Sheila's LiveJournal

I just turned the last page of Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel, "The Lacuna." I wish it were science fiction and I could recommend it for a Nebula! Easily her best fiction so far, this one is a wonderfully rich story of a likable young man with an American father and Mexican mother who is mostly raised in Mexico, with a cast of characters that includes Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky. The prose is lyrical and heartbreaking in turn, the story itself deeply moving but also funny at times. The story turns dark in the J. Edgar Hoover years, surely not this country’s finest hours. I didn’t see the ending coming, but it was fitting; nothing in the book is a throw-away – it all works out in a very satisfying way.

I first encountered Kingsolver’s work when her early novel, "The Bean Trees," landed on the remainder table of the local bookstore. (How’s that for encouragement for those of us whose early work goes thudding into oblivion?) I noticed the blurb from Tony Hillerman and decided to give it a try. From then on I was hooked on Kingsolver. I’ve read almost everything she’s written since, fiction and non-fiction, including her account of the year the family spent living off the land, raising their own food ("Animal, Vegetable, Miracle").

Try this one. I heartily recommended it.

I have another guest blog up on the Nebula Awards site, an expanded version of something I first posted here -- with more connections to SF and to one of my own stories:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/islands_of_the_imagination/

I recently wrote a blog for the Nebula Awards site about (among other things) the affinity humans seem to have had with drums and drumming from prehistoric times. After church this morning, we celebrated the start of Black History Month with a workshop given by a master drummer, Marcus Miller – performer, teacher, scholar. Marcus brought about twenty different drums from the west coast of Africa and a couple of Native American pow-pow drums. He invited everyone to pick one and participate, and all the drums found willing drummers. But it was the kids who got the lesson first and best. Marcus demonstrated some pretty complicated rhythms, and where the adults obviously wanted to say, “whoa, slow down, say again?” the children copied what he'd demonstrated flawlessly first time. The ensemble performances that resulted were powerful and exhilarating. Drums get into your blood stream and echo in your bones! (Marcus pointed out that the basic two-beat rhythm is the sound of the human heart.)

I have a small (Native American) shaman's drum, hand picked for me by a friend who was a shaman-in-training. I think I'll take it down from the wall now and try out a few rhythms.

... is the title of my new posting at the Nebula blog site:

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/cymbals_and_ceremonies/

In previous centuries, the twelfth and last day of the Christmas season was an occasion for revelry and hilarity in England, and I finally understand why. Many people think the twelve days lead up to Christmas, but in actuality they only begin on December 25th and end with January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany when the Magi visited the Christ Child. So the eve of that feast was the last chance to celebrate Christmas, a kind of last fling before returning to the drudgery of the everyday world (rather like these three old men, trudging home by the back route to avoid King Herod).

And it really was a feast in itself with drunken parties and wild goings-on, just what you'd expect from a celebration that had as its “master of ceremonies” the Lord of Misrule. Things were seldom what they seemed on Twelfth Night when the peasants held sway as temporary lords of the manor, and men dressed up in petticoats like women. Shakespeare had a lot of fun with this in the comedy of the same name: a woman (who would've been played by a young man originally) disguised as a man, being pursued in love by the female object of affection of her male employer, a self-righteous buffoon, a couple of drunken knights plotting mischief, a wily Fool egging them on. Easy to imagine how entertained the original audiences would've been, knowing (and perhaps themselves celebrating) the occasion.

Maybe this comic impulse to misrule is what underlay the pantomimes we went to see in January when I was a child in England. The tradition for these re-tellings of fairy tales and legends is that the “Dame” is always played by a man in outrageous drag, and “Prince Charming” is a woman in tights. The Clowns and Fools conspire to make life miserable for a variety of petty villains in the story, and the audience is invited to share in the frivolities by shouting responses at appropriate points in the action.

I knew all that, of course, but this year I realized another reason to be glad of Twelfth Night. The hustle and bustle of the Christmas season, the stress, the rush, the headaches, the overeating and under-exercising, the gaudy decorations gathering dust and the tree shedding needles, the accumulation of bills due -- all this finally over!

Have a happy and blessed Epiphany! (Only 334 more shopping days 'til Christmas '09.)

[with apologies to Lewis Carroll.]

One of the great joys of grandmotherhood is getting to experience a lot of wonderful things all over again with the younger generation. This weekend, Amy's eighth birthday, I took her and another granddaughter, Autumn, to see the Nutcracker Ballet in Long Beach. I was delighted that the ballet was the same weekend as the birthday, because I wanted to make sure Amy's day didn't get lost in the great Christmas hustle and bustle; I wanted to celebrate it right. Autumn's mother, April, brought both girls into town on Saturday evening, and we were joined by a third granddaughter, Shannon, for dinner at a favorite pizza house. Then the birthday girl, Autumn and I went to see the ballet.

The Long Beach company always puts on a good show, with a gloriously expanding (and flashing) tree, a flying horse and sleigh, flying fairies, huge golden snowfalls, cannons and fireworks popping and dazzling all over the place – oh, and some pretty good dancing. In my childhood in London, we always went to the pantomime at Christmastime, but since that's not an American tradition, we've substituted the Nutcracker instead. (One year, we did The Glory of Christmas at the Crystal Cathedral, and that was spectacular too.) I think the girls enjoyed the Nutcracker; I know I did.

This morning, Amy's actual birthday, April came back into town and we celebrated the Fourth Sunday of Advent at St Luke's. I love the Advent ritual at my church, the seasonal decorations, all those great old pre-Christmas carols. April used to go to Sunday school at St Luke's, and Laurel, Amy's mom, was baptized there, so it's really "in the family." Then after the service, Shannon joined us again and we went for Sunday Brunch on board the Queen Mary. Almost like being on a cruise! The waiter served champagne for the grownups and sparkling cider for the kids, and Amy opened presents. The ship was decorated for the holidays – although it seemed to us that it was all for Amy's birthday.

Now the family has gone to their respective homes, and the dogs and I have a quiet evening ahead to relax in.

Oh, wait – I still have gifts to wrap!

I have another blog up that I wrote for the Nebula blog site. But not for long, so catch it while it's hot! (This makes number four. I didn't realize I had much to say until I started.)

http://www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/the_persistence_of_the_numinous/

Every year, on the first Saturday in October, the little village of Idyllwild, in the San Jacinto Mountains of California, puts on an Art Walk/Wine Tasting event. It's a lot of fun to go to, and I've attended seven, counting by the glasses in my cupboard. You pay a fee – this year it was $25 – and you get a pretty wine glass which you carry up and down the road to the different galleries, gathering samples at each stop. A lot of very fine wineries based in Temecula come up to pour their wines, and there's always food, cheese and crackers and fruit, and usually live music too. This is where I first tasted Barefoot wines, a favorite of mine now. A trolley runs along the route if you need it. This year we were a party of six people and had five dogs along with us, and we couldn't have used it if we'd needed it (we didn't). One year, they had a horse-drawn trolley which was a great attraction for the children who'd come along with their parents.

I enjoy this event, and usually browse the galleries and craft stalls looking for unusual Christmas gifts. Idyllwild is an arts community, with a thriving culture of artists of many kinds, and an internationally known, private arts high school where I taught creative writing for several summer camps. Since I have a small cabin just outside Idyllwild, I often come up to the mountains during the year, but the Art event has to be one of the best occasions of the year.

Making this even more special was the fact that my oldest granddaughter had invited her just-found birth-father to meet the family and enjoy the village scene. I am so happy for her: this is something she's always longed to do, and he seems overjoyed to get to know the daughter he never knew he had. As if the wine itself wasn't enough, this was pretty heady stuff!

The only negative thing was that it rained, not hard at first, but enough to soak through my sweatshirt to my t-shirt. We had umbrellas, but they were in the car. The dogs put up with it just as we did, which is to say not without some complaining. I think that the weather must have affected the number of visitors because the crowd didn't seem as dense this time as in other years. That's not good for the artists and craftspeople. We bought three kinds of bread at a bakery and left a bit early to go down to my daughter's house at the foot of the mountains. There we were joined by another daughter and her family, eager to meet my granddaughter's “New Dad,” and we had a great barbecue (It wasn't raining down there, of course).

Now I have to find where in Long Beach I can get bottles of the port wine I fell in love with this time!

An extended version of a riff I did here on the extraordinary outdoor art exhibit -- The Blob -- at Long Beach Museum of Art (plus pix and links!) appears here:

www.nebulaawards.com/index.php/guest_blogs/whats_that_supposed_to_be/

At the Eaton Conference recently, I picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, replacing my original copy lost many moves ago. The conference had taken as its theme science fiction about the moon, and Bradbury was an honored guest. I looked forward to reacquainting myself with a classic example of his work.   

I wasn't disappointed. Bradbury's prose sings – it really is best when read aloud. Being introduced to Bradbury's work by a twelve-year-old boy long ago, I had fallen in love with the voice of these stories, saturating myself in his music. I realized, as I re-read of life in a vanished time and place in America, that it's not the story itself that grabs me. Most of the stories have tiny plots that would sound ho-hum when summarized in a sentence or two. And the characters, the innocent children and wise old adults that populate the pages, probably never existed even in Bradbury's own childhood in Illinois. But that's not really the point.

The magic of these stories lies in their poetry. I'm not the first to remark that so many Bradbury lines enchant the ear out of all proportion to the information they actually carry. Consider the opening paragraph of the first “chapter” (Bradbury doesn't name or number them as such) in Dandelion Wine:

    It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.”

Here's another opening, from a chapter in the middle of the book:

    And then there is that day when all around, all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one by one from the trees. At first it is one here and one there, and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and twenty, until all the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs in the soft, darkening grass, and you see the last apple on the tree, and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from your hold upon the sky and drop you down and down....”

A lesser writer might have written, “It was an early summer morning,” for the first, and “In Autumn, when all the apples fall from the trees” for the second – and would've missed the dreamlike world that Bradbury's words create, a world we immediately recognize as true to our own mythic childhood.

So it was with a great deal of pleasure that I re-read the book, recognizing the parts I'd admired before when I knew so much less about the skill that lies behind the apparently effortless tunes of simple words.

And that realization brought me to remember the work of another poet whose prose work was a rhapsody about simple places and simple people: Dylan Thomas. I hadn't read Under Milk Wood, a play for voices, in a very long time, though I re-read Thomas's collected poems at least once a year. The date I'd inscribed on the inside front cover was the year I went to college, the year after Thomas died. I'd hated “modern poetry” while I was in high school – until I encountered Thomas and the poem, “Fern Hill.” For the first time, I had the experience of being swept off my feet by the sheer emotional torrent of words, with only the slightest understanding of what the poem meant. Like Bradbury, Thomas loved small towns, though his are in his native Wales:

    ...herring gulls heckling down to the harbour where the fishermen spit and prop the morning up and eye the fishy sea smooth to the sea's end as it lulls in blue. Green and gold  money, tobacco, tinned salmon, hats with feathers, pots of fish-paste, warmth for the winter-to-be, weave and leap in it rich and slippery in the flash and shapes of fishes through the cold sea-streets.”

I've never lived in towns anything like either poet describes, yet I seem to remember them; the music of the words conjures them in my imagination. The thing is, these aren't the places Bradbury and Thomas lived either; they're myths about those places, more real than bricks and stones. That to my mind is good writing; that's Art.

Ah, Miss Warner, dragon of high school English classes, you told us that sentences ought not to run away with the images they contain but cower timidly behind their periods and semicolons, and that words ought not to be strung together with “and” like beads on a chain. How lucky you didn't teach Ray Bradbury or Dylan Thomas!

The Long Beach Museum of Art is one of two museums in the city, the other being the Museum of Latin American Art – or MOLA – but it's the one with the better location. It's right on the bluffs, overlooking the wide beach and the yacht-studded Pacific, in what started life as a residence built by the Wrigley family. These days, the original house is home to a café, a gift shop, and administrative offices, while the handsome next door two-story building houses the collection. For the most part, it's an interesting collection, though it leans heavily towards ceramics. From time to time it displays outstanding work of one artist or another.

But right outside the old house section, and just inside the original brick wall,  there is often a display of some oversize “art.” The quotation marks are not a mistake. This time the display seems to be a shapeless giant baby, sort of a Pillsbury doughboy only cruder, in a violent yellow color. A class full of kindergartners on stepladders could've produced this in an afternoon.  Passersby noticing it (it's hard to miss) can be heard to say. “What the **** is that supposed to be?” A good question. I don't know who the artist is; I don't care to find out, either. But I'm afraid a lot of my taxpayer money went to purchase this monstrosity

Which leads me to a meditation on the subject of what, exactly, constitutes “Art?”.Setting aside the old non-answer: art is in the eye of the beholder, I think there are some prerequisites that must be satisfied before something can be called Art with a capital letter.

First off, Art should carry some meaning. I don't mean it should be didactic, forcing us to accept its judgments, but that it should make us think, or feel something significant. Michaelangelo's David, for instance, makes me appreciate the wonder and beauty of a perfect male body. The more you look at a piece of real Art, the more you see in it.

Secondly, I think Art should speak to the spirit. It's hard to contemplate the David without going on to think of a Creator who is capable of bringing such beauty into being – and also creating the artist who can capture it. And if you don't buy that, it might inspire you to think of the wonders of evolution that culminated in such beauty.

And thirdly, Art can be entertaining, making us smile or lightening our mood in some way, or conversely making us weep. Maybe both at once? (I'm thinking of the Art of the mime and the clown here.)

Not all Art manages all three, but if it doesn't register on at least one of these standards – and possibly two –  then I don't think it can be called Art. Blobs of paint or a single black stripe on a white canvas aren't Art. (But maybe Pollack's speckles are? They certainly make me think.)

Do these same standards apply to music and literature? Dance? I have a feeling they do, at least for me. (That's why many of the the Beatles' songs are Art as far as I'm concerned, up there with Schumann and Vaughn Williams.)

The Museum's yellow doughbaby does none of this.It's an ugly blob that only inspires me to think some people who fancy themselves as arbiters of art just got taken. It reminds me of the time thirty years ago when Cal State Long Beach paid who know how much to an artist for a wooden sculpture to place on campus. What they got was a pile of railroad ties dumped in a heap. I guess the moral of this is, some cities never learn!

What do you think?