Margotlog: Spring Beauties
Green so intense it's iridescent! Maybe it's because there are no leaves on the trees yet to block the rainbow green of first shoots: tulips, lilies, violets, waterleaf. As I walk the alleys west of my house following the light, I spy trout lilies under a garage overhang. The only ones in the neighborhood.
Three types of trout lilies grow here--the rare Dwarf. and its larger cousins. white and yellow, found throughout eastern North America all the way into northern Canada. The tiny Dwarf lodges only in Minnesota around Faribault and in the Nerstrand Big Woods, usually at around 1000 feet on the hillsides beside streams.
The little patch I cherish is surely the larger white trout lily, so secretive and ephemeral that occasionally I miss it entirely, for the patch of plants rises like magic from the cold soil, its speckled leaves like trout seen through rippling water. Then the tiny up-turned bells appear briefly, and soon when the leaves on the trees above come out, the flowers disappear, the leaves subside into the soil, and the little patch is a memory. This is the earliest I've ever spied them. It's the earliest spring ever recorded, since the 1880s. I catch my breath, hoping that the little patch will survive.
It's already been damaged by unknown hands that threw heavy chunks of concrete on its eastern portion. Then last fall, the well-meaning (I assume) electric company came through and sheered off the screen of scrub trees that shielded the lilies from the alley. This is such a delicate plant, even in its larger variety, since it propagates only through runners underground, and then only those plants that have put out a flower. I catch my breath again, hoping it survives the more intense sun this year, hoping to greet it next year.
My other favorite earlier bloomer is scilla, also called Spring Beauty. Its blue is so intense that I have to stop, as if a carpet of velvet from the Virgin's mantle lay itself down. Because it is so bright a hue, not so delicate, and lasts longer, it is often planted in yards and along alleys. One patch that I've loved in previous years is now covered over with brush--the homeowner either didn't care or couldn't help him/herself. The beauty either removed or tamped down. I sigh, as I often do in early spring--such fragility, bravery, intensity.
The moustache orchid upstairs in my bathroom, which I've been trying to help bloom for several months, now has two round bulbs of flowers on its stem. I know I lack the proper "grow light" to force it forward. For weeks, I've been trying to protect the rather vulnerable stem--tying it higher, moving the plant farther from the desk edge to protect it from jumping cats. With all the green suddenly sprung outside, I find my hope for this orchid diminishes. I'm ready to give it up, and try again next winter.
Monday, March 26, 2012
Friday, March 23, 2012
Margotlog.: Poetry Out Loud - 2012
Margotlog: Poetry Out Loud
It's one thing to memorize a poem, but quite another to stand up in front of strangers and give it voice so compellingly that you meld your own timbre and emphasis, pacing and intelligence to the poem's essence.
Almost a spectator sport, you'd say, and I'd agree. That's why I leap at the chance to serve on a judging committee for Minnesota's Poetry Out Loud competitions when I'm asked.
This year the state "finals" were held at the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, a fitting venue, named for one of the state's favorite literary lights, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He grew up in Saint Paul, in various rented apartments, a down-at-the-heels member of the Irish upper class. He went away to college, taking the train east to Princeton, but he came back to write his first novel in an upper-story apartment on Summit Avenue, a well-preserved brownstone which I pass several times a week on my way east and downtown. When This Side of Paradise was published by Scribner's in 1920, it made Fitzgerald an immediate success. He married his love Zelda Sayre and they danced and drank their way into the smart set, while Fitzgerald wrote short stories and the handful of novels we continue to admire.
Back to the young readers on stage: their poetry choices, offered by the national Poetry Out Loud committee, have expanded this year, so we are told. Everything from John Donne to Thomas Hood, Philip Freneau and Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, Louis Carroll and Carl Sandburg, Stephen Crane and Wilfred Owen, Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats, Richard Wilbur, Robert Hayden and Dorothy Parker, Anne Sexton (yes there are some men in here), Maya Angelou, Mary Karr, Garrett Hongo, then the humorist Bob Hicok (never heard of him until now), Virgil Suarez, Marge Piercy, Linda Gregg, Lisel Mueller, Michael Ryan, and a few others I'll forget to name.
Eighteen young worthies had been selected by regional competitions, coming from far northwest to the south-easternmost tip of our tall tall state. Some were dressed to the nines--ladies in high heels and flouncy skirts. Others wore jeans or a tailored suit. They were game, but they were nervous. I took a brief glance at each, then buried my face in the text--I was the accuracy judge, which meant that I listened with all my might, and scarcely looked at them.
Their voices said it all. We are not equally blessed with low, rich sound. Nor with the ability to float the voice over line breaks to convey the syntax of what becomes with each passing generation, a greater sense of the spoken language brought to the page. Perhaps it's no surprise that the group did better in bringing alive the richness in older, more structured poetry. John Donne, Thomas Hood, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe--the young renditions had charm and grace and "punch" in the right places, but not too much. Even Dorothy Parker's structured, mordant humor they made emphatic and enjoyable.
But they failed with Emily Dickinson--"I heard a funeral in my brain," she writes. Oh my! Her abrupt, spare whispers, full of portent but continually undercut with delicate, trenchant irony--well, it's not poetry meant to be declaimed. It's a midnight whisper, full of self-mockery, odd humor and despair. Punching it with the voice kills it, but these youngsters couldn't help themselves. They gave Emily "punch," which shattered her delicate, crystalline, mocking words.
They also didn't pull off most of the long poems, which it turned out were mostly contemporary. Even Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," which is one full page of almost prose-length lines, led them into one kind of defeat or another. They could manage the beginning list of epithets which I so enjoy: "Hog Butcher for the World/ Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat...Stormy, husky, brawling,/ City of the Big Shoulders." But the long, middle set-up where the poet takes on detractors requires a change of tone, almost to an argumentative whisper. Our readers tried to bull it through.
One young man did a dandy job with the working-class critique of builders and their escape clauses in Bob Hicok's "After working sixty hours again for what reason." Lines such as "My boss, fearing my intelligence,/ paid me to sleep on the sofa," etc. came across with the right story-telling tact and propulsion. But many other readers got lost in contemporary works like Mary Karr's "All This and More," with its evocation of an armchair devil: "So your head became a tv hull/a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger/sloppy at the mouth." Quite complex, the tone and attitude enscrolled with these heavy words. Very hard to lift off the page.
The two young women who won first and second place could not have been more different--one African-American with a deep melodious voice, the other Asian-American with a light almost playful tone. Yet each chose works to suit her voice and style. When the African-American young woman presented William Butler Yeats' "When you are old and grey and full of sleep..." she brought tears to my eyes. She almost sang this beautifully modulated hymn to age and remembered love. "Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled/And paced upon the mountains overhead/And hid his face amid a crowd of stars." Poetry doesn't get any better than this!
It's one thing to memorize a poem, but quite another to stand up in front of strangers and give it voice so compellingly that you meld your own timbre and emphasis, pacing and intelligence to the poem's essence.
Almost a spectator sport, you'd say, and I'd agree. That's why I leap at the chance to serve on a judging committee for Minnesota's Poetry Out Loud competitions when I'm asked.
This year the state "finals" were held at the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, a fitting venue, named for one of the state's favorite literary lights, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He grew up in Saint Paul, in various rented apartments, a down-at-the-heels member of the Irish upper class. He went away to college, taking the train east to Princeton, but he came back to write his first novel in an upper-story apartment on Summit Avenue, a well-preserved brownstone which I pass several times a week on my way east and downtown. When This Side of Paradise was published by Scribner's in 1920, it made Fitzgerald an immediate success. He married his love Zelda Sayre and they danced and drank their way into the smart set, while Fitzgerald wrote short stories and the handful of novels we continue to admire.
Back to the young readers on stage: their poetry choices, offered by the national Poetry Out Loud committee, have expanded this year, so we are told. Everything from John Donne to Thomas Hood, Philip Freneau and Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, Louis Carroll and Carl Sandburg, Stephen Crane and Wilfred Owen, Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats, Richard Wilbur, Robert Hayden and Dorothy Parker, Anne Sexton (yes there are some men in here), Maya Angelou, Mary Karr, Garrett Hongo, then the humorist Bob Hicok (never heard of him until now), Virgil Suarez, Marge Piercy, Linda Gregg, Lisel Mueller, Michael Ryan, and a few others I'll forget to name.
Eighteen young worthies had been selected by regional competitions, coming from far northwest to the south-easternmost tip of our tall tall state. Some were dressed to the nines--ladies in high heels and flouncy skirts. Others wore jeans or a tailored suit. They were game, but they were nervous. I took a brief glance at each, then buried my face in the text--I was the accuracy judge, which meant that I listened with all my might, and scarcely looked at them.
Their voices said it all. We are not equally blessed with low, rich sound. Nor with the ability to float the voice over line breaks to convey the syntax of what becomes with each passing generation, a greater sense of the spoken language brought to the page. Perhaps it's no surprise that the group did better in bringing alive the richness in older, more structured poetry. John Donne, Thomas Hood, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe--the young renditions had charm and grace and "punch" in the right places, but not too much. Even Dorothy Parker's structured, mordant humor they made emphatic and enjoyable.
But they failed with Emily Dickinson--"I heard a funeral in my brain," she writes. Oh my! Her abrupt, spare whispers, full of portent but continually undercut with delicate, trenchant irony--well, it's not poetry meant to be declaimed. It's a midnight whisper, full of self-mockery, odd humor and despair. Punching it with the voice kills it, but these youngsters couldn't help themselves. They gave Emily "punch," which shattered her delicate, crystalline, mocking words.
They also didn't pull off most of the long poems, which it turned out were mostly contemporary. Even Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," which is one full page of almost prose-length lines, led them into one kind of defeat or another. They could manage the beginning list of epithets which I so enjoy: "Hog Butcher for the World/ Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat...Stormy, husky, brawling,/ City of the Big Shoulders." But the long, middle set-up where the poet takes on detractors requires a change of tone, almost to an argumentative whisper. Our readers tried to bull it through.
One young man did a dandy job with the working-class critique of builders and their escape clauses in Bob Hicok's "After working sixty hours again for what reason." Lines such as "My boss, fearing my intelligence,/ paid me to sleep on the sofa," etc. came across with the right story-telling tact and propulsion. But many other readers got lost in contemporary works like Mary Karr's "All This and More," with its evocation of an armchair devil: "So your head became a tv hull/a gargoyle mirror. Your doppelganger/sloppy at the mouth." Quite complex, the tone and attitude enscrolled with these heavy words. Very hard to lift off the page.
The two young women who won first and second place could not have been more different--one African-American with a deep melodious voice, the other Asian-American with a light almost playful tone. Yet each chose works to suit her voice and style. When the African-American young woman presented William Butler Yeats' "When you are old and grey and full of sleep..." she brought tears to my eyes. She almost sang this beautifully modulated hymn to age and remembered love. "Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled/And paced upon the mountains overhead/And hid his face amid a crowd of stars." Poetry doesn't get any better than this!
Monday, March 19, 2012
Margotlog: Dog Bites
Margotlog: Dog Bites
A man walks down the block, a reddish hound prancing forward, then when the man spies me and speaks to the dog, it doubles back, nose to the ground. The dog is not on a leash.
Flashback: I've had two dog bites when walking in my neighborhood, a relatively peaceful spot in Saint Paul, not far from highway 94. The first was maybe ten years ago. A fat toy collie was used to crossing the street unaccompanied, from its house to the adjacent alley, then back again. Otherwise it was on a tight leash in its shallow front yard.
One afternoon rather bemused, I began crossing before its house, not aware of it in the yard. All of a sudden a torrent of barking erupted and the dog flew at me, bit through my shorts into the flesh of my thigh, and hung on. I screamed in horror, hit the dog back, and ran the three remaining blocks home. The wound was messy but not deep. I cleaned it with alcohol, covered the bite marks with bandages, and with shaking fingers dialed the owner's phone number.
A few hours later, the owner, a single woman, called back and left a message on the voice-answering machine. "Oh, don't worry, he's had his shots. And he's not vicious, only protective." Says who? I thought bitterly. When I called the vet she mentioned, her claim was confirmed: the dog's rabies vaccination was up the date. I had to leave town the next day. The wound healed. After that, I steered clear of that side of the street.
Three years ago, a couple with a white boxer moved two doors down from our house. They spent a lot of money renovating the yard and house, fencing the backyard with a waist-high picket fence. And they found a dog-walker from the halfway house a few houses in the other direction from us. This dog-walker often let the white boxer off its leash. It was far bigger than a toy collie. When it bounded across the street, paying no heed to her voice commands, and lept onto my front porch, I was terrified and screamed at it to get away. The woman merely kept calling it with a cutsey-sweet voice, as if it were a toy.
I yelled across to her to keep the dog on the leash, but she simply waved her hand at me and kept walking, the dog bounding ahead of her to the corner. Leaves fell, snow fell, it was mid-December, crunchy underfoot. I decided to walk, early afternoon, before my evening class. The neighborhood was deserted. As I proceeded along the sidewalk into the space before the boxer's house, it suddenly let fly a torrent of barking. It stood on its hind legs, its front paws between the pickets of the fence, baying at me. The dog walker was collecting mail on the front porch.
All of a sudden, the dog had my ankle in its teeth. "Get that dog away from me!" I cried. The dog walker rushed off the front porch and grabbed the dog's collar.
"Did he hurt you?" she asked, a worried look on her face. I was wearing hiking boots that came up over the ankle. Yet I could feel the bite underneath the leather.
"I can still walk!" I said. "But keep that animal chained up."
I made my usual tour. By the time I got home, I was furious and called the non-emergency police number. Within a half hour, a young policeman was at the door. I showed him where the dog's teeth had punctured the leather and left red marks on my skin. "If I'd been a child at that dog's level, that bite might have taken out my cheek or eye!" I cried. "Yes, I want to file a complaint."
It took several months for the complaint to work its way through official channels. Just before our court date, the female half of the couple who owned the dog knocked at my door. "Please withdraw your complaint," she begged. "He's really a nice dog. When we let him off the leash in Wisconsin, he plays beautifully with my husband's nieces and nephews."
I was furious at her. "There is no way I will withdraw my complaint," I told her. "This is not Wisconsin. This is a city block with lots of people walking along the sidewalk. Your dog is a menace."
What I didn't say, the court did: the problem was as much with the owners as with the dog. The court determined that the owners had to build a ten-foot fence, and keep the front window of their house always curtained. When outside, the dog had to be on a lead only in the backyard. If it was being walked, it must wear a muzzle and be kept on a tight leash.
Dogs are territorial: if they see someone enter their line of vision and cross into a property they've determined is theirs, they begin scare tactics. The more this continues, the stronger the dog imprints itself with this behavior. The couple was also warned that if the dog was ever off-leash again, they would be required to put it down.
Within a year, they moved. I was intensely relieved.
Fast forward: As I pass the man with the rather benign acting hound, I say, "Dogs are supposed to be on a leash."
He looks down on me from his fleshy, benign height: "Oh, I have him," he says.
"I don't believe that," I retort.
"Too bad for you," he answers.
Yes, it is too bad for me because if he's wrong, I or one of the many children who now crowd our block will be the one bitten, not he. By the time I reach home, I've determined that I have several choices: I can cross the street the next time I see him. I can disguise myself with a different hat and follow him from a distance to his residence. Then I can report him. Or I can wait for something nasty to happen.
For now, I'm writing this little history.
A man walks down the block, a reddish hound prancing forward, then when the man spies me and speaks to the dog, it doubles back, nose to the ground. The dog is not on a leash.
Flashback: I've had two dog bites when walking in my neighborhood, a relatively peaceful spot in Saint Paul, not far from highway 94. The first was maybe ten years ago. A fat toy collie was used to crossing the street unaccompanied, from its house to the adjacent alley, then back again. Otherwise it was on a tight leash in its shallow front yard.
One afternoon rather bemused, I began crossing before its house, not aware of it in the yard. All of a sudden a torrent of barking erupted and the dog flew at me, bit through my shorts into the flesh of my thigh, and hung on. I screamed in horror, hit the dog back, and ran the three remaining blocks home. The wound was messy but not deep. I cleaned it with alcohol, covered the bite marks with bandages, and with shaking fingers dialed the owner's phone number.
A few hours later, the owner, a single woman, called back and left a message on the voice-answering machine. "Oh, don't worry, he's had his shots. And he's not vicious, only protective." Says who? I thought bitterly. When I called the vet she mentioned, her claim was confirmed: the dog's rabies vaccination was up the date. I had to leave town the next day. The wound healed. After that, I steered clear of that side of the street.
Three years ago, a couple with a white boxer moved two doors down from our house. They spent a lot of money renovating the yard and house, fencing the backyard with a waist-high picket fence. And they found a dog-walker from the halfway house a few houses in the other direction from us. This dog-walker often let the white boxer off its leash. It was far bigger than a toy collie. When it bounded across the street, paying no heed to her voice commands, and lept onto my front porch, I was terrified and screamed at it to get away. The woman merely kept calling it with a cutsey-sweet voice, as if it were a toy.
I yelled across to her to keep the dog on the leash, but she simply waved her hand at me and kept walking, the dog bounding ahead of her to the corner. Leaves fell, snow fell, it was mid-December, crunchy underfoot. I decided to walk, early afternoon, before my evening class. The neighborhood was deserted. As I proceeded along the sidewalk into the space before the boxer's house, it suddenly let fly a torrent of barking. It stood on its hind legs, its front paws between the pickets of the fence, baying at me. The dog walker was collecting mail on the front porch.
All of a sudden, the dog had my ankle in its teeth. "Get that dog away from me!" I cried. The dog walker rushed off the front porch and grabbed the dog's collar.
"Did he hurt you?" she asked, a worried look on her face. I was wearing hiking boots that came up over the ankle. Yet I could feel the bite underneath the leather.
"I can still walk!" I said. "But keep that animal chained up."
I made my usual tour. By the time I got home, I was furious and called the non-emergency police number. Within a half hour, a young policeman was at the door. I showed him where the dog's teeth had punctured the leather and left red marks on my skin. "If I'd been a child at that dog's level, that bite might have taken out my cheek or eye!" I cried. "Yes, I want to file a complaint."
It took several months for the complaint to work its way through official channels. Just before our court date, the female half of the couple who owned the dog knocked at my door. "Please withdraw your complaint," she begged. "He's really a nice dog. When we let him off the leash in Wisconsin, he plays beautifully with my husband's nieces and nephews."
I was furious at her. "There is no way I will withdraw my complaint," I told her. "This is not Wisconsin. This is a city block with lots of people walking along the sidewalk. Your dog is a menace."
What I didn't say, the court did: the problem was as much with the owners as with the dog. The court determined that the owners had to build a ten-foot fence, and keep the front window of their house always curtained. When outside, the dog had to be on a lead only in the backyard. If it was being walked, it must wear a muzzle and be kept on a tight leash.
Dogs are territorial: if they see someone enter their line of vision and cross into a property they've determined is theirs, they begin scare tactics. The more this continues, the stronger the dog imprints itself with this behavior. The couple was also warned that if the dog was ever off-leash again, they would be required to put it down.
Within a year, they moved. I was intensely relieved.
Fast forward: As I pass the man with the rather benign acting hound, I say, "Dogs are supposed to be on a leash."
He looks down on me from his fleshy, benign height: "Oh, I have him," he says.
"I don't believe that," I retort.
"Too bad for you," he answers.
Yes, it is too bad for me because if he's wrong, I or one of the many children who now crowd our block will be the one bitten, not he. By the time I reach home, I've determined that I have several choices: I can cross the street the next time I see him. I can disguise myself with a different hat and follow him from a distance to his residence. Then I can report him. Or I can wait for something nasty to happen.
For now, I'm writing this little history.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Margotlog: The Author Behind the Mask
Margotlog: The Author Behind the Mask
There are some who stand back a little from their characters, bemused and thoughtful, smiling indulgently perhaps or with a worried frown on their faces. In this group belongs one of my favorite Southern writers, Eudora Welty, with her light, comic touch, and the capacity to breathe magic and midsummer madness into otherwise plebian souls.
Every summer, heading to the North Shore of Lake Superior, I pack the spoken-word version of Welty's Delta Wedding (1946). This sprawling, lively summer escapade reminds me of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Through the lowlands of the Yazoo delta flit children, black servants and conjure women, an occasional automobile filled with flappers, and the soon-to-be ghosts, heirs to the ancients immortalized in delicate china, awkward paintings, and memories of cavalry charges.
There's a bird in the house; the smallest child whimpers in naptime sleep, a ruby pin falls from Laura's hand into the delta waters and lies there slumbering into eternity. A fight breaks out among the hired black workers, the youngest scion has an affair with a wandering beauty, his wife, a village girl of no distinction, finally reappears after walking miles in the heat. Such gentle madness, such incipient change. And in the midst of it all, the mother, Ellen, from Virginia, pregnant she realizes with her seventh child, is almost eaten alive by this romping, maddening, loveable Mississippi clan. When she stands on the porch after the wedding, and pushes back her hair, we survey the late summer garden with her and begin the work of mulching and pruning, smiling bemused along with the author, hidden among the trees.
Other writers so fully identify with their creations that each swing of a scythe or nervous shuffle of papers, becomes immediate, haunting, almost unbearable. In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which I've begun listening to for perhaps the third time, there is no comic distance, with the author standing apart. Instead, with each of the perhaps eight main characters Tolstoy penetrates into the reaches of their conflicted psyches as they throw clothes into a portmanteau or midjudge a race horse's stride and come down breaking its back or determine to resist any outward sign of inward hurt. It's clear that Tolstoy himself identifies most passionately with two of this cast, Anna herself and a large-scale farmer named Levin. But he doesn't begin the saga with either. Instead we wake with Oblonsky, a spend-thrift official of beguiling charm, who has just been found out by his long-suffering and fading wife, Dolly. This drama of hurt and remorse could not be rendered more sympathetically, for the author knows and accepts each so fully that we wear their foibles on our sleeves.
Yet, there is a precision to this rendering that saves it from becoming maudlin or invasive. Tolstoy insists on the matters of daily life--from coffee being drunk, to Levin's taking up a scythe and mowing with his peasants; from Karenin's cracking his knuckles to Anna's quicksilver changes of mood and tone in agonized rendezvous with lover Vronsky. We are inside each character so fully that we must do some of the work of assessment ourselves, listening and watching for minute shifts in behavior and sensibility, catching glimpses of them in relation to minor characters who will appear briefly, then depart, never to be seen again.
These works are my winter night music and summer evening shades. I'm sure they affect the fictions I work out for myself, but how exactly is hard to say. That process--of calling up out of thin air something substantial and moving--takes me a long time, as over and over I reread and tinker, occasionally flash forward, then for a long time, pause, uncertain how to proceed. Perhaps it's subconscious, these mentors' effect. A little recognition here, a little theft there. Mostly they help me enter the enormous waters of what's possible in life and craft and not worry too much about being tossed overboard and drowned.
There are some who stand back a little from their characters, bemused and thoughtful, smiling indulgently perhaps or with a worried frown on their faces. In this group belongs one of my favorite Southern writers, Eudora Welty, with her light, comic touch, and the capacity to breathe magic and midsummer madness into otherwise plebian souls.
Every summer, heading to the North Shore of Lake Superior, I pack the spoken-word version of Welty's Delta Wedding (1946). This sprawling, lively summer escapade reminds me of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Through the lowlands of the Yazoo delta flit children, black servants and conjure women, an occasional automobile filled with flappers, and the soon-to-be ghosts, heirs to the ancients immortalized in delicate china, awkward paintings, and memories of cavalry charges.
There's a bird in the house; the smallest child whimpers in naptime sleep, a ruby pin falls from Laura's hand into the delta waters and lies there slumbering into eternity. A fight breaks out among the hired black workers, the youngest scion has an affair with a wandering beauty, his wife, a village girl of no distinction, finally reappears after walking miles in the heat. Such gentle madness, such incipient change. And in the midst of it all, the mother, Ellen, from Virginia, pregnant she realizes with her seventh child, is almost eaten alive by this romping, maddening, loveable Mississippi clan. When she stands on the porch after the wedding, and pushes back her hair, we survey the late summer garden with her and begin the work of mulching and pruning, smiling bemused along with the author, hidden among the trees.
Other writers so fully identify with their creations that each swing of a scythe or nervous shuffle of papers, becomes immediate, haunting, almost unbearable. In Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, which I've begun listening to for perhaps the third time, there is no comic distance, with the author standing apart. Instead, with each of the perhaps eight main characters Tolstoy penetrates into the reaches of their conflicted psyches as they throw clothes into a portmanteau or midjudge a race horse's stride and come down breaking its back or determine to resist any outward sign of inward hurt. It's clear that Tolstoy himself identifies most passionately with two of this cast, Anna herself and a large-scale farmer named Levin. But he doesn't begin the saga with either. Instead we wake with Oblonsky, a spend-thrift official of beguiling charm, who has just been found out by his long-suffering and fading wife, Dolly. This drama of hurt and remorse could not be rendered more sympathetically, for the author knows and accepts each so fully that we wear their foibles on our sleeves.
Yet, there is a precision to this rendering that saves it from becoming maudlin or invasive. Tolstoy insists on the matters of daily life--from coffee being drunk, to Levin's taking up a scythe and mowing with his peasants; from Karenin's cracking his knuckles to Anna's quicksilver changes of mood and tone in agonized rendezvous with lover Vronsky. We are inside each character so fully that we must do some of the work of assessment ourselves, listening and watching for minute shifts in behavior and sensibility, catching glimpses of them in relation to minor characters who will appear briefly, then depart, never to be seen again.
These works are my winter night music and summer evening shades. I'm sure they affect the fictions I work out for myself, but how exactly is hard to say. That process--of calling up out of thin air something substantial and moving--takes me a long time, as over and over I reread and tinker, occasionally flash forward, then for a long time, pause, uncertain how to proceed. Perhaps it's subconscious, these mentors' effect. A little recognition here, a little theft there. Mostly they help me enter the enormous waters of what's possible in life and craft and not worry too much about being tossed overboard and drowned.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Margotlog: What Could Be Finer?
Margotlog: What Could Be Finer?
In Charleston when I was a girl, we used to sing, "Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the mor-r-r-r-ning?" Back then it was simply finer having frozen vegetables, from my mother's cooking point of view. Sliced bread came in with World War II (I'm guessing, I don't remember the world without it). Canned goods, ditto, ditto. These days, it's PLASTIC packaging. UGH! Though I have to admit, plastic wrap on bread products keeps them fresher and moister than does paper.
Still, there are limits. "I have here in my hand..." It's another voice from the past. Who am I channeling--Tricky Dicky or Chairman McCarthy (that would be Joe the Schmo, not from Ohio but our sister state of WisconSIN-i-o).
Actually what I've been holding in putative hand for the last few days is a light plastic box, sans lid, which has mysteriously appeared in Kangaroo brand (from Wisconsin) pocket bread, or as we call in our house: pita. Pita conjures up palm trees and dates, and now I'm skimming lightly over the Mediterranean sea, looking down on ancient camel-cultures, where having one's sandwiches nicely cosseted in a self-made pocket protects them from blowing desert sand.
Now I'm putatively jumping up and down with indignation: What's with the EXTRA PLASTIC? you Kangaroo bongers? All of a sudden, the nicely compact packages of Kangaroo pita have ballooned out into something crunchy and hard to store in my crowded fridge. Not to mention, to SHOUT from the rooftops: THIS IS PLASTIC YOU CAN'T RECYCLE.
I phone the cheese-heads in Wisconsin, Area Code 800-798-0857 and am routed to a pleasant-speaking operator who then channels me to Marketing Director, warning me he's out of the office. BUT NOT BEFORE SHE EXPLAINS something along these lines: "Well, he/we thought the plastic box would protect the pita bread from breakage." Hmmm, I mutter to myself. I never was bothered by such a problem. Pita is a rather flexible critter. Now it no longer fits in my camel's saddle bag.
I leave an irate message, ending with "You've lost a customer. I'm switching to Holy Land brand!" It's true. Back I go from Kangaroo land to Holy Land, where the makers (just over the river in Minneapolis) still have the sense to keep the plastic to a minimum and trust to ancient ways.
Wanna know my rather crazed extrapolation? In a constant scramble to separate oneself from the competitors, Kangaroo has been duped into thinking that adding a plastic box (WHICH BY THE WAY IS HARD to return to the flexible plastic sleeve) to their packaging will make customers WANT more and more. This is what marketing directors are hired to conjure.
I sigh, and make one more leap, as the drifting sands from the desert clear for a moment: now we are blaming Iran's nuclear designs on President Obama. I know, it sounds as far-fetched as my desert and its oasis. Yet I kid you not: yesterday in the Star Tribune, an article mentioned that Obama's popularity has dropped ten or fifteen points because of rising gas prices.
We American consumers see no further than the sand clogging our eyes: What about the huge gas-guzzling SUVs I see raming their way down residential streets no wider than a needle? Or to try a slightly more global perspective: do we want war with Iran rather than economic sanctions? Let's try packaging that one: I bet it will have free-standing plastic a mile high that obscures everything but our own wavy reflections.
In Charleston when I was a girl, we used to sing, "Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the mor-r-r-r-ning?" Back then it was simply finer having frozen vegetables, from my mother's cooking point of view. Sliced bread came in with World War II (I'm guessing, I don't remember the world without it). Canned goods, ditto, ditto. These days, it's PLASTIC packaging. UGH! Though I have to admit, plastic wrap on bread products keeps them fresher and moister than does paper.
Still, there are limits. "I have here in my hand..." It's another voice from the past. Who am I channeling--Tricky Dicky or Chairman McCarthy (that would be Joe the Schmo, not from Ohio but our sister state of WisconSIN-i-o).
Actually what I've been holding in putative hand for the last few days is a light plastic box, sans lid, which has mysteriously appeared in Kangaroo brand (from Wisconsin) pocket bread, or as we call in our house: pita. Pita conjures up palm trees and dates, and now I'm skimming lightly over the Mediterranean sea, looking down on ancient camel-cultures, where having one's sandwiches nicely cosseted in a self-made pocket protects them from blowing desert sand.
Now I'm putatively jumping up and down with indignation: What's with the EXTRA PLASTIC? you Kangaroo bongers? All of a sudden, the nicely compact packages of Kangaroo pita have ballooned out into something crunchy and hard to store in my crowded fridge. Not to mention, to SHOUT from the rooftops: THIS IS PLASTIC YOU CAN'T RECYCLE.
I phone the cheese-heads in Wisconsin, Area Code 800-798-0857 and am routed to a pleasant-speaking operator who then channels me to Marketing Director, warning me he's out of the office. BUT NOT BEFORE SHE EXPLAINS something along these lines: "Well, he/we thought the plastic box would protect the pita bread from breakage." Hmmm, I mutter to myself. I never was bothered by such a problem. Pita is a rather flexible critter. Now it no longer fits in my camel's saddle bag.
I leave an irate message, ending with "You've lost a customer. I'm switching to Holy Land brand!" It's true. Back I go from Kangaroo land to Holy Land, where the makers (just over the river in Minneapolis) still have the sense to keep the plastic to a minimum and trust to ancient ways.
Wanna know my rather crazed extrapolation? In a constant scramble to separate oneself from the competitors, Kangaroo has been duped into thinking that adding a plastic box (WHICH BY THE WAY IS HARD to return to the flexible plastic sleeve) to their packaging will make customers WANT more and more. This is what marketing directors are hired to conjure.
I sigh, and make one more leap, as the drifting sands from the desert clear for a moment: now we are blaming Iran's nuclear designs on President Obama. I know, it sounds as far-fetched as my desert and its oasis. Yet I kid you not: yesterday in the Star Tribune, an article mentioned that Obama's popularity has dropped ten or fifteen points because of rising gas prices.
We American consumers see no further than the sand clogging our eyes: What about the huge gas-guzzling SUVs I see raming their way down residential streets no wider than a needle? Or to try a slightly more global perspective: do we want war with Iran rather than economic sanctions? Let's try packaging that one: I bet it will have free-standing plastic a mile high that obscures everything but our own wavy reflections.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Margotlog: What Sends a Girl Away or Havana in Key West
Margotlog: What Sends a Girl Away or Havana in Key West
The largest city in Florida until the late 1890s was Key West, so I recently learned. We were perusing the exhibits in the Key West historical museum, one of which featured the story of Cuban cigar makers who set up shop across the brief interlude of ocean between the "last" key and Havana.
It's hard for anyone born after 1970 (who doesn't live in S. FLorida) to take in how intimately south Florida and Cuba have been connected--industrialist Flagler might as well have built his long railroad (which connected mainland Florida and Key West) in a more southerly direction. Havana was a romantic destination by steamer for decades before politics put a cabash on our association with that island. Of course since the "Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962-3" the U.S. has kept Cuba at arms length. It's not easy to visit that island except by a diplomatic back door, usually Belize.
I'm musing about this because Key West, like modern Miami but much earlier, had a Cuban flavor. This was due largely to Cubans bringing their cigar-making across the spit of ocean to Key West. Near our 50s-style motel we passed the Gato Cigar company building: it was one of many large and small cigar-manufacturing enterprises, one of which was founded by a woman!
Segue to Pittsburgh at the turn of the last century. Imagine an Italian-American family with three daughters, the oldest of whom became my grandmother, but the youngest of whom lived into her 90s, giving me lots of opportunities to know her and two of her three daughters: Josephine or as we said, Aunt Jo.
Family lore includes the tale of her being "sent" south to Tampa from Pittsburgh. She was sixteen. Her goal was to stay with an Italian-American Protestant minister who'd migrated to Tampa from Pittsburgh. His connection to our family remains sketchy, but the Protestant element must have been a major part, for Josephine's father had converted to Protestantism in Sicily. He became a Waldensian, which had almost no meaning in Pennsylvania. Eventually he preached to a Presbyterian congregation, and on the side converted my soon-to-be grandfather to do the same.
Back to Josephine: like her sisters she was talented in playing the piano. "Her little fingers flew up and down the keys," her daughters Sadie and Eleonora would tell me years later. I saw some of that myself. She also played the organ for her father's church services, starting at the age of eight. Falling asleep during the sermons, she'd have to be roused by her father raising his voice at the concluding prayer to make sure she was alert enough for the final hymn.
In Tampa, her host family also engaged her at the organ or piano, but she became involved with Cuban cigar makers, because they were the "target" audience for the minister's conversions. This Italian-American minister worked during the week as a reader in the cigar factories. There in Key West I found exactly depicted this phenomenon: during their long hours rolling and shaping tobacco leaves, the cigar makers were entertained (and kept awake) by a "lecteur" if I have the word correct. As much actor as reader, this gentleman performed literature--of what type I know not. But he was a key part of the industrial process.
Enter the cigar makers into Josephine's story: they serenaded her under her host's window, night after night, her lovely reddish curls and sweet smile, not to mention fingers flying up and down the religious keys, won the hearts of single, young gents, immigrants like herself. By the time she arrived in Tampa to play out this charming and slightly racy escapade, the Key West Cuban cigar makers had pulled out of the lower town and brought their businesses north to Tampa. Why? According to the Key West historical society, because at least one owner refused to negotiate higher wages when his workers went on strike. Whether he left them in the lurch and hired new workers in Tampa, I don't know. But the workers Josephine encountered were Cuban, speaking a language which is Italian's kissing cousin.
"Why do you think her family sent her all alone down the East Coast to Tampa?" asks my husband as I relate this daring and romantic tale. "A girl of sixteen, sent out of town?" he continues. "What do you think that suggests?"
I look at him with the innocence that is at the heart of how I view these adorable relatives. Then the light goes on: "Oh," I say, somewhat abashed. "But nobody ever said a word about that!"
The largest city in Florida until the late 1890s was Key West, so I recently learned. We were perusing the exhibits in the Key West historical museum, one of which featured the story of Cuban cigar makers who set up shop across the brief interlude of ocean between the "last" key and Havana.
It's hard for anyone born after 1970 (who doesn't live in S. FLorida) to take in how intimately south Florida and Cuba have been connected--industrialist Flagler might as well have built his long railroad (which connected mainland Florida and Key West) in a more southerly direction. Havana was a romantic destination by steamer for decades before politics put a cabash on our association with that island. Of course since the "Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962-3" the U.S. has kept Cuba at arms length. It's not easy to visit that island except by a diplomatic back door, usually Belize.
I'm musing about this because Key West, like modern Miami but much earlier, had a Cuban flavor. This was due largely to Cubans bringing their cigar-making across the spit of ocean to Key West. Near our 50s-style motel we passed the Gato Cigar company building: it was one of many large and small cigar-manufacturing enterprises, one of which was founded by a woman!
Segue to Pittsburgh at the turn of the last century. Imagine an Italian-American family with three daughters, the oldest of whom became my grandmother, but the youngest of whom lived into her 90s, giving me lots of opportunities to know her and two of her three daughters: Josephine or as we said, Aunt Jo.
Family lore includes the tale of her being "sent" south to Tampa from Pittsburgh. She was sixteen. Her goal was to stay with an Italian-American Protestant minister who'd migrated to Tampa from Pittsburgh. His connection to our family remains sketchy, but the Protestant element must have been a major part, for Josephine's father had converted to Protestantism in Sicily. He became a Waldensian, which had almost no meaning in Pennsylvania. Eventually he preached to a Presbyterian congregation, and on the side converted my soon-to-be grandfather to do the same.
Back to Josephine: like her sisters she was talented in playing the piano. "Her little fingers flew up and down the keys," her daughters Sadie and Eleonora would tell me years later. I saw some of that myself. She also played the organ for her father's church services, starting at the age of eight. Falling asleep during the sermons, she'd have to be roused by her father raising his voice at the concluding prayer to make sure she was alert enough for the final hymn.
In Tampa, her host family also engaged her at the organ or piano, but she became involved with Cuban cigar makers, because they were the "target" audience for the minister's conversions. This Italian-American minister worked during the week as a reader in the cigar factories. There in Key West I found exactly depicted this phenomenon: during their long hours rolling and shaping tobacco leaves, the cigar makers were entertained (and kept awake) by a "lecteur" if I have the word correct. As much actor as reader, this gentleman performed literature--of what type I know not. But he was a key part of the industrial process.
Enter the cigar makers into Josephine's story: they serenaded her under her host's window, night after night, her lovely reddish curls and sweet smile, not to mention fingers flying up and down the religious keys, won the hearts of single, young gents, immigrants like herself. By the time she arrived in Tampa to play out this charming and slightly racy escapade, the Key West Cuban cigar makers had pulled out of the lower town and brought their businesses north to Tampa. Why? According to the Key West historical society, because at least one owner refused to negotiate higher wages when his workers went on strike. Whether he left them in the lurch and hired new workers in Tampa, I don't know. But the workers Josephine encountered were Cuban, speaking a language which is Italian's kissing cousin.
"Why do you think her family sent her all alone down the East Coast to Tampa?" asks my husband as I relate this daring and romantic tale. "A girl of sixteen, sent out of town?" he continues. "What do you think that suggests?"
I look at him with the innocence that is at the heart of how I view these adorable relatives. Then the light goes on: "Oh," I say, somewhat abashed. "But nobody ever said a word about that!"
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Margotlog: Father Sun, Mother Moon
Margotlog: Father Sun, Mother Moon
When I first came to what we off-handedly call today "environmentalism," I met the wonderful poems of N. Scott Mommaday.
I am a feather in the bright sky,
I am a blue horse that runs in the plains... ("The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee")
Around this delightful song of joy and affection for the natural world, I created a writing exercise called "Circle Poem in the Native American Spirit," which I published in my book, The Story in History (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1992).
Those early days of my "environmentalism" began as a healing practice after losing my father. That rift in the world, that hole in the sky, I began to fill with feathers. As I walked west under the Hamline bridge, heading toward the Mississippi River, but turning rather quickly and coming east and home, I collected feathers. Most were crow feathers and pigeon feathers with their dark tips and lighter shafts, or occasionally a flicker feather--startlingly yellow in its shaft with varegated dark and lighter bands. The greatest prize were cardinal feathers, dusty red--my favorite Minnesota bird.
On trips to various shores, I gathered large goose and gull feathers, and once found what must have been a hawk tail feather, with its long banded strength. These I gradually added to a papier mache mask in an all-over design, attaching each with a torn piece of pale construction paper on which I wrote one of my father's sayings: "Per de la madonna," or "Eh, Porceluzza!" His Italian saying predominated, as being the essence of himself.
Perhaps it was this loss-and-love homage that began my fascination with birds. Bird feeders went up in the back yard, first close to the house, then when birds began throwing themselves at their reflections in the upper windows, further out in the yard. Feeders for big sunflower seeds, and little thistle seeds, and the mix of millet and corn that attracts sparrows. Soon I had a flock of squirrels feeding with the birds. Every six months or so a hawk would swoop down and squeeze a bird to death, while plucking its head feathers--probably hastening its death. I squirmed and complained--this was hard to watch--but I did watch, and accepted that hawks too have to eat and some eat their own kind.
Last summer, in western Minnesota, a farmer became furious with the huge white pelicans who have made a come back in Minnesota. When their island in a big lake shrank with rising water, the birds took to nesting in fields. This farmer had rented land and anticipated a crop. When pelicans nested on the land, he was so angry that he crushed hundreds (maybe thousands) of pelican eggs, and killed fledglings already born. He'd been warned by a game warden that the birds are protected, but this did not deter him. The warden, suspecting that he might do something ugly, returned the day after issuing the warning to find this horrible fratricide--Father Sun, Mother Moon, Brother Bird, Sister Lake.
When I first read about the murder, I was so shaken with grief and horror that I almost couldn't bear it. Now, months have passed and that initial raw emotion has subsided. The farmer has been tried and sentenced to pay a fine of $12,500 (the largest such fine ever issued in Minnesota, if I'm not mistaken). He must also perform many years of service to the natural world. He voices penitence. He says it is the worst thing he has ever done. I believe him, though I know him not at all.
As I've been driving around, thoughts about his case flash across my mind. I wonder what he felt as he smashed those huge eggs and killed the helpless fledglings? I imagine that rage creates a sense of enormous, unchecked power. It blinds and floods, it takes over the entire being. It does not exercise patience or anticipate other outcomes or search for ways to distract with other emotions, with other activities. It does not seek companionship to pour out the murderous hate in a neutral ear.
Then I remember stories of easterners who took the newly built trains across the western plains and shot for sport the buffalo stampeded by fear of the "iron horse." These anonymous, 19th-century killers had no real motive: they were fulfilling no need for food or hides. They were simply drunk with unchecked power. They left the carcasses to rot.
This history is in our blood. Yet our laws and regulations attempt to check that history with recognition of its horrible excesses. Here, the farmer who robbed a native bird of thousands of its seasonal offspring, reminds us of the two sides of our American, our human story.
His life will not be the same after this. Nor should he be an outcast. In fact, his action reminds me of what we all do, these days. Not with such direct brutality, but rather with the soft connivance of comfort and avoidance, we create holes in the sky.
And, if we're lucky, we find ways to set about the task of living with less, curbing out demands, making amends and offering to help stitch the world whole.
When I first came to what we off-handedly call today "environmentalism," I met the wonderful poems of N. Scott Mommaday.
I am a feather in the bright sky,
I am a blue horse that runs in the plains... ("The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee")
Around this delightful song of joy and affection for the natural world, I created a writing exercise called "Circle Poem in the Native American Spirit," which I published in my book, The Story in History (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1992).
Those early days of my "environmentalism" began as a healing practice after losing my father. That rift in the world, that hole in the sky, I began to fill with feathers. As I walked west under the Hamline bridge, heading toward the Mississippi River, but turning rather quickly and coming east and home, I collected feathers. Most were crow feathers and pigeon feathers with their dark tips and lighter shafts, or occasionally a flicker feather--startlingly yellow in its shaft with varegated dark and lighter bands. The greatest prize were cardinal feathers, dusty red--my favorite Minnesota bird.
On trips to various shores, I gathered large goose and gull feathers, and once found what must have been a hawk tail feather, with its long banded strength. These I gradually added to a papier mache mask in an all-over design, attaching each with a torn piece of pale construction paper on which I wrote one of my father's sayings: "Per de la madonna," or "Eh, Porceluzza!" His Italian saying predominated, as being the essence of himself.
Perhaps it was this loss-and-love homage that began my fascination with birds. Bird feeders went up in the back yard, first close to the house, then when birds began throwing themselves at their reflections in the upper windows, further out in the yard. Feeders for big sunflower seeds, and little thistle seeds, and the mix of millet and corn that attracts sparrows. Soon I had a flock of squirrels feeding with the birds. Every six months or so a hawk would swoop down and squeeze a bird to death, while plucking its head feathers--probably hastening its death. I squirmed and complained--this was hard to watch--but I did watch, and accepted that hawks too have to eat and some eat their own kind.
Last summer, in western Minnesota, a farmer became furious with the huge white pelicans who have made a come back in Minnesota. When their island in a big lake shrank with rising water, the birds took to nesting in fields. This farmer had rented land and anticipated a crop. When pelicans nested on the land, he was so angry that he crushed hundreds (maybe thousands) of pelican eggs, and killed fledglings already born. He'd been warned by a game warden that the birds are protected, but this did not deter him. The warden, suspecting that he might do something ugly, returned the day after issuing the warning to find this horrible fratricide--Father Sun, Mother Moon, Brother Bird, Sister Lake.
When I first read about the murder, I was so shaken with grief and horror that I almost couldn't bear it. Now, months have passed and that initial raw emotion has subsided. The farmer has been tried and sentenced to pay a fine of $12,500 (the largest such fine ever issued in Minnesota, if I'm not mistaken). He must also perform many years of service to the natural world. He voices penitence. He says it is the worst thing he has ever done. I believe him, though I know him not at all.
As I've been driving around, thoughts about his case flash across my mind. I wonder what he felt as he smashed those huge eggs and killed the helpless fledglings? I imagine that rage creates a sense of enormous, unchecked power. It blinds and floods, it takes over the entire being. It does not exercise patience or anticipate other outcomes or search for ways to distract with other emotions, with other activities. It does not seek companionship to pour out the murderous hate in a neutral ear.
Then I remember stories of easterners who took the newly built trains across the western plains and shot for sport the buffalo stampeded by fear of the "iron horse." These anonymous, 19th-century killers had no real motive: they were fulfilling no need for food or hides. They were simply drunk with unchecked power. They left the carcasses to rot.
This history is in our blood. Yet our laws and regulations attempt to check that history with recognition of its horrible excesses. Here, the farmer who robbed a native bird of thousands of its seasonal offspring, reminds us of the two sides of our American, our human story.
His life will not be the same after this. Nor should he be an outcast. In fact, his action reminds me of what we all do, these days. Not with such direct brutality, but rather with the soft connivance of comfort and avoidance, we create holes in the sky.
And, if we're lucky, we find ways to set about the task of living with less, curbing out demands, making amends and offering to help stitch the world whole.
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