Margotlog: Mozart and Matisse
I used to believe that I was the young Mozart. This came about when I read his biography, a book with an orange cover, sitting in my father's huge, over-stuffed chair, during the heat of a South Carolina summer. When our mother took my sister and me to the Charleston Symphony concerts at Memminger Auditorium, I suspected that the boy Mozart hung suspended within the velvet folds of the curtains at the left of the stage. Never the right. Something of the rascally, talented boy waited there.
In those days, there were many biographies for young readers with orange covers. Another told the story of Madame Curie, a celebrated female scientist, unusual at any period. She lived in Paris. Cure and Curie sounded alike. Yet, though I admired her, I did not want to be Madame Curie, but always the young Mozart. He came alive under my fingers running up and down the piano keys, the years I studied piano with Grace Miller, walking down the irregular slate sidewalks of Charleston, and presenting myself at her door. She had a face peppered with orange freckles, and surrounded by a frizz of orange-brown hair. Something of a leprechaun.
I chose Mozart and not Beethoven or Haydn, whose concerto for four hands I learned well enough to perform with Miss Miller at my last piano recital. I chose Mozart because he was a boy genius, full of fire and jokes and whimsy. We were a family of sudden inspirations and surprises--my father embracing my mother in the kitchen instead of yelling at her about spots on his Citadel uniform. A rat running across the Old Citadel courtyard, its tail long as a ladle. Slabs of ceiling plaster falling and crushing our little play table. When we returned who knows how many days later, long strands of straw, ancient as the Old Citadel itself, hung over the wreckage.
When "Amadeus," the film about Mozart and his rival Salieri, came out in 1984, I believed in it with a child's abandon even though by that time, I considered myself more than grown up. I wanted to be that boy genius so endowed with grace that he could make silly faces while performing like an angel. Creating music of soaring divinity while sliding a frog down the soprano's décolletage. Struggling in poverty toward an early grave even as he composed one of the world's most enchanted opera, The Magic Flute.
Now I've seen a production of The Magic Flute by the Minnesota Opera Company that does justice to my early vision of Mozart's comically sweet, dark music. The production uses animation with dragons built of clockworks, devils playing hangman with one's chances, yet reversing the tune just in time toward sublime, tumbling delights. Maybe I'm entering my second childhood. Maybe Mozart never left his first, but trundled it along toward his death at age 35, fulfilling symphonic demands yet retaining inside his pocket a pop-up nose of a delightful nihilist who brings joy even as he sings these madcap harmonies toward the grave, to the tune of bells.
Matisse, the French Impressionist, turned wild colorist and final graceful abstractionist, could not have led a life less inspired by childhood. He was a quintessential pater familias, good bourgeois who went to work in a suit. I bring him up here because also this week I saw an exhibit of Matisse's work at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Opera in St. Paul; painting in Minneapolis. We are very arty twin cities sometimes.
These two artists, separated by almost a century, tell different tales of how talent discovers itself. The boy Mozart, born with genius, bestowed in relatively few years and reverenced ever since. Matisse, taking years to work himself beyond a rather dry repetition of the time-honored subject--woman in a chair. Yes, Matisse became a Fauve, a wild beast throwing bright colors against each other, sometimes even slashing a green stripe down his model's face. Yet there remained in him the
careful, constant revisionist. Take his series of drawings of an odalisque--that exotic import from a sultan's palace, aka the reclining nude, sometimes as in Ingres, very tightly painted despite her naked curves, sometimes as in Delacroix, tinged with shadows and patterned cloth, a hint of hand cymbals just beyond the frame.
For Matisse toward the end of his painterly development, this motive was played back and forth, from more naturalistic to greater simplicity and monumentality. We know because he took pictures of the more than 12 studies of an odalisque which he made over a week or two. How interesting, I say to myself, noticing how in one he retains the slit of buttock against buttock, yet how in another that elides that to a simple curve. The final painting is almost Egyptian in its rock-like U shape. I'm not sure I like it.
But I love what happened not long after, when giving up painting for paper cut-outs, Matisse began an experiment with bright colors, flat shapes, and jazzy placements. Wavy curving thin thick light dark blue chartreuse red black arranged almost at random on time-honored 9 x 12 paper. Or as in the Barnes Museum in Philadelphia, set a line of huge cavorting females in an array of colors across a huge mural--the essence of motion so joyful as to obliterate anything but itself.
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
Margotlog: Another Silent Spring, a Spring Without Bees?
Margotlog: Another Silent Spring, a Spring Without Bees?
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT's effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we have recovered the sounds of spring--gulls returning north wheeling in the sky, silver against the coming dark. Beautiful reminder that winter is ebbing and we in Minnesota are returning to the land of the living, the melting, the growing.
My heart clutches. What am I going to plant this year that won't kill the bees? For many seasons I've bought my container flowers for the back deck from Menards. Think Fleet Farm, or any local hardware store that caters to backyard gardeners who want a quick fix. Recently I've become convinced that I can't do this anymore. It's too deadly.
For several years I've been reading about bee colony collapse. It's taken a while to finger the culprit, but scientific evidence now points to a widespread pesticide family called Neonicotinoids. Think Neon - I - cotin-oids.
Not only is this family of pesticides widely used against so-called pests, meaning insects that harm row crops (and potatoes, etc), but they are also applied to garden plantings before these seedlings make their way to our yards. Thus, we simple flower lovers are unwittingly spreading death to some of the most crucial insects on the planet--bees who pollinate many many kinds of flowering trees, many of whose flowers turn into fruit and nuts. Think apples as the most basic. But also almonds which I personally love to crunch.
Alerted to this phenomenon last year, I began paying attention to the flying insects in my summer yard. Yes, there were fewer bees. Monarch butterflies had decreased for the past six or seven years almost to invisibility. We didn't even have wasps any more--those pesky stingers who used to live in the ground just at the edge of the house. Only an occasional honey bee, bumble bee, only an occasional white cabbage butterfly hovered around my flowers on the deck last year. I saw one Monarch butterfly all summer long.
This change has occurred incredibly fast. Was it only a few years ago that driving south from the North Shore of Lake Superior, I encountered so many Monarchs drifting across the highway that I clutched the wheel, hoping against hope not to hit them?
There is no doubt in my mind that many of our crucial foods are being threatened by agri-chemical giants like Monsanto, and by our own greedy stupidity. It may be something of a diversion but I can't help thinking of underlying patterns. Seeing the documentary film "King Corn," made by two "kids" with Iowa roots, teaches that raising an acre of corn today in mid-continent U.S., involves an enormous outlay of herbicide, possible because the corn plants via their seeds have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide. Note: the herbicide kills sideline "weeds" too, to the detriment of Monarchs and other flying insects who have a special bond, aka, eating, nesting, etc., with them.
Now only does the US today raise more corn by a factor of several thousand than our farmers did forty years ago, but most of that corn goes to two truly disastrous operations: the making of corn syrup and fattening feed lot cattle. Corn-fed beef, which is what is mostly sold today in the US has over 9 grams of fat/unit versus grass/fed beef's 1.3 grams. This endangers our health, not to mention the gross environmental damage created by concentrating cattle in feed lots--their waste products rival that of medium-sized cities. All I need to say about corn syrup is that it's in nearly every food product manufactured in the US, especially soft drinks, and in concentrations high enough to add hundreds of thousands to the ranks of diabetes sufferers every year.
We can't all be chemists or farmers, but since we all like to eat and many of us care deeply about the beauty and viability of our natural world, it behooves us to pay strict and unflagging attention to what the Wizards of Chemistry are up to, and to raise our voices and put our bets against their sneaky promises of "a better life through Chemistry."
I'll be searching out organic flowers this season, and turning in ever greater numbers to foods that are not genetically engineered or chemically enhanced. I'll also be keeping tabs on the bees, hoping against hope that my flowers sustain and do not derange them.
This is as crucial a crossroads as Rachel Carson's outcry against DDT. We must prevail against chemical companies like Monsanto. We must follow the European Union and outlaw the production and use of neonicotinoids. It is a political and environmental battle for our own and our planet's health. One and the same.
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT's effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we have recovered the sounds of spring--gulls returning north wheeling in the sky, silver against the coming dark. Beautiful reminder that winter is ebbing and we in Minnesota are returning to the land of the living, the melting, the growing.
My heart clutches. What am I going to plant this year that won't kill the bees? For many seasons I've bought my container flowers for the back deck from Menards. Think Fleet Farm, or any local hardware store that caters to backyard gardeners who want a quick fix. Recently I've become convinced that I can't do this anymore. It's too deadly.
For several years I've been reading about bee colony collapse. It's taken a while to finger the culprit, but scientific evidence now points to a widespread pesticide family called Neonicotinoids. Think Neon - I - cotin-oids.
Not only is this family of pesticides widely used against so-called pests, meaning insects that harm row crops (and potatoes, etc), but they are also applied to garden plantings before these seedlings make their way to our yards. Thus, we simple flower lovers are unwittingly spreading death to some of the most crucial insects on the planet--bees who pollinate many many kinds of flowering trees, many of whose flowers turn into fruit and nuts. Think apples as the most basic. But also almonds which I personally love to crunch.
Alerted to this phenomenon last year, I began paying attention to the flying insects in my summer yard. Yes, there were fewer bees. Monarch butterflies had decreased for the past six or seven years almost to invisibility. We didn't even have wasps any more--those pesky stingers who used to live in the ground just at the edge of the house. Only an occasional honey bee, bumble bee, only an occasional white cabbage butterfly hovered around my flowers on the deck last year. I saw one Monarch butterfly all summer long.
This change has occurred incredibly fast. Was it only a few years ago that driving south from the North Shore of Lake Superior, I encountered so many Monarchs drifting across the highway that I clutched the wheel, hoping against hope not to hit them?
There is no doubt in my mind that many of our crucial foods are being threatened by agri-chemical giants like Monsanto, and by our own greedy stupidity. It may be something of a diversion but I can't help thinking of underlying patterns. Seeing the documentary film "King Corn," made by two "kids" with Iowa roots, teaches that raising an acre of corn today in mid-continent U.S., involves an enormous outlay of herbicide, possible because the corn plants via their seeds have been genetically modified to resist the herbicide. Note: the herbicide kills sideline "weeds" too, to the detriment of Monarchs and other flying insects who have a special bond, aka, eating, nesting, etc., with them.
Now only does the US today raise more corn by a factor of several thousand than our farmers did forty years ago, but most of that corn goes to two truly disastrous operations: the making of corn syrup and fattening feed lot cattle. Corn-fed beef, which is what is mostly sold today in the US has over 9 grams of fat/unit versus grass/fed beef's 1.3 grams. This endangers our health, not to mention the gross environmental damage created by concentrating cattle in feed lots--their waste products rival that of medium-sized cities. All I need to say about corn syrup is that it's in nearly every food product manufactured in the US, especially soft drinks, and in concentrations high enough to add hundreds of thousands to the ranks of diabetes sufferers every year.
We can't all be chemists or farmers, but since we all like to eat and many of us care deeply about the beauty and viability of our natural world, it behooves us to pay strict and unflagging attention to what the Wizards of Chemistry are up to, and to raise our voices and put our bets against their sneaky promises of "a better life through Chemistry."
I'll be searching out organic flowers this season, and turning in ever greater numbers to foods that are not genetically engineered or chemically enhanced. I'll also be keeping tabs on the bees, hoping against hope that my flowers sustain and do not derange them.
This is as crucial a crossroads as Rachel Carson's outcry against DDT. We must prevail against chemical companies like Monsanto. We must follow the European Union and outlaw the production and use of neonicotinoids. It is a political and environmental battle for our own and our planet's health. One and the same.
Friday, March 14, 2014
Margotlog: Beyond the Palms, Hawai'i
Margotlog: Beyond the Palms, Hawai'i
Not this year, but a few years ago, we entered the Kasbah of Hawai'i hipsters, circa 1970. No clue outside the low, white dwelling with palms-and-hibiscus yard. No clue in the blue-green lapping lagoon and fluffy white clouds above. But once we opened the door to our room, we entered a den of dusty delight. I'm laughing as I write this. Jam-packed. The glitz of compulsive collecting.
The bed was fine, sheets and towels too, but as we sat on the commode, there facing us was a bunny-hop child's game at knee-level on a table also containing a Rubix cube, and a placard posing a mind-ball game challenge. As I stood to wash, the soap entered my hand via a naked brass cupid, smirking and salacious. The soap lathered nicely.
Either side a Victorian bureau with long mirror stood huge dolls with long lashes and very red cheeks. The flapper wore ankle-strap pumps, sausage curls, and frilly dress. Her pal, a 1940s career gal sported in ankle socks and pumps and straw hat with off-kilter plume. Each wore a blessing of dust. Each doll's face was quite mannish, minus the five o'clock shadow--our first clue that our hosts were gay.
Behind the dolls hung images of nuddish women wreathed in mist. Could these have been the front for a gay bordello, circa 1890?
The orange carpet was worn in places, the wallpaper covered in orange, pink and white stripes. Yet mostly hidden behind dark, maudlin art--old pensioners, dowager ladies in gossamer throws, a Hudson-River-School landscape, a Currier and Ives snowy scene, a seascape containing a rotting hulk, and a portrait of a prognathous young man in a Nazi uniform. My husband suggested he was the Nazi-loving American artist Marsden Hartley.
A small settee covered with a plaid blanket was crammed with needle-point pillows of fruits and vines. A den of moldering teddy bears slumped beside the bathroom door.
In another corner a table covered with nylon lace held a knock-off Tiffany lamp, a compote of plastic fruit, a wooden mountaineer whom I expected to be a nut-cracker but was actually offering a posy and adjusting his bows and arrows. Above a tiny chandelier anointed us all with wisps of dust.
Inside a mirrored cabinet wobble dolls held still, while above, strange faces with huge noses bent down to sniff us.
We couldn't leave--there was nowhere else to stay the three night. Nor did we particularly want to. The hosts were kind and enjoyed displaying their wares--as we arrived the dining room table was studded with silver candelabra. But inside "our" room, with the door closed, something musty and unhealthy edged closer and closer, not to hurt us, but to absorb us into one of them.
Not this year, but a few years ago, we entered the Kasbah of Hawai'i hipsters, circa 1970. No clue outside the low, white dwelling with palms-and-hibiscus yard. No clue in the blue-green lapping lagoon and fluffy white clouds above. But once we opened the door to our room, we entered a den of dusty delight. I'm laughing as I write this. Jam-packed. The glitz of compulsive collecting.
The bed was fine, sheets and towels too, but as we sat on the commode, there facing us was a bunny-hop child's game at knee-level on a table also containing a Rubix cube, and a placard posing a mind-ball game challenge. As I stood to wash, the soap entered my hand via a naked brass cupid, smirking and salacious. The soap lathered nicely.
Either side a Victorian bureau with long mirror stood huge dolls with long lashes and very red cheeks. The flapper wore ankle-strap pumps, sausage curls, and frilly dress. Her pal, a 1940s career gal sported in ankle socks and pumps and straw hat with off-kilter plume. Each wore a blessing of dust. Each doll's face was quite mannish, minus the five o'clock shadow--our first clue that our hosts were gay.
Behind the dolls hung images of nuddish women wreathed in mist. Could these have been the front for a gay bordello, circa 1890?
The orange carpet was worn in places, the wallpaper covered in orange, pink and white stripes. Yet mostly hidden behind dark, maudlin art--old pensioners, dowager ladies in gossamer throws, a Hudson-River-School landscape, a Currier and Ives snowy scene, a seascape containing a rotting hulk, and a portrait of a prognathous young man in a Nazi uniform. My husband suggested he was the Nazi-loving American artist Marsden Hartley.
A small settee covered with a plaid blanket was crammed with needle-point pillows of fruits and vines. A den of moldering teddy bears slumped beside the bathroom door.
In another corner a table covered with nylon lace held a knock-off Tiffany lamp, a compote of plastic fruit, a wooden mountaineer whom I expected to be a nut-cracker but was actually offering a posy and adjusting his bows and arrows. Above a tiny chandelier anointed us all with wisps of dust.
Inside a mirrored cabinet wobble dolls held still, while above, strange faces with huge noses bent down to sniff us.
We couldn't leave--there was nowhere else to stay the three night. Nor did we particularly want to. The hosts were kind and enjoyed displaying their wares--as we arrived the dining room table was studded with silver candelabra. But inside "our" room, with the door closed, something musty and unhealthy edged closer and closer, not to hurt us, but to absorb us into one of them.
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Margotlog: SPCO's Innuendos
Margotlog: SPCO's Innuendos
Dear Music Lovers, the Twin Cities now has two dueling orchestras back on stage. Well, not exactly dueling, but at least playing at each other across the river. I could not be happier, though I rarely cross the great divide to sit in Minneapolis's Orchestra Hall--too abstract with its "cubes" staring down from the high, high ceiling. Plus I have to pay big bucks to park. Am I a philistine or not?
Last weekend's SPCO concerts led by German pianist and now conductor Christian Zacharias both charmed and puzzled me. He, we've heard many happy times before. His fluid, long-armed piano technique is a marvel. You can almost tell he'll be at ease as he walks on stage, loose-limbed like a Slinky, and almost smiling. He and three string players gave a fine rendition of a Mozart Piano quartet. The star was, no surprise, Zacharias. What fluidity, what measured dynamics, what precision and dew-drop clarity, what melt-in-your-mouth piano! Yet, the ensemble music itself came off rather dry. Maybe because three strings simply don't have enough heft to balance the piano, or maybe because they are given little to do but support--both problems with the composition, not the rendition. Mozart, on his way to learning what makes truly exciting Mozart sound--which for me almost always includes the bell-tones and rasps of oboes, flutes, and woodwinds against the whoosh of strings. Think woodland sent skyward into celestial spheres.
What Zacharias did with Charles Ives "Unanswered Question" was not so happy. Yes, the trumpet asks the question offstage. Yes, the woodwinds and flutes/oboes become increasingly discordant in trying to answer. But what happened to the obbligato of camp-ground hymns which Ives gave the strings? They are supposed to play offstage too--all rather cloak and dagger--but Zacharias kept them visible, they just played so softly as to be no more than a whisper, or less kindly, mouse-scratch. No, no, no. The piece lacked tension--the questions must go against something sweet and soothing; otherwise, no innuendo, just bleats of uncertainty.
Finally the old SPCO panache asserted itself with a Haydn London symphony. The old master was making a big splash in a city crazed for music. Renown and beloved, he was feted and courted, kept almost too busy to compose. But clearly he did, at the peak of his prime. What wonderful soaring strings and sashaying flirtation from flutes/oboe/woodwinds. What I had expected of the Mozart was produced by his much older contemporary. Yes, Zacharias may have overdone the extreme dynamics. Yes, we could have used a bit more modulation and innuendo, but the music pulses with so much energy, the invention falls so in love with the orchestra's capabilities, that no one can do wrong. I loved it for rollicking, for tootling, for crashing and deep diving. Congratulations to talented, hometown frolic led by imported but welcome to return, Christian Zacharias..
Dear Music Lovers, the Twin Cities now has two dueling orchestras back on stage. Well, not exactly dueling, but at least playing at each other across the river. I could not be happier, though I rarely cross the great divide to sit in Minneapolis's Orchestra Hall--too abstract with its "cubes" staring down from the high, high ceiling. Plus I have to pay big bucks to park. Am I a philistine or not?
Last weekend's SPCO concerts led by German pianist and now conductor Christian Zacharias both charmed and puzzled me. He, we've heard many happy times before. His fluid, long-armed piano technique is a marvel. You can almost tell he'll be at ease as he walks on stage, loose-limbed like a Slinky, and almost smiling. He and three string players gave a fine rendition of a Mozart Piano quartet. The star was, no surprise, Zacharias. What fluidity, what measured dynamics, what precision and dew-drop clarity, what melt-in-your-mouth piano! Yet, the ensemble music itself came off rather dry. Maybe because three strings simply don't have enough heft to balance the piano, or maybe because they are given little to do but support--both problems with the composition, not the rendition. Mozart, on his way to learning what makes truly exciting Mozart sound--which for me almost always includes the bell-tones and rasps of oboes, flutes, and woodwinds against the whoosh of strings. Think woodland sent skyward into celestial spheres.
What Zacharias did with Charles Ives "Unanswered Question" was not so happy. Yes, the trumpet asks the question offstage. Yes, the woodwinds and flutes/oboes become increasingly discordant in trying to answer. But what happened to the obbligato of camp-ground hymns which Ives gave the strings? They are supposed to play offstage too--all rather cloak and dagger--but Zacharias kept them visible, they just played so softly as to be no more than a whisper, or less kindly, mouse-scratch. No, no, no. The piece lacked tension--the questions must go against something sweet and soothing; otherwise, no innuendo, just bleats of uncertainty.
Finally the old SPCO panache asserted itself with a Haydn London symphony. The old master was making a big splash in a city crazed for music. Renown and beloved, he was feted and courted, kept almost too busy to compose. But clearly he did, at the peak of his prime. What wonderful soaring strings and sashaying flirtation from flutes/oboe/woodwinds. What I had expected of the Mozart was produced by his much older contemporary. Yes, Zacharias may have overdone the extreme dynamics. Yes, we could have used a bit more modulation and innuendo, but the music pulses with so much energy, the invention falls so in love with the orchestra's capabilities, that no one can do wrong. I loved it for rollicking, for tootling, for crashing and deep diving. Congratulations to talented, hometown frolic led by imported but welcome to return, Christian Zacharias..
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Margotlog: Plot
Margotlog: Plot
Here in fly-over winterland, we are anticipating a winter storm. Our weather radio--cranked with a whirr, whirr every two minutes--has voices that sound like Yukon Yukes, drawling, then clamping their jaws.
I go out early to the postal box, intent on mailing letters before the "blowing and drifting." It's warmish, near 40 above zero. To you in Florida, this means a chuckle. To you in Mexico, it means almost nothing. To us after weeks of below zero, not just below freezing, but way below zero--20, 30 below, it means an increase of 50 degrees. A heat wave.
With heat comes melting. I wear my usual "waffle stompers" laced up tight against twisted ankles, but still, I pick my way very carefully, noticing a strange shift in the "plot" of Summit Avenue's wealthy (Fitzgerald's avenue of American architectural "monstrosities). For weeks as I've strolled through intermittent snows, I've been cursing these well-to-do for doing nothing with their sidewalks. Snow built up and was trod upon, leaving depressions where heels sank, and small peaks where snow refroze. When it was colder and snow kept replenishing itself, these slogs coated feet with snow, making every step heavier and heavier. I cursed nastier and meaner. Would I call the ombudsman? Would I call the city council, the police, the mayor's office?
Now with the peaks and valleys frozen, these former slogs offer at least some traction, as opposed to slanting, snow-free walks which are slick with slippery melt.
The plot thickens. Recently I've been tutored on plot. My fiction is too character-ridden. It stalls. Readers (at least some of them) don't seem to feel a forward motion. "You need to think plot," instructs my guide, a well-published fiction writer herself.
Eyes on the changeable sidewalks, careful not to slip, fall, break, I peruse plot and how the shift of even one element can change how others act and react. A mother goes berserk and kills a comatose child, unleashing a maelstrom of accusations, incarcerations, the threat of the electric chair. While in the background, her husband, also the damaged child's father, is struck dumb by his placid wife's act. He is stricken almost to the point of immobility. The other children wander aimlessly through their small lives, surviving on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, being helped to the school bus and taken in on weekends by worried neighbors. And the mother who's also a lawyer as she discloses in prison--hers is perhaps the most interesting transformation. She feeds fellow prisoners ideas to challenge their sentences. She, a well-educated, wealthy white woman, takes up with the poor, with drug addicts, African-American and other races. She almost forgets her husband and other children, she almost forgets the child she killed "out of mercy."
Maybe you see what I mean. Change one element and chart the consequences. Now I have to decide that that element will be. That is, unless I'm too in love with what I've already written, with the words I struggled so hard to craft, to let them go!
Here in fly-over winterland, we are anticipating a winter storm. Our weather radio--cranked with a whirr, whirr every two minutes--has voices that sound like Yukon Yukes, drawling, then clamping their jaws.
I go out early to the postal box, intent on mailing letters before the "blowing and drifting." It's warmish, near 40 above zero. To you in Florida, this means a chuckle. To you in Mexico, it means almost nothing. To us after weeks of below zero, not just below freezing, but way below zero--20, 30 below, it means an increase of 50 degrees. A heat wave.
With heat comes melting. I wear my usual "waffle stompers" laced up tight against twisted ankles, but still, I pick my way very carefully, noticing a strange shift in the "plot" of Summit Avenue's wealthy (Fitzgerald's avenue of American architectural "monstrosities). For weeks as I've strolled through intermittent snows, I've been cursing these well-to-do for doing nothing with their sidewalks. Snow built up and was trod upon, leaving depressions where heels sank, and small peaks where snow refroze. When it was colder and snow kept replenishing itself, these slogs coated feet with snow, making every step heavier and heavier. I cursed nastier and meaner. Would I call the ombudsman? Would I call the city council, the police, the mayor's office?
Now with the peaks and valleys frozen, these former slogs offer at least some traction, as opposed to slanting, snow-free walks which are slick with slippery melt.
The plot thickens. Recently I've been tutored on plot. My fiction is too character-ridden. It stalls. Readers (at least some of them) don't seem to feel a forward motion. "You need to think plot," instructs my guide, a well-published fiction writer herself.
Eyes on the changeable sidewalks, careful not to slip, fall, break, I peruse plot and how the shift of even one element can change how others act and react. A mother goes berserk and kills a comatose child, unleashing a maelstrom of accusations, incarcerations, the threat of the electric chair. While in the background, her husband, also the damaged child's father, is struck dumb by his placid wife's act. He is stricken almost to the point of immobility. The other children wander aimlessly through their small lives, surviving on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, being helped to the school bus and taken in on weekends by worried neighbors. And the mother who's also a lawyer as she discloses in prison--hers is perhaps the most interesting transformation. She feeds fellow prisoners ideas to challenge their sentences. She, a well-educated, wealthy white woman, takes up with the poor, with drug addicts, African-American and other races. She almost forgets her husband and other children, she almost forgets the child she killed "out of mercy."
Maybe you see what I mean. Change one element and chart the consequences. Now I have to decide that that element will be. That is, unless I'm too in love with what I've already written, with the words I struggled so hard to craft, to let them go!
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Margotlog: Halloween Kimonos
Margotlog: Halloween Kimonos
We have two sensibilities in this house--my husband's deep-rooted radicalism. He went to prison during Vietnam not just as a draft dodger, but as a draft refuser. I didn't know him them. Now he reads The Nation.
During Vietnam I was going to graduate school, raising a toddler, and inching my way into an imagination which belonged only to me. Denise Levertov's poem from 1964 with these lines
a spring night entered
my mind through the tight-closed
window,
wearing
a loose Russian shirt of
light silk
lifted me on a dream of sensuality and carried me across the tops of the elms. It carried me out of the big upstairs window and into a sense of possibilities. Meanwhile the kid was playing at being "Laura" from the Laura and Mary books. Sometimes I was dog Jack, barking down from the bed onto "Laura and Mary" on the shag carpeting.
Catching the touch of imagination's wing drew me out of bed after the husband beside me was fast asleep. I crept across the hall and crouching on a studio couch, wrote in semi-dark the lines that had been forming themselves in my mind:
Here we stand, the professor's girls
in wallpaper kimonos,
knitting needles quiver in my
black yarn hair, my sister's
flop like rabbit ears. Once more
she's charmed more candy into her paper sack,
once more the neighborhood cutie
has chocolate on her chin.
I think I know she won't blow me
any Mars bars, jelly beans, Hersey's kisses
from her chipmunk mouth. I think her teeth
should rot. I think next Halloween
her scalp should itch from red bugs
in her witch wig of Spanish moss.
I think my mother should see me pout.
But she says the picture shows
how she makes do on a professor's salary.
Now when I look at us, I wonder
at how we fought. Did my sister
save sweets against the winter cold?
Could I taste love or chocolate
on my spiteful tongue:
Capturing that quintessential conflict with my sister was a defining moment. It had none of Levertov's dreamy sensuality. It was not particularly imaginative in the sense of being transported from the everyday into a land of possibility. But it was a spitting clear rendition of sibling rivalry which I had often felt but never before quite pinned down.
Now when I read a review of Levertov's Collected Poems in The Nation (2/3/14), I'm startled by the reviewer Adam Plunkett's preference for a much later Levertov reference to silk. This was in the service of spirituality:
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
Call me a confirmed pagan. I want my silk worn by a spring night, come to charm me into creativity.
We have two sensibilities in this house--my husband's deep-rooted radicalism. He went to prison during Vietnam not just as a draft dodger, but as a draft refuser. I didn't know him them. Now he reads The Nation.
During Vietnam I was going to graduate school, raising a toddler, and inching my way into an imagination which belonged only to me. Denise Levertov's poem from 1964 with these lines
a spring night entered
my mind through the tight-closed
window,
wearing
a loose Russian shirt of
light silk
lifted me on a dream of sensuality and carried me across the tops of the elms. It carried me out of the big upstairs window and into a sense of possibilities. Meanwhile the kid was playing at being "Laura" from the Laura and Mary books. Sometimes I was dog Jack, barking down from the bed onto "Laura and Mary" on the shag carpeting.
Catching the touch of imagination's wing drew me out of bed after the husband beside me was fast asleep. I crept across the hall and crouching on a studio couch, wrote in semi-dark the lines that had been forming themselves in my mind:
Here we stand, the professor's girls
in wallpaper kimonos,
knitting needles quiver in my
black yarn hair, my sister's
flop like rabbit ears. Once more
she's charmed more candy into her paper sack,
once more the neighborhood cutie
has chocolate on her chin.
I think I know she won't blow me
any Mars bars, jelly beans, Hersey's kisses
from her chipmunk mouth. I think her teeth
should rot. I think next Halloween
her scalp should itch from red bugs
in her witch wig of Spanish moss.
I think my mother should see me pout.
But she says the picture shows
how she makes do on a professor's salary.
Now when I look at us, I wonder
at how we fought. Did my sister
save sweets against the winter cold?
Could I taste love or chocolate
on my spiteful tongue:
Capturing that quintessential conflict with my sister was a defining moment. It had none of Levertov's dreamy sensuality. It was not particularly imaginative in the sense of being transported from the everyday into a land of possibility. But it was a spitting clear rendition of sibling rivalry which I had often felt but never before quite pinned down.
Now when I read a review of Levertov's Collected Poems in The Nation (2/3/14), I'm startled by the reviewer Adam Plunkett's preference for a much later Levertov reference to silk. This was in the service of spirituality:
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
Call me a confirmed pagan. I want my silk worn by a spring night, come to charm me into creativity.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Margotlog: Cats in Winter
Margotlog: Cats in Winter
Our three don't go out so we don't worry about frostbitten paws or frozen fur. It's been snowing so much lately, they would be wet if they braved the elements--little Julia the black and white, with a cute moustache and black goatee, next Maggie the square-faced, a calico like the oldest Tilly with motley shifts from orange to white to dark flecked with tan. Only Tilly suffers stiffness and lethargy when it's 20 below as it's been way too often this January. Five school closings in one month, surely a record, and most on Mondays.
Yet all three know winter from summer. No open doors and windows to sniff the breeze. No delighting in cool linoleum. Instead Maggie hunkers down by the dining room radiator, and Julia leaps atop a few radiators upstairs with blankets or towels draped over them. Tilly has discovered a new warm spot recently--the laundry basket beside the radiator in a bedroom. One night in the dark I reached down for a bathrobe and grabbed instead a snarling cat.
Especially Maggie's fur stands on end with static electricity, except just after someone's showered when the bathroom air is moist. They Julia begs to be cuddled--a piercing squeak, then once in arms, a half grunt, half purr and willingness to remain passive while her hair is patted backwards. I do the same to Tilly in early morning when I drink my coffee in bed and she comes to be stroked. Her hair is the longest and finest of all three felines, but her willingness to groom herself has waned. Mats form along her belly, under her arms and under her chin. My theory used to be that she slept too long on one side--thus the mats. But under her chin doesn't make any sense unless she rolls onto her neck to rest. Guess I don't know all there is to know about each cat.
We are so much part of a family it's eerie. This has been true ever since Fran and I acquired more than two cats, which come to think of it was when we got married. We blended cats and kids. His Fluffy and Bart, my nameless calico--well she had a name but lived only a short time. I no longer remember, though her ghost is hovering just beyond memory.
Winter is a quieter time. I listen to Frances Mayes' Every Day in Tuscany not only in the evening but also at noon when doing my stretches. When Julia sees me pull the floor towel off the rack, she squeaks with excitement. I swing it at her like a torreadore's cape, but she skitters away--this is NOT how things should go. Giving in, I lay it flat and she immediately take her position at one end. Frances Mayes amuses me as she pronounces Italian with a Georgia. twang, Not until listening to this book on disc have I realized how southern she is. Yet this light-hearted account of TWO houses in Cortona, a slew of friends who seem to do nothing but cook for each other and walk in the town's piazza, is a fine antidote to this beastly winter.
I tried quite a while ago to take partial possession of a small apartment in an Umbrian hill town, but after three months, understood I would never stay long enough to make the upkeep and mortgage worthwhile. I need my one and only yard, outside the upstairs bathroom picture window, the eight trees I've planted over the years on the property, the slant of Midwestern roofs now covered with snow, and the certainty that all that I cherish is in one place. We could never take three cats to Italy like artist and writer friends take their big dog. Our cats define home, along with books, art works, the slant of light, the friends we've known for years, and of course my husband. Mine is not an expansive personality, at last not as expansive as Frances Mayes'. Yet it's fun to hear about heat and swimming pools, and baby cingali or wild boars, tearing up a hilltop garden. I gave up growing vegetables long ago and plant only flowers and tend trees and cats.
Our three don't go out so we don't worry about frostbitten paws or frozen fur. It's been snowing so much lately, they would be wet if they braved the elements--little Julia the black and white, with a cute moustache and black goatee, next Maggie the square-faced, a calico like the oldest Tilly with motley shifts from orange to white to dark flecked with tan. Only Tilly suffers stiffness and lethargy when it's 20 below as it's been way too often this January. Five school closings in one month, surely a record, and most on Mondays.
Yet all three know winter from summer. No open doors and windows to sniff the breeze. No delighting in cool linoleum. Instead Maggie hunkers down by the dining room radiator, and Julia leaps atop a few radiators upstairs with blankets or towels draped over them. Tilly has discovered a new warm spot recently--the laundry basket beside the radiator in a bedroom. One night in the dark I reached down for a bathrobe and grabbed instead a snarling cat.
Especially Maggie's fur stands on end with static electricity, except just after someone's showered when the bathroom air is moist. They Julia begs to be cuddled--a piercing squeak, then once in arms, a half grunt, half purr and willingness to remain passive while her hair is patted backwards. I do the same to Tilly in early morning when I drink my coffee in bed and she comes to be stroked. Her hair is the longest and finest of all three felines, but her willingness to groom herself has waned. Mats form along her belly, under her arms and under her chin. My theory used to be that she slept too long on one side--thus the mats. But under her chin doesn't make any sense unless she rolls onto her neck to rest. Guess I don't know all there is to know about each cat.
We are so much part of a family it's eerie. This has been true ever since Fran and I acquired more than two cats, which come to think of it was when we got married. We blended cats and kids. His Fluffy and Bart, my nameless calico--well she had a name but lived only a short time. I no longer remember, though her ghost is hovering just beyond memory.
Winter is a quieter time. I listen to Frances Mayes' Every Day in Tuscany not only in the evening but also at noon when doing my stretches. When Julia sees me pull the floor towel off the rack, she squeaks with excitement. I swing it at her like a torreadore's cape, but she skitters away--this is NOT how things should go. Giving in, I lay it flat and she immediately take her position at one end. Frances Mayes amuses me as she pronounces Italian with a Georgia. twang, Not until listening to this book on disc have I realized how southern she is. Yet this light-hearted account of TWO houses in Cortona, a slew of friends who seem to do nothing but cook for each other and walk in the town's piazza, is a fine antidote to this beastly winter.
I tried quite a while ago to take partial possession of a small apartment in an Umbrian hill town, but after three months, understood I would never stay long enough to make the upkeep and mortgage worthwhile. I need my one and only yard, outside the upstairs bathroom picture window, the eight trees I've planted over the years on the property, the slant of Midwestern roofs now covered with snow, and the certainty that all that I cherish is in one place. We could never take three cats to Italy like artist and writer friends take their big dog. Our cats define home, along with books, art works, the slant of light, the friends we've known for years, and of course my husband. Mine is not an expansive personality, at last not as expansive as Frances Mayes'. Yet it's fun to hear about heat and swimming pools, and baby cingali or wild boars, tearing up a hilltop garden. I gave up growing vegetables long ago and plant only flowers and tend trees and cats.
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