Paradise

My current read is Paradise, by A.L. Kennedy, a younger Scottish novelist. It’s a good read, though difficult in places due to the harsh realities of its alcoholic narrator. Here’s the blurb from “The Seattle Times:” “A stunning depiction of alcoholism, as funny as it is sad, as ironic as it is romantic.” In this passage the narrator is standing in the doorway of a barn, soaking up the feeling of a Scottish summer, and remembering her childhood.

“Beyond the lintel’s shade, there is the sweetness of grain fields on the breeze, the bland dust of poor soil, baked to a yellowish crust: and salt, too: something of the high-tide line, bladderwrack and rock clefts dank with scrub and gorse: that slightly human, musty fug of heated gorse, the snap of its seeds, the blood drop in the yellow of each flower: which is to say, the smell and taste and everything of my being a child in summer, of running between the blue, narrow shore and the racing depths of barley with my brother until the sun had fallen and the sandy earth was cooled to match the temperature of skin.”

A beautiful evocation of place, strangely punctuated, and a delight to read aloud. As a matter of fact, you could chop it up randomly and call it poetry.

I speak real good

On the same day (yesterday) that Barack Obama was busy giving one of the most eloquent speeches on race for decades, the Chimp in Chief was in Sarasota, mangling the English language … yet again. It’s like the crazy uncle everybody has gotten used to, so we don’t even think about it anymore when he says amazingly stupid things like, “I heard somebody say, where’s Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas.” I’m not making this up. Click on the link yourself if you don’t believe me.

Yesterday’s pronouncements, while not as bizare as the above, still demonstrate that the guy is not playing with a full deck. Here’s one example amongst many:

Spending Research And Development
“But there’s a lot of research and development being spent here in America.”

Lord, give me strength to endure the remaining months of this so-called presidency.

Bovine masses

Kate Christensen’s satirical novel, The Great Man, has just won The PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction. She gives a great interview:

“We live in a profoundly conservative time. The pendulum has swung backward to “family values,” whatever the fuck that means, fundamentalist religions, and a tame and docile population who’s being scarily and almost cartoonishly manipulated by the most criminally dastardly government this country has ever had. We dress alike, we talk alike, we are a big homogeneous bunch of domesticated cows in Pottery Barns.”

You go girl! Couldn’t agree more.

Two Odes to March

As I Go From Here

I’ll look up at the sky
As I lie in the snow of March
Smiling, staring up
And the sky will be blue.
The trees will be bare
At the end of winter.
The sky will be blue
With the sound of the
Wind and Waves.

Partridge Tracks

An abortive thaw makes for a
Thin crust.
Attenuated ice crystals
Glisten where they pucker
On the ridge, in the sundown,
Where the partridge went by.
The roar of the pines, hushing.

Nature Deficit Disorder

I have been dipping into Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, where I learned, amongst other shocking things, that the average 8 to 10 year old spends six hours per day watching T.V. or playing computer games - in front of a monitor, in other words. That same kid spends four minutes per day in unstructured outdoor activity, FOUR MINUTES! So, no splendor in the grass, no pondering cloud shapes, no making forts in trees, and no chance to make friends with nature …and yourself.

Meanwhile, I notice kids driving to school in this below zero weather - wearing shorts, with no coat. When I was a kid we didn’t wear shorts in the winter. Call me old fashioned, but we kind of understood that it was cold out, that cars sometimes break down, and that the cold was real, not some virtual projection of reality. Yeah, I know. I’m showing my age.

Spitzer

Over at Corrente they are playing “House of the Rising Sun”, by Eric Burdon and the Animals - which is appropriate, if you think about it:

There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And it’s been the ruin of many a poor boy
And God I know I’m one

What a dummy. What was he thinking? And … more importantly … even if you are filthy rich, like Eliot Spitzer, how can you justify paying several thousand dollars on at least 7 or 8 occasions for a call girl? I mean, didn’t the Pope just come out with a whole new list of cardinal sins? Wasn’t “Contributing to widening divide between rich and poor” amongst them? Wait a minute! Maybe Spitzer was actually involved in an elaborate form of wealth redistribution? Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all?

Six below zero

… That’s right. Six below zero this morning at the top end of Lake Leelanau. And it’s dark, because some government wonk, in his infinite wisdom, thought that moving the clocks ahead three weeks early would be a good idea. Still, I am hopeful. The sun is coming up, and it will get above freezing today, then a thaw sets in for the rest of the week …. and baseball season starts up in about three weeks… so the bulk of the evidence seems to point to progress, despite the fact that it is six below zero on March 10th.

We can do this.

The miracle of melancholia - L.A. Times

Here’s a passage which pretty much speaks for itself, and which I’ve quoted at length below, from the L A Times:

“Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.

This of course does not mean that we should simply wallow in gloom, that we should wantonly cultivate depression. I’m not out to romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide.

On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I’m valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I’m offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I’m saying that it’s more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie.”

Read more here. It’s well worth the time.

Mr. Hulot’s Holiday

It is the last day of February, and the snow is flying. I think I will go home and watch one of my favorite movies, just to cheer me up. It always works.

M. Hulot’s Holiday is a charming movie. The charm lies, I think, in the tendency of the movie to portray our attempts to impose routine behavior on the holiday experience. In the end we carry our stories with us, as turtles carry their shells. Upstairs the beautiful young girl opens her windows. She has just arrived. She looks out from her rented room onto the beach. The regulars notice as they promenade. Everything is new and full of promise. The sky is blue and the air is fresh. But the holiday resort is populated by types. There is the bratty child, the upright colonel, the indignant waiter, and then there is M. Hulot, agent of anarchy. The dramatic interest in the story arises out of the encounter between the imposed routine of the boarding house and the liberating possibilities of the holiday experiences.

Who wouldn’t want to be at the seaside on a day like this? It’s just therapy, much needed on this, the last snowy day of February.

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, by Peter Parsons

“Pythagoras the philosopher, having disembarked and teaching letters, advised his pupils to abstain from beans.” This nonsensical little tongue twister is a schoolboy translation exercise, discovered among huge trash heaps of papyrus in Oxyrhynchos (literally “City of the Sharp -Nosed Fish”), an ancient site 100 miles south of Cairo. It is a slice of life that proves that even in the 2nd century AD, language learning involved pointless sentences that nobody ever used - sort of a Graeco-Roman Egyptian version of “La plume de ma tante est jaune,” or (one that has stuck in my mind all these many years after first learning German), “Das aufschnieden des Stieffels ist zu vermeiden.” (“The cutting off of boots is to be avoided.) Good to know that some things never change.