Magnolia Studies

Lovely weekend, with a full honey moon. Walked many miles in beautiful, breezy weather. Listened to live music, talked with sweet people, visited old homes (restored and/or renovated). I've read a book and pondered various things.

There was silence, too.

I offer this evening two Magnolia Studies by Jonathan Koch. And two poems, in the current issue of Poetry Porch: "Wild Columbine" and "Transported." This is a fascinating issue, and I'm tickled to be in it with Frederick Turner, one of my professors at Kenyon College, who helped revive the Kenyon Review.

I suppose that makes it a Random Coinciday as well as a Poetry Someday in the blog.

In a Fog

Dense fog this morning, and then I was swimming in it. Lap swimming. Driving in fog is mysterious and weird, delightful and scary. Swimming in it is just like swimming without fog, since it's close up and just like the mist on other mornings when the water is warmer than the air.

I feel in a sad fog lately about the recent shootings. We know better than to keep on keeping on without enough gun control. Poor Emilio, in the wrong place at the wrong time. He loved soccer, his mother said, and now he'll miss the World Cup. A small, ironic shame inside a huge, horrific one. Shame on us.

How will we fix it?*

*Brazil.

My computer is in a fog, too, aka slow motion. I feared acquiring a virus from someone I communicated with recently in a professional capacity, so I cleaned everything, and the slo mo may just be the computer reacquiring all its cookies.

Or it might be fumes. Remember how my husband paints, lately, with paint thinner? Imagine my dismay, and the hilarity, of finding toxic fumes in Bark, by Lorrie Moore, the story called "Paper Losses." In this story, a woman's husband (shortly before a divorce) is building model rockets in the basement. She's talking to a supportive friend about her unsupportable life and the general lack of marital communication:

"I ask, 'What the hell are you doing?' I ask, 'Are you trying to asphyxiate your entire family?' I ask, 'Did you hear me?' Then I ask, 'Are you deaf?' I also ask, 'What do you think a marriage is? I'm really curious to know,' and also, 'Is this your idea of a well-ventilated place?' A simple interview, really."

I love Lorrie Moore. It's scary, as I said before, how much I identify with her characters and situations, wishing I could be half as funny, but I'm happy to report that I simply ask my husband to wear an appropriate mask while painting with paint thinner. I'm pretty sure he's not trying to kill us. Or himself. Summer is good. We can open the windows.

Yes, I got to the library, and they had Bark, and I answered most of my own questions. Yes, dogs. Yes, trees. Plus people barking at one another instead of communicating more gently and in human language. I'd have figured out the tree part if I'd looked closely enough at the cover image, but I was focusing on the words, fog colored.

Birds of America

I'm re-reading Birds of America, a book of short stories by Lorrie Moore, for book group, which meets later in June. It came out in 1998, and I guess I didn't read it then, but I'd read several of the stories when they first came out in magazines. I read the collection in May. And now I am reading it in June, following the Great Books shared inquiry discussion method advice of reading it twice before talking about it.

Each of these stories has a bird in it, or a reference to birds, or a bird image, or bird poop (as on the Blarney Stone in Ireland...which my parents visited; I will have to ask them about the angle of kissing, the lipstick marks, the bird poop). The bird might turn out to be a bat. Moore's current book is called Bark. Will there be dogs? Trees? Dogs peeing on trees? Must find out. At the library!*

I love Lorrie Moore's stories. I get her humor, her references. We know the same show tunes. She's hilarious and melancholy. I sympathize with her flawed, suffering, funny, smart, pathetic characters, and sometimes rather too closely identify with them. For example, Olena, a librarian of Transylvanian heritage, her name an anagram for "alone," in the story "Community Life."

*"When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries--a fibbing fruit, a story store--and now she had a job in one. She had originally wanted to teach English literature, but when she failed to warm to the graduate study of it, its french-fried theories--a vocabulary of arson!--she'd transferred to library school, where everyone was taught to take care of books, tenderly, as if they were dishes or dolls."

There's a vampire thing going on in the background of "Community Life," and this is subtly countered in the story that comes next, "Agnes of Iowa," in which a writing teacher advises a student to avoid the trendy vampire genre in her own creative writing. Olena in "Community Life" is pale and withdrawn and grows reclusive; her boyfriend, rationalizing his own bad behavior, accuses her of "sucking the blood of [the community]" instead of contributing to it. But she can see the falseness in people's cheerfulness and politics. Of course, any time she does try to be "normal" or human, or to contribute to the community, it is always devastating. You can see why she retreats.

The stories in Birds of America are all realistic. I read that Bark contains a ghost story. I guess Lorrie Moore is trying genre writing now. Edith Wharton did ghost stories. I like a good ghost story. A character named Mack, in Moore's story "What You Want To Do Fine," is horrified, as was I, to learn that John James Audubon shot the birds he painted. But I learned this from a Eudora Welty story. Geez, I learn a lot of things from fiction. And poetry.

"He shot them?" Mack kept asking. "He shot the damn birds?"

"Revolting," said Quilty loudly. "The poor birds. From now on, I'm going to give all my money to the Autobahn Society. Let's make those Mercedes go fast, fast, fast!'

That's characteristic Lorrie Moore humor and word play.

Saturday night I saw Fowl Plays, the 10-Minute Plays at Heartland Theatre Company. Each of those had a bird in it, too. What fun! And that makes it a Random Coinciday in the blog.

Land Shark

Anybody remember the original Land Shark skit on Saturday Night Live? Um, I do! It struck my fancy. I couldn't stop laughing. Well, recently in the blog I mentioned Poet Beer, so now it's equal time for Land Shark. Why today? Because of Rob Carney's "Gathering Pages for The Book of Sharks" in his poetry feature up today at Escape Into Life, among other wonderful poems you can see here, with fabulous art by Paul Tremblay. Poet Rob Carney was recommended to me by the wonderful Scott Poole. Thanks!

Why the lightning? Because of last night's thunder-storms and this morning's steady rain, which kept me away from the pool, alas, for lap swimming.

Why a comedy skit? Because Rob Carney is quietly hilarious, whether he's bringing statistics, sex, Gemini girls, or bookstore cats into his also perfectly serious poems. Oh, yes, it's a Poetry Someday for the Hump of the Week in the blog!

Friends Forever

Early Bird Lap Swim began this morning, with me as the first (and for a while) the only person in the pool. But here are the fun babies swimming, no doubt friends forever after this liquid bonding.

Yesterday I participated in the Friends Forever Fun Run/Walk (I walked). I love this organization, its slogan ("World Peace...Grown Locally"), and its local program. (Read more here, scroll down to Illinois for Bloomington-Normal press coverage.) In the Life Raft: Israel program, 5 Jewish Israeli youth and 5 Arab Palestinian Israeli youth get to come together and do fun stuff and form friendships by visiting towns in the USA, as it's difficult to do such a thing (in an organizational way, publicly) in Israel. Privately, people get along together well all the time!

Before we left, we sang a song, "Salaam," by Mosh Ben-Ari, arranged by Rick Recht, in English, Hebrew, and Arabic and got sent off by the Song of the Shofar.We walked from Moses Montefiore Temple to the Islamic Center, 3 miles, and it was very hot! We were greeted by friendly faces, air conditioning, water, brownies, pastries, fruit, and a lovely imam, who told us about the activities in the center and answered our questions.

It was a lovely, hot, red-faced, sweaty time, partly on sidewalks, partly on the Constitution Trail, partly on the grass by the side of the road on Gill Street, and I wanted to jump into the pond with the sprinkler in it, but I consoled myself with the thought of Early Bird Lap Swim. And Poet beer. (Not really. I just made that up when I found this picture of my bottle bush, formerly a burning bush, but it died. I hope not from hanging bottles on it! It's growing back, finally, in various places near where it used to be, and also far from where it used to be. How does that happen?) And great conversations with Unitarians along the way....