Never-published draft posts (2009)

I stole this idea from Heather.

5/12/09: I think

that contentment is a discipline. An art? Yes. Days like today, happiness doesn't float down from the sky and swathe me in bliss. It wants to be practiced assiduously so it becomes part of my consciousness instead of something I feel only when I'm enjoying my circumstances. This is good, I teach myself, pointing my eyes to the shadows of dogwood blossoms on brick. And this. The soles of my feet in cool mud. And on, and on.

___


9/11/09: Changed my mind

I used to think that art was the alchemy we use to transmute the ordinary, to make mundane things extraordinary. I thought it was in the narrating that we made things magical.

Now I think, not quite: Art is just a way to teach ourselves to see that it was already extraordinary.

___


12/10/09: Untitled

I address Puppy —
You know... — and she turns her head to listen as we walk.
Because I am wondering,
three blocks later
I begin a sentence in French.
No, she doesn't care.

Driving around the block looking for parking, I chant to myself:
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Was kann man sagen?
qu'est-çe qu'on peut dire, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
"The more things change, the more they stay the same..."

And then in the evening
I read aloud to myself
very
very
slowly
a poem in Russian
which I do not understand, which I would probably love in translation if I could but
it's hard to see the poem for the syllables.

ISO 1600 in full sunlight

Sausalito, CA.

Read in August 2011

As always, titles link to the pertinent Goodreads page — feel free to add me as a friend on there if you have a Goodreads account.

1. Raven Summer, by David Almond

2. Feeling Sorry for Celia, by Jaclyn Moriarty
I love everything I have read by Jaclyn Moriarty. (So far it's all been epistolary young adult contemporary-mostly-realistic fiction.) Always entertaining and fresh and affecting, always takes me less than 24 hours to read, and never predictable.

3. Liar, by Justine Larbalestier
What a mindfrak of a book. It seemed straightforward the first time through, certainly engrossing, but then I read the designated discussion thread on her blog and realized I was trusting the narrator FAR too much. (I could probably mull this book over for days and still feel confused...)

4. Ruby Slippers: How the Soul of a Woman Brings Her Home, by Jonalyn Fincher
I'm not the target audience for this book; I just read it as part of my ongoing commitment to keeping an eye on the evangelical discourse on gender. It didn't impress me, but overall it didn't offend me either, and that in itself is mildly impressive. For the average evangelical USian woman, its ideas would probably be more refreshing than I'm able to discern.

Floating

"The sun was low in the west, and the breeze soft and languorous that came up from the south, charged with the seductive odor of the sea." 
– Kate Chopin, The Awakening

I won't forget: wading into the Atlantic in the evening and the evening of summer until it was deep enough to float instead of walking. Wearing it on my skin. Being in open water under the open sky gives me such a sense of freedom and peace. Have you read The Awakening? The night-swimming scene early on left the most lingering impression on me — "She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude..." — I am reminded of it any time I go swimming in the sea, properly swimming past where my feet can touch and past where the waves break, I mean.

The traditional association between women and the sea makes me feel genuinely and personally lucky. I rather think it's one of the best things the female sex has to its name.

Wandering an unfamiliar university

Darkened hallways, but I felt some air moving under a closed door. It was unlocked. Drab seventies concrete architecture, Brutalist to the max, but: windows, and August wind. I went to the back of the classroom and sat inside the curtains and was grateful and moved; I might have laid my hand across my heart or just said, Oh quietly to no one.






An intermezzo, maybe.