Notices by dogtrax (dogtrax@mastodon.social)

For friends among the hashtags I regularly use -- #smallstories #smallpoems #smallquotes etc -- I am going to pull back in most digital spaces for the month of July (as I do every year). I may still jump in now and then, but nothing with any regularity. I hope you all keep writing.

Things I noticed on a Front Yard #Feldgang:
* the tiniest of flowers in driveway cracks. There's no way I would have paid attention to them otherwise
* a lone dandelion, with seeds ready to spread. This one is an outlier of the season
* the dead branches of the pine tree, framed underneath, with sky as backdrop, gives a new perspective
* a tree trunk as map, framed close, with crags and valleys
* a chewed leaf, bugs' dinner left uneaten
#smallstories
More about project: https://clmooc.com/clmooc-explores-the-world-the-feldgang-variations/

“Through their entanglements with algorithms, global music metadata arrangements, and automatized web-scrapers, streamed music files get wrapped up in the whirlpools of data traffic that surround digital streams.”

-- from Spotify Teardown (Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music) by Maria Erikson, et al, page 78

#smallquotes
#AmReading this book by researchers about the inner workings of Spotify
and it may be of interest to #MusicCollab friends, too

Listen:

the wind strums its strings
as shadows link arms,
moving in and out
of each other's proximity,
motion to the rhythm
of morning's early light

We ourselves
wander among the performers
of this quiet dance hall --
the corners where sun catches angles --
eyes open to the possibilities
of something always in motion

just before the moment fades,
forgotten forever

#smallpoems

@tdorey small pauses are worth celebrating ...

@wordsmith I love those unexpected conversations

“Words, stories, books allowed me to have not so much a quiet eye -- never, perhaps, my forte when I was young -- but a widened gaze at worlds I could never have imagined from my very small vantage point over Walnut Street, where I met Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Bronte and Margaret Mitchell for the first time.”

-- from Reader, Come Home (The Reading Brain in a Digital World) by Maryanne Wolf, page 88

#smallquotes

@Algot

the void
shouts
back:
I heard
you

I'm looking out the window as I write. An overwhelming green of the world is contrasted with sunlight filtering through our yard. Everything is framed by the window itself, a narrowing field of vision. I move my head to change the view. Our fence seems to shift, but it is mere illusion. Then there is a squirrel, balanced and calm, sitting on a post of the fence and centered into what I am seeing -- this grey creature on our grey fence surrounded by tree green and sun gold. #smallstories

Books
satisfy the need
to read, to learn
to feed the mind,
to find a way forward

Books
sink a hook
into your heart,
the start of something,
unexpected

Books
are more than mere
collections of words,
of stories told, of pictures
to behold

Books
are the very thing
that shook the earth,
ideas that launched
intellectual rebirth

#smallpoems for DS106 prompt about libraries ...

“Be heroic. It matters.”

-- from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader, edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick, from a letter by Caroline Paul, page 226

#smallquotes

Who is it who
leaves this debris
here, in this space
in the kitchen
that always needs
to be cleared
by day; and then,
by morning --
or night, when, just
as we feared, with sleep
clinging to us,
so desperate
and dear -- from where
does the detritus
of children suddenly
re-appear?

#smallpoems

(wrote this for ds106 daily create this morning with the prompt of kitchen detritus)

“Myths do not happen all at once. They do not spring forth whole into the world. They form slowly, rolled between the hands of time until their edges smooth, until the saying of the story gives enough weight to the words -- to the memories -- to keep them rolling on their own.”

-- from A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab, page 469

#smallquotes

Run your fingers
along the stem
of the branch, touch
the nub of bark
and imperfect design,
notice where each leaf
becomes a seam of green,
something new once
grew here

#smallpoems

inspired via https://www.flickr.com/photos/88003313@N06/15657844983 from Flickr Prompt site https://poem-prompt.glitch.me/

“… mathematicians employ strategies familiar to most readers. They form mental images. They paraphrase in their head. They skim past distracting technicalities. They draw connections … (t)hey engage their emotions, finding pleasure, humor and squeamish discomfort in their reading material.”

— from Math with Bad Drawings (Illuminating the Ideas That Shape Our Reality), by Ben Orlin, page 22

#smallquotes