Month: December 2010

REVIEW – “What the Water Gave Me: Poems After Frida Kahlo” by Pascale Petit

Ros Barber
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Pascale Petit, a painter and sculptor before she turned poet, has long felt connection with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Though What the Water Gave Me makes no claim to be a comprehensive verse biography of Kahlo, it succinctly maps the short distance between pain and painting.  Like the paintings, these poems give the sense they insisted themselves into existence.  Giving Kahlo a voice beyond the canvas, they trace an artistic soul from its conception: ‘sheathed in pearl/as I learn,/even before birth,/to doodle in the dark.’   Only half born, Kahlo observes with ‘baby painter’s eyes’:

Look at how
I wear my mother’s body
like a regional dress –
its collar gripping my neck.
For now, her legs are my arms,
her sex is my necklace.

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Being Hacked: 7 Pieces of Silver Lining

Ros Barber
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I can hear you now. Come on, you say. The benefits of appendicitis is one thing, but really, surely there are no benefits to having your (several) websites simultaneously hacked and all the files deleted?  I mean how irritatingly positive can you get?  (I’m sure my kids would provide you with an answer, but luckily they take no interest in what I do – what child does – and are unlikely to come pitching in with comments.)

I admit the experience was less than fun, at the time. But here I am, with everything restored from back up and deeply grateful that it wasn’t worse.  After all, the hacker got to the websites, it seems, through a weakness in Windows XP, with a trojan activating XP’s Remote Assistance feature, meaning he (and yes, you can be sure it was a man, God bless them all) had control of my desktop.  So frankly, he could have done a lot more damage.

So like all less than desirable events, I’m looking at it as a learning experience. And what did I learn?

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