spring fever

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

There’s nothing to explain why I’d make public this merry bit of drivel composed while drinking lapacho bark tea on the patio one morning, other than the kind of confused thinking brought about by elevated temperatures. Although, really, I’m fine, thank you.

But it’s spring and things can sometimes get silly.

So here’s my contribution…

I call it ‘Springing Forward and Back’, because, really, what else could it be called other than, perhaps, ‘Ode to Those [and you know who you are] Who are Each Year Surprised When Wildlife Returns to Their Prized Lawns and Gardens and Whose Noses Wrinkle at the Sight of Droppings Near the Hydrangeas as They Wonder Aloud Whatever to do About the Rabbits and Squirrels and Ducks Who Refuse to Stay Tucked Away in the Wilderness Where They Belong but Stubbornly Hang About Instead in Respectable Neighbourhoods That Were Fashionably Carved out of the Wilderness and are now NOT Wilderness and Who are Not Impressed with People Like Me Who Welcome Said Wildlife to our Un-Manicured and Un-Lawned Garden Because I Figure There is Enough at the Buffet for All of Us’.

But that seemed on the long side.

So, ‘Springing Forward and Back’ it is—

The garden has become a couples retreat
cardinals first, become regular guests
then the rabbit starts bring a date
(it looks serious)

now Ethel and Norman arrive
swim in the snow melt of tarp covered pool
(it looks serious)
preening wings, paddling feet

swim in the snow melt of tarp-covered pool
“over here!” rabbit calls to his date
preening wings, paddling feet
and the cardinals dine on black seed

“over here!” rabbit calls to his date
withered greens, water, feed, put to good purpose
and the cardinals dine on black seed
if not allowed to eat here they’d kill the prize orchids

withered greens, water, feed, put to good purpose
god forbid they bathe nude in the fountains!
if not allowed to eat here they’d kill the prize orchids
a retreat from the lawns, manicured, clipped

god forbid they bathe nude in the fountains!
yes, bring them, we say, your friends and your lovers
retreat from the lawns, manicured, clipped
spread your wings, fluff your fur and relax

The garden has become a couples retreat
cardinals first, become regular guests
then the rabbit starts bringing a date
(it looks serious)

the shape of our blue monkey thoughts

~ carin ~ Leave a comment

I was thinking why handwriting is read so differently than on-line type and have decided it has something to do with how in handwritten notes we not only share words but the shape of our thoughts. ‘Blue monkey’ typed, is a series of letters, identical no matter who types it. But write ‘blue monkey’ by hand and I have a better idea of what your particular blue monkey might look like.


I thought I’d invented the idea of ‘blue monkey’, but apparently not—
—thank you, google…

hypothetically speaking…

~ carin ~ 3 Comments

IF… and I’m not saying I have, I’m just saying if I had just finished reading a book that had been heralded as the next great literary thing, or words to that effect [the point being it was raved about excessively]… If such a book existed and I had just finished reading it and I found it, let’s say lacking to a great degree in literary greatness to the point where almost none was discernible [unless literary greatness translates into a few not entirely bad sentences and a few good ones]… if I’d just finished that book—in which the title character is essentially pointless, only occasionally and dismissively referred to, and who then dies and is referred to again down the road as a means of cueing the reader to recall the narrator’s bond with them and so trigger an emotional response [which doesn’t happen, BTW, because exactly zippity-do-dah in terms of a relationship has been developed between the two and frankly nobody cares that one of them is dead…]

…If I’d just read this book, in which, it should also be mentioned, that while written in first person, the narrator knows things inside people’s heads and other places she has not been—which annoys me more than this keyboard has letters to describe, given how hard I work and curse and revise to avoid just such sacrilege—and while we’re at it, the narrator’s dialogue is not consistent with her age, not to mention dull, not to mention one minute she’s an innocent and the next, though still the same age, she’s expounding on life in a way that suggests having spent the past century sitting cross-legged on a mountain-top in saffron robes…

…IF I had read such a book, a book that had been touted as a remarkable debut, in which not one shred of poetry exists, where even the imaginative is obvious [and just in case you still don’t get something, don’t worry, it’ll be spelled out in crayon somewhere down the road]; where countless unrelated events span decades haphazardly and pointlessly, leaving a nest of loose threads rather than any semblance of whole cloth; a book that reads like a bad movie in which darlings rule [we can only assume they amused the author too much to have them properly shot], where relationships are flat, and where—because apparently nobody stopped her—the author uses both ‘immediately’ and ‘suddenly’ in the same sentence…

…had I read such a book—I would have slammed it shut and asked that age-old question: wtf?

For the record… it’s not the author I blame. It’s a good draft. But where was the editor? And how does a reputable house publish this, in this… this very good draft condition?

But here’s the real sixty-four thousand dollar question: how in all that’s decent does it not only get good reviews, but buzz in high places…?

I mean, if there was such a book. And I had just read it.

advice i like

~ carin ~ 1 Comment

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

~ from The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje

—Scooped from this very delightful article on slow reading…

three girls

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

So I walked to the library.

And inside, the first thing I see, a girl, maybe five or six, in a red dress with big black polka dots, skip, skip, skipping, towards the kiddie book section—arms overhead and long blonde pony tails bouncing and swinging from side to side, unbridled as her joy.

On the way home, a girl, maybe fifteen, in cutoff shorts and tiny tee-shirt. Long brown hair, tied back, exposing round, freckled face and big smile. An apple-cheeked, wholesome Daisy Duke. She delivers newspapers in a wooden wagon and as I walk past she says Hello! in this way that feels like she’s actually happy to see me. Some people can do that. Some people can be fifteen and beautiful and not know it, and make being a paper girl who hauls around an old wagon seem like a very enviable thing.

Around the corner, an old girl. Maybe eighty. Maybe more. Grey hair, wavy, cut in a bob, shoulders hunched forward like a parenthesis, as if it’s been a long time since her back was straight. Comes out of one of the swanky houses that abutt the ravine. She’s in smart trousers and a light khaki jacket with a Burberry collar, black patent leather flats. She walks toward the dead-end of the street; I assume she’s off to visit a neighbour for tea or a few hands of bridge. But no. She walks to the end, then pauses, turns back and walks home. All in perfectly polished patent leather pumps.

venus and mars (the rocket science version)

~ carin ~ 4 Comments

“She was an attractive French Canadian in her forties named Julie Payette, who had flown one shuttle mission and would fly another in July 2009. She was dressed in blue NASA coveralls, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail. On the screens above us, in the briefing center, the space shuttle Discovery crouched, steaming, as the countdown progressed. Payette was too kind to laugh in my face when I asked her bout the silence of space, but she looked as if she wanted to.

“There is always noise in space,” she said. “When you don’t hear noise, it’s a problem, especially in a space suit. It means the interior ventilators are not working, not circulating air; the carbon dioxide [that humans breathe out] has a different density in zero gravity, it makes pockets around us.” She had intense brown eyes and a mouth that tried hard not to twist upward at my cluelessness. In order to sleep weightless, she continued, she had to find corners to wedge herself in, but “it’s hard to find comfortable places.” Her favorite nook was in the space-suit bay, jammed between two parked suits. “The helmets purr, ” she said, then repeated it happily, in French: “ils ronronnent.”

~from Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence, by George Michelsen Foy (Simon & Schuster, 2010)

~

Here’s the thing: were the author speaking with Neil Armstrong, would he have noted Armstrong’s hair colour and how he wore it; would the intensity of his eyes, or lack thereof have warranted even one line of ink? (Not to mention the shape and/or tendencies of Armstrong’s mouth to turn up at the corners.)

Granted, he may have asked about sleeping arrangements on the shuttle, but I’m not convinced he’d have asked Neil to repeat anything in French…

Furthermore, I wonder: if a woman had interviewed Payette [or Armsrong for that matter] would attractiveness, hair, mouth and eyes have figured in a story about the quality of sound and silence in space?