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.

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..

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!

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.

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.

Margotlog: Super-Beetle at Twenty Below

Margotlog: Super Beetle at Twenty Below

Supposed to be the worst winter here in flyover land since 1982-3. And what do I immediately recall from thirty years ago? Not where I lived, nor who I lived with, but the car. It was a VW Super Beetle, meaning it had heat. Now I'm laughing because there'd been an earlier Beetle in my life without heat. It drove my first hubbie and me from New York, via Atlanta, then Alabama, etc until we turned north. At one spot in rural Mississippi, we forded a stream. I kid you not, the road did not have a bridge. We drove through the stream. Cows and some people lifted their heads to watch. Should we wave and call "Hi"? Nope. Too dangerous with our New York license plates. This was the deep south in the late 1960s. (Yes, Emily, that is before you were born! and civil rights did not mean civility.)

By 1982, I'd left the first husband behind, yet hadn't found the second. I was in "living-with-limbo." Now I remember him, another poet-type like myself, but he imbibed more. I tried to keep up, but simply got sick or fell asleep. It was not a match made in heaven. Nor was the weather, that first year we shacked up together. The Super Beetle had heat which was a good thing since I was driving to outstate schools, maybe as far as Moorhead--next to Fargo, for those who only saw the movie.   

The cold was intense, the snow depth gigantic, but the little Super Beetle chugged along. Which is not what I could say about myself. That was the period when I learnedly exquisitely about frostbite. I'd stagger in and sit on the radiator by the inside front door. (Yes, Emily, there were two front doors separated by a small anteroom to keep out the riffraff.)

My hands were so cold I could not feel the doorknob to turn it. Once inside and warming my hands on the radiator, they began to tingle, then throb, and finally to ache. It took me several decades before I learned two crucial things: to buy men's padded gloves and to wear under them thin plastic or rubber gloves. Men's gloves have strong thick padding which helps deter the cold, as does the looser fit. Women's winter gloves are worthless. Ditto women's winter boots. For years my toes also got frostbitten because even so-called "padded" women's boots had are lined with only a namby-pamby stretch of thin felt or foam. Men's boots are far thicker and sturdier, and they give me enough leeway to wear double pairs of socks. Now those socks are wool. But for the hands the extra layer of plastic or rubber allows for finer touch without nude fingers getting frozen to freezing metal.

Last weekend at the St. Paul Chamber Concert, a nicely dressed woman slid into her seat on the other side of us. Looking down at my men's boots with their hooks and eyes, their stiff rounded toes, and waffle-stomper treads, she said, "That's what I'm buying next time." I felt moderately vindicated. It's taken me decades, but I finally know how to dress for twenty below. The Super Beetle has gone the way of most flesh. It had heat, but its defroster was abysmal. My Prius does much better with defroster and heat, but there's no car on earth that can make the first twenty minutes of driving at twenty below a thing of beauty and joy forever. We're just luck if they start.

Margotlog: Jim Harrison's "English Major"

Margotlog: Jim Harrison's "English Major"

Too many years ago to count, I won the Loft's Mentor Series as a poet. Over the course of nine months, we were guided by perhaps six mentors, among them the poet and novelist Jim Harrison. I was recently divorced and gun-shy of men with aplomb and swagger. Not that Harrison was intimidating--far from it. He was friendly, with a gruff, pleasant voice, and seemed to enjoy our company. I remember walking down the street beside him, very aware of his physical presence. That was as close as we came. His subject matter--lakes and streams, critters, American men out of doors--was almost completely different than my focus on the visual arts and motherhood. He had nothing to teach me. Or so I thought.

One of our Christmas cards this year came from a fan of Harrison's, a fiction-writing poet like Harrison. Her card was a reproduction of a Harrison poem about a bear. Glued beside it appeared to be a bit of bear skin, with the fur/hair attached. Then, folded around the card was a letter explaining how she'd looked for bear, found an aged skin which fell apart when she tried to cut into it, and eventually settled for buffalo. Her appreciation for Harrison was palpable, and her story of settling for the critter she could make work, amused me so much that I called to tell her how one of our cats had appropriated the card and was batting it around the downstairs. We had a good chuckle.

This was the open door I evidently needed because the next group of audio books I borrowed from the library included Harrison's "The English Major." The reader had a gravelly male voice with a Western twang. It was the voice of the main character, Cliff, who had just been divorced by his Coke-swilling and powdered-donut eating wife, had his farm sold out from under him and lost his beloved dog. So untethered was he, that he set out on a quest to visit each of the contiguous U.S. states, with a jigsaw puzzle of the states to keep him company.

He took to the road in Michigan, crossed Wisconsin (rather familiar territory), then took a serious emotional detour in Minnesota when he hooked up with a former student who'd written him over the years as "my best instructor ever." Marybel was Lolita untethered. And Cliff? I had a lot to learn about how a bruised male ego digs in as if there is no tomorrow. I was, to put it mildly, out of my depth. Did male writers really indulge in such raunchy sex talk? How much of the story was going to go on like this?

Turns out there was a lot more to Cliff than a starving appetite. He was a bird watcher and fly fisherman and especially in Montana, his fly fishing attained the grace of a bull fight. Rocky and watery, enigmatic and satisfying, and the telling outperformed sex with Marybel by megawatts.  By this time, I began to get a whiff of what my friend found to admire in Jim Harrison's fiction.

It's entertaining, I discovered, to view American women my age through the eyes of a sensitive but macho American guy. It was curious to hear him decide to rename the states from their early Native American inhabitants. It was a relief to find him eventually returned to a kind of farm, a sort of dog, , and a wife who didn't wound his psyche with every word. The story has a sort of happy ending. It also accumulates power and interest as it goes, which is almost all we writers can hope for--keeping them reading all the way to the end.