Winter Lemon

Here is a new painting by one of my favorite painters, Jonathan Koch: Winter Lemon.

Background music: "Birthday" by The Beatles.

You say it's your birthday.
It's my birthday, too, yeah.

It is my birthday, and I am glad to have been born. The ice is melting into winter lemonade all around me. I hear the polar vortex is returning, but it don't worry me, it don't worry me...(another song, from Nashville, sung by Barbara Harris.) You may say that I ain't free, but I would guess that I probably am, in some deep, important ways.

I've been pondering some deep, important things while 1) re-reading short stories by Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore (wise, compassionate, hilarious, sad) and 2) continuing to read Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Goodwin tells us that Lincoln went to the theatre a lot, finding it a marvelous stress release during the Civil War. Of course, that last visit to the theatre was fatal, but in the meantime he found joy! This makes me feel OK about my love of movies!

And in the amazing story "Free Radicals," by Alice Munro, she gives us a character who loves to read and to re-read, especially the classics. (I re-read, too, and re-watch movies, to see what I learn this time around. The Bruce Willis character utters something about re-interpretation of movies in Twelve Monkeys, I might add, having just re-watched and re-interpreted that. I have a happier take on the ending now.)  Back to Munro:

She would pick one up [a classic], thinking that she would just read that special bit--and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

I understand this and connect to it. In "real life," so many people wear masks and costumes, don't they? They imitate conventions, they celebrate "re-inventing yourself," etc. In fiction, people are what they are and quietly or dramatically deal with their problems, and authors create a context in which we learn more about the "why" and the "how" of their lives and struggles. Fiction broadens and deepens my compassion for the people around me in real life, while the behaviors of people in real life don't reveal much of their real life to me. A paradox. An irony.

I was recently reminded that Elbert Hubbard was the one who said the lemon/lemonade thing, in an obituary for an actor. Others used and varied it afterward. Hubbard was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and raised in Hudson, up the road, the town of my rural address growing up. One of my college professors descended from Hubbard, and I handled some of his Roycroft books during my stint in a used book store. I do love the random...and connecting the random dots into a constellation. Maybe I'll call it Lemon Tree.

New background music: "Lemon Tree" by Peter, Paul, and Mary

Still Happy

On Blue Monday in the blog, I needed to get happy, and, thanks to some sunshine and Pink Martini, I am still happy. Also, Pink Martini notwithstanding, yesterday was National Drink Wine Day, so I did not have a pink martini, nor any other kind of martini. (But Diane Keaton did, with French music in the background, in Something's Got to Give, which I watched again in order to stay happy. Once again, I adored the crying-laughing-writing montage in that fun movie.)

Anyhoo, what I meant to say was 1) you can make your own collage at the Pink Martini website and 2) I love the song "Je ne t'aime plus (I don't love you anymore)," sung by China Forbes and Philippe Katerine and written by them over several years--1997-2013. They sing in French, but the translated lyrics include such romantic lines as "And I think that you are fat / And I know that you are bald / And I think that I don't love you anymore." Don't worry, as 1) there's a context: "I am angry with you tonight / Because you told me that I belong to you" and 2) like Something's Got to Give, it's got a happy ending.

But, speaking of hair, please go read "Girls with Moustaches" and "'I Wish My Dad Had Hair'" and other poems by Yvonne Zipter, up today at Escape Into Life, with fabulous art, some of which you also see here, by Sean Mahan. Zipter's poems are sweet and funny but also elegiac, and today calls for an elegy. Our community has lost another theatre person, and a masterful singer, Phil Shaw. There is sadness in town today, and fond memories. And fading sunshine.

Here's an Origami Girl.

Now go make your own collage.

And/or arrange buttons into a beautiful flower.

And stay happy.

Get Happy

This is Phyllis Diller! Isn't she beautiful? I was listening to the Pink Martini album, Get Happy, and the last song came on: "Smile" by Charlie Chaplin. (Yes, Charlie Chaplin! From Modern Times!) Anyhoo, I thought, "I know that voice!"

Sure enough, it was her.

It is her smile, isn't it, that makes her so beautiful. The light coming from her, an openness.

Phyllis Diller was on my mind, since I recently read We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy, by Yael Kohen, which reminded me that many funny women also sang. Wikipedia told me about Diller's actual background in piano. And the Pink Martini notes (on the back of Polaroids) told me "Smile" was her last recording. Oh, thank you, Pink Martini, and thank you, too, for the song "Get Happy," done in Judy Garland & Barbra Streisand style, that is, together with "Happy Days are Here Again," but here it's China Forbes and Rufus Wainwright. (I do like him, even though he whines.) Thank you because I needed to get happy (hunks of snow still and again falling, together with ice pellets, another duet) and the song was over the top and I burst into tears! But I got happy. On a Blue Monday. That's gray.

Escape Into Love

Yesterday..., I did not eat this beautiful thing. But I would have: 1) If it were in my house or 2) If I could have driven to the patisserie, Eclair de Lune, which really exists! But 1) I got dumped on 2) By snow and 3) that patisserie is in Canada.*

I wasn't driving to Canada yesterday.

I wasn't even driving down Veterans Parkway to go to the 7th grade intercity volleyball tournament, which was the romantic Valentine's Day plan! I wasn't even driving out of my unplowed neighborhood. (Plowed now! Thank you, Town of Normal!)

Instead, I posted Escape Into Love, a set of 4 love poems, at Escape Into Life. And watched Downton Abbey on video. (According to the online quiz, I am Lady Mary.) I'm in Season 3. And can actually watch Season 4 if the snow keeps up, because my parents have the whole set, thanks to donating to their local PBS station! And I posted, here in the blog, a recommended list of 14 books by women you might want to read in 2014!

Speaking of pastries, my Eclair de Lune post gets lots of hits, thanks to the patisserie, I'm sure. Or the movie Moonstruck, as Eclair de Lune is French for that. It's always fun (and a little depressing) to figure out what people are really looking for when they click on my blog. Thank you, loyal readers. I will post pictures of pastries whenever I can.

*and on Facebook, where you can "Like" it, even if you can't drive there. In the snow.

14 in ’14 on the 14th

Happy Valentine's Day!

In 2014, many readers are focusing on reading women writers, to help morally and practically support women in literature. 

Here’s a great list in the#readwomen2014 movement, by Sarah J. Sloat at her blog, the rain in my purse.

And here’s a list of 14 books (fiction and non-fiction) I recommend:

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell*

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Home by Marilynne Robinson
Bossypants by Tina Fey (laugh out loud funny and very wise)

Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber (science writing)

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought by Marilynne Robinson

My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki

The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro**

The People stories by Zenna Henderson (in whatever gathering you can find)***

*If you read The Sparrow, you’ll probably also want to read Children of God, the sequel. The Sparrow stands alone, but readers asked her to keep going.

**Despite its awkward title, this is one of my faves by Munro. (I recommend any book of her short stories; I haven’t read her two most recent books yet, so I should read those in 2014!)

***I discovered Zenna Henderson in 1972 when I was living in London, though she was from Tucson, Arizona. I was in my science fiction phase of adolescence and missing the USA. While I usually read “literary” fiction or mainstream fiction, I love that I have science fiction at the top and the bottom of my list, which came out in no particular order! Just favorites over time.

I love short stories, so I also recommend Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Edith Wharton, but above I was going for mostly contemporary writers. In the list above, the books by Strout, Munro, Henderson, and Lahiri are short stories (linked stories in Olive Kitteridge and in The People series, separate volumes or collected). I’ve read a jillion novels by Anne Tyler. I love her for her compassion and natural storytelling. Try Breathing Lessons, too. The Accidental Tourist.

Maybe I’ll do a separate list of books of poetry by women, or two lists—recommended and on a personal “to read” list. Likewise, I should do a “to read” list connected to 1) book group and/or 2) ambitious reading plans for 2014. One of my ambitions is to finish Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I love it, it’s just long!

I do recommend other books by these authors, and perhaps I shouldn’t have put Marilynne Robinson in there three times, but her works really stick with me. Gilead and Home are novels that look at the same community and characters from different perspectives, at a quiet, steady pace in a rich and thoughtful prose style. The Death of Adam shows Robinson’s profundity as a thinker and her scholarship. She is a great writer of our time.