engoulevent

I came across this quote in "The Sunlight Dialogues"  "The aesthetic response is in large part a response to order as moral affirmation".      The characters have very genuine qualities, especially the female characters. Millie's determination for a better life highlights the weakness of a pursuit for a better life,  unsympathetic to the world around her...she emerged from an impoverished background where she learned that her face held the greatest resource for her change in circumstances.  Clumly's blind wife assumes the role of a meek woman making do, but she hides her clever self , hiding an equivalent contempt, while dealing with the world in the best way she can.  Her drinking problem is regarded as a small thing to her husband who in his role as police chief regards himself as burdened with the ailments of an entire society.    Their characters are fixed.  The drama evolves from the solidness of the soul's container.  These personalities will not adapt.  The sense of pre-destination is oppressing.  

The ethics, or aesthetics in the subtext force the reader to slow down. Garden alleviates some of the seriousness of the book with bits of humor:

We are suddenly plunged into a funeral service:

Vanessa was weeping.  "Beautiful funeral." she said....She was holding her husband's upper arm with both hands, leaning her heavy face against his elbow.  Her eyes widened and she said. ""What an awful thing last night!....Poor woman! Cold blood! When I think we had him right under our roof-"

...Will Hodge speaking  of the murder tells us:  "They shot her with a gun wrapped up in a blanket--the blanket off my bed."

"Blanket!"Vanessa said. "Not Grandma's quilt!"

"No, another one," he said. "One Millie left."

She put her hand to her heart in relief.


For me this interlude was more amusing than the charade described below which appeared a couple of pages before the excerpt above:

Hodge had hardly slowed down before Freeman was out, sneaking along the line of parked cars, darting clownish, from bumper to bumper, impossible not to notice, until he was opposite the store from which Clumly and the other policeman had just emerged.  They went into the next store, The Place of Sweets.  Freeman darted in behind them, and a moment later darted out again and came ostentatiously sneaking, smiling joyfully, back to Hodge. "They're investigating," he whispered. (There was no reason he should whisper.)

Telling a story in the Stephen King tradition doesn't require sacrifice in the way John Gardner sacrifices the integrity of his story, whether it be a stranger in the form of a hitchhiker possessed of a devil-may-care attitude and a philosophical one-liners, or the occasionally insightful ramblings of the Sunlight man.  Gardner doesn't title his book Batavia, but rather The Sunlight Dialogues, a platonic format.

Furtive times two

This photo was taken by Danielle McAllister, and to me this is a great photo.  Susan is sneaking out of the picture, a bit sheepish about being noticed, yet although the hat  could be taken as a disguise, but a hat like that can't help but  call attention to her.    The photographer is snapping off a quick pic, has the photographer also tried to be clandestine?  Susan must be traveling with another person,  who is conspicuously absent from this photo. 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/54372460@N07/7112692997/

Funny tweet on the twitter thread:
Leese ‏ @IrnBruShampoo

My dad is such an idiot for not thinking to record what Susan Boyle done in his shop the other day.

@_charlottenberg lmao! She was buying this couch that's a massive circle for like 3 people and it turns so she was on it spinning round and she started swinging her bag round her head going "areeba areeeeeba!" and she asked for a discount hahaha






From this funny post to Jensen's  serious tone:


Robert Jensen reviews Belen Fernandez's book ' The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work' which attempts to understand the almost ubiquitous support for Thomas Friedman whom Fernandez regards as a journalist who blatantly panders to privilege, suffusing his text with Western racism while making banal endorsements of American power.
I tried to reply to his most recent email :

I have read neither Friedman nor Fernandez.  Although I firmly understand Fernandez's frustration with a public too willing to gobble up Friedman's pre-chewed C.V., she comes across as disgruntled and smug, whereas  by her description,  a tone of gratitude adheres to Friedman. Fernandez writes:
He’s the perfect oracle for a management-focused, advertising-saturated, dumbed-down imperial culture that doesn’t want to come to terms with the systemic and structural reasons for its decline.
Well, she's certainly pegged our spirit of willful cultural blindness.  Yet, appreciation is more quickly trusted than discontent, no matter where the truth lies.  Moreover, smugness isn't endemic to America.  I am reminded of a recent TED talk by Chris Bliss emphasizing the role of comedy
in communication and of Ken Kesey's quote: "The small can overcome the large with treachery, creativity and humor."  Perhaps there is a large amount of humor in 'The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at work', but I suspect not.  

Five stories published in the February edition of Harper's by Diane Williams.

From the story Girl with a Pencil :

And so was invented a kind of brute--a brunette who has longish hair, who must love her enemies, who acts responsibly.

From A Gray Pottery Head:
A tulip tree, tucked into a right angle, formed by two planes, was brought in to her view.

This is a story of a dying woman walking to a familiar place...the short phrases are quick breaths?, the tulip tree her dying vision, unable to move any farther, the woman lying on the ground, with only two planes of view? 

    The story With Red Chair :  In the words of people who frequently repeat themselves--he is told fair words of devotion, sitting in a room decked out in antique velvet.

What type of people frequently repeat themselves? Weak-minded, the homeless,  perhaps undertakers, anyone wanting to convince us of something with no hard facts to sway us.  Are these people sycophants?   Used car salesmen?

The storyteller  proceeds, interjecting a collective judgement:  "It is not our purpose to say anything imprecise about their scheme" ...yet it is defined as a scheme no less.   As if to say:  you,  reader know the type of person of whom we speak, we need not be detailed about their shenanigans,    The story-teller reveals a personal distaste for these characters who have pursued a bourgeois lifestyle.  Did the characters' easy lifestyle lead to the accidental death of 3/5 of the family group?  And now, for our perusal, we spectators can gawk at the achievement of these spent lives, we spectators.

http://soundcloud.com/leonardcohen/leonard-cohen-darkness?page=1


A few lyrics to Leonard Cohen's Darkness
"I thought the past would last me, but the darkness got that too."
"I caught the Darkness, it was drinking from your cup" 
  A great line Mr. Cohen, instant classic, makes you wonder why it had not been uttered earlier.
" I caught the darkness baby, and I got it worse than you"    I love the vault from the active to the passive form of "caught"

"Peace is harder to make than war."   Stanley Weintraub

"I see the music in your face that your words can not explain."  David Byrne lyrics to Strange Overtones,

"But she's an amazing collaborator, and I feel like sometimes I have a map in my pocket that folds up and I pull it out and it's bigger than the table, and there's 1,000 places to go with her."
Tom Waits describing his wife.

The oldest cedar tree has burst into fire the weather is so dry here....What a glamorous ending!

Thinking about the risk Susan takes getting on stage in front of less than receptive audiences.  Maybe it wasn't that much of a risk given her talent, but the biggest risk that I've taken recently is to purchase a bubble bath that described itself as "foaming"...would there be enough bubbles to warrant the $5 cost?

The question put to the podcast website: do you fact check fiction?  An author writing about an event that occurred twenty years earlier may have a temporal proximity when compared to a writer describing the same event one hundred years later, but which has the sharper lens?  With physical proximity, the closest witness generally has the most accurate, or clearest view of the event, not necessarily true with time.  As observers we are influenced by the social and political milieu, by our beliefs about others and ourselves, by our mood, by our background.  These aspects determine the value we place on events leading to bias.  Bias makes a story interesting, particularly when the outcome reveals our biases. 
I was listening to a podcast on the origin of the spiritualist movement.  The originators endured many tests to their claims of being able to speak with the dead.  For me, as for many listeners, the fact that these two women created a career out of this claim to be able to communicate with the dead is enough to dispel any notion of truth behind their claim.   These women  live by communicating with the dead, channeling the ghost of a murdered previous resident now hidden in the cellar wallsl. If excavation of the walls reveals no bones, then the ghost cannot exist.  The podcast follows these two pioneers of the spiritualist movement until one of them, many many years later, finally recants her story, then shortly thereafter she  recants her retraction.    As denizens of the 21rst century, we smugly acknowledge the absurdity of any claim to channel the dead.  At the end of the podcast, it is revealed to us that the bones of the resident  described as haunting the cellar were indeed found in the cellar walls when the weather finally permitted an excavation..  Now we are uncomfortable; the objective behind every successful story.



Hot or h-awww-t?   Les deux.

Do we dream more of what we cannot be just as we desire more what we cannot have?

He is surrounded by people who speak the same language but with an unfamiliar tongue.  The land attracts him with its potential for anonymity.  Here he hopes to lose everything, to dissipate into a fog-laden berm, to become forgotten in the repetition of seasons, to de-patronize his soul. 

I am rereading The Woman I was Born to Be.  Her words make me feel as if I have known her my entire life, yet I can't help but feel that I will never know her. 

Alexandria is gone. She did not turn up for dinner on Thursday (9/22).
I miss her big toothless head. I never took her photo. It as if she never existed.
The other cats seem in good spirits. I miss emptying the litter box, I miss her loud
Raucous meow. I have spoken with the neighbors, I have looked in the trash, in the dark spaces under bushes. Nothing.
Lacey wandered over to the water bowl. By habit I jumped up to provide, clean fresh water.
But the water was  pristine, no Alexandria to muddy the water, to leave tufts of hair and bits food from her few remaining teeth.  
Alexandria formed my habits, became part of me. I never took a photo of that one pound griseled head on a four-pound body.
Even those things  that you don't acknowledge become a part of you that you can't deny.
I miss her.




And then there is  one for whom you devote every idle thought;
and she is only a shadow.

I am always subconsciously  creating mazes for myself.  I move the footstool away from the chair  and I angle the coffee table diagonally across the room.  The yard has sinewy vertical and horizontal paths to best capitalize on available  sunlight.  The cat food bowls are scattered about the kitchen. When I can see only walls, I choose to amble within these self-imposed confines,  to explore the geometry of  routine spaces.

"That's her, that's her"  The animal shelter is closed on Sunday and Monday.  I biked to the shelter early Tuesday...on the top row of cages, in the dead center, there she was, behind a sign that said "Wet Food Only, no teeth" .   I had only my bike but the shelter gave me a carrier and a rubber bungee cord to secure the carrier  to the bike rack.  I biked home the four or five miles and put her inside then biked back to return the carrier and cord.  I took photos immediately...I will post one soon.