Peg Duthie's Blog, page 63

"Just the parts where everyone gets eaten. Please?"

Today's subject line comes to you from a picture book, Ian Falconer's Olivia and the Fairy Princesses. During a recent Q&A in the NYT, Falconer advised other authors "not to underestimate your audience. Children will figure things out; it's what they do best -- sorting out the world."

The man means it. The dedication of the book reads, "With deepest apologies to Martha Graham," and there's a two-page spread in the middle of the book of Miss Olivia in eighteen poses à La Graham. I cannot even.

(And, later in the book, the phrase "corporate malfeasance" shows up. Talk about not talking down!)

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"waiting like a beautiful woman / no one at the party will talk to"

Today's subject line comes from Jennifer Grotz's poem "Boy Playing Violin," which depicts a duel between two buskers -- one, the boy of the title, and the other a puppeteer with, among other props, "a Tina Turner puppet / with little silver high heels and a bona fide snarl." Grotz describes their audience, which includes tourists and lovers and poetry, the last the beautiful woman of my subject line.

Grotz read the poem aloud Thursday night at Vanderbilt. It was a fun evening: I met up with Joanne for crispy tofu and eggplant beforehand, and it had been so long since we'd seen each other that we just kept talking and talking. In fact, we would have missed the start of the reading if my friend William hadn't called out to us from the bookstore table.



The corridor of Buttrick Hall just outside Room 101 is pretty cool -- it's decorated with prints of ferns from mid-20th-century engravings, as well as several stanzas from an Emily Dickinson poem in raised type.

Today I went to Cheekwood, where Save Our American Raptors was giving a presentation. The birds in the demonstrations included Tebow, a barred owl (not named after the QB); Theodore, a barn owl; Cody, a red-tailed hawk; Casey, a black vulture; and Alta (sp?), a bald eagle. The handlers described the vulture as "the most intelligent bird we work with -- it frequently outsmarts us." It was very funny watching it hop around the room (both it and Theodore displayed some independence from the script -- Theodore felt like flying where he wanted to, and Casey kept hopping off the handlers' arms and perches. I was sitting on the floor, and it was awfully, awfully cool hearing the whoosh of wings just a few inches from my head during the fly-bys.



(I was tempted to get in line to pet the owls afterward.)

(Note to Nashville folks: the program will be at Cheekwood again on Oct. 20. Be warned that parking on Saturdays can be a total zoo, so allow plenty of time for finding a space and walking from there to the auditorium.)

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two quotes about Molly Ivins

Like Mitt Romney, she was raised as a child of Republican privilege. Unlike MR, she derived different lessons from that world. Two quotes from the Minutaglio and Smith bio I've been reading:

[Sara] Speights says, "Molly was incredibly disciplined. I think she was dead determined not to act nouveau riche. She didn't want to be one of those people. She wanted to be a genuinely gracious Southern lady. She made a conscious decision on how she would treat people and she lived by it. People would always come up to us in airports and she was always nice to people." [emphasis mine]

-- Minutaglio, Bill; Smith, W. Michael (2009-10-15). Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life (Kindle Locations 4426-4428). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

As he watched his sister, Andy thought that her success and generosity were almost easy to understand. She had grown up disliking the pecuniary people who lorded over others, and she was determined to move in the opposite direction.

-- Minutaglio, Bill; Smith, W. Michael (2009-10-15). Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life (Kindle Locations 4458-4459). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

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RIP Louis Simpson

Quoted in the NYT obit by Mervyn Rothstein:

All you really know is given

at moments when you're seeing

and listening.

Being in love

is a great help.

Oh yes, but keep a dog.

- "A Farewell to His Muse"

And from Contemporary American Poetry (ed. Donald Hall, Penguin, 1962):

All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . .

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras,
The Bay mists clearing;
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.

- "Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain"

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l'shana tova (happy new year!)

[woman lighting candles - Israeli doll at the Doll & Miniature Museum of High Point]

Here is my bouquet, here is a sing
song of all the things you make
me think of, here is oblique
praise for the height and depth
of you and the width too.
Here is my box of new crayons at your feet.
- Marge Piercy, Colors Passing Through Us

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words for living well

Miniature needlepoint frame, in a bedroom scene at the Doll & Miniature Museum of High Point


live in the layers, not in the litter - Stanley Kunitz, quoted by the Velveteen Rabbi

I thought it might amuse her, and so I shared - Marissa Lingen

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Melissa Clark, on how her family tells stories

It's not that we ever change the plotline, exactly. It's just that the specifics are negotiable; we pick and choose (and, okay, sometimes make up) the details depending upon our moods, our audience, or how loud the person talking over us is. The one about the Passover when my sister and I spiked Elijah’s Manischewitz with hot sauce--just to see which adult played the prophet and gulped down the wine while we children answered the door--can be poignant, cynical, or hilarious depending on the telling. And the fact that my uncle Danny turned even redder in the face than usual and downed three glasses of water afterward answered the question.

- Clark, Melissa (2010-09-07). In the Kitchen with A Good Appetite: 150 Recipes and Stories About the Food You Love (Kindle Locations 5647-5652). Hyperion. Kindle Edition.

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And then I pulled out a goose!

During yesterday's shift at the hospital, I cleaned a pink Ford Mustang the size of my forearm. There were things rattling under the hood that didn't sound like they should be, so I fished around its innards for a while. Eventually, I pulled out two Lego pieces and a goose.

It's just fun to say, "And then I pulled out a goose!"



Cleaning seems to be the theme of the week so far. Miss Abby is actively molting (the wastebasket was empty this morning, but small mammals could comfortably nest in it now), I'm back to cooking (which means more dishwashing), and several projects are in the thick of the neaten-things-up phase.



Word to Nashville folks: Midtown Cafe's running a $12.12 two-course lunch special this week.



Speaking of fun phrases, the recent interview of Ian Falconer in the NYT Book Review delighted me. I especially liked this bit:

Interviewer: If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?

Falconer: An answer to that could be its own book. Socrates, I'm sure, could really hold a dinner table. I'll bet Suetonius could keep your attention too. (“Oh my dear! Next to Galba, Caligula was an absolute nun!”)

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schooling

Mary McLeod Bethune doll, at the Doll & Miniature Museum of High Point, NC

Writing news: 7x20 recently published "Gray Areas".

Weekend reading: an interview of Bel Kaufman (author of Up the Down Staircase) by Robert Sullivan, and parts of Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life. Among other things, I hadn't known she was such a Francophile. And I loved this glimpse of her Columbia j-school training:

[John] Hohenberg would run students through harrowing "speed drills"--demanding that they crank out stories in just a few minutes. And he urged everyone to keep $100 set aside. It was basically a Fuck You account--so that if an editor ever demanded that you do a story you hated, you would have at least $100 to help you walk away from the job.

[Minutaglio, Bill; Smith, W. Michael (2009-10-15). Molly Ivins: A Rebel Life (Kindle Locations 1611-1614). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.]

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we hope, more than anything, for more

We throw our parties ... we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep -- it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there where our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

- Michael Cunningham, The Hours

[The photo is of one of the windows in my kitchen -- the two whisky glasses contain Christmas cactus cuttings. I listened to Cunningham's recording of The Hours as I drove east, and it was perfect for my mood -- he's excellent both as a writer and reader, and his characters' preoccupations in sync with both the me that brought along a raft of work and the me exulting in getting away from keyboard and easel on a gloriously bright summer afternoon.]

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