Concerns

There has been an unusual amount of activity from two locations accessing the blog. In light of this and other analysis, some works have been removed from the site. Most of the works removed are those poems which will be a component of the poetry book concept previously mentioned on the site. I apologize for the terseness of this announcement, but it was necessary to protect the integrity of poetry I wish to disseminate into the world in a productive manner.

The subtle disconnect

 This is an observational post, not a fixed, bone-crushing fence post. Observation is the art of painting a dysfunctional piece of art in words that may or may not lead to a conclusion. It is, by nature, piecemeal, but locally relevant...what impacts my life and your life daily.

I have one multi-faceted question: what happens when one's personal and familial life is impacted more by what happens locally and regionally than what a national body or organization dictates? One might ask the question in this manner: What happens when there is such a disconnect between my local life and the dictates of a national system?

The answer to that question is unfolding in real time. 

There are no choices within that system.

My regional realities are not scalable with national realities. Case in point: a three-bedroom house on a town lot, a nice brick home, down the street, sold for $100,000 two days ago. The national average, as reported by a national firm, claims that the average house sale is $500,000. 

If I see a $500,000 home sale locally, it is rare. It is a $1.5 million dollar sale outside Appalachia. We live in two different realms, two different "normals."

That is but one sign of disconnect. 

No one here supports a surveillance state. That system is doomed in a rural Appalachian region. We are seeing the seeds of that failure in post after post online, in publicly-shared videos, in our daily lives as we drive down the road. Appalachia will not roll over and play dead while a national system tries to overpower the people's will.

This nation is not a uniform creation. It is debatable how long this reality has existed. But, it is obvious when one is present, observing.

For those of you who live outside America, it may not appear as a disconnect. It is subtle. It is not as direct as a French mob rioting. It is not national, it is regional. The disconnect is real. I live within that reality.

A Poetry Book?

My whole life I have been telling stories...the ones I made up to tell my little brother, the ones I told to my daughter...the ones I scribbled out into poetry...the ones I heard from our family Seanachai across The Pond. 

The stories find poetic form, particularly in trying times. 

When I survey my best poems, they all tell a story. The dead-end street. The day we buried grandma. My oldest memories. The old lady in the rocking chair. The man who wanted to leave the mountains forever.

The poem becomes more than the tale the Seanachai tells. It is a tale of a people, of a place...more than the family lore. 

I am contemplating producing a short book with poetry and short tales. Not for money, but to share with the world. Sure, if I pay for the costs of printing and shipping, it will be worth it. Amazon will publish just about anything not a.i.slop. How many poetry-story books make any money? That is not the reason for having it published.

When I attempt to get my first novel published, I'll query until the cows come home. For a poetry book or a storyteller's book (poetry and stories), the purpose is for readers to enjoy it. To quote it. To be touched by it. To be inspired...

Shall We Escape E-Space?

E-space swallowed my last substack post. While we, in regular space, try to ascertain what effects the big bad world around us will have on our thoughts, movements, and actual spoken dialogue...the world of E-space leaves some of us feeling like primordial slime in Darwin's evolutionary fantasy.

Devotees of Doctor Who will recognize the concept of E-space. It is a place that is "nowhere." It is a pale white and is like an unending stage. That said, it would be an actor's nightmare (no exit stage left available). 

It is where the pages of a novel exist in thought, not in the marketing realm. It is where my current work-in-progress sits while I add substance to the whole.

It is in the E-spaces that failures occur. Where writers wake up one morning, and to their own dismay, find 50,000 words ripped from their beings because it is written in first person, not third person (The main character is telling the story and shouldn't be). It is where the author discovers the setting sucks, the setting makes no sense, the setting isn't that wonderful vacation spot one remembered near Isle of Palms, but rather, a nightmare in Myrtle Beach. 

There can be too many E-spaces in our lives...great holes of potential never realized. If we do not grasp, do not seize, the opportunity to boldly go where we have never been before, we do not reach a level, a potential...that our readers deserve, that our clients deserve, that our children deserve.

Where are you in life? Are you mired in a job that is only a job? Are you cut off from your potential by those around you? Or, are you in an in-between space, an E-space? 

Why Blogspot?

If you follow other writers on wordpress, substack, and the like, you might wonder what is Daithi doing here on blogspot? Surely, if he is a serious author, he'll be on substack, or at least wordpress.

I was on wordpress. I am no longer posting there because (1) about five years ago, there was a mass exodus of readers from that venue (2) it was the worst maintained (not at all maintained) website I have ever written on. The end came on the fateful day when I was no longer able to log in to my own site. Rude. Clueless. Not a nice site.

Substack, on the other hand, is a like a tight nit group of generally left-leaning writers of varied talent or lack of talent. I have tried to post there, but frankly, Klingon makes more sense than the maze of dysfunctionality I find for a "creator."

Blogspot, or blogger, is, in my entire experience of online writing sites, the easiest to use, has the best tool (google translate), and results in the greatest return of readers. I have readers from all around the world. And, on any given day, or night, I have more readers in one calendar day than I did in one month on wordpress.

While I work on "A Fine, Far Country," I can share work here that reaches the masses. It is exciting for me to be able to reach across the globe and provide creative works for people as far away as Germany, Brazil, Japan, and Kazakhstan. 

I offer free access, unlike many of the posters at substack. One fine day, after the current work in progress is completed, I will add a new author website where one can purchase books and more. 

For now...

Slan go foill.....so long for now.

A diversion

 The new short story on my site is an example of what one might classify as "Local Color." The style was popular in the early 20th Century, especially between the teens and forties. 

I have collected several books from the era, mainly adventures, for my own library. There is a particular narrative positivity within negative environments in these novels and short stories. 

My main character, Jimmy Neeley, is a do-gooder from the city. Most of your readers who could afford a novel at the time would understand Jimmy and his altruism. 

Consider the piece like a snow globe of a particular style and time...and enjoy.

More to come. 

make poetry make sense again

 is all writing a form of storytelling...even poetry?

it isn't if the poem rails against the evils of social injustice, laden with an asbestos-like toxicity that clings to one's soul after interacting with the poem.

it isn't if the structure overpowers the rationality, leaving us floating in a fetid pool of word excrement.

it isn't if the meaning meanders around in our craniums until it leaks out somewhere unsettled.

poetry has meaning. if it doesn't, it is not poetry. it is something else. it is structural ambiguity. it is semantic nonsense. it could even be soundscript.

but it isn't poetry. it is presumptuous, mindless drivel.

make poetry make sense again.

 

 

How would you like to be remembered?

There's a scene in So, I Married An Axe Murderer, where Mike Myers, in character, describes a distasteful girlfriend as "she smelled like soup." He rejects her based on a single characteristic that overpowers the senses and makes her odious in the audience's minds.

Such a description dismisses such characters, confines them to "the fragmentary." 

I would not wish this on any of my readers. It may suffice to call one "thin as a pencil at 20 paces" with additional details to make one create a living vision within the movie in one's head. One can build on said "pencil in the wind" whenever the character is interacting with another. Another character may reveal other traits..."she made me think of Aunt Martha, the waif of a creature that looked like she'd gone through her own private Auschwitz." 

Anything less than the components needed to create that figure in your mind, and with that figure you've pictured, move through a series of events, either physical or emotional, does not do the reader justice. It is not fair to the contemporary reader, who may or may not have the same imagination of a well-read 19th century schoolteacher.

Mike Myers' line works because she is in a list of failed ex-girlfriends. That is the only time it should work- if we, as authors, do not want to torture our readers with more insight and then drop her from any other mention within the story.

My goal is to create the clearest image in your head as you read. It may linger like the taste of an expensive wine. It may not sharpen until you're read three or more sentences of descriptive characteristics of that person. But you should be able to envision that story in your head from my additional descriptive words, including those that create a gentle or harsh image because of the words used. 

Do you enjoy reading that helps you create such images as you read? Is it taxing when you are left with two or three words to describe a character? 

I would not like to be referred to as "the guy with garlic breath" if the only interaction with the character the readers had of me was in an Italian restaurant eating garlic bread. And then, every time I was introduced in another scene, it is my garlic breath that you remember. I never move on from that, and every line of dialogue comes "from that guy with garlic breath." Even after I am in bed dreaming about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Even after I have met the love of my life within the story, and she is described in various ways while the audience remembers me for my garlic breath. That is a failure of storytelling. As an author, I am trying to bridge the gap, to add more paint to the picture, so you, as the reader, can enjoy the story from start through the finish...not confuse you with not enough information.

 

  

Silentium Aureum

 Golden silence. The curtain falls and you are no longer in foreplay. You are no longer seething with passionate muse. You are alone with page and vision; the exact act in your mind as you write the word-pictures only you and your audience follow. You are no longer parallel with the work, you and the audience are on the same line.

At this point, the two of us, you and I, have entered the new world. We are creating together- me with the words that formulate what follows in my head, you with what your background, knowledge, and interpretation bring to that paradigm. 

I cannot revel in dangerously poetic classical music anymore. I am beyond that. 

The adolescent- in composition, not age- must mature beyond what is present and enter what can be future. 

It is why composure, at this juncture, can be so draining, without the winds of divine inspiration. One can research, organize, synthetize work into art, or one can use all the components and surrender form and process to what cannot be contained in the mind. It spills to the page because it is as if it was written for you.

The most creative writing is not process-driven drivel, it is writing driven to be a connection with the audience that is deeper than purely in the mind. 

 

Status Rerum

When was the last time you read fiction, written in this century, that was vivid, that was revolutionary, that left you wanting more?

Chances are you do not have a long list. It is not as financially rewarding to publish work that breaks barriers in style. It is less accepted to create not just a work, but a whole philosophy, breaking with standard publishing norms, while expecting a significant worldwide response. But it has been done. And once the floodgates open, the old ways will have to give way to a new standard.

 That is why I have left normal behind to embrace something more poetic, something more vivid. 

I am engaged in the creation of an 85,000 word journey at present, so I ask that you have patience and expect fewer posts here while engaged in this work. 

In the meantime, enjoy these posts...and expect a random post now and again...

The ruthless writer

 Of the four Ruths that I have known in my life, two of them were often quiet and calming. They were the opposite presence of what is necessary for creating a well-delivered, readable story- ruthlessness.

How ruthless must I be to craft a quality piece of readable literature?

compassionate ruthlessness.

Compassionate because the story is your love. You have woven a web of wonderful words and phrases that may even leave an audience breathless after a few pages, but.... without ruthlessly extracting what is not consistent, not in continuity, the reader, the listener, stumbles over a stone in the path. And, we don't want that, do we?

The trouble with creating a salient work of art is that it must consist of only the images formed from the words used. It cannot assume. It cannot fail in subject and number. It cannot fail in form. It cannot leave one scratching one's head wondering what on earth the author is trying to convey.

On the other hand, I am not responsible for the level of one's intellect. If I write for a graduate-level audience, I am not going to explain what I am writing. That detracts from the story.

The most famous Ruth of all my days was a woman with phrases from another era who enlightened me with archaisms like "your tongue is loose at both ends." With that in mind, I shall not be like that character, but shall return to the ruthless revision process one needs to employ to create a finished story.

So long for now- slan go foill.

Momentary blip...pardon me

I have removed "The Struggle." I wrote it in the style that was particularly common before the incoherent random style invading "Western" poetry sites today. I suspect that much of this random-sometimes-incoherent disconnected poetry is actually the work of artificial intelligence. The latter is a term I think we all can agree is dubious, particularly when analyzing attempts at poetry and music.

Like some of you who still embrace the strictly human, when I fail it is because I have strayed from my own styles. I shall refrain from becoming nebulous, unless it is within a body of work to humor my audience. In the meantime, pardon me while I concentrate on the novel in progress. The coming week's forecast is racist against freckled people, so I will be inside, hiding from Venusian weather.

Slan go foill...

   

Renaissance

 There was a time, in a corner of a shingle of Christendom, when more than your fair share of men were "pregnant" with opportunity...bearing  weight, pressing against the repressive confines of a fixed, but expanding wall...pregnant with purpose. 

They were realizing a fundamentally inadequate position in the fallible human structure of a religious entity...so much so that your man was unable to break free without a supernatural birthing that shattered the pagan structure imposed upon him and those with him who did not fit into the structure assigned to him by an aristocracy out of touch with members, active congregants, and those seeking to do God's will.

It was, frankly, a pathetic period of regression, when whole denominations decayed, when vomit-worthy nominalism forced many from those within the movement. This egress from that denominationalism freed the expectant and birthed a more organic house church movement in the flailing West.

But, I am not fixated on that time, venue, nor the aftermath of that era. I am alluding to the same kind of repressed passion in the sense of a Creative in a complicated, anti-creative tech-friendly social environment that makes that Creative feel like a baby stuck within a womb, more than ready to be birthed onto the stage, into relevancy, and freedom.

Some of us have spotted that glimmer of hope, that foreshadowing that we shall come out of obscurity, pregnant with message and purpose, to speak to the hearts and minds of a generation drowning in mediocracy. 

Wherever humanity embraces God-driven creativity, not the warmed leftovers of artificial intelligence, the soul is once again awakened by the written and spoken word, and imagination blooms. Character grows, compassion grows, community grows. When creativity is once again on stage, in action, fervent and connective, we all benefit, we all grow. It borders on a touch of the heavenly because our intellects break free from programmed thought.

Wherever men and women gather to interact with a purveyor of that compassionate Creativity, culture finds a home, and we rise above the downward movement of a society losing touch with the divine and the human.  

I call on all those who desire to break free from this anti-creative, pro-machine world, who have a compassionate creativity to share with the world. There is a growing segment of western society longing for the creative word. It is time to return to a place of performance poetry, prose, and remembrance, to enrich society and bring back culture, a component of today's world that will die without a literary and vocal renaissance.

Mission Oaks

They told him "you can't grow that here" so many times that he purposely planted flowers, trees, and bushes in the ravine behind his house that defied every local landscape artist and every garden center.

Walking along the sidewalk outside the low wrought iron fence around the house lot, Bert planted Banana trees, orchids, and stuff that isn't supposed to grow in Ohio.

One day I was blessed to be able to meet Bert, his wife Susan, and photograph the house and gardens. And while they were inspired by a trip to the Chelsea Flower Show in London in 1990, it sounded like the local attitude toward his plans was what drove Bert to create Mission Oaks Gardens, acquire more land, and establish a Smithsonian Institute recognized American urban garden that has inspired the creation of many community gardens throughout the world.

                            Mission Oaks in May 2021

                            

                            Japanese Red Pine and Bald Cypress,

                            2018

Bert Hendley Jr. was a successful financial planner and a Master Gardener. He and his wife were instrumental in the founding of the Muskingum County Park District. Bert passed away in early 2024, and  the gardens have shifted more toward the conifer and rhododendron plantation, away from some of the more stunning exotic flowers that once lined the garden trails...

But, Mission Oaks, maintained by three wonderful people I met last week, remains Ohio's premier urban gardens. 

                                            in the conifer garden today

                            

 

Live to love

If you woke up this morning, God gave you another day on Earth to do the right thing. You are not promised tomorrow. Today is the day of salvation. 

If you are awake now, ready to go to bed, to sleep, remember, you have been given another night. If He wakes you tomorrow morning, will you give Him thanks for every person you meet? Will you share His love with those people you meet?

We were made to love as the creator loves- selflessly. While the enemy of our souls seeks to sow fear and hatred, reject the way of the worldly, and be the person God desires you to be. Love as Christ loves. 

In the library

 As a child, I would sit on the carpeted floor at the county library reading through juvenile books while my father would wander "the stacks," a cramped area where adults had to search through smaller books in a labyrinth of rows. It amazed me that I could, if given the opportunity, read through two or three books, then find others to take home, all while my father found himself lost in the stacks.

So many years later, I still remember the titles or faces of some of those books, with occasional flashes of memory, or a strange name appearing in my mind at the most unusual of times.

If I did not read all the books of Eilis Dillon, it wasn't because I did not want to. If I did not read every Madeline book, it wasn't because I tired of the little French watercolor, it was because someone had checked out the book I wanted. 

I have fond memories of that library and the beige carpet. It was in that space that I found so many stories that probably helped contribute to my own storytelling skills at such a young age. 

But it was not always that way. I remember the first readers in school. I remember some phonics, some mixture of sight recognition, but no one method of acquiring reading skills. 

This was before I found solace on the beige carpet. I'd sit in the circle as we read aloud. "See Flip run. See Jane run. See Flip and Jane run." It was dull. It was stupid. And I was bored out of my mind. I could not understand why we only read three or four pages at a session. 

Finally, one day, I took my book home with me. That day I read the rest of the entire reader. I went back to school the next day and wondered aloud why we weren't moving on to other books. 

I went through On Cherry Street so fast the teacher was embarrassed. I went to the school library. While there were books in that library, there were few interesting ones, and certainly none with the kind of story that would enthrall a child who had passed all the reading levels "allowed" in his grade.

The education system there was so poor that many of us lost interest in the texts used. 

But in the county library, I was free to roam like a buffalo on the plains. I had a home to roam while my father...or mother...was preoccupied looking for that one book. Meanwhile, I was accumulating enough books to need a bag to carry them all home.

If the books in that library helped give me a desire to be a reader, imagine what you can do by taking your child to the library. Let your child search through the level-appropriate books. Encourage them to take several books for the week.

Your son or daughter may not become an author, but they will gain an appreciation for reading, and thereby, an appreciation for learning. And reading is just the beginning of that journey.

A Reminder

 The works presented on this site are mine, created by me without any touch of artificial intelligence. All individual works, in the form of posts, are copyrighted by International Copyright Law and are the property of Daithi Fleming. No portion may be used as part of a whole of original creation of another, in any disseminated form, but each passage must adhere to standard copyright laws, citing ownership of the passage quoted, and adhering to international law.  

My profile narrative contains one line meant to remind readers of that protection. I am disseminating this information in this form because there are many throughout the world unaware of these international creative protections under the law.

Beef with Onion in a Mustard Cream Sauce

 

Beef with Onions, Garlic, Mustard, and Sour Cream...

For a quick and easy lunch:

1/2 pound beef stew meat

1 medium or large onion

1/4 cup butter

1 tablespoon of a red wine

6 cloves of garlic

2 tablespoons Dijon Mustard

1/4 cup sour cream

black pepper and salt to taste

In a stainless steel sauté pan, add beef stew meat, and chopped or sliced onion, peeled and chopped garlic, butter, and salt and black pepper. Cook on low to medium heat. Add red wine in the process. Test the beef to see when cooked, do not overcook. Remove the beef from the pan to finish the sauce. Add in mustard and sour cream, more butter if desired, and sauté the onions to desired completion. Warm the beef in the pan. Mix with the sauce. Pour the sauce on top of the beef if not mixed before. Enjoy your lunch!

Servings: One. For two, double the amounts.