Meg Sefton's Blog, page 27

lil’ ole me

How are you this Friday night? I keep hearing this song. I heard Peggy Lee’s cover in the soundtrack for the movie The Savages with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney. Peggy Lee’s cover is beautiful, heartfelt, and pristine. And The Savages is a great movie. I’m in the middle of Reds (all three hours of it) starring Diane Keaton, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and other stars. Keaton sings this beautifully.

But I like this homespun cover. I’ve always thought it would be great to learn the ukulele. I looked at them when I was last in a guitar shop, which was ages ago, certainly pre-pandemic. I have long since neglected my guitar, so why not take up with another instrument. This is just the kind of song I would like to learn.

This singer gives it lots of heart and character. It seems just the right style for the lyrics. The sheet music was published in 1894. The composer was W.H. Petri and the lyricist was Philip Wingate. A cursory search on Google reveals that this was commonly sung by grandmothers in the early 1900s.

Blessings and Peace —Margaret

Inktober: Breakable

matthias lueger, flickr

There was a sadness in Aunt Mary after they gave her the medications. Last fall, I had never seen her happier. She was to fly to Jamaica to marry her fiancé. Turns out, that was all a delusion.

“Why did they do that?” I asked Mama.

“I don’t know, baby.”

Conrad Aiken’s “House of Dust,” part V

Winter is hear by Morten Siebuhr, flickr

The House of Dust: A symphony by Conrad AikenV.The snow floats down upon us, mingled with rain . . . It eddies around pale lilac lamps, and falls Down golden-windowed walls. We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain, We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while We shall lie down again. The snow floats down upon us, we turn, we turn, Through gorges filled with light we sound and flow . . . One is struck down and hurt, we crowd about him, We bear him away, gaze after his listless body; But whether he lives or dies we do not know. One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him; The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow. He sings of a house he lived in long ago. It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in; The house you lived in, the house that all of us know. And coiling slowly about him, and laughing at him, And throwing him pennies, we bear away A mournful echo of other times and places, And follow a dream . . . a dream that will not stay. Down long broad flights of lamplit stairs we flow; Noisy, in scattered waves, crowding and shouting; In broken slow cascades. The gardens extend before us . . . We spread out swiftly; Trees are above us, and darkness. The canyon fades . . . And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness, Vaguely and incoherently, some dream Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . . A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam; Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills. We flow to the east, to the white-lined shivering sea; We reach to the west, where the whirling sun went down; We close our eyes to music in bright cafes. We diverge from clamorous streets to streets that are silent. We loaf where the wind-spilled fountain plays. And, growing tired, we turn aside at last, Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers, Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb; Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime.

Inktober: Exhausted

Florida Fall Colors by Florida Fish and Wildlife, flickr

Down the center of the peninsular state, the tropical climate briefly withholds its sauna so a few exhausted leaves of august trees may die in their golden glory. Yet the fanfare is ignored amid the ravenous, eternal green, impatient heat, marauding winds—the energy of youth and growth and destruction.

Half beast

Buck by Thomas Hawk, flickr

They had arranged to meet at the kitschy sandwich shop next to the used vinyl records store. He thought it might appeal to her what with its eclectic confusion of chandeliers and stained glass panels suspended from the ceiling. He preferred simple and clean spaces with vaulted ceilings, no ornamentation. But for sure, she would like it. They would both wear masks, as agreed, what with the pandemic. They were new to each other though they had chatted on Zoom for months.

He waited for her in a church pew, another affectation of the place. For the first time, he worried about whether his antlers would become entangled with low hanging crystals, whether they would smash into a stained glass window and bring it crashing to the floor. People were generally accepting of him, of his difference, but he found it inconvenient nonetheless to carry this weight around on his head, though of course, his rack gained him respect. Who could argue with a 15-point man-buck? She knew about him though he didn’t have the space in his apartment to get the full screen picture of his singular crown. He didn’t care anymore, didn’t have the luxury of self-consciousness. Now, the second year into the pandemic, loneliness was beginning to gnaw away at him. She had said she felt the same way.

She was all freshness and sweetness and light, just as he had expected from their screen-time, and she laughed at the marvel of his Royal set of points. She gave him a hug and said how much she loved it. The first bit of trouble was, as he had anticipated, with a chandelier, though their waiter seated them in the most accommodating location. The height of his body had added to the difficulty so that he had inadvertently unhooked a chandelier with a point, but he shrugged and wore it while they drank their wine. This tickled her. The staff scurried around them for the tall ladder while they ordered. The bigger trouble came with the meal. She had made him so comfortable that he forgot himself when he ate his salad. He had long practiced eating in the way civilized people ate but with the pandemic and the social isolation, he had apparently slipped back into some old habits and chewed with his elongated face in an exaggerated circular motion, much in the fashion of beloved deer.

He saw her staring at him, watching his mouth. She was no longer laughing and delighted. She had nothing to say to him to help him save face. She made an excuse to make a phone call outside and she didn’t return.

Out by the railroad tracks which led to the woods where his brother had died, where his mother had given birth to him, and his father had taught him to forage and fight, he wondered if it had been an overreach for him to be in this other world. He gave into this likelihood and let his hands become hooves. He bolted through the empty city and out through pastures and orange groves, and up into lands father north, familiar breezes, forests of berries and trees and acorns.

Surreal Friends

Leonora Carrington & Leonor Fini, bswise, flickr

I am visiting once more Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, a novel narrated by the fictional 92-year-old Marian Leatherby who, early in the novel oft quotes her friend Carmella: “One can never trust people under seventy and over seventy.” There are early opinions of antimacassars, a description of collecting and spinning cat hair for a sweater, and an expression of love for her crone beard which she finds rather “gallant” though she notes the “more conventional” would find it “repulsive.” And of course, there is the the hearing trumpet, a gift from her friend Carmella. It is encrusted with silver and mother-of-pearl and shaped like a buffalo’s horn. The instrument will empower her hearing to bionic proportions, apparently.

Find me a narrative or a comedian that will make me laugh, even in tough times, and I will be forever hooked. Leonora Carrington was a British-born surrealist artist and writer who lived in Mexico City most of her adult life, beginning in the 1940s. I used to have an art book (Surreal Friends) with her work included, along with two other surrealist artists in exile in Mexico in the 40s—Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. I was needing cash and had to sell a couple of art books, and alas, this tome was able to fetch me more than any other. But it was a beautiful book.

Even more precious to me is Carrington’s beloved novel from the publisher Exact Change The Hearing Trumpet which, if memory serves, was recommended me by my first writing teacher and friend over twenty years ago. The narrator turns the world upside down, shakes down its pockets, and admires the paper clip and the dime and the bunched up lint that falls out. It is subversive in that it refuses standard issue readerly expectations and novelistic conventions; it subverts capitalistic, materialistic values; it questions normative views so often adopted even in art and literature, but especially in a consumer society.

It delights: You think you know what this character is about and then, in the next sentence, you have no idea. She defies your expectation, and in fact, any preconceived expectation at all. Despite what judgements our world and our literature would commonly impose on such “characters,” Carrington constantly offers up a world that is more exciting, more imaginative, more full of possibility and less limited, less limiting.

I hope to successfully revise and find a home for a story of a woman who has a rich inner life as well as an active and rich imaginative life though she is trapped by the ravages of age. She can’t even speak, but she travels in memory, interacts with a ghost friend, imaginatively reinterprets a relative as a fairy tale character. I was perhaps remembering some of Carrington when I wrote the story, though I was also remembering a story by Lars Gustafson, and likely stories by my first writing teacher as well as writers such as Janet Frame.

No matter what is happening in real time, we can live and create in an alternate reality, perhaps one that causes us to examine ourselves, what we value, who we value. A subversive vision can be mild and couched in humor but it upends the world.

Netflix’s “Midnight Mass”

Let my Prayer Rise like Incense by Father Lew, O.P., flickr

Though the Netflix horror series Midnight Mass is hardly a Christian apologetic, it offers a masterful presentation of issues in fervent religious communities, particularly in the Christian community. Other religious and nonreligious beliefs are explored as well, including cultic offshoots of mainstream faiths.

I grew up Presbyterian and later in life was confirmed in the Episcopal church. I have had some education in Catholicism as part of my coursework in seminary and my fine arts degree, but I am not as intimately familiar with this faith, which serves as the subcultural setting for the series. However, the Christian faith portrayed in the series could have easily been Episcopalian—except for confession. And the hymns scattered generously and beautifully throughout the film were very much a part of my protestant upbringing. Watching this cultural layer through this particular iteration was interesting.

What impresses me most about the series are the truly deep discussions characters have with one another. This strikes me as a time truly pre-pandemic/Zoom call. And I kept thinking: I wouldn’t mind living in a little town with no roads where everyone walked everywhere and where people made their living from the ocean.

I didn’t think horror could be beautiful and I truly hate the glorification of violence, but there is something beautiful here. Still, it is not for the sensitive nor is it for children.

Yours —-Margaret

Inktober: Tithe

Nave of Church by Dennis Jarvis, flickr

A cancer patient’s family moves away while he’s in treatment. Afraid and lonely, he realizes he may need a church who will burry him. After joining a church, he learns his way into a plot is to tithe but all disposable income is owed the hospital.

Inktober: Frog

Chocolate Frog by Jehane, flickr

Terramae makes peanut butter chocolate frogs for trick or treaters, but her boyfriend, a chef, uses them for a mole. She yells at him and he says “I wish you would just smoke one big doobie.” She makes a huge batch of frog edibles for his staff. Everyone gets fired.

“Long Black Veil” Jerry Garcia