That thing you use to drown your food? That condiment that grace notes the glory of fried food? My BIL's favorite restaurant condiment?
Nope, just a new blog post that trims the strands remaining in the end of January and neatly blanket stitches the edge. I am in a crafting frame of mind but don't have an immediate project to hand, so I am YouTube daydreaming through art journals and handmade beads and funny felt creatures and breaking out the sewing metaphors. Also, plotting a drive to Half Price because January's TBR? Yeah. Too chewy.
To all my former writer's group friends who suffered through my allusive and weird drafts? Your revenge is at hand. Repeat after me in your best Inigo Montoya voice: You killed my patience, prepare to read Moonwise.
Moonwise is the epitome of my January TBR. I'd picked it up once upon a time after encountering mention of it that promised a love-it-or-loathe-it but rewarding read for those who could make it through. It sounded exactly like something I would love and the first few pages intrigued me. Who is this woman who has shown up at a friend's house? Why is she desperate? What is she hoping this visit will accomplish? Also, what a lovely, atmospheric beginning.
Then...well...things happen. Maybe. Or...other things happen. I'm not British, so those things are seriously opaque to me. Are these women who have just graduated from university? Are they middle-aged? What, exactly, is a "hallows?"
I find myself reading a page, skimming back over it and just trudging forward through another sentence, numb. It's winter in the story and there are witches. Maybe. There's definitely snow. The reading experience seems to chime with the experience of one of the characters, a variety of confusion in which you become sincerely grateful for an interlude regarding the local goats because you know what a goat is and THANK GOODNESS FOR THAT.
Despite the slow going, I find myself wondering if I would have enjoyed this closer to the time I found it. Before I'd read Harry Potter, before I'd tried to write a half-dozen abandoned novels, before I'd moved so thoroughly into the Fezzbook and YouTube weeds that my reading habits atrophied. Before my TBR exploded with tons of used book stress-buys. This is to say that I think this is a book that rewards being treated like a lake to be explored rather a backyard lap pool. When you set yourself up to read it as part of a large pile of other books by the end of a given month, I guess you deserve to find that it slaps you in the face and sucks you down into a slough of text from which your preserved body will emerge in the data stream years hence with no indication of what happened except that you fell in a book and drowned, trying to treat a lake like a lap pool.
Soon...not today, perhaps tomorrow...I'm going to go questing for a copy of The Alienist or Poor Things or The Left Hand of Darkness or...manga? Maybe that would be a good shift for February's TBR stack. There will be stacks of not-new novels and a sunny afternoon to explore the shelves and, lurking in the background, a dark lake of a novel waiting for my attention.
Monday, January 29, 2018
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Sam
The following was inspired by a recent WordCrafters prompt (Carrie always picks the best prompts).
When the ship landed (without conception,
without birth), my sole touched dirt.
When the cloth became sea and blood and star and peace,
I, too, was clothed.
When the dozen became a hundred became a thousand,
I became fierce.
I became prayer.
I became war.
I became.
I am not jailed by any orator.
Interrogate me.
When you see your face, you see a star
In my constellation.
I am nothing but paint and myth.
I am nothing but a flag falling and rising.
I am nothing but a mask.
Wear me, when you claim me,
To see the shining of every face around you.
Wear me, when you claim me,
Until the torch flames in the lady's fist.
When the ship landed (without conception,
without birth), my sole touched dirt.
When the cloth became sea and blood and star and peace,
I, too, was clothed.
When the dozen became a hundred became a thousand,
I became fierce.
I became prayer.
I became war.
I became.
I am not jailed by any orator.
Interrogate me.
When you see your face, you see a star
In my constellation.
I am nothing but paint and myth.
I am nothing but a flag falling and rising.
I am nothing but a mask.
Wear me, when you claim me,
To see the shining of every face around you.
Wear me, when you claim me,
Until the torch flames in the lady's fist.
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Once Upon a Storm
Once Upon a Storm
Dollar weed lagoon, my pond of the golden fish--a windblown wrapper carp--
rises between the hoofbeats of a rainstorm, dust and water crushed to dusky sky
just beneath where the fence--in drier days--has been shorn into a ragged opening
for the exhausted grass.
Now diamonds grow from this dark water, from puddle beds of clay and green.
Wishes granted by fish mouth, close to the ground, gleam on the skin of the sky as it dries.
All the streets are cleaner now; the greens are thicker, the chill is sunnier now
the wishes have soaked into the ground.
Dollar weed lagoon, my pond of the golden fish--a windblown wrapper carp--
rises between the hoofbeats of a rainstorm, dust and water crushed to dusky sky
just beneath where the fence--in drier days--has been shorn into a ragged opening
for the exhausted grass.
Now diamonds grow from this dark water, from puddle beds of clay and green.
Wishes granted by fish mouth, close to the ground, gleam on the skin of the sky as it dries.
All the streets are cleaner now; the greens are thicker, the chill is sunnier now
the wishes have soaked into the ground.
Saturday, January 6, 2018
Wonder Stories
Today, I am thinking about things that do damage and things that do not. About stories that are more like mycelium roots, about what kinds of relationships we have, and about the window that is still open in this room, while others throughout the house have been shut.
I was reading Jen Campbell's "The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night" when I put the book down for a moment and noticed that it's published by Two Roads press and then, whether they intended this or not, I was thinking about the Frost poem and about my own walk in the arboretum this afternoon, in the only section of the woods that are open after the hurricane. I started thinking about my spouse's comment that I needed to be mindful of little six- and seven-year-olds as I enumerated the flaws I'd found with the latest Star Wars movie and how I should be aware that this was their first experience of the movie on the big screen. That I shouldn't take a chance on ruining their childhood experience of a movie that both of us had loved as children. Even if it isn't the same movie. Even if we don't know any six- or seven-year-olds.
Am I still that kid in the theater? The one who dreamed about Luke Skywalker showing up and walking in person at the very front of the movie theater, directly in front of the screen, just as stunned by his movie as we were? Is that person the one who was disappointed by the latest movie? The one who is enchanted by "The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night"? Is that person still kept tenuously inside me, like an astronaut in space, tangled up in the roots of all the wonder stories that I've read or seen?
It feels as if more than the breeze is seeping through the window, as if evening itself wanted to pour into the room and even out the light and dark, bleed the screen a little dimmer, so that I can pay attention to a distant neighbor's hammering, the beat of my own heart as I sit cross-legged in this chair, the burble of barks that trace arrivals and awarenesses among the houses and yards. That breeze promises a little extra buoyancy to the person tangled in those roots, hints at stories that are just about to bud open in the night.
I certainly don't want to damage the growth of any stray senses of wonder around me. As much I resent his words--sometimes bad stories have to be untangled verbally--, I'll have to hang them in the same place as those other writer 'rules' of surreal applicability, in the oil and water mixtures of 'should' and 'art' that become stories.
I was reading Jen Campbell's "The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night" when I put the book down for a moment and noticed that it's published by Two Roads press and then, whether they intended this or not, I was thinking about the Frost poem and about my own walk in the arboretum this afternoon, in the only section of the woods that are open after the hurricane. I started thinking about my spouse's comment that I needed to be mindful of little six- and seven-year-olds as I enumerated the flaws I'd found with the latest Star Wars movie and how I should be aware that this was their first experience of the movie on the big screen. That I shouldn't take a chance on ruining their childhood experience of a movie that both of us had loved as children. Even if it isn't the same movie. Even if we don't know any six- or seven-year-olds.
Am I still that kid in the theater? The one who dreamed about Luke Skywalker showing up and walking in person at the very front of the movie theater, directly in front of the screen, just as stunned by his movie as we were? Is that person the one who was disappointed by the latest movie? The one who is enchanted by "The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night"? Is that person still kept tenuously inside me, like an astronaut in space, tangled up in the roots of all the wonder stories that I've read or seen?
It feels as if more than the breeze is seeping through the window, as if evening itself wanted to pour into the room and even out the light and dark, bleed the screen a little dimmer, so that I can pay attention to a distant neighbor's hammering, the beat of my own heart as I sit cross-legged in this chair, the burble of barks that trace arrivals and awarenesses among the houses and yards. That breeze promises a little extra buoyancy to the person tangled in those roots, hints at stories that are just about to bud open in the night.
I certainly don't want to damage the growth of any stray senses of wonder around me. As much I resent his words--sometimes bad stories have to be untangled verbally--, I'll have to hang them in the same place as those other writer 'rules' of surreal applicability, in the oil and water mixtures of 'should' and 'art' that become stories.
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