A Secret World — A Special Soliloquy

Inside the books...

Is where I find Lulu, in the family room scanning the tall shelves, the hundreds of books. Have you read all of these? she asks.

Ah huh, I nod, just about. Wait, maybe I didn't read Sister Carrie.

Wow! I don't know why I hadn't noticed these before. I never really looked at them all. 

Yes, I say, well it's not a big deal. I've had a half century to read stories.

Lu swipes her paws across the paper spines and smiles, Hmm, true, but it's still a lot of books.

These books have been my secret worlds. Each one of them, with their own special suns and stars, seas and rivers, pyramids, canyons, gulags. They are made from Poof! Just like this multifaceted planet on which we make our home.

Max tells me that it all started with a bubble, or foam, from which things popped. Or fizzed. I ask him where the bubble, or maybe the foam, came from. There must have been air. Was this the kind of foam in which you could take a bath? He shakes his head, up, down, Yup, yup, that's the question! Exactly.

Planets, universes, worlds, or books—the Poof! came from something. May I suggest, a mastermind?

This was the world before Poof: someone, something, yes, a mastermind conceived a plot, a situation, characters, conflict, tension, climax, resolution, catastrophe, revelation, and designed, created, this story within a dramatic structure, along a sweeping arc, born of a secret world, and put it (and run-on sentences, too) out there, in the air, in space, in the universe, on the planets, on Earth, on bookshelves, at Amazon, for us. For our pleasure.

This is true.

Poof!

This January I will be joining another kind of secret world. For the next two years, in this mystical, somewhat secluded bubble of a world (a/k/a  The Bennington Writing Seminars at Bennington College), I will be working with some brilliant and highly regarded authors, and will be reading no less than one-hundred books. And maybe, writing one. Actually, I'm registered, matriculated, and have already begun the work. January will bring the first of five ten-day residencies over the following two year period. This full-time process, in theory, should culminate with a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing and literature.

I'm pretty excited.

And terrified.

I am not a mastermind, but I'm hoping for a big Poof!

This, of course, will require a lot of dark (or white) space for a while. Not quite a vacuum, but a space with clear, colorless, odorless air in which to breath, void of fiery comets or space debris, or anything that has the potential to crash into my secret world and throw me off course. You know what I mean. It will require many days at the library. Cloistered. So here, my friends, may be my last post for a long while. I won't say forever. But, well, you know I'm no multi-tasker.

Saturday night, Michael and I went out to listen to Red Molly, a girl band (as they refer to themselves), a really fabulous girl band about whom I wrote, in a Frolic, nearly a year and a half ago. They were performing in a small town in Massachusetts. There, in an acoustically perfect coffeehouse, at the very end of the evening, past 11:00 PM and bordering on breaking some serious rules (wrap it up girls—our traffic detail needs to go home!), they sang their final song.

May I suggest.

And this song, I forward to you, a Thanksgiving of sorts, a Thank You. Until I once again emerge from my secret world...

Poof!

 May I Suggest by Suburban Soliloquist 

May I Suggest

By Susan Werner

May I suggest


May I suggest to you


May I suggest this is the best part of your life


May I suggest
/ This time is blessed for you


This time is blessed and shining almost blinding bright


Just turn your head
/ And you'll begin to see


The thousand reasons that were just beyond your sight


The reasons why /
Why I suggest to you


Why I suggest this is the best part of your life



There is a world


That's been addressed to you


Addressed to you, intended only for your eyes


A secret world


Like a treasure chest to you


Of private scenes and brilliant dreams that mesmerize


A lover's trusting smile
/ A tiny baby's hands


The million stars that fill the turning sky at night


Oh I suggest
/ Oh I suggest to you


Oh I suggest this is the best part of your life



There is a hope


That's been expressed in you


The hope of seven generations, maybe more


And this is the faith
/ That they invest in you


It's that you'll do one better than was done before


Inside you know
/ Inside you understand


Inside you know what's yours to finally set right


And I suggest
/ And I suggest to you


And I suggest this is the best part of your life



This is a song


Comes from the west to you


Comes from the west, comes from the slowly setting sun


With a request / With a request of you


To see how very short the endless days will run


And when they're gone


And when the dark descends


Oh we'd give anything for one more hour of light



And I suggest this is the best part of your life

On Capturing the Surreal

It was like this. Surreal. The Outer Cape. Come Saturday morning there were barely a dozen bodies on the beach. No. Twelve exactly. I counted. There had been an electrical storm the night before, morning was grey, but by 9:30 AM the clouds were beginning to slowly disperse southeast over the Atlantic. At 10:30 AM, lunch in backpacks, we mounted our bikes and peddled along the sandy, narrow road, following the deep grooves of wide tire treads set in clay. At the top of the wooded hill, we could barely see the ocean but we heard it like we hear, from a mile away, the soft hum of a highway during rush hour. The pine-covered path that wound down, in serpentine fashion, took us through tall, dancing oaks and merry, berried bushes and out to a paved road leading to the ocean. Lulu piloted the way.

It was like this.

Surreal. The Outer Cape. Nearly every day (and on a few days, very soon after the storms cleared), in northern Wellfleet, abutting Truro, we set our low chairs, blanket and small cooler along the wide expanse of Newcomb Hollow Beach, where the forest, gushing out to sea, falls off in a dramatic one-hundred foot sand plunge, and its rosehip, bearberry and boulder strewn dunes tell a marly, striated history of life along the coastline. (These are the great dunes that Henry David Thoreau called "the backbone of the Cape.") Vegetation clings perilously to the edges of these sand banks, and at the foot of the fallen earth lie injured, traumatized, forest scrub.  It was on this beach, before the inexhaustible sea, that I read to my husband, from Thoreau's Cape Cod, "The breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild horses rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when at length the sun shown for a moment, their manes were rainbow tinted." To which he, eyes still fixed on Richard Zacks's The Pirate Hunter, replied: Wow. Is that ever overwritten. (Which makes me wonder, now, if I am doing the same.) But the breakers, the gurgling white breakers, from a certain angle, did look like the streaming manes of a thousand wild horses rushing to the shore.

At least to me.

It was on this beach, too, where little terns scattered and herds of seals bobbed in the aqua froth, that Max ran barefoot every day--straight into Truro, along deserted ivory sands, way, way out of our sight. On one such run, as Lu and I ate lunch, I became aware that Max had been gone a long time. Too long. And I had grown concerned. Almost an hour into his run, my phone rang. It was Max. Mom, he said, Mom! And then, the phone cut out. Now, I was more than concerned. I tried reaching him several times, but there was no reception. (On the outer Cape, the valleys and hollows, including the shoreline, are almost entirely dead zones.) Moments later my phone rang again. Max had climbed one of the steep sand slopes--the only spot in which he could find a smidgen of cell phone reception. Immediately I asked if he was OK.

Yes! he hollered into the phone. But there's a seal! A beached seal, and I don't want him to die. I've been cupping water in my hands and tossing it over him to keep him hydrated.

What? Max hun, I explained, seals don't get beached. They're not whales--it's normal for them to come on shore. They can scoot back into the water. He's probably just resting.

Yes, but he's bleeding. His flippers are torn up. He said, too, that he was the only person on the beach. No one else in sight. Which is the way it is in lower Truro, where few roads lead directly to the coastline.

This boy. Kind heart. I felt his worry. (He is the boy who, once, as a four-year-old, eyeing the stations of the cross in church, cried out, What are they doing to Jesus! They're hurting him!) I told him that the seal would be fine. It would go back into the sea and the salt water would heal the wounds. And then I instructed him not to get too close to the seal, not to touch it, especially since it seemed hurt. And then--I don't know why, perhaps I felt deprived of mammal intimacy--I told him to take pictures with his phone, from a distance, to get off the dunes, where he was not supposed to be, and to run back to where I was beached.

When Max returned a half hour later he told me that he had zigzagged down the dunes--so as not to cause this great escarpment to collapse--and then ran toward the area where the seal had been resting only to find that his friend was gone. Returned to the sea. But before he called me from the top of the sandy slope, before he even thought to set his fingers on any buttons, or worry about collapsing dunes, he said, he sat face to face with the seal on the empty shoreline. Just him and the seal. The seal and him. And the seal barked ever so slightly, and Max gently said Hello back.

So the seal is fine. I said.

Yeah, he's good. He smiled.

You had a moment with the seal. That's pretty special, don't you think?

I do. Yup. I do. And then he dug into the cooler and pulled out a water and a turkey sandwich.

It was like this.

Surreal. The Outer Cape.

During an eight-year span in the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau set out on four walking tours of Cape Cod. Two of these tours were solo, and two were with the company of his friend and poet, William Ellery Channing, whom had previously advised Thoreau to go out into the briars and build a hut. Thoreau took Channing's advice in earnest. The book that followed that excursion is Walden. The book that followed Thoreau's Cape Cod jaunts is Cape Cod, which is the book that I read on the sand bar that is Cape Cod. It seems that these haunting, and haunted, sands are the closest I may ever get to experiencing a real desert. The Cape Cod National Seashore, in fact, is a kind of desert island. One can sit on the seashore for hours almost entirely alone, even in the hottest, dog days of summer. This graceful arm, especially its soft, sandy wrist to fist, has a history of luring artists and writers to its shores. In the dunes of Provincetown, through which we biked, we were reminded of the writer's shacks of years ago. A few still remain. Eugene O'Neill and Norman Mailer both, at one time, lived in these dune shacks. From a tiny, grey hut overlooking the Atlantic (so the story goes), Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Here, on the Outer Cape.

Surreal.

And then, a friend of my husband's, who had led us, on our bikes, through several miles of hilly dunes at the tip of the Cape tells us that Mary Oliver is a Wellfleetian. Imagine. Mary Oliver in Wellfleet. (I hadn't heard or read this before, or if I had I'd forgotten.)  I wanted to imagine that I would run into her the next morning while sipping coffee out on the deck in front of The Flying Fish in downtown Wellfleet. But then, I looked her up--the Bard of Provincetown--to find only a P.O. Box number in P-Town. Maybe I misunderstood when he said, "She lives right here." But we were sitting on the brick patio of a Main Street, Wellfleet, restaurant. Right here, on the Outer Cape, may mean almost anywhere on the Outer Cape. (Oliver's bio on Poets.org states that she currently resides in Provincetown.)

We had dinner in Truro the night before we left the Cape. Most nights had been cloudy and threatening, but this evening, our last, was clear and dry. Before we returned to our rental in the woods we stopped by Newcomb Hollow for a last look at the falling sands, the beach, the breakers. Along the shore a few bonfires blazed, some had been abandoned and smoldered. We listened to crackling fires, to waves piling up against what seemed the edge of the universe. The night was very dark, black-dark, and we proceeded carefully down the slope, onto the beach, where we stood under the flawless dome of a flickering galaxy.

No. It was more than flawless. Impossibly beautiful, it was. Astonishing. To the left, to the right, north or south the sky pulsated, fiery dots shot through the sky, auditioned, as if they had waited for our reflection, for our very being so that they might demonstrate their capabilities. I think, truly, they were playing with us.

On the shore, by a pit of orange embers, I pulled out my cell phone. One photograph of the shimmering Milky Way and I understood that the evening could not be captured this way. It could not be digitized, put under any unnatural process, reimagined elsewhere. It was only here--Midnight under the Milky Way--below this celestial canopy under which its myriad characters glint and transmute, on the Outer Cape, land of the surreal, that this beach, this sky, this ocean, this sand was real. Very real.

Sifting Through the Narrative

"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." ~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick 

Lulu's last day of fine arts camp was more than a week ago. Two weeks she'd been there; two weeks in which I thought I'd find an ocean of time to write. But I failed to get in the water. It was the sands, those turbinado-sugar-sands that were still on my mind, mind sands, dunes or desert, where grains of narrative filtered between my toes but failed to stick underfoot. Desert, beach, glass, quartz, black, garnet or volcanic for Chrissake—there was simply no semblance in the sands, and if there were, if by chance there may have been a granule of anecdote, this also sifted through the sieve-of-a-brain that is mine.  No narrative, no structure. Nothing doing. Undoing is what I did. Undoing packages that I'd neatly tied up many years ago. I don't know why I have this compulsion to return to old boxes, to open the lids of rust-covered dreams. A strategy perhaps. Fear of marching forward. Up the hill. For whom do I march, anyway? Up which hill shall I march? What will I find on the other side? (Assuming I actually make it over the summit and across to the other side.)

While Lu crafted and beat the steel drums Max often went down to the fishing hole that is Howard Pond. I had plenty of time to climb a hill. To climb a mountain. But I didn't. I don't know what I did. There's lots with which to fill a day. Filler. I could tell you about all kinds of minutial chores I performed throughout the day. Taxi here and there. Pack, unpack. (Well, I have been traveling, too.) Dishes. Clothes washing. My god, clothes washing! Minutiae fills. It also numbs the mind. And sucks gobs of time and energy into its black hole of domesticity. It allows for disengagement. It's enticing. Which is handy now and then.

Stop.

That path, that sandy, rosa rugosa lined path, is what I've been walking. Yes. Bodily present or not it's where I've been dredging my bare feet like some exotic ammophilous being. And I could tell you, also, that since leaving the turbinado-sugar-sands of Nantucket I'd been thinking about Herman Melville's Moby Dick and my own furling wave of melanomic monomania.  (A wave of which I rode for too long.) This is an unpredictable wave, or so I thought. However, if you drift with it, let the current pull you, you'll eventually be delivered back to the safety of the shore. Should you panic, let it collapse over you, you'll plunge into a delirious spin unto the murky seafloor. 

Wait. I've overdone the metaphor. 

Back to an epic story... 

(Which is what, I think, I should be telling.)

You know Melville's tale—the ship captain, Ahab, obsessed with destroying the great white sperm whale, the ferocious and cunning Moby Dick, to whom he lost his leg. Nantucket is from where Ahab's Pequod sailed. Melville wrote of Nantucket before he ever set foot on the "mere hillock, and elbow of sand."  He first visited the island only after Moby Dick was finished. But it didn't keep him from envisioning, from writing about the island, and its people who... 

... plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to the very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

Moby Dick is a book I never fully read. Until now, right here, online. And in each line, each carefully chosen word, I come to understand that I've spent this summer undoing because my story,  my Moby Dick, my Ulysses, hell, my Dick and Jane, is like Moby Dick himself: one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. A portentous and mysterious monster. I thought I'd slay him this summer. Ha!

I am not Ishmael. I don't know where to begin. Somewhere, in the sand, I keep thinking. In the sand.

*    *    *

And speaking of envisioning, this man cut away at the stake, has to be one of the coolest literary images I've stumbled upon.

You can see more magic from Brian Joseph Davis here. 

*    *    *

I'm returning to the Cape in a couple of days. Out, above the elbow, along the National Seashore (where sharks, maybe whales too, are slinking about). I'll be  a week or so there. In the sand. The children return to school in less than twenty days... at which time I plan to return to this space fully engaged. 

Now, off to bring Max to soccer...

Not the Usual Frolic — Summer Hours

It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up. 

-W. Somerset Maugham

But I did. As I do every day, even if it's a day in which I cannot take a seat at my desk. And every day that passes, every day of these last two weeks plus some, as such reminds me of how little I've accomplished—at least in terms of scribbling out anything cogent. But school, you see, ended. Summer began. Maine awaited. Celebrations befell. The beach beckoned. Flower and herb pots called (although I've not returned the message). My niece, the Magpie, stayed with us for several days. She loves to flit about and take one thing from another to build something of her own. Anything really. She's a wonder. Then, there was the search for a new car which quite literally gobbled time. True, it ate up every last morsel. And drooled some. (How in the world could I have expected less?) Mourning the loss of the ten-year-old car: entirely unexpected.

I've gone and done something ridiculous. Three rows. For the kids. Ridiculous. Less efficient. She's a beast. An ebony zaftig. A sphinx I can't seem to crack. But she gets six to the beach quite comfortably. And what a beach. Not the beach to which absolutely everyone-and-their-in-laws-in-the-burbs clusters. Oh no. I never liked that beach. Not even as a teen. Back then it had a crowded boardwalk, loud radios, gum-snapping dolls, the scent of baby oil, and lots of gold chains. (But the bus got me there and so I went.) I doubt it's changed much. Maybe it has. Regardless. It's still crowded. At the beach, I don't want to run into people I know. Unless I've planned it. Otherwise, I want Maugham in my lap and a lifeguard who watches the kids. 

He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. ~William Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage.

I stored chicken stock in an old glass milk bottle. Lulu thought it was lemonade and drank it. Seriously, Mom? Did you have to put it in a milk bottle?! It was not the sort of thirst quenching drink she'd anticipated. Should I have labeled it? I thought that it so closely approximated a urine specimen that she'd surely steer clear. Besides, who would drink something from a milk bottle that did not even remotely resemble milk?

At the graduation party for her granddaughter, the valedictorian, Aunt Sue (Mother's sister) came bearing gifts for her three nieces. A box of Grandmother's books with copyrights dated from the 1920s (W. Somerset Maugham's Short Stories) through 1979 (Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance). Backwoods Betty grabbed The Case of the Cautious Coquette, from Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason series. I took Roman MacDougald's The Whistling Legs, and Carter Dickson's The Cavalier's Cup. As well as the Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham. (Grandma, it seems, liked mysteries. Aunt Sue, it seems, was surprised by this.) Mary glanced at the box and quickly turned and walked away before any of us could put a hardcover in her hand. I don't blame her. The dusty novels are not allergen-free. Mother, curious as to the box's contents, pulled out a few titles but ultimately slipped them back in, refraining as well.

For a while, when I was a girl, Grandmother lived on a dairy farm. My goal for quite some time during those years was to finagle, each summer weekend, an overnight stay at her place on the farm. Once there, I stole eggs out from under the hens in the chicken coop, chased cats up trees, jumped from the third floor to the second in the hayloft, milked cows, hugged goats and played with the Wright girls at their homestead across the street from the barn. Sometimes, I got to ride Missy the pony. Back then, I welcomed the respite from the noise of the city and the opportunity to run wild while Grandmother baked a strawberry-rhubarb pie. I do not remember ever seeing on the bookshelves of Grandmother's apartment any of the amusing old titles that Aunt Sue had packed in a box. Come to think of it, I do not remember ever drinking milk there, but I do recall whipping cream with a hand blender to the thickest peak in the state. And pouring it over pie.

From the bottom of the stairs Max calls up to me. It's late and he should be getting to bed. Instead he's asking: Oh hey Mom, do you know what this stuff is that's in a dairy bottle?

What stuff, Max? I shout down to him, chuckling to myself, as I try to finish this piece.

It looks like pee. Do you know what it is? It's in that milk bottle? What is it?

Now, I cannot stop laughing. It's funny what one should decide to ask. Or what one thinks oughtn't (or needn't) be asked. I reveal the secret, and decide to close up shop and return to Maugham. I can no longer concentrate. So much for cogency.

Summer Hours: Here and there, like the Magpie. Friday Night Frolics optional. Time off with the kids, mandatory.

(By the way, is anyone reading Joe Blair? I like this guy, and he keeps a blog, too. See his latest post here. )

  Rusted Root - Send Me on My Way by wayne21

Friday Night Frolic — Enumerating Story

[Source]

1.  To begin: Flaws. One of my many, is that I've never been able to calculate. Calculus, trigonometry, even algebra, simple logarithmic functions, escape me. In high school, Geometry was the only category of mathematics that I was somewhat able to grasp. That's because it included doodling. (Well, didn't it?) I've often wondered if this failing was solely because I could not understand mathematical relations or if I simply refused to try, refused to to understand. Or. Refused to accept that anything could be answered with such certainty. One plus one, yes, two. But even that simple equation never seemed so simple to me. And this suspicion was confirmed after my second child was born, when in the haze of endless nights punctuated by frightening infant caterwauls and toddler walkabouts it became clear that the idea of one plus one equalling two was nothing more than an algorithmic farce.

I wonder if my inability to calculate bears any connection to a cognitive deficit known as dyscalculia, which Wiki describes as an "innate difficulty in learning or comprehending arithmetic." The reason, though, is more likely disinterest. In any event, I've no compulsion to further explore what I've accepted as a lifelong inadequacy and limitation. I surrender all calculations to the accountants. After all, not everyone can be a mathematician.

2.  Some of us have to write.

3.  Some of us have to tell stories.

4.  And some of us, well, all of us, should listen...

5.  To this...

A short short film that I came across the other day while visiting one of my favorite magical depositories on the internet, Brain Pickings. Brain Pickings is, in the words its remarkable curator, Maria Popova, "a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are." 

Ken Burns, on story:



Stories as acceptable and sincere manipulation. Waking the dead. Building emotional truth. Keeping wolves from the door. Continuing ourselves. Reminding us that it's just Ok.

At about 4:20 Burns illustrates the how and why in which he conveys story. It's a powerful and vulnerable moment that offers us insight into to his success. Moreover, he shares my suspicion that one plus one does not always equal two.

6.  (Now, there's something called story algorithm, but I don't want to go there just yet.)

7. As a sort of book club experiment, I've been reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes along with Lu who is currently reading the book for her English class. Other than Zen in the Art of Writing, it had been a long time since I'd read Bradbury, since I'd read Something Wicked, and as I flip the pages of his book, I'm reminded of why I adored his stories as a young girl. The grand collector of metaphors set out to have a helluva lot of fun. He stuffed his head with anything he could from every imaginable field. He went to carnivals and cinemas and read comic books and nearly everything else he could collect from the library—short stories, essays and poetry. Only the greats, nothing modern. He likes to say that he practically lived in the library.

The world in which Bradbury lived as a child is very much alive in his works, and it's hard for me to believe that a man who extols the virtues of writing only for the pure joy and fun of writing ever had a moment in which he feared he'd waste time writing something that might not be very good. Even so, by the age of thirty he had his first novel published. And what followed was awfully good.

At the library, from Something Wicked:

Out in the world not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did. Listen! and you heard ten thousand people screaming so high only dogs feathered their ears. A million folk ran toting cannons, sharpening guillotines; Chinese, four abreast, marched on forever. Invisible, silent, yes, but Jim and Will had the gift of ears and noses as well as the gift of tongues. This was a factory of spices from far countries. Here alien deserts slumbered. Up front was the desk where the nice old lady, Miss Watriss, purple-stamped your books, but down off away were Tibet and Antarctica, the Congo. There went Miss Wills, the other librarian, through Outer Mangolia, calmly toting fragments of Peiping and Yokohama and the Celebes. Way down the third book corridor, and oldish man whispered his broom along in the dark, mounding the fallen spices...

Something Wicked has instantly transported me back to the world of Will and Jim, and Mr. Dark and the salesman toting the curious lightening rod—back to the eclipse of morning's first hours when a flashlight under the bed covers lit fantastical words ablaze. It's been difficult to fight the temptation to read ahead of Lu and her class, but I'm holding back, filling my time with other stories, considering what and how I will write, collecting ideas, piecing words together in such a way, reminding myself that it's just Ok. These are the kinds of calculations I can do in my head. And it's a helluva lot a fun.

*  *  *
8.

Dead Combo is the ten year old band of friends Tó Trips and Pedro Gonçalves, of Portugal. They began their partnership after they recorded together, for the first time, a contribution to the tribute album to the late Portuguese guitarist, Carlos Paredes.

Together, Trips and Gonçalves have created their own story as well as their own incarnate personae whom they describe as "characters that could have come from a dark comic book: a caretaker and a gangster." They have recorded together, as well as with the Royal Orquestra das Caveiras (Royal Skulls Orchestra), with whom they released a live DVD in 2010. 

Story can be told many ways. You can find more of Dead Combo's story music here.

Gone Skiing

Sierra ski racing in the mining days. New England Ski Museum.

“Hans Castorp found that one quickly gets readiness in an art where strong desire

comes in play. He was not ambitious for expert skill, and all he needed he

acquired in a few days, without undue strain on wind or muscles. He learned to

keep his feet tidily together and make parallel tracks; to avail himself of his stick

in getting off; he learned how to take obstacles, such as small elevations of the

ground, with a slight soaring motion, arms outspread, rising and falling like a

ship on a billowy sea; learned, after the twentieth trial, not to trip and roll over

when he braked at full speed, with the right Telemark turn, one leg forward, the

other bent at the knee. Gradually he widened the sphere of his activities.

.     .     . 

He rejoiced in his new resource, before which all difficulties and hindrances to

movement fell away. It gave him the utter solitude he craved, and filled his soul

with impressions of the wild inhumanity, the precariousness of this region into

which he had ventured. On his one hand he might have a precipitous, pine-clad

declivity, falling away into the mists; on the other sheer rock might rise, with

masses of snow, in monstrous, Cyclopean forms, all domed and vaulted, swelling

or cavernous. He would halt for a moment, to quench the sound of his own

movement, when the silence about him would be absolute, complete, a wadded

soundlessness, as it were, elsewhere all unknown. There was no stir of air, not so

much as might even lightly sway the treeboughs; there was not a rustle, nor the

voice of a bird. It was primeval silence to which Hans Castorp hearkened, when

he leaned thus on his staff, his head on one side, his mouth open. And always it

snowed, snowed without pause, endlessly, gently, soundlessly falling.

~ Thomas Mann, excerpt from Chapter 6, The Magic Mountain, 1929

Such is the call of the wintry mountain. And so it happens this week is winter break--that time of year the Suburban Soliloquist unplugs and leaves the mortal flatlands for the higher, hiemal call of the Great White North, where she revels on the gleaming slopes of powdery snow, and the surrounding territory's majestic views. (With skis much shorter and lighter than the twelve foot wooden slats of the nineteenth century.)

At last.

Next week, after she's halted to hearken the echo of her own skis scraping the snow-wrapped summits and long, winding trails of the White Mountains, she'll  be back to the muddy, mortal flatlands and the hypertextual webs of ether. 

Aren't you all looking forward to this year's extra day of winter? Perhaps it might even bring snow to suburban streets, parks and fields. One can only wish...

The Franklin Line

She is on the commuter rail reading the restored edition of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.  Her eyes are misting over like the city she's about to walk through. She can't let go the last line of the Forward, what Hemingway's son, Patrick, reveals to be his father's last professional writing and "the true foreword to A Moveable Feast: 'This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.'"

He'd taken his own life a few months before she'd been born, and she'd grown up with his books at her trinket covered bedside table, thinking the man—of the few author's she'd read at the time—the most rugged, brave, passionate. Perhaps she'd held too close this quixotic adaptation of the novelist, and this line, this last line of the Foreword, causes her a minor heartbreak for Hemingway. This is not her handsome Hemingway, she thinks.

The train enters South Station and she slips her cap over her head, walks down Essex to Surface to Beach and through Chinatown. It's early morning and the street vendors have not yet set their tables at the curbs. Snow melts from Chinatown's sloped rooftops and awnings and dampens the fleece toque on her head. She crosses over to Kneeland to Tufts Medical Center.

At the TMJ clinic on the sixth floor the receptionist asks her if she's there for sleep or TMJ. She pauses a moment, she wants to say Sleep! Sleep would be nice. Had she bothered with such pleasantries (as she ordinarily does) she would have engaged the receptionist in a short conversation about the joy of sleep and the dolor of insomnia. Oh, I know, wouldn't we all like more sleep! the receptionist would cluck. But she's too tired for conversation. What she says is TMJ, and does not elaborate, and the receptionist automatically hands her a clipboard with the usual craniofacial pain indicator.

In Dr. Correa's surgical suite, her day and night guards are adjusted. They're too tight and the night bite splint keeps her from a deep sleep. She can hear Dr. Correa, in an adjacent room, whittling away at the hard plastic pieces with a drill. She slides off the exam chair and moves toward the glass bay. The window washers aren't banging against the concrete on their suspended scaffolding today. She spreads the louvered shades with her hands and looks across the street at the Floating Hospital where her daughter had had surgery in May. She thought about seeing her in pre-op, Everything will be fine, just fine, she'd said, and then, after Lu was wheeled away, she'd walked out the heavy swing doors and fell to pieces.

She looks north, to the right, up Washington beyond the Paramount, and, if she could have seen that far, the Old State House at Devonshire, Faneuil Hall at the foot of Congress, and Mass General a brisk walk beyond where her husband had been admitted for surgery in September. But her attention shifts to Government Center where they had parted after their first date more than twenty years ago, and where, just across the way at One Beacon, she had secured her first job in Boston, at a lively law firm that occupied four of the building's thirty-seven floors. If she could have fixed her eyes west on Kneeland where it stretches along the edge of the theatre district, funneling into Back Bay and Brookline beyond, she might have remembered how much she misses the walk down Chestnut Hill Ave from her apartment on Commonwealth to Bangkok Bistro at Cleveland Circle for chicken massaman, and then up Beacon, past her old apartment above the Rabbi's brownstone, to the Tam for a Bass Ale. But the Floating Hospital blocked her view west and she could see only the enormous brick facade of the medical center.

She thinks about lunch with Max at Jade Garden, and how he'd happily annihilated an oversized bowl of boiled shrimp, scallops and octopus. She thinks about the spongy pork buns and fragrant lotus leaf wrapped rice at Hei la Moon's dim sum with Lulu, and Blue Man Group, where she'd dug herself out from under toilet paper with both of them. She reminds herself to pick up mangosteens, winter jujubes and guava—the kids' favorites—on her way back to the train station. This had become her routine. And she didn't mind, even if it had become pedestrian, it took her back to a place, or even a time, she wished to be. She was not constructed for the burbs. She didn't understand its particular syntax or mechanics, the conformities within its framework, nor the nuances of its assembly. It was a misplaced parenthetical where she bided her time as the children played in the streets, joined soccer and lacrosse teams, engaged in requisite and acceptable activities. She longed for the rack and pinion of the city or the notched ridge of a mountain. The in-between hollowed her heart.

Boston was the city where, among its quaint stone buildings, streetcars, glass skyscrapers, Irish pubs, emerald parks and broad river—a place she'd felt was home, and it was home—she'd grown into herself. Now she gazed out the window at the snow-lined streets of a place that seemed far away; had she really lived there for more than a decade? During the past year, Boston had become her destination for sober reasons. She was at Tufts to be deprogrammed. When did the grinding start?

Dr. Correa returns to the room with her newly shaped appliances. They are the first part of the program. The second and third parts are physical therapy and relaxation. He asks her to sit down and keep them on for a while to determine if they're comfortable. She sits and tries to relax. She snaps the upper guard in and moves her jaw forward and back. There's more tongue room now, she says. She takes it out and tries the lower guard which seems looser and more wearable, which is important, the doctor reminds her, because we want you to be happy. We want the program to work.

Yes, they're fine, she says, just fine. 

The doctor tells her to call if anything changes, otherwise, he'll see her again in three weeks.

She looks out the window one last time, packs her bag and runs back to South Station to catch the 2:40 so she can pick her kids up by 4:00pm. Under the split-flap she realizes that in her rush she'd forgotten to buy the Asian produce and would return home fruitless. She sits in a forward facing chair, because she does not like to ride backwards, tucks her Charlie Card in the loop on the seat in front of her and opens her book. The Franklin Line schedule marks where she'd left off at the end of Chapter 8: "All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start to work again. In those days we never thought that any of that could be difficult."

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Thank you to Leah, of Eating Life Raw, for gifting to me the Versatile Blogger award (which I've added to the sidebar).  I had the happy occasion of personally meeting Leah last October when she travelled north to visit family, and I can vouch that Leah not only eats life raw but does so with fresh insight and tenacious optimism! Her words inspire—each of her posts are wrapped in shiny paper and curly ribbon, like little gifts to the world.

Friday Night Frolic — A Mouse is a Mouse, For All That

"It's a constant battle between mice and men."

~ Lulu

Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast,
 O, what a panic is in your little breast!
 You need not start away so hasty 
With argumentative chatter! 
I would be loath to run and chase you,
 With murdering plough-staff.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
 Has broken Nature's social union,
 And justifies that ill opinion
 Which makes thee startle
 At me, thy poor, earth born companion 
And fellow mortal!

I doubt not, sometimes, but you may steal;
 What then? Poor little beast, you must live!
 An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves 
Is a small request;
 I will get a blessing with what is left,
 And never miss it.

Your small house, too, in ruin!
 Its feeble walls the winds are scattering!
 And nothing now, to build a new one,
 Of coarse grass green!
 And bleak December's winds coming, 
Both bitter and keen!

You saw the fields laid bare and wasted,
 And weary winter coming fast,
 And cozy here, beneath the blast,
You thought to dwell,
 Till crash! the cruel plough passed 
Out through your cell.

That small bit heap of leaves and stubble,
 Has cost you many a weary nibble! 
Now you are turned out, for all your trouble,
 Without house or holding,
 To endure the winter's sleety dribble, 
And hoar-frost cold.

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
 In proving foresight may be vain:
 The best laid schemes of mice and men
 Go often askew,
 And leave us nothing but grief and pain, 
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
 The present only touches you:
 But oh! I backward cast my eye, 
On prospects dreary!
 And forward, though I cannot see, 
I guess and fear!

~Robert Burns, "To a Mouse, On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough" [Standard English Translation] *

* * *

Our furry mortal companions, after all, are merely trying to meet the three basic needs of any living thing: water, food, shelter (and clothing for us lesser humans). Air and sunlight help, too. So what exactly is the battle? What is this compulsion to subordinate nature to man? Can we not work together, in harmony? Maybe this is why Michael leaves peanut butter out for our critters? (She naively asks.)

The thing is, though, the mice have come into our natural world. Our home. And they are, to be sure, small and crafty. Their careful approach to the mouse traps—evidenced by clawed peanut butter globs atop the plastic cheese of traps set around the house—illustrates their slyness and resolve. We are housing and feeding the beasts. Like hell they startle at us!

Up until Michael found a few mini-Santa chocolates haphazardly unwrapped—broken pieces of Santa-shaped, teeny-gnaw-marked chocolate bits scattered under the Christmas tree—the children were accused of consuming too much candy and leaving foil wrappers strewn about the house. Not one of you will fess up, eh? And why the heck are so many ornaments knocked off the tree? Well? They stared at me with eyes narrower than usual. You mock your mother?!

Soon after Max's and Lu's acquittal, while de-decking the house of boughs of holly and sucking all traces of pine into a monster canister, I broke out the vacuum's brush attachment, lifted the cushions from the living room's couch and found a trove of bird seed that had been hoarded by the mice. Under the cushion of a fabric-covered chair, I discovered a small, sugar-sprinkled gingerbread cookie (a treat left for our Santa chimera), shredded ribbon and other scraps. I wondered if it hadn't taken a platoon of mice to conceal their booty. Our house had become the bandits' very own Moveable Feast—a splendid place brimming with tasty morsels and sparkly lights, with ample nooks and chinks for notable adventures. Who needs Paris?!

And then my breast went a-panic. Bold rodents! What have they to worry about? They'll tear apart the pantry! I thought about d-CON (for a moment), and shored up all food-filled containers, vacuumed and sprayed and scrubbed. And then Michael went for the traps.

But our mice are much too clever.

There's a little voice inside me, though, thanking the gods for not mashing the head of one mouse in those traps. Yes, the fields are bare and wasted, and the bleak winds of winter have arrived, but the critters are merely trying to survive. There must be a more humane way to rid our domain of them (for it's quite impossible and far too unsanitary to co-exist in the same domicile). Is there not?

Until we figure it out, Max will carry on about the pests' scratchy evening shenanigans keeping him awake at night. And I'll stock up on glass containers.

* * *

King Rat (an illegal whale hunt protest) by Indie rock band Modest Mouse, has an official animated video, directed by the late Heath Ledger, that's apparently been hijacked by VEVO. If you'd like, you can see it here. Modest Mouse has been making music since 1997, but it wasn't until 2004 that they established mainstream success with We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, for which they enlisted musician and vocalist James Mercer of the Shins, and Broken Bells (with whom we Frolicked here), as well as help from Johnny Marr (former Smiths guitarist). Marr ultimately toured, in 2007, with Modest Mouse.

You can find more information, including tour dates, on MM's blog. They'll be playing in San Francisco, at the Macworld/iWorld convention, January 25, 2012.

Hmm, the only modest thing about our mice is that they don't make a show of it while we're still puttering around the house. But in the evenings, they Frolic!

___________________________________
*Burns's poem inspired at least two book titles: Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and Sidney Sheldon's The Best Laid Plans. Per Wiki, in 2007, Ian Anderson (of Jethro Tull) read the first stanza of the poem as a prelude to his remastered One Brown Mouse, adding the line "But a mouse is a mouse, for all that" (referencing Burns's Scot song, "Is There for Honest Poverty"—popularly known as "A Man's A Man for A' That") which I sneaky-as-a-mouse stole for this post's title.