Blood-Red and Complicit

Those are the books I'm currently reading, simultaneously. Well, I'm not actually reading them all at once, like scanning them from left to right, etc. -- but I dip into each one and read a bit, then lay that one down and dip into another one. I'm almost finished with the lyrical Ade by Rebecca Walker (she's Alice Walker's daughter, and I actually met her at a friend's house the other day!) and just loved it. Percival Everett's short stories are like no other that I've read, and I delved into the Flannery O'Connor because I read about The Displaced Person, didn't remember it from earlier reading and was just gobsmacked -- again -- by her brilliance. It's about a Polish refugee who finds work on a farm in Georgia, shortly after World War II, and -- well -- let's just say that it's prescient and that we haven't evolved too much since then, especially given much of the country's response to allowing Syrian refugees inside and the fact that a whole lot of people support contenders for the throne of the plutocracy who want to keep them out. There's also my own complicity to contend with (I learned at Tomales Bay from the great writer Steve Almond that we are ALL complicit in one way or another with just about every travesty) as part Syrian and all American. But hey, my last rant on that SIT U A Cee On landed me in a heap of trouble, including being asked to get my head out of my poetry ass, so I'll just leave you this passage from the story. (The Gobblehooks is what the woman, a white sharecropper, calls the Poles because she can't understand their name):

Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying "Time marches on!" This was the kind of thing that was happening every day in Europe where they had not advanced as in this country, and watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others.

That story was written in the 1950s, folks.

The Sy Montgomery book is an astounding one about an octopus and human consciousness. I can hardly stand how good it is and can only read in bits. I'll report back on it next year, which is just around the corner. My other Leisure Activity, done largely at night when the children are safely in their rooms either sleeping or playing horrific video games, is watching the second season of The Affair. It's on Showtime, and I don't subscribe to Showtime, but I signed up for a trial membership, and I'm in. I know there are probably better quality shows right now on the TV, but I can't stand a crime thriller or anything with lots of lawyers or intrigue on The Hill or spies and Strong Women Who Never Smile but are CIA operatives in the middle east. Give me a cheesy drama with lots of graphic sex, good acting and unbelievable story lines that revolve around marriages and child-rearing and New York City and Long Island over self-conscious Claire Danes combatting terrorists or fake southern accented Kevin Spacey sliming Washington D.C. Don't watch The Affair with your children (just allow them to steal cars and shoot up people in foreign lands with fancy guns and that all-American camo wear) or your parents (if your parents are like mine) because I repeat: the sex is graphic and there's lots of language and pretty much every single person is despicable, but it's a good soap opera for the likes of me.

I got my nails painted bright red today -- just in time, I told my friend -- for my drive up to snowy Yosemite tomorrow morning and my phantom lover. Just kidding on the lover -- phantom or not. I am leaving with the boys for the rest of the week and meeting my parents and two of my nieces at my favorite place on earth. Yosemite is a holy place, in winter or summer, and while I did just read a disturbing article about the thousands of Native Americans who were killed and otherwise displaced from their native lands, including Yosemite, I will approach it with reverence and humility and full acceptance of my own complicity as a white woman, reaping benefits hundreds of years later, my nails blood-red.

Hippo Solstice

What are ya'll doing? I'm lolling about and then getting up and doing stuff like laundry and cleaning the stuff off the dining room table, then reading a bit of Flannery O'Connor's The Displaced Person (it's relevance to us and particular prescience) and then walking to OSH to buy those little carpety things that go under the dining table legs and then back to lolling and then to helping Sophie off the floor where she's lying seizing (yes, seizing, but I've done another WEAN of her gd medication, so we're in for it) and then debating whether pizza is in order for dinner -- again.



It's a long poem, but it's so beautiful. Read it silently and then read it aloud and let those words roll off your tongue.



A Dream of Solstice

Qual e' colui che somniando vede,
che dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa
rimane, e l'altro a la mente non riede,
cotal son io...

Dante, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII


'Like somebody who sees things when he's dreaming
And after the dream lives with the aftermath
Of what he felt, no other trace remaining,

So I live now', for what I saw departs
And is almost lost, although a distilled sweetness
Still drops from it into my inner heart.

It is the same with snow the sun releases,
The same as when in wind, the hurried leaves
Swirl round your ankles and the shaking hedges

That had flopped their catkin cuff-lace and green sleeves
Are sleet-whipped bare. Dawn light began stealing
Through the cold universe to County Meath,

Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling,
Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones
Millennia deep in their own unmoving

And unmoved alignment. And now the planet turns
Earth brow and templed earth, the crowd grows still
In the wired-off precinct of the burial mounds,

Flight 104 from New York audible
As it descends on schedule into Dublin,
Boyne Valley Centre Car Park already full,

Waiting for seedling light on roof and windscreen.
And as in illo tempore people marked
The king's gold dagger when it plunged it in

To the hilt in unsown ground, to start the work
Of the world again, to speed the plough
And plant the riddled grain, we watch through murk

And overboiling cloud for the milted glow
Of sunrise, for an eastern dazzle
To send first light like share-shine in a furrow

Steadily deeper, farther available,
Creeping along the floor of the passage grave
To backstone and capstone, holding its candle

Under the rock-piled roof and the loam above.


Seamus Heaney

Sunday Geek

So, I think I mentioned somewhere that Henry is now a driving young man. My own trepidation at the thought of him cruising the highways of Los Angeles aside, he's also now the ecstatic owner of a used car, a humble vehicle that apparently carries some clout in its used-ness. I caught him on Friday night, just before my salon, outside actually washing the windows with water and soap. I don't think you need to know that he has never, and I mean never washed a window of a car by hand. The boy has many strengths but that sort of thing -- hand-washing a car's windows -- has never been seen in this land. Today, he bought a chirping bird that he will place on the dashboard of his sacred vehicle. I raised my eyebrows when he showed it to me, suggested that if it were Oliver who had made the purchase, there would be no end to the carping about how obnoxious that is! You're such an idiot! You're so weird! etc., to which Henry just smiled and proceeded to show Sophie, who, as you can see, completely appreciated it.

What I love about parenting is when your kids are unwitting geeks, when the self-conscious adolescent thing disappears, and they're just delighted to be alive.


Geekiness doesn't fall far from the tree, as they say. This morning I scrolled through Facebook and came upon a rare recording of one of my favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor,* reading her famous short story A Good Man Is Hard To Find. My friend Tanya Ward Goodman (inimitable writer herself, most recently of Leaving Tinkertown fame) had posted it, so I clicked and clicked and opened and settled in Sophie's purple beanbag chair and just about died from happiness.

Here's the link to the audio part:



And while you're listening, you can open up the short story and actually read along.

If you're even the tiniest bit like me, you will feel overwhelmed with gratitude and happiness, lulled by the soft Georgian accent of that titanic woman and entirely blown away by her sinister story.

Pray tell what your Sunday is looking like.







*And here's a little thing for my fellow geeks who love Flannery O'Connor and probably hate Ayn Rand -- something O'Connor wrote to a friend about Rand:

I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.

Sitting in a Car

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character

who is not very willing to support it,

but most people think of these as

hard, hopeless and brutal.

Flannery O'Connor

Sitting in a car in a flowered dress, I was talking to you as if it were a natural thing, the give and take, the soft laugh, the absence of flesh. There was no talk of being centered, of allowing things to unfold, the kind of Buddha-speak to which those of us who spurn the spiritual gravitate toward as if it will save us. I sort of like the sexism in Updike and Fellini, I offered and I wasn't embarrassed. You listened even as your words tumbled over mine and mine over yours. It occurred to me in my heresy that it was because I sensed vulnerability, there, in the coarse language of Updike, the parade of female flesh in Fellini. You were the one that mentioned O'Connor, those horrific characters, the stories. I have this image in my mind, this character that won't leave me alone, I told you. Remember the scene in "The Graduate" where the mother throws her head back and screams? Yeah, you said, and then you made that noise that she made. She visits me all the time, I said. Not that mother but that woman. She needs a name. She has a helmet of hair. She laughs like that. Throws her head back and laughs maniacally. We had to stop talking. I had to go, get out of my car. There was nothing more than a string of words in that conversation. We aren't most people, hard, hopeless and brutal. There was everything, though, that was soft, of grace.