Got my contributor’s copy of Lilies and Cannonballs Review the other day and, after reading it, I’m even more excited about my inclusion in it (and I didn’t think that would be possible). It’s beautiful and the writers and artists found within, left me moved and inspired (and feeling unworthy of sharing space with them). It’s a wonderfully eclectic journal.
100 things we didn’t know this time last year .
My favorite:
97. Matt Groening’s father – the inspiration for Homer Simpson – has only complained once about his alter-ego’s actions. It was an episode in which Homer badgered Marge into walking some considerable distance on a hot day to fetch him something.
and my least favorite(s):
13. Smoking killed nearly one million people worldwide in 2000, according to the World Health Organisation.
94. A cruise ship can put more than 130,000 litres of sewage into the sea each day.
I was bored and surfing last night and I came up on this show Wickedly Perfect. It was absolutely ridiculous and the antithesis of anything that I am interested in (one need only see the derth of decorations and the multitude of dust in my home to realize that I am not interested in being like the people in this show) and yet I was riveted. What is wrong with me?
Okay, I only remember part of this dream from last night–it involves a couple I know (I can’t remember whether there children were there or not), me, and my husband. The couple were living in a house just off the road on a side of a mountain. The lot was wooded but it got some sunlight (even though the tone of this dream was not sunny or color–it was sort of sepia). I pulled into their driveway which was dirt and then suddenly I hadn’t driven there, I had walked there (this mountain is a recurring mountain in my dreams) and Allen was with me. First there was no snow on the ground and then there was snow, melting. In the middle of their drive there was a patch of sunflowers, about 5 feet tall. They had small faces and there was snow all around their roots. The couple came out of the house and I asked them about the sunflowers. The woman told me that her husband had planted them–just scattered the seeds the year before from the last year’s crop and they grew right there. The man got pissed off and whacked a head of a sunflower. Then I think their son was in the background but he ran away behind the house.
Okay, that’s all I remember. WTF?
Okay, so this is definitely not for everyone but I read about Kamana in my new tracking book and I’m thinking it is something I might look into. Here’s a brief description:
The Kamana Naturalist Training Program is a four level independent study program that covers the naturalist background needed to engage in the wilderness arts, including tracking, bird language, survival and native living skills, traditional herbalism, and naturalist mentoring. It is the ultimate blueprint for a students’ time spent in the field and in conducting nature-related research. Students become confident naturalists, melding modern field ecology with the skills of a native scout.
We did the dishes rarely—once or twice a week. Mostly they were red tinged wineglasses or heavy blue glasses with crusty milk rims piled up easily and out of sight in the deep soapstone sink. I would lift them one by one and place them on the wooden countertop. Sometimes there would be mold and sometimes not. It depended on how long they’d been there, how hot it was outside. It depended on the closeness and direction of the sun. It was cosmic.
The apartment was the middle floor of a Victorian. Ours had been partly the original maid’s quarters. Our kitchen was a sink and a pantry.
Our bathroom had small blue tiles on the floor. Once a dead mouse rotted underneath the claw foot tub.
The moldings, the built-ins, the place had it all. It even had two bedrooms but we used the second one as a den. Until he moved out and then it became my bedroom and the one we had shared became the bedroom of someone else. An other’s room.
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We could fit two low chairs and a small hibachi on the deck. To call it a deck is a stretch. It was more like a precarious overhang with railings.
I would sit out there and smoke, using the hibachi as an ashtray. The couple next door waved to me once. Pleased and envisioning my entrée into their clever, perfectly ordered lives, I smiled, waved. “Hey,” he said, “Hey, so do you mind taking in that blanket you have hanging there? It’s an eyesore.”
Eyesore this, motherfucker.
To call all Senators toll free:
Ellen Meister‘s debut novel, GEORGE CLOONEY AND OTHER SECRET LONGINGS OF THE APPLEWOOD PTA, a frank suburban comedy about three PTA women who are transformed when Hollywood announces plans to shoot a movie in their town, to Carrie Feron at Morrow/Avon, for publication in early 2006, by Andrea Cirillo and Annelise Robey at the Jane Rotrosen Agency.
Read more about the fabulous Ellen Meister in this recent interview
Way to go, Ellen!!!
Alice Munro’s Runaway is a rich and compelling collection. It took me longer to finish this book than I thought it would but I felt I had to stop after each story, absorb it, let it live within me for a few hours before I could go on to the next. It is a remarkable book.
Three of the stories (three interconnected stories–“Chance”, “Soon” & “Silence”) I read previously in The New Yorker and thought them wonderful but they are not my favorites of this collection. My favorites are “Runaway”, “Passion” and “Trespasses”, which I loved the most.
“Trespasses” moved me not only because the situation was odd and sad (a young girl finds out secrets about her parents—that there had been another baby who had died, that she might be adopted) but because that moment of chilhood slipping away and people, who were once trusted and believed unerring, are revealed as fallible, is so familiar to the human existence and yet Munro brings it to us in a new way. And this, at least in my mind, is what Munro does best—shines the light back on the reader. Tells us our own story but in another’s words.
All of these stories have something that makes them special (although, I wouldn’t say that they are all perfect stories–take the final story “Powers”, for example–even though I appreciated all of the risks Munro took with it, it read to me more like an outline for a novel, than a story–although I did love the moment when Nancy finally sees Ollie for who is he) and they all carry the common thread of what it means to be a woman/girl/human being—sometimes knowing, often scared, ultimately alone. The beautiful moments within each of the stories are those moments when Munro illuminates the thoughts of her characters and reveals what it is that makes them each unique, each sublime, such as this moment from “Trespasses”:
Lauren had a particular feeling of disgust about feet in nylon stockings. Not about bare feet, or feet in socks, or feet in shoes, or feet in nylons covered up in shoes, just about feet in nylons out in the open, particularly touching any other cloth. This was just a private queer feeling—like the feeling she had about mushrooms, or cereal slopping around in milk.
Essentially, Munro tells us the secrets of her characters and in doing so she reveals to us our own hidden wants, fears, disgusts and loves.
the raw story is reporting what the Ohio Secretary of State (a Republican), “in apparent disregard for his non-partisan role as Ohio’s chief election official” said, in his own fundraising letter, in regards to the election. Read all about it.
myfanwy collins 