Katey Sagal

            I spent a good part of Thursday reading “The Thunderbird Poems” about Norval Morriseau by Armand Garnet Ruffo. The title of every poem is the title of a painting by Morriseau, so before I read the poem I searched Google images for the painting. I was able to find most of the paintings. Much of the artwork is imaginative and there is Ojibway symbolism contained throughout all of them. I find the work often to be overly simplified and I think it’s because of a lack of painterly skill that he relied heavily on colour and symbolism. That being said, there are a lot of the images which I like and find to be well designed even though I don’t think they are great works of art.

            As for Ruffo’s poems, for the most part they seem amateurish to me. The very first poem, “Life Scroll” is actually pretty good but everything else in the book consists of editorial descriptions in verse of paintings of Morriseau’s circumstances at the time of production. I find this kind of writing to be extremely contrived and uninspired.

            I started reading “Live From The Afrikan Resistance” by El Jones. Each poem is about a different important figure from Black history, especially Nova Scotia Black history. The subjects of the poems are interesting but unfortunately the poems are horrible. It was a much more fulfilling literary experience to just look up each name on Wikipedia and read the article. Jones seems to be almost saying that it doesn’t matter if her poems are lousy because she is honouring Black history. Personally I would rather read a good poem about a child rapist than a bad poem about Ghandi.

            I watched the first two episodes from the tenth season of the Big Bang Theory. In the first one, since Penny and Leonard had originally eloped they decided to include all of their families in a ceremonial renewal of vows. Katey Sagal plays Penny’s mother and she’s even more gorgeous now than she was when she was on Married With Children thirty years ago. She’s a year older than me. What makes our generation so good looking?