Greenridge: August 2011

We saw, heard and felt her recently at a Berkeley Repertory Performance.

http://www.ted.com/talks/anna_deavere_smith_s_american_character.html

Welcome from Sylvia and Sal

Sylvia's
favorite books
Nabokov's "Speak Memory", poems, short stories and biographies.

I like to be involved in community activities -- am on the boards of local Castro Valley Library and the Alameda County Library. I do not like phone banking (will never do it again) or fundraising. I like gardening altho I kill most everything I plant with over-watering. I like reading, sleeping (a lot), eating (a lot), walking and talking to friends. I adore opera, classical music, theater, television -- I know a real soul-mate if they like Seinfeld - #1 soul-mate is Sal!

A Cat/A Future

A cat can draw
the blinds
behind her eyes
whenever she
decides. Nothing
alters in the stare
itself but she's
not there. Likewise
a future can occlude
still sitting there,
doing nothing rude.

--- Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received both a bachelor's and master's degree from UCLA.
About her work, J. D. McClatchy has said: "Her poems are compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes. She is an anomaly in today's literary culture: as intense and elliptical as Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as Frost."