Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 132

mica

If I could live my life in mixed-up time order, I'd go back in time and get my kids when they were six months and five and seven and nine and bring them to the sandy parking lot of the playing field I ran to this morning. When the kids were those ages, we used to hunt mica in sand under swing sets at playgrounds, and there was lots of mica flashing in the sand of this parking lot, this morning. So I'd go back in time, and bring them here, and we'd go pick up pieces of mica, and I'd wrap them...

Zadie Smith and storytelling

Until recently I wouldn't have called myself a storyteller, out of respect for the term. I guess I thought a storyteller is someone with a generative, unlimited imagination, someone who makes worlds . . .
My own writing seemed more prosaic--often my subjects are the simplest things in the world . . . and when I sit down with these subjects, my aim is clarity . . . Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say, "That's just what I've always felt, but you said it clearly."

[When I had kids]...

title drop

In The Grapes of Wrath, we got to the title drop.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates--died of malnutrition--because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

T...

Wednesday--with dandelions

a path alongside dandelions



such dandelions!





Comments off because we've already been dandelion talking in the last entry; these are just for you to enjoy. Comments will be back next post.

Golden

Just imagine everything is golden-yellow. Birds everywhere are golden: yellow warblers with streaks of orange on their breasts, and goldfinches, and golden-orange orioles, and black-and-white bobolinks with golden heads. Even the red-winged blackbird, with his scarlet epaulets, has yellow gold on him: fringe for those epaulets. And all these birds are singing golden songs. The trees, meanwhile, are a hundred different hues of yellow and green, and in the tender new grass (which tastes like th...

A railway bridge, Google, coffee shop

I told sovay about this railway bridge--the tracks are gone now; it's a hiking trail--for the Delaware & Hudson line. There are dandelions and sumac growing on this bridge now.



I do love its flourishing style and debatable quotation marks . . .



Here, the restaurant instructs passersby to Google the chamber of commerce for menus (though I like reading this as "Google chamber"--do you dare to enter the Google chamber?)



But a church in the same town warns that you won't find all your answers throu...

"the stars are close and dear"

"No--the stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood of the worlds. And everything's holy--everything, even me."

--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 23.

Gonna fall apart from love.

transactions

The other day Wakanomori and I stepped out onto our porch in the late afternoon, and from up the street we could hear the sound of mad running--a whole gang of kids, let's say two boys and three girls. One of the girls, the tallest, was in a frilly skirt. Another child had very bright sneakers--neon green or day-glo orange; I forget which. (I love bright sneakers).

"Here's some people!" shouted the frontrunner, a boy. "Here's some people!"

"What can I do for you?" I asked, expecting them to be...

repealing laws...

Irom Sharmila wants India's Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) repealed. How, concretely, is that done? The question makes me wonder how we repeal federal laws in the United States. I know how we pass them . . . To repeal them, is it like passing another law? A bill comes up, and the bill says, "To repeal. . . "? I know that's how it worked with repealing Prohibition, but that was an amendment to the constitution.

. . . And however it's done in the United States, it's probably done diffe...

Two court dates for Irom Sharmila

It looks like Sharmila will have a hearing in her home state of Manipur, regarding the charge of attempted suicide (on account of the hunger strike), beginning May 13. Her fiancé found this news report, and while it's not in English, the description underneath the video is.

One thing I like about this brief report--less than a minute in length--is that Sharmila herself speaks, and vigorously, and forthrightly. I've seen videos of her speaking in English, a language she's not comfortable speaki...