Tristan Smith, at it again--

Dear Tristan Smith,

While I find it somewhat interesting that someone bearing the name of a tiny, imaginary, malformed dwarf with translucent skin should invade my private e-mailbox with semi-erotic Valentine wishes, I regret to inform you that I regard the sacred obligations of St. Valentine as demanding decorum and faithfulness. The unfortunate saint wasn’t put to death for arranging love affairs but for offering the bonds of marriage, my wee novel friend, and I am married. L-o-n-g married, with three children who need their mother to ferry them about and to comb their hair and so on, not to go tearing after a translucent fictional dwarf.

Don’t you think that you had quite enough shenanigans while serving time as the main character in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith? Can’t you just lie in peace on your shelf without signing up for a hotmail account and bothering married novelist-poets with your impertinent desires?

I ask you, is it seemly? Is it right?

No, Tristan Smith, it is not.

Besides, one book per character is quite enough. You are not Rabbit Angstrom, to go running about and multiplying the world.

Further, if you are a person of sound limbs impersonating a translucent fictional dwarf, the Ghost of Attorney Chenoweth Blithers—a resident of the northwest tower of the Palace--tells me that this is an act in gross violation of our local regulations, particularly as found in the Act against Cruelty to Little People, Imaginary Moving Figures Division, Section 3, Article 72. That’s the chapter just after Cruelty to Little People, Stationary Figures Division, ending with Garden Gnomes. However, if you simply did not realize that your nom-de-plume would cause a malformed translucent dwarf to spring up in this writer’s mind, I suggest that you visit your nearest bookstore and purchase the book of the same name, published by our friends at Vintage Paperbacks.

Thank you.

* * * * * * *
Persons and fictional personages wishing to contact me for bookish reasons may still reach me by using the name "camellia" [at] the domain name of my main web site (see sidebar.) Yes, that is a circuitous mode of giving one's address, but I am just a wee bit tired of spam...

St. Valentine's Day at 2:00 a.m.

Here's my Valentine to you, whoever you are:
Adrienne Segur's Prince about to wake Beauty
in the Palace where it is always 2:00 a.m.,
while all the sleepers stand around like a rosy dream.
With a poem from the beautiful dreamer, Yeats...

Aedh Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

And what good Valentine love-wish does one send to the mysterious e-stranger who slips by the Palace--what is right for such a ghostly figure, someone who will may never meet or exchange a word with me except in this e-aetherial chamber? What can a beggar queen give to the foolish Hans or the goose girl or the warrior, the wandering priest or magician or witch? I'll just be willing the best--whatever that means, and that's a thing more than you or I can know--for you, whoever you are, whoever you are, whoever you are . . .

from the Forest of Blue Leaves

These magnolia pods made me feel homesick. It’s bright enough outside, and snow and shadows are lovely, but I want to go home and be warm and see flowers and eat my mother’s cooking. If you aren’t bred for this place, it’s hard to survive January and February without falling into the realm of snow-shadows and being covered over by their strange blue leaves.

A penpal of mine from Athens—Georgia—is going to quit the teaching of creative writing and to stop his blog, at least for now. (That’s Phil, who was tagged and wrote his response to the Five Weirdnesses as a "comment" to the previous post.) I’ve always felt that deliberately putting a stop to things is one of the essential acts of life—and especially putting a stop to things that appear very important to other people. I imagine that Phil will write more books and more music and do some carving in alabaster—all sorts of fruitfulness—with the time he gains. Sometimes it’s good to be a hermit and retreat a little, in order to find other satisfactions.

So now I am wondering about my own blog… It’s a strange little missive to the world, or to whatever pieces of it are attracted like filings to a stray magnet. I get occasional letters about it that are pleasing, but often I feel that I’ve simply tossed a bottle (green, with a high punt and lots of bubbles) into the ocean of e-aether. Then I check my stats and wonder who these people are—who you are—someone fell from a great height into the ocean and grazed my green glass bottle and hurtled on through the sea of aether?

I’ll have to think about it. To blog, or not to blog… That does seem in question these days.

Another writer penpal of mine wrote yesterday and confessed the various barbs and hurts she had felt lately, many of them courtesy of the web. It's strange what the aether contains and what it unleashes, good and bad. Every Jack is a reviewer now--and writers need that word-of-mouth reporting when so very few books are "pushed." Yet every Jackass is also anointed and given a cap and bells to shake in the public square. (It's confusing, because the writer in me is curious about them both.) So I wrote back and reported on my own humiliations, just to cheer her up... To be a writer, one must keep a soul that's tender but wrap it in hardness, so that glass hammers strike against a mine of diamonds.

To my astonishment, I just saw a book by a third penpal of mine at The Great American in Cooperstown. Buried in a mass of dreck discount books was the hardcover of Howard’s The Year of Jubilo, shining like an emerald in a trash heap. I picked it up and was going to buy it, then decided that I’d rather someone else find and read it, since I have a copy and a new reader is always desirable. So I left it there for somebody else to pluck up a treasure and took home chocolate, oxydol, and a pair of pink and red Valentine huggy monkeys for my youngest, who is sentimental about cute things and is always setting up zoos and pet stores in the center hall. I wonder who will take home Howard’s book? I’ll have to check and see if it’s there, next time I pass by. If a book makes it to a village of a mere 2000, it’s a signal event. It's about as strange as if a book comes to mooring in a village on the other side of the world.

Credits: The magnolia pods are from Laurelines
(http://laurelines.typepad.com/my_weblog/),
a site by Laura, an altogether interesting person
who is pursuing the lovely will o’ the wisp of art
to gain "the silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun."
Creative Commons License.

Tagged, tags, & other weirdnesses

All right, here’s my confession of weirdnesses, since I have been ‘tagged’ by the interestingly weird Ms. Jarvenpa of outside the windows. I’m going to focus on childhood oddities. These strike me as fairly weird, and yet many people have told me that I’m an astonishingly “normal” writer. And I delight in my very normal-though-double life as mother of three and writer. These days, who doesn’t live a double life?

1--For much of my childhood, I ate only or mostly raw (and preferably green) food—green beans, potatoes, black eye peas, lady peas, crowders, okra, bell peppers, celery,cabbage, turnips, squash, cucumbers, kohlrabi, carrots, radishes, peaches, plums, etc. In fact, I ate so many carrots that my skin had a beautiful persimmony flush to it from carotene. You may suspect that I was a gassy little brat, but in truth children have iron bellies and can pass even pennies, olive pits, toy tags, and other unattractive and inedible items with only infrequent ill effects.

2--I was one of the Princess and the Pea sort. I couldn’t bear tags in clothing, and I still cut them entirely off or else round off the edges and stitching with scissors. I didn’t even like seams.

3--But when I was little, somebody else had to trim the tags. Because I had a scissors phobia! More weirdness. Nobody would cut my hair because they were afraid of finding my blue and later green (all those veggies!) eyes impaled on their scissor-points. So my hair eventually tickled the backs of my knees. At last the enemies of hair finally chopped off my long, ripply tresses and gave me a permament, and I looked the perfect idiot in those squirmy curls and my little blue cat-eye glasses.

4--I used to hear voices murmuring when I was waking up. Well, still do sometimes, although now I erupt out of bed and rush off to wake children—no time to listen. I suppose that's related to my childhood's infrequent hypnogogic/hypnopompic dreams. Spooky ones, sometimes.

5--I spoke in complete sentences and small paragraphs before the age of one, yet I did not take my first step until seventeen months old. That means that I rode about quite happily and volubly, calling for my desires to come to me instead of stumbling about trying to reach them on my own. It was, I imagine, rather hard on my mother by the seventeenth month.

Perhaps the real oddity of my childhood was excessive, passionate reading. That's the route I took toward a more intense life. Maybe it also helped me come to grips with this beautiful, terrible world where some are called to fall from burning buildings and others to rise toward them in sacrifice, where some are taken by waves or cracks in the earth, and where nobody gets to walk free and naked in the garden forever...

That’s enough zaniness, isn’t it? I don’t have to admit the ecstatic weirdness of my inner adult life… I’m a perfectly normal sample of the adult writer and mother. So there.

Credit:
royalty free photograph,
"horn of plenty,"
taken at the Floralies in Ghent by livinus,
www.sxc.hu/

The Palace Pot Boy & General Factotum: You didn't say you always break chain letters, did you? That's weird. Who you gonna wanna tag? What 5?

The Beggar Queen: So who promoted you to General Factotum? I'm a chain breaker--fine. Scram! Maybe I'll tag Phil at Turtle Creek, anyway...