big celie

Celie lived with her six children in a tumbled down company house beside the railroad. Coal dust covered everything within a mile of the track but no dust ever covered Celie. She dressed her family like she dressed herself – in white – and was known for starching and ironing every piece of linen she owned until a line couldn’t stand up straight in it. Women called her wanton, though none were ever willing or able to provide details in support of the accusation. Men called her stout as a bear – she was the only woman in the county to work the mines. Everyone called her Big and said she laughed too much to have any real fear of God or the Devil, though opinion was divided as to whether this was virtue or vice.

Celie was the only person in three states who dared to call Effie Payne by her given name. All because Effie once hinted she had heard that Celie, in her younger years, before she was known as Big, had been one for the bottle. Two days later Celie showed up on Effie’s doorstep.

“I’ll tell you but once, Sister. I don’t take with no liquor. Never have. Never will. And I sure don’t take with people who says I do.”

Effie could still remember the way Celie’s forehead throbbed when she spoke, the way her fists clenched at her side.

“You make sure you understand me real good, EF-FIE,” Celie said the name like it was a swear. “I’d hate to have to come back here and repeat myself.”

Afterwards, Effie tried to have Celie thrown out of the church. The pastor said people had tried before. But when it came to getting done, no one ever showed up to do it.

the bulrushers

After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him, because I don’t take no stock in dead people. – Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

jack kerouac’s beliefs and techniques for prose and life

According to BrainPickings (my latest obsession) Jack Kerouac’s 30 point list “Beliefs and Techniques for Prose and Life” was allegedly tacked on the wall of Allen Ginsberg’s hotel room in North Beach a year before his iconic poem “Howl” was written. My personal favorite…Be a crazy, dumb saint of the mind.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

and the planet mars took me home

Alone at night, when I was twelve years old, I looked at the planet Mars and I said, ‘Take me home!’ And the planet Mars took me home, and I never came back. So I’ve written every day in the last 75 years. I’ve never stopped writing. – Ray Bradbury

I’ve been reading a lot of screen plays lately. They’re good stand-ins for poetry. But only when they’re done the way they ought to be done. The Royal Tenenbaums, Lars and the Real Girl. I read these every year. They make me happy. I have in my hand a poem my grandmother wrote the day she turned my age. Disbelieving the birthday that I’ve now passed, the one Jane Smiley called the age of grief. Others arrive there sooner. Almost no one arrives much later. She was so young my grandmother, when she was my age. Ray Bradbury is not young. He is awesome. Listen…

downton abbey. and some smothering dream.

This isn’t a post about Downton Abbey. But it is a post about Wilfred Owen, and he seems to be popping up a lot lately because of Downton. Media Bistro recently published a “Downton Abbey Reading List” and The New York Times even did a piece about Downton and how publishers were using America’s interest in it to promote historical fiction and biographies of the First World War. Both mentioned Owen-Wilfred Owen-a British soldier and poet who wrote, with horrific imagery, about the horrors of war.

*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is a line from Horace’s Odes. Roughly translated: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” Wilfred Owen was killed in battle one week before the war ended. He was twenty-five years old.

You can see the original manuscript, and other works, at the University of Oxford’s Great War Digital Archive.

regency

I spent the last few weeks eating pies and watching costume dramas and reading Claire Tomalin’s Dickens Biography. I gained five pounds, discovered the wonderfully squared jawline of a young Douglas Booth, and began to suspect that my favorite Victorian novelist was a wee bit fond of hallucinogenics (see: henbane). I also slept. A lot.

christmas. three things.

cast your fate to the wind

I’ve been listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas Album and various Vince Guaraldi holiday hits since mid-September. They’re all mildly sedative and put the calm in me.

I spent most of last week in the hospital. I didn’t get there on my own merit – a certain someone decided to have a stroke, and there I was. So there I went. Steph was two floors above me, with her own somebody. (Though my somebody was her somebody too.)

We told each other it was okay to cry. Then made a big exaggerated song and dance of it because we were still embarrassed to be doing it at all. We met at 3:00a.m. for cheeseburgers and doughnuts and didn’t even pretend to care about the heart charts on the wall. And we crashed in the 5th floor waiting room more than once and wondered aloud each time whether we were just that tired or “is that an earthquake causing the room to shake?”

As depressing as it all was, there was a certain kind of comfort in being forced to do it together.

I just went to the Apple website. Steve Jobs has died and, all of a sudden, I feel really worn down again because…if Steve Jobs can die, in spite of himself, then anyone can.

But Vince Guaraldi is on the iPod. And that’s something, I suppose.

she’s the zeal i wish i had

I started running again last week. Because everything hurts when I don’t and because it’s preferable to yoga. Because even though I’m a bit of a sloth, when it comes to exercise, I’d rather move than not. Also, you can’t eagle pose to Eye of the Tiger. That’s just a fact.

Steph drove over this morning and we cranked out three miles before getting distracted by macchiatos and cold black coffee at the farmer’s market. On our way back she did the limbo beneath a lavender tree. I thought about joining her, but didn’t. I’m about as bendy as a brittle old stick at the moment. That’s a sorry excuse for an excuse, I know. Made all the worse, considering Steph.

Steph had major surgery two months ago. Surgery that involved a thirty inch incision. To put it into perspective, she’s only sixty inches tall. She’s the zeal I wish I had. I’m thinking about kidnapping her and forcing her to be my personal trainer and all around cheerleader. That would be ace.

the brief wondrous

Junot Diaz made me cry. Twice. Not his writing . Because, I’ve gotta be honest. I haven’t read any of it yet. (Not yet.) But his voice. I have absolutely zero in common with the man. Our backgrounds are not at all similar. Our lives, current, even less so. But hearing him speak really lit a fire under me. It was one of those ‘remember this moment’ moments. And I shared it with Mal.