a dragonfly 
    along the surface of the algae. Reel in our lines

    as if any turn could be the last before we are
    swallowed. Stumble up the hill, stars stabbing us

    in the back, cross the porch's portal out of breath. 
    Our sojourn to pond, success usually. A bucketful

    of bullheads or bass, what we drew out of its banks, 
    if providence granted. Now today in the same room

    where bone cancer caught its hook in my grandfather 
    and took his ghost out, I look out its west window

    to see him standing there again among the cattails,
    wearing his yellow windbreaker, aqua fishing cap.

    Head bowed like a monk, contemplating the dragonfly 
    just before it bolts across the horizon, swallows him.

    The poem is best read in desktop and sometimes lansdcape on your browser of choice.

    This post is also part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz.

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  • Transfiguration

    As mentioned Thursday, in July of 1995, before I got married, I spent six weeks on a  retreat at Mt. Saviour Monastery above Elmira, N.Y. where a handful of other young men and I lived with the Benedictine monks there. While there, I ended up writing a couple of poems. This is another one of them, on the great philosopher monk Thomas Merton. 

    Transfiguration

    	-- at Mount Saviour Monastery, July 1995

    The clouds of unknowing roll over me,
    nuclear in their design,
    probably like those that carried him,
    his spirit out to the Pacific and beyond

    the vapor trail I view on the horizon
    now. An airliner lifts off, brushes
    the cross on the steeple,
    the silence into sonic resonances.

    Like the SAC bomber that buzzed
    across his hermitage's roof
    (its bay doors, the jaws of Apocalypse,
    if opened could swallow the countryside).

    The same type of bomber that took him
    stateside. On Sunday after Mass,
    I listen to the blues in the common room,
    ponder the irony of lyrics, saints' fates.

    As always, this poem is best read in desktop and landscape on your browser of choice.

    Since this poem is about Thomas Merton, I am going to give you a link to two of his poems in the February 1949 issue of Poetry.

    Today’s post is also part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz. For those visiting from Deb’s link-up, I encourage you to look back at the poems I’ve shared earlier this month.

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  • Waking A Stranger

    For National Poetry Month, I’m sharing poems each day, one that I’ve written followed by whatever one from three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day.

    Waking A Stranger 

    Touching something like that is like waking a stranger 
    says the archaeologist this morning on the radio 
    when asked what it's like excavating 
    Native American remains in a nearby county.
    Driving to work, I think I know what she means:
    it's like catching the fleeting glance in the rearview
    of the person behind you that you don't know,
    but that you think you do for a moment.
    Or like when a painter is applying the brush 
    to the canvas and something begins to take shape,
    but he doesn't know what yet. Or like the circles
    a pen makes when a writer is doodling, a knot 
    of lines overlapping lines that form 
    a hurricane whose eye he cannot see out of.

    The above poem is best read in desktop and landscape modes on your browser of choice.

    Today’s poem from one of three sites that share a poem each day is “The Stranger in Her Feminine Sign” by Dunya Mikhail on The Poetry Foundation website.

    Today’s post is also part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz. If visiting from The Sunday Salon or otherwise, please scroll back on the blog for more poetry each day this month.

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  • Ah, poetry!

    I’m not going to lie, but “cultivating my garden,” why I started this blog not coincidentally on January 20 of this year, is not easy right now. However, I am going to try in April with it being National Poetry Month and the month of my wife Kim’s 55th birthday – and also sadly the month of her mother and best friend passing away four years ago. With two of the three, I have things planned, really only sort of with the second, and the third one is really up to Kim with however she wants to remember them.

    For National Poetry Month, as mentioned in my last blog post, I will be sharing poems each day: first, mine from years ago, and then a link to another poem from one of three sites that share a poem a day that strikes my fancy that day. I subscribed to the three sites earlier this week in anticipation of National Poetry Month. For my wife’s birthday, which is next Sunday, we both are off next weekend and whatever we do, or don’t do, we’ll be together. As of now, we have no fixed plans.

    Also I’m going to try to write a poem or, maybe to be more accurate, to start a poem each day during April. I had a couple of poetry classes in college including an independent study during my senior year of college in the early 90s where the goal was to write poetry and get some poems published in literary journals, a very few of which I did. In the early to mid 2000s, I returned to writing poetry and even had a poetry reading at a now-defunct cultural society in suburban Philadelphia. That is where about half of the poems I’ll be sharing this coming month will be coming from.

    It only seems apropos that I leave you with a poem or two. I thought I’d start small with two of my favorite short poems:

    The title of this post comes from a line by Satine to Christian in the 2001 Baz Luhrmann movie Moulin Rouge that for some reason I think of when I think of talking about poetry: “Ah, poetry. Yes, this it what I want naughty words.”

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  • Mom, breakfast, and music

    Every Thursday, I share three good things from today, in the past week, and/or in the week or weeks to come, to focus on what is good. I encourage you to share in the comments your three good things too, if you want. I was introduced to thinking on three good things for the week by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz who lists hers every Sunday on her blog.

    Today, and probably always, I’m keeping my three good things simple and off the top of my head. I just got home from running errands this morning: laundry at the laundromat, a grocery pickup, getting gas, and a breakfast wrap from a place in town. So, I’ll stick to today:

    • Talking to my mom on the phone
    • The aforementioned breakfast wrap and place
    • Earworms. Earworms? Really? Yes, really.

    I realized this morning that I hadn’t talked to my mother in about a week. So while at the laundromat, after I put the loads in the washer, I gave her a call. We ended up talking longer than I expected, but it was good.

    She remembered today was her mother’s birthday. Her mother, my grandmother, would have been 100 today. She died in 2003. My mom shared memories of her mother, her father, and siblings (all since gone) growing up, stories – mostly good while acknowledging and forgiving the bad – that I never had heard. It was unexpected – and unexpectedly emotional, with all the feels. I won’t say it was necessarily what “the doctor ordered,” but it was good to remember grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

    We talked longer than expected, which was more than okay. After I put the clothes in the dryer and went to get breakfast. It also was good, very good, and probably not what a doctor would order,especially with high blood pressure, but I’ll take it – and did.

    My friend Kyle’s place, Komodo Gelato, but he doesn’t have just gelato.

    Last and definitely least because you might not want to listen to what I’m going to share are earworms. Today’s were a pair of songs, one on the radio in the laundromat and the other, maybe because the country in the song has been in the news:

    I chose this over the cheesy sexist MTV video. You’re welcome.

    And with that, I’ll sign off for this week and go watch some college basketball (I know I should be watching hockey) as I have the day off.

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  • Reading book-to-movie adaptations after watching the movies

    So, yesterday my wife and I watched two movies based on a book series: Enola Holmes and Enola Holmes 2, based on the series with her name by Nancy Springer. We had watched the first one in 2020, but when we started watching the second one, we couldn’t remember the first so we went back and started over.

    As Benjamin Lee wrote in The Guardian, in his review of the second one in 2022:

    There’s more of the same in Enola Holmes 2, an equally boisterous romp that’s equally as hard to remember once it’s over but one that should keep its many fans engaged enough to warrant further sequels.

    And indeed, there is a third one in the works, according to Millie Bobby Brown, who portrays Enola in the movies. As well as I think there should be. It’s true, like Lee said, that they’re hard to remember, but Brown along with a great ensemble cast including Helena Bonham Carter as her mother and Henry Cavill as her brother, Sherlock, made the movies popcorn fun enough for me and my wife to want to watch more.

    I must admit that I now want to try Springer’s series. I also realize that this isn’t the first time I have wanted to read a book or series after watching the movies. Probably one of the first movies with which this was the case for me was Field of Dreams, which was based on the book Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella. I think I read the book or attempted to read it but as I remember at the time I didn’t like it and thought the movie was better.

    Other movies based on books or series I wanted to read after watching the movie or movies include The Maze Runner, High Fidelity, The Last of the Mohicans, Bladerunner, Dolores Claiborne and Misery to name a few. Some I did and some I enjoyed (loved The Maze Runner series) while others I didn’t (High Fidelity – worked better for American audiences with a record shop since I recognized more of the music). On the latter, I did enjoy some of Nick Hornby’s other books such as A Long Way Down.

    So, how about you? Any books or series you wanted to read after seeing the movie that they were based on first? Feel free to share in the comments.

    This is part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz. And in case you missed it, on Thursday I posted about my three good things for the week, which this week mainly was one thing: a negative biopsy, a negative biopsy, a negative biopsy! for my wife.

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  • My 20 Favorite Best Picture Winners and Nominees

    Since The Oscars are on tonight, I thought I’d look back at my favorite Best Picture winners and nominees for each decade since the 1940s. I skipped the 1920s and 1930s, because I don’t know any of the movies from those decades. I picked two from each decade (*winners) and two honorable mentions:

    • 1940s: Rebecca* and Casablanca*
    • 1950s: All About Eve* and Sunset Boulevard
    • 1960s: Judgment at Nuremberg and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Paul Newman and Robert Redford)
    • 1970s: The Godfather Part II* and The Conversation (special shout out to the late Gene Hackman), honorable mention: Network (so relevant always)
    • 1980s: Broadcast News and Field of Dreams, honorable mention: Moonstruck, one of of my wife’s favorite movies
    • 1990s: Schindler’s List* and Goodfellas
    • 2000s: Gladiator* and Up in the Air
    • 2010s: Winter’s Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild
    • 2020s: Drive My Car and Everything Everywhere All At Once

    If I had to pick just one that I’d say you must see, it would be Sunset Boulevard for lines like this: “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small.“

    What are some of your favorite Best Picture winners and/or nominees?

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  • Back to Inspector Montalbano

    As mentioned last week, I’ve given up on finishing Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor as my first book of the year. I also mentioned that I was going to test some poetry books for my first read but none of them stuck. Now I’m returning to a series I’ve been reading over the last couple of decades, the Inspector Montalbano series by Italian writer Andrea Camilleri. I’m up to No. 24: The Other End of the Line, which I plan on finishing today for my first book read in 2025, and I only have a few left until I’m finished with the series of 28 books.

    After this one are:

    • The Safety Net
    • The Sicilian Method
    • The Cook of the Halcyon
    • Riccardino

    The last one was published in 2020 after Camilleri’s death in 2019 at the age of 93. There are two other books of short stories with Montalbano that I also want to read, hopefully before the end of the year.

    Also this week

    I celebrated:

    So what are you reading, watching, listening, and/or doing this week?

    This is part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz.

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  • Ah, poetry!

    I think I’m going to have to give up on Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor as being my first book that I’ll read this year. Instead, today I’m turning to poetry. About an hour and a half ago, I went to Libby to pick out some possibilities. I have about half a dozen choices. I’ll let you know next week what I chose.

    As for the rest of the year, I have three books I want to finish before its end:

    1. Candide by Voltaire
    2. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
    3. The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

    The first is because two different friends recommended and at the end of the book is the inspiration in part for this blog: to cultivate my garden figuratively. The second is one that my wife has been trying to get me to read for a while, plus another friend. My wife and I are also playing quid pro quo with my reading this before the end of the year and her reading Bruce Springsteen’s biography Born to Run. The third is a reread for me, from a course on O’Connor and William Faulkner that I had in college.

    What are you currently reading or what is on your radar for this year to read?

    This is part of The Sunday Salon hosted by Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz.

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