Mikey Likes

Clyfford Still Museum

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Big Reasons to Go:

  • Clyfford Still MuseumYou’re a fan of Still’s work
  • In-house art-making space with encouraging and helpful staffer
  • The museum shows a progression of Still’s work – this is a great help if you don’t “get” abstract expressionism but are curious
  • Quarterly rotations of the displayed works
  • Great gallery rooms with beautiful lighting
  • The most helpful museum staff I’ve ever met. The guards aren’t there just to scold you away when you get too close.
  • They’ll fetch a chair if you want to sit and contemplate when the benches aren’t where you’d like to sit.

Find out more about it on their website, Clyfford Still Museum. I went last summer and remembered the pleasures.

Library in Use

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Jennifer had a library book on hold for months, three or four. It was finally available. While she was in Salem. Could I pick it up for her? Certainly. As I drove home from Salem I decided to stop at our local branch. I wanted to check on the availability of a prescription. I didn’t want to go home and drive right by the library.

I thought, “I’ll use one of their computers.” It seems lots of other people had the same idea, the computers were taken. OK, I took the books out to the car. I got my laptop and brought it back into the library. There were open table spaces. Sat down, logged into the MultcoLibrary-Neighborhood WiFi. Boom, I’m online and able to find that Yes, the prescription was filled.

Yay! for the library. I had what I needed. Even better there was a milk crate of empty paper bags. Just what we needed for the kitchen garbage. Books, a connection to my email, a newspaper, and paper bags, this library provided quite a bit today.

Woodstock Library. Multnomah County Libraries.

Signs Precedeing the End of the Word

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A week ago I wrote about Herrera Land:

Their book Signs Preceding the End of the World begins with a woman walking down the street.


I’m dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched: a man with a cane was crossing the street, a dull groan suddenly surged through the asphalt, the man stood still as if waiting for someone to repeat the question and then the earth opened up beneath his feet: it swallowed the man, and with him a car and a dog, all the oxygen around and even the screams of passers-by.
Opening sentence of Signs Preceding the End of the World


Could you stop reading there? I couldn’t. So I continued.


Three cheers for Lisa Dillman! She is the translator of the work and several others. Translators have a difficult craft to practice. Ms. Dillman does so well.

Self, in Herrera Land

I’m happy report that the book continues to tell the tale of Makina’s journey to the United States to find her brother. She’s street wise and winds her way past men.

It is great. I give it an unqualified recommendation.