I'm a Flower of the Mountain but not The Sick Rose

A book that I was tempted to buy yesterday but didn't

It's 3:16 pm on the west coast, we're battening down the hatches in anticipation of some big rainstorm, and I've only been home for about an hour. The rest of the day was spent in my car, driving around the big shitty, dropping my children off and picking them up. When I got home I heated up some spinach artichoke dip that I found in the freezer (please don't judge) and scooped it up with tortilla chips. I'm also going to eat an apple and thereby avoid a heart attack (have you heard that eating an apple a day is as effective as taking a statin?). I am waiting for Sophie's bus to drop her off, when I would normally have to transfer her to my sexy white Mazda and head out for the Ventura Freeway to pick up Henry from track practice. Between bites of dip (don't judge me) and chips, and before the apple, though, I idly texted a friend and asked whether her son was staying late today and if so, could she pick up Henry as well and drive him home?

She said yes.

Her yes was equivalent to Molly Bloom's yes I said yes I will Yes. My overabundance of joy at not having to drag Sophie into the car and travel on the Ventura Freeway at rush hour, readers, might be difficult to understand, but trust me when I compare it to Molly and Leopold's rapture. It was that good.

...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. 

James Joyce, Ulysses

Riding in the Car with Boys and Other Stuff

to Elizabeth L.

This morning I had an exhaustive conversation with several LAUSD worker bees because despite it being only the third day of the 2014-2015 school year, and the sixth year that Sophelia Bedelia has attended this school and therefore the sixth year that she has ridden the bus in the afternoons, there are problems. I've told you before that we refer to the Special Education Department of the LAUSD as                                        D O W N T O W N because for as long as I've known it (which is going on seventeen years!), whenever there are problems, anyone who works for the LAUSD blames it on  D O W N T O W N.

Like today. Apparently, DOWNTOWN has eliminated the position of SPED coordinator at our school because -- well -- who knows why? We had a rather nice and efficient coordinator last year, a welcome replacement for the retired Wicked Witch of the West, but I guess it was asking too much to see some continuity. I believe he has been shuffled back to another classroom and a new person is temporarily in the school office, but she obviously had never heard of Sophie nor did she know anything about her IEP, the wheelchair bus request which is in the IEP and the fact that the aide assigned to ride the bus with her was also assigned to ride with another kid who is apparently quite a handful. I'm not going to belabor this clusterf**k and tell you everything that has transpired because it's boring and very first worldish, but I kept Sophie home from school today so that the new bee could figure out the problem, and after the telephone call I felt overwhelmed and crazy again because remember: It's the small stuff that is going to kill me. I calmed myself down by imagining a trip to D O W N T O W N where I imagine I'd find some nasty little man behind a curtain, sort of like Oz.

Anywoo. Let's move on to riding in the car with boys.

Today's conversation and arguments revolved around Burpsnarts. The Brothers were actually arguing over Burpsnarts, which they explained are when you burp, sneeze and fart all at once. I repeat that they were having a conversation and actually arguing about this, and while it didn't come to blows, I fantasized a bit about slowing down and jumping out. Because I am a responsible woman, though, I refrained from it and in my mind thought about dining out with James Joyce and Nora and then getting on a private plane with my friend Elizabeth and moving to Bora Bora.

The Bookworm Thrills

The Bookworm, circa 1974 or 1975***

I've just been reading The New York Times Book Review, have downloaded several new books, added a couple to my Amazon wish list and spent several hours dipping into the old reviews of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude and a few of his other novels. That made me search for my old copy of the book, which I found and which I'm thinking I should re-read. Marquez loved Joyce and Woolf, and just the other day I was talking to an old and dearest friend, and he reminded me of Joyce's short stories, how amazing they are, how you can pick up anything of his and just dip in wherever, start reading, re-reading, whatever. I had told him that I couldn't get through the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch, that it bored me and I wasn't sure why. I'm wondering if I can get through the Marquez, this late in the game or whether I should stick to shorter novels. I haven't read a biography in years, so I'm pretty sure that I'll be buying the hard copy of the new Updike one by Adam Begley. The review made it sound fantastic, and while I came late to the Rabbit books, I fell in love with Updike over the four summers I spent reading each of those books, culminating in my seeing him at UCLA right before he died. I can still remember my surprise at his warmth (I'd thought he'd be patrician and snooty), at how long and thin his fingers were, how I wanted to jump from my third row seat right into his lap. And then there's Barbara Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God (that's the one I downloaded), described by the reviewer as electric, but then later as discursive, repetitive and claustrophobic, but Ehrenreich fascinates me, and so do people's lives and their mystical experiences so I'm going to read it. When I was a child, I'd walk into a library, move toward the children's section and have to kneel down, my foot wedged in my crotch, such was the urge to pee. This ridiculous side effect of book titillation carried on well into my adulthood when I still frequented bookstores, and even now, as I click and download and order, I feel the same sort of urgency and excitement at the prospect of so much to read, so many books. There's still time.






***Really, one can't exclaim enough over this perfect shot that my mother took one Christmas when I was ten or eleven years old. She always claimed that she'd practically shout at me such was my reverie when immersed in a book. I think she made that maxi dress for me, and I'm struck by my hair grown out and curled, evidently, with a curling iron. There would be several painful years of adolescence still to get through when the hairstyles got even more scary, and let's just say that being a bookworm was not a ticket to popularity and ease at a fancy private middle school in Atlanta, Georgia in the seventies. Oh, and let's not even talk about the couch fabric.

Saturday Night West Coast Re-Post

So, today is the great James Joyce's birthday, and there's a nice biographical homage to him over on The Writer's Almanac this morning with tidbits like this:

Joyce liked to drink and he liked to dance; his daughter-in-law said that "liquor went to his feet, not head. "Joyce usually sat with his legs crossed with the toe of one crossed again under the calf of the other. He was kind and generous to strangers, and he was known to invite waiters to join him at his table for food and drink. 

There's also a nice nod to the Irish writer on Brain Pickings with excerpts from a little-known children's book, The Cats of Copenhagen.

I've written about him here and there, highlighting some of my favorite passages from his short stories and books, so today's re-post will be one of those with one of my favorite photos of Sophie and Henry from 2010.

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2010

A Portrait of the the Artist

as a Young Man is certainly not one of my favorite books, but I remember a certain passage inside of it so well that it feels like yesterday when I first read it, or savored it or hung, suspended, in it. Today, in 1916, James Joyce published it, his first novel.

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and faint flame trembled on her cheek.

"Heavenly God!" cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

Epiphany

inadvertent revelations...little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal 


 the sudden revelation of the whatness of a thing


 the moment when the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant


--comments on epiphanies from James Joyce

A Portrait of the the Artist

as a Young Man is certainly not one of my favorite books, but I remember a certain passage inside of it so well that it feels like yesterday when I first read it, or savored it or hung, suspended, in it. Today, in 1916, James Joyce published it, his first novel.

He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls and voices childish and girlish in the air.


A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.


She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and faint flame trembled on her cheek.


"Heavenly God!" cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

Faintly falling, falling faintly

It's hard not to believe one is living on an entirely different planet when I open my door to a blue sky, blazing sun and eighty degrees this December afternoon. My son called me into the living room before he left for school to show me footage of the sports dome in Minnesota caving in from the recent obliterating snowstorm. Many of the blogs I visit and read have photos of trees encased in ice, children bundled up in boots with rosy cheeks and pots of chunky soups simmering on stoves. My son Oliver's cheeks are rosy, too, but mainly because he played a quarter-final soccer game this weekend in downtown Los Angeles where the temperature probably spiked at 85 degrees. Yesterday, we finished decorating our Christmas tree, not beside a crackling fire but with the door wide open because The Husband and I are not going to turn on the air-conditioner in mid-December, damnnit! I am not too bothered by the lack of holiday appropriate weather because I actually despise snow and cold weather. And while it's a bit irritating to still be wearing a tee-shirt with no sweater when you're out and about, getting ready for the two-week Christmas vacation, I comfort myself with one of my favorite passages in Irish literature.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.


--  from James Joyce's The Dead


You can watch a clip from John Huston's equally mesmerizing movie by clicking HERE (embedding the video is blocked). I highly recommend watching the whole four minutes or so, particularly the end.