interesting read…

about literature and sex. I believe it’s from The Pillow Book, which is a movie I come back to every now and then. Disturbing, beautiful, and never boring.

great story

Yes, it is. I’m not sure I could do this. I’m no Scarlett O’Hara. Don’t know nuthin ’bout birthin’ no babies. Nu-uh. Technically, I didn’t even birth the kiddo. Unassisted, anyway. Not that I’m complaining.

I can’t yet bring myself to touch the worm the kiddo offers me when she goes “fishing” with the homemade fishing pole she made, the one with the six inch stick and hot pink line. She’s on her own. I probably could deliver a baby  if it came to that. But I’d make a lousy farmer. I was just remarking upon that yesterday as I took a stroll around the pond with my friend Bonnie on Mother’s day. My animals would largely be pets. I’m an excellent pet owner.

So much life abounds in the pond. It always makes my day when I spot the beaver. I like watching it swim. My eyes are too bad to spot the turtle heads, but Bonnie finds them for me. Another pair of sharp little eyes found tiny snails along the edge. Soon the dragonflies will come along. It’s time to get the microscope out to find the other tiny things living in the water.

I love living near a pond.

lightness and loft

Couple weeks ago, on a Sunday, there was talk of a big snow storm coming our way. And I was like a kid again, wishing and hoping for a snow day for Emm. Just one extra day where we could hang out, all cozy, and not have to go anywhere. And we got it. Emm bounced between playing Brother Bear on her computer, and watching the actual movie. She’s obsessed with the story, which features totems, as a key point. I collect deer (my grandfather used to paint ‘em in all of his paintings. Unless they were the cow paintings for farmer’s barns. I don’t collect cows.). So she finds a stray deer ornament from Christmas, attaches a string to it, and wears it around her neck. “Look, Mama! This is my TOTEM!”. Always thinking and making connections, this one.

So I putter around the house. Get bored. Decide I need to read something. Perfect day. And maybe it’s because of all the ads and reviews in the paper for To Kill A Mockingbird at Hartford Stage, which feature Mathew Modine, I don’t know—but I remember that I have a copy of Birdy, by William Wharton–Mathew starred in the movie version—that I haven’t yet read. Recommended to me years ago.

I’ve always believed that things in life come when you’re ready/receptive to them. Want them. Need them, perhaps, for a particular reason. I’m reading Birdy at a wierdly coincidental time. See, Birdy, if you haven’t figured it out just by reading his name, likes birds. A lot. He’s actually obsessed. As am I, sort of. We divirge, he and I, upon the qualities of our shared obsessions. For me, birds are beautiful, fragile beings who operate on a plane of existence so very different than mine. I’ll never interfere, and I’ll never be a bird. They are separate. I’ve had cats that I’ve considered almost children, but the birds will never be. They are they. And that’s all. It is enough.

Birdy wants to be a bird. Quite simply. In the beginning of the story, he’s perched on the edge of a hospital bed, flapping his folded arms and being hand fed, like a baby bird. He’s just gotten home from Viet Nam. The rest of the story is a series of flashbacks narrated by his childhood buddy, that shed light on the origins of Birdy’s avian obsession. I haven’t yet finished the book. I’m feeling like my heart is going to be broken, and I sort of dread it. But it’s a beautiful book.

What Birdy most wants is to fly. He constructs a bird suit, with hand sewn feathers. He devises all sorts of flight experiments himself, and studies his many, many canaries (boy do I want a canary now). He takes meticulous records. I can’t quite relate to that. I don’t keep records much. Asking me to take even a snapshot of anything is a bit much. I’m not sure I have much of a desire to fly, either, though in my dreams, I’m often in flight, kind of zooming around. It feels so authentic sometimes, that I can’t believe I’m asleep.

But I relate to Birdy’s yearning to feel weightless, unbound. Particularly during my disastrous year at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in the mid-nineties. I’ve just been awarded a big scholarship, and I’m all ready to go hard at the next step (never did figure out what that was actually going to be. Probably some other kind of award to “legitmize” my talent. Sigh). The city at first captivates me, particularly what I see as this wonderful, jazzy mix of what I think of as the sacred and profane, all mixed in together. Seediness and then your churches and your high end stores. Right next to each other. I liked that.

But a week into classes, I can’t seem to get the fuck out of my bed. I’m dragging, and I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps it was the solid two months of theatre work preceding my arrival…grinding, exhausting, meticulous crazy work…the comedown from that had been traditionally difficult for me in summers prior. Or it could have been the disintigration, second semester prior, of a fling that I wasn’t quite ready to shake off.  I didn’t know. I figured I would do what I always did when I felt a little off. Work more. Find a project. Something. Anything so that I didn’t have to deal directly with whatever I was feeling.

But it doesn’t work. Nothing does. Not even a new roomate (thank God!), who can’t understand why all I want to do is hang out in my slip all day, sleeping,  and eating Oreo cookies and diet Coke in my permanent new residence: my bed. And crying. Alot. Poor Felix. My instructors are beginning to get really pissed off at me for all of the missed classes. And it doesn’t matter. None of it does. I feel deeply, weep heavily. And then feel nothing. Sometimes, I feel nothing so much, that only a scrape of a razor along the insides of my forarms reassures me that I’m somewhere, and feeling something. And then I cry hard all over again.

There is only one class I regularly attend, and I have feelings of anticipation and dread about it all week. Wierd sexual tension with the instructor. I never present any work.  I fidget and sigh, and doodle and stab at my ever present journal, often taking notes rabidly and randomly throughout each seminar, every week. Finally, we have break. And I never leave from my permanent spot, while everybody else dashes outside for cigarettes or a coffee. This is my  favorite spot, in all the city. And I need this. Every week.

It’s just a gap. A gap between two tall buildings, whose view I covet and can’t find anywhere else but from the otherside of these huge windows in this particular classroom. I see, between the concrete, air. Space. Endless, infinite space. If I stare long and hard enough;  relax just enough, I am out there, between those two buildings, floating the way I’d yearned and begged for so many times in my journal entries. Heavy and weighted, no more.

Please?

Addendum, or a note to anybody, everybody: I’m fine! I’m fine, k? Just thinking outloud, now that I can, about a period of my life…a good 15 years ago. Yikes! don’t want to worry anyone.

peace out.

something about this…

says it all for me:

Excerpt of T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Man

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I needed this today

a response to a post from Colin M’s  blog:

 ”I know your works. You are neither cold nor hot. So because you are lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth.” (from the movie There Will Be Blood)

 Passion is hot or cold; love or hate; perfect or incomplete — never lukewarm. -By PolWatcher

Much of the past year has been spent creating security and a home, and restoring peace in life for the kiddo and myself. Surely, we’ve needed it. It’s entailed healthy amounts of intropection, resourcefulness, and quiet deliberation. I’ve never felt so consistently even in my life. But passion is my zone. Without it, I feel lost. Bored. I do appreciate the middle way. I try. It indeed makes my life easier, hanging out in the middle, especially in contentious situations with certain ornery people.  But in work? Love? Art? Play? I’ll take passion, thank you. All or nothing. Toss the playbook and stretch whatever this thing is outward and take it to the ends of the earth and we’ll see where we get and leave it all on the floor in the end…passion.

Gotta go find it again.

good read

I need. I want to read The Sky Below, and this one(admittedly because of the John Irving comparisons. His own latest have disappointed.). Any others I’m missing? Anyone?

Also, after virtual absence of interest in photography for too many years (photography was my major), I have been looking at the recent edition of BW magazine. Wolf Suschitzky’s work, especially his By the Water, Light and Shadow, and  Loving Care  galleries, I like.

just because

I’ll be around later today or tomorrow, but I wanted to throw this up on here because…just because. It’s from The One Hundred Languages, which is a part of the Reggio education philosophy. My daughter attends  a Reggio school.

No Way. The Hundred is There.

The child is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marvelling, of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.

Loris Malaguzzi

(translated by Lella Gandini)

darling…

this is. I don’t know how Left Handed Scissors landed on my dashboard, but after a quick peek at this new blog, I’m charmed by her sewing projects. I’m in awe of people who sew…in this age, there’s a lot of love of the craft behind those projects.

other thoughts….

C.C. Sabathia…a Yankee? I love his durability and skills, but I’m skeptical in of a player who seems like one of the least enthusiastic prospects ever to consider playing for  this legendary team. C.C. always struck me as a Californian…as in, Angels. And wouldn’t he have loved to play in L.A. for Joe Torre? Ah, well….

I’m appalled by the Illinois governor, aren’t you?

I got a Plenty magazine subscription free in the mail and I have to say, this could be one of my favorites. Good read for the environmentally conscious.

Literally…

a book meme:

Total number of books owned:

I have no idea. Truly.

Last book bought:

Flea Market Style, it’s a great book that I can pick up again and again and draw inspiration from. Flea Market is probably closest to what my house is done up in. I love finding things and putting them into context alongside other discoveries.

Last book read: The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World, Michael Pollan

Five books that mean a lot to you:

1. The Lines of My Hand, Robert Frank-The Americans is the more popular work and an acknowledged masterpiece, but I like this monoprint better because it’s more lyrical and personal, and full of fleeting moments. The photos have an honesty, and even at times, an innocence.
2. The Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving-Even for enthusiastic Irving fans, this one’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Often, you either love it or hate it; it’s too bizaare for some. I never recommend it to anyone. But it reminds me, in an inflated, over the top way, of my own family and myself, in spirit, before my father died. Just about every character fits a family member, and the dynamics and history aren’t too far off from my own family, literally or symbollically. Franny is myself before I got all quiet and subdued by my father’s passing.
3. Signs On the Wind, Lenore Tawney-I often take this one places with me if I anticipate a wait in line. She’s one of my favorite artists; quirky, playful. I never get tired of this one.
4. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy-The ending is not everyone’s cup of tea. But I read this and there it was: my inner life as a child, right down to the lyrical quality, the wistfulness and wonder, the cutting cruelties, the terrors, the word and sound play. Arundhati Roy is the writer I would like to be. I just wish she wrote even one more book. But she’s doing something more meaningful to her as an activist. Good for her.
5. Written On the Body; Jeanette Winterson-For me this was her best book; not too clever as some of her books can be. It’s a long meditation on departure and loss; poignant, beautiful. It struck a nerve, and it comforted me and spoke my feelings when my sister was dying of cancer. The main character also stuggles with commitment. I related to that.

Sense and some sensibilities

I’ve been waiting for him to come along. A no nonsense, down to earth sort who takes no prisoners. Talks tough when he has to. Doesn’t kiss ass, or sway whichever direction the wind blows.

No, I’m not talking about a man. Or a candidate. I’m talking about an equal, my friends. For the kiddo. Heaven knows she needs one.

The kiddo is liked by many of her peers, but not until very recently, has she mingled with anyone her own size who doesn’t fuss over her and tend to her like the baby she prefers to be, or who (usually a male) lets her run the show and is more than willing to fight with others for the privilige of doing so. Know where we found him? Practically in our own yard, where he (Nathan) can be found often, hanging out with her on her Little Tykes playcube.

Nathan doesn’t relate to her on turf other than level, equal, fair and square ground. He will not be pushed. He is not a passive tourist in whatever play itinerary the kiddo attempts to force upon him. Her pouting moves him not. He’ll walk away when it comes to that. Of course, five minutes later, probably when there’s a commercial on, I’ll here the sliding glass door of his patio open, and he’ll be out looking for her again. This is guaranteed to happen at least three or four times an hour. But tedious as it is, I’ll take it. She needs a dose of reality on this level. They’re like siblings, spatting with each other one minute, clasping hands and proclaiming their mutual admiration for each other the next. Nathan wishes the kiddo were a boy, so they could have sleepovers. The kiddo just wants a brother. It appears that she’s found something like that. Good for both of them.

Toni Morrisson has another book coming out. As far as I’m concerned, she should just live forever so she can keep writing great stories and characters. And I’ve discovered Ghada Amer, a painter and sculptor whose works in embroidery on the themes of eroticism, pornography, the myths of beauty, and gender roles intrigues me. Her work can be seen  in the current addition of Fiber Arts.