Where the wild things are swinging

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If I had to choose only one book to save from our children's shelves when they grew up, it would be Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. (No doubt a whole lot of other people feel the same.) Sendak wrote and illustrated the 48 page, ten sentence book in 1963, and I discovered it the next decade during bookstore "squats" in the children's section when I was in college. Maybe I wished I had written it and drawn those illustrations. A few years ago I did copy one of his pictures onto the new seat Don sawed for our 60-year-old swingset my siblings and I grew up with, which now sits on the hill behind our family cottage. This was the first time that old swing seat had been replaced. I used to fly so high on it that I wondered what would happen if I looped all the way up and over the top of the A frame. What I imagined didn't happen, thank goodness, but Sendak's vision did, as I copied and painted his swinging characters right onto the new wooden seat. I even bought a copy of the book to leave in the cottage's red reading room so kids would be sure to have the book handy for a read after swinging.




So you'd think I would have been ecstatic at the movie theater recently when I saw a trailer for Spike Jonze's upcoming feature movie version of Sendak's book. But my immediate reaction was horror. NO! You can't make this book into a movie! I closed my eyes to shut out the images and saw only those from the book in my memory.

In the book you have ten glorious run-on sentences (for example: "Almost over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of my own room where he found his supper waiting for him and it was still hot."). You have a boy's dream after he has been sent to bed without his supper, illustrated in some of the most evocative images ever. You have a nightmare transformed into a love story, the mysterious dilemmas of parenting with mercy and grace, and conversely of being a child who has to grow up into a responsible person, but not quite yet. You have delicious and cuddly monsters painted in warm earthy tones. You have cute small Max in a white wolf suit and crown. The way he dishevels that crown when he's sleepy is so charming! As a lover of children's illustrations, I got lost in them. I wanted little text. Making it into a movie would fill in the gaps of imagination in unwanted ways, changing it forever.

It is the dilemma of all books-to-film. How do you take Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and make it into the film "The English Patient"? In that case, the book is spare and wonderful, and the movie is lush and wonderful. Both succeeded. But often the film is a disappointment after a rich book. Of course the opposite can often be said too.

In a fantastic article Loring sent me by Wendell Berry (he whose beloved poem resides on my sidebar) about our country's warped economics, in which he criticizes the entertainment addiction we're in (The Progressive, Sept. 2009, p. 24), Berry wrote:

If you can read
and have more imagination than a doorknob,
what need do you have
for a "movie version" of a novel?

To agree with Berry, you could argue that a novel is different from an illustrated children's book. Without illustrations, a novel relies on the reader's vision of each scene and interpretations of characters. If you're a good reader, this terrain can be fertile indeed. If a movie gets made, and if you had any attachment to the book, you wish they would consult with you about the cast, set, direction and costumes! It's your story now after all, for the scenes and characters have evolved into your inventions too. Especially vile is when a film is made of a classic tale, such as "The Scarlet Letter" or "Last of the Mohicans," and the story is changed unrecognizably and unforgivably into a more palatable (sell-able) Hollywood adaptation. Why not just write a new story-script in the period and context?

To argue against my original mortification, a children's illustrated book is different, no matter how sacred, especially if the author was also the illustrator. Apparently Maurice Sendak has been working on a movie version of Where the Wild Things Are since the 1990s, and he pursued Spike Jonze as the one to make it. How do you argue with a book's author, if he had a vision for it as a film? It makes perfect sense that a visual artist would cross over into film. And from the enticing film sets and costumes I've seen so far, I myself can feel the pull. Can he help it that so many of us own this entity called Where the Wild Things Are and might object to his decision? Such controversy in my head over his imagination's expression!

In the video below you can hear Sendak and Jonze describe their collaboration in the movie. As Sendak says, Jonze took the peculiarness of the book and made it into his own Where the Wild Things Are with Jonze peculiarness. The glimpses of the monsters in the misty forest and silhouetted by the crashing sea, and of the fabulous Max, who happens also to be a "Max" in real life, have seduced me. Guess where I'll be October 16? In the presence of a newly inspired and evolved expression of what Maurice Sendak made possible: a wild seat to ride up and up as high as the next visionary could take it.

But please, no movie version of Goodnight Moon. I can live with the sweet animation narrated by Susan Sarandon, but I will not allow my future grandchildren to watch it on TV when I'm around. They must look at the pictures from my lap and hear "Good night comb and good night brush" from my voice box, feeling my heartbeat against their temples. And then I will close the finger-softened pages of the book and tell them for the 100th time how their mother said "Dat Doh" for "Goodnight Moon." Then I will eat them up, I love them so.




Here are my siblings' grandchildren helping me put the new swing on that old swingset.

pride and joy

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Peter has been home several months between the band's cruise ship gigs, bringing us humor, music, wittiness and creativity. He was his sister's Man of Honor and our man of help for the August wedding here on the farm. This baby o' mine leaves again in a few days for a third and maybe final three month gig. Last week the ship's official videographer Stephen graced the farm with boyish Vancouver sophistication (that's him on the left), and we ate a burger in our local tavern while they caught us up on their just completed documentary road trip to Chicago and Nashville. This will likely be Peter's last extended stay at home, since he hopes to move on to NY or London after the Hawaii tour, and I have the same melancholy I did in 2006 when he moved out after college and I wrote the prose poem below. There is pride and joy watching our daughter and son pursue their lives. And there is longing to remain with them always. Such is life as we accomplish just what we set out to do: help them on their way.

A Son Moves Out

Guitar picks sprout from the necks of multiple guitars lined up like timbers on the family room floor. The limbs of his body stiffen with the weight of a duffle bag and amplifier that seem to want to keep him planted here - oddly, since it's the music that's pulling him away.

A stump on the couch, I look out the door he opens, at willow fronds hooking and tossing their ochre against the snow field like fishing lines. A gust rolls through the house. I hold on to the couch. The fabric pleat flies up horizontally, the arm covers blow off. I dig my toes into the cushions.

Rooted, I stay. Like a twig, he goes.

Here is a 4 1/2-minute video of Bonnie Raitt singing my favorite of one of Peter's heroes, Stevie Ray Vaughan in a terrific version of Vaughan's "Pride and Joy."

dishes

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With the onset of autumn, I remember that I have china. "The Holidays" are around the corner with all that feasting - the first being Thanksgiving in November when we'll welcome Don's family to the farm. I will be digging into the china cabinet for bowls, cups, plates, pitchers and platters to serve mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, coffee, and pumpkin pie.

I collected the cups and saucers, above, from different antique shops because I loved the rosebud handles. Once I fell for the first set, it was not easy to find more. This was before eBay.

This egg cup is a good excuse for making soft boiled farm fresh eggs Friday morning after Thursday's Thanksgiving feast. My set of Spode buttercup belonged to Grandma Olive, then my mother, and now to me. When I pull them out, I feel I am touching my women, and their hands are now my hands.

No matter how humble the home of a woman is, she feeds her family on dishes. On special occasions she will spend extra time chopping, mixing, cooking and filling her best ones with feast-worthy delectables. If her mother used those dishes before her, their value goes deeper. And if her mother's mother used them before her, serving food in them is an even greater joy.

Every ladle of food - from the thinnest soup to the heartiest meat - becomes food for the soul as well as the body when family and friends come together and multiply memories and generations through celebration.

My sister Nancy gave me this Irish Belleek butter dish that looks like an Irish cottage. It is so lightweight, it feels like you are holding a seashell. You can tell it is European because it is square, not oblong, for the European shape of packaged butter. I cherish it as a gift from my sister as well as for the link to Ireland where I have fond recollections and connections.









Everyone in the world deserves to eat well, to live well. In photographs of the world's poorest communities, I have seen blue tarp shanties set up with style, neatness and grace. There is an instinct within us humans, in women especially, to nurture the family. This nurturing is for the body, the soul and the heart. When she feels her dishes are beautiful, the food is appealing, and that she is bringing her loved ones together at special times to create new memories and remember old ones, it is worth every chop of an onion, each whisk of butter and flour for a roux, all the stirring of thick batter for cake, all the rolling out of pie dough for custardy pumpkin filling, the kneading of bread dough for yeasty buns, and every heartfelt anvil of stress over the possibility that everything won't get done or taste delicious. There are many men, like Don, who also feel these instincts and spend hours in the kitchen out of a desire to nurture loved ones.

What follow are from a big heavy wonderful book called The Way We Live by Stafford Cliff with hundreds of photographs by Gilles de Chabaneix, showing how people live around the world. I chose some pictures of people preparing food, as well as dishes.

Romania


Bangkok




Sweden



Provence



Sweden

And this final photo is not from the book but was taken by rauf near Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India. When I saw this at his post in February I was so touched I had to stop and be quiet. This is a mud hut, and the woman of the house designed and built the wall mounted dish rack herself.

these meadowsounds: sumac

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. . . We are here again with the beloved. This air,
a shout. These meadowsounds, an astonishing myth . . .

- read the whole short poem: Ode 3079 - Meadowsounds, by Rumi


beloved Sumac:

(please click to enlarge)

For Julia, who after a long hot summer in Texas especially requested a post with warm autumn colors in cool Michigan.
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Turkey season

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Don keeping watch over his flock by day

Has it really been almost a year since we saw Sarah Palin talking with a reporter about being Vice President and pardoning a turkey from being killed for someone's Thanksgiving table, while turkeys were visibly being slaughtered behind her? It was a grisly example of someone being out of touch with their surroundings.



In the U.S., if you call someone a "turkey" it's an insult, meaning the person is stupid (out of touch with their surroundings -- yikes). Or if you say some project was a turkey - like a movie - you mean it was a failure. Apparently this arose from the fact that turkeys are thought to be stupid. You know how we call someone a "bird brain" if they don't seem to have terrific mental capacity? Well of all the birds, turkeys have the smallest brains in proportion to their size: 2%. Domestic turkeys have supposedly been known to drown standing out in a rainstorm - looking up, mouth open, "hey, what just hit my little head?" as it pours down their throats.

Some say turkeys get a bad rap, since their mortality is not good, and they die from other things more than from drowning. But there is some truth that domestic turkeys have been bred away from their wild instincts to find shelter from the elements.

After we lived in the country of Turkey we encountered a few individuals out of touch with their surroundings who, after chuckling a bit asked in disbelief, "You lived in Turkey? What do you mean, there's a place called Turkey?" Actually the real name for the country is Türkiye. If you pronounce it correctly by rounding your lips and putting that ü just behind your teeth, no one thinks you're talking about living inside a big bird. (Did you know that Sesame Street's Big Bird was made with 4000 turkey feathers?) I remember going to bed at night after speaking a lot of Turkish and my cheek muscles were sore from all those ü's and ö's. Here's an exercise in something close to stupidity for you: When you go to the turkey farm with the kids this year, try saying "göbble göbble göbble" and make the correct sound for the Turkish ö. Öh, and in Turkey they call a turkey a hindi. Now what's that about? I think it went something like this: Turkeys have to do with American Thanksgiving -> American Thanksgiving has something to do with American Indians -> Indians -> Hindi. Phew. I feel like I just flew around the world.

Two of the big toms in the photo at top - the ones with tail feathers fanned, and big pink and blue drooping gobbledy-goop under their little 2% heads, one bronze and one white - died recently after each breaking a leg. See, I told you they die from other maladies. Don doesn't know if they were in a fight, or just too heavy for their drumsticks. :| They have another two months to grow before Thanksgiving dinner - one for us and the rest to be given away. I'm afraid the one tom that's left won't fit in an oven.

I can't say that I think turkeys are dumb, but they look dumb the way they stand and stare at you inside your personal space. Or maybe they just look curious, because they certainly are that. In fact, they look the opposite of being out of touch with their surroundings if I really think about it. Can you be dumb if you're this curious?



So this is what you can say if you don't want to call someone stupid, or a turkey:







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synchronizing: unexpected duets

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My poetry mentor Diane Wakoski taught me to write poems that bring unlike things together. At all costs, avoid clichés, such as comparing tears with rain, or love with fire. She showed that it is far more affecting when a poem like Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" connects things in surprising ways, like winter and a person's mind, as that poem does. I think good poems make you feel two things: 1) I never thought of that before, and yet 2) I always knew that, maybe I forgot it, but I've known it somewhere, sometime.

That's really the theme behind this blog: bringing things together, not that I always think about that when I post.

Two years ago when I first heard about Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin doing a musical collaboration with country/folk singer Alison Krauss I was intrigued by the pairing and wanted to buy the album, titled Raising Sand. I hadn't been excited about Led Zeppelin when they were on the radio in my teenage years, but when my son Peter learned to play guitar in the '90s, Led Zeppelin was one of his favorites, and I found myself rocking along to "That's the Way" or "Ramble On" through his discovery. So in 2007 I loved the idea of rock star Plant and country singer Krauss (that even my punk daughter listened to) singing together. I never listened to or bought the Plant-Krauss album when it came out, even though you can listen to the whole thing at their web site here - so nice. But finally about a month ago I heard it and was blown away by one of the songs: "Gone, Gone, Gone." So, as I was downloading it and putting together a mixed CD, I had the Genius Sidebar open and it was suggesting other duets, two of which I also downloaded. It would be nice to have a whole album pairing singers from different genres. Ha, I speak out of ignorance - even though rauf, Loring and João try to educate me about music. There are probably dozens of captivatingly unexpected duet albums out there, and I am going to hear about them in comments.

Pour yourself a cuppa coffee, or tea. Plug in the good speakers. Put your feet up. Relax and listen. You need some music. Rockabilly. And Blues.

"Gone, Gone, Gone" by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss is my favorite song at the moment. NOTE: Robert Plant is wonderfully "Zepellin-esque" in the studio album version in the link above, so I like it a bit better than the live version below. It's cute though, if you watch the video below closely you can see Krauss do a little Zepellin-esque thing toward the end, as if she's imitating her co-singer.





The second song Genius recommended was JJ Cale and Eric Clapton singing and playing the blues in "Ride the River." It would be a blast to ride the river in a boat with these two, I could paddle since they'd have their hands full of guitars and mics.





The third song Genius recommended was another duet with Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and country singer Emmylou Harris singing as a couple who look at their life through a photo album in "This is Us." Here they are on the Letterman Show, and it's fun to watch them sing to each other, but I like the studio recording that follows a bit better here too. Emmylou sounds a wee bit flat in the live version. But what a cool voice she has.





Here's the studio version of the same song:





Had you heard these songs before? Are there other cool duets to add to an unexpected duets mixed CD?

RESPECT

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Congressman Joe Wilson didn't have it when he shouted "You lie!" to President Obama in the middle of his speech to Congress.

Someone spray painted this word on a step going up to my university office building. I don't know why. Sometimes graffiti is art, but most of the time it's disrespectful.

Meditate on the word.

Respect.

Respect is the balm we hold in our hands every moment.

Some people believe if you treat someone with disrespect you lose the right to be treated with respect yourself.

I have a story that demonstrates what I feel about respect. The story belongs to a man - let's call him Vick - for whom I frankly don't have much respect. But this story, like an iridescent bubble, surrounds and protects him from my memories and wrath.

Vick was my boss for three years. While he treated me with respect, I cringed when he led our staff with a cold, condescending and dictatorial style. Out of a staff of 20, only a couple people liked him. I'll never forget in my first week on the job one secretary said she wished his plane would crash. Out of respect for his position, I found a way to be pleasant and cordial in our daily professional relationship, and at some level I respected his expertise in his field. But I would never want him for a friend, even though he could be charming and even warm at times. Charm on the heels of cold arrogance only increased the chill.

So, this is the story he told me, the bubble around him that embodies my definition of respect.

Vick went to France with his American wife, a professor of French, every summer for several weeks for her academic research. This was one realm where he felt intimidated, convinced the French people he encountered scoffed at his American accented French. How strange it was to picture him, Mr. I-RULE-THE-WORLD, feeling inferior. His robust physique, while perhaps lending itself to his power in the U.S., only increased his feeling of mortification in Paris. And isn't it rather charming that he revealed his vulnerability to me this way?

He explained to me that he learned from the French how to enter a restaurant: Walk in the door quietly. Listen to the room. Let the room receive you. Serenely, calmly, genteelly ask the host for a table. He was so careful about this it became his appeasement, his little sacrifice at the altar of the French gods, hoping he might be accepted in spite of his Americanized French.

One year Vick's parents-in-law visited them in Paris, and they had no clue about the "respect the room" rule he had learned and honored. All those years of showing deference entering a restaurant were blown away in a gust when the door opened and his mother-in-law chattered away full voice while everyone in the room gaped at them. Our tall, broad, bearded professorial Vick in a tweed sport coat held his head as high as he could while his innards melted in humiliation.

This is what I think of, what epitomizes respect for me. Entering quietly. Listening. Then proceeding.

Even the air we move through deserves our respect.

And now I am reminded of a little Mark Strand poem:

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

- Mark Strand
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l'atelier: layers and layers

A good thing about having your own room is that you can put out whatever objects you want and no one objects. On these shelves in l'atelier I have stacked boxes collected for decoupage projects that have not yet materialized, stones that were collected from beach walks and coasters sliced from the pine tree that broke my heart when it died last year.



A farmer built this 10' x 22' building as a chicken coop over 100 years ago. You can tell it's a coop because five windows line only the south side of the building, for the warm sun in winter months. On the opposite wall there are shelves where I think the farmer had his egg layers' nest boxes, but there is no sign of the boxes.

There are other items waiting on these shelves, like my oil paints (I tried painting here once), and my bouquet from Lesley and Brian's wedding nestled near the earth woman's arms in a favorite photo cut out of a magazine. When Don powerwashed and painted this room, I asked for a blue ceiling. You can see in the photo below how the tin roof was layered on rough sawn oak boards.

When I am in this room I feel that I am at the hinge of the universe, a point where there is neither time nor space. There is life here. Although everyone calls this "Ruth's atelier" it does not belong to me any more than it belongs to time and space.

It doesn't matter if the decoupage projects get done, or if the painting of Killarney stays forever in its stage of tonal study without the finishing layers of paint. I will keep adding stones to the collection on the shelf. These objects feel at home in a room of piles that are happily unfinished, but whole.

spiderwebs in the meadow

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The vocabulary of spiderwebs:

Silk. Gossamer. Ballooning. Dragline. Anchor. Spiral. Funnel. Orb. Dome.

And on dewy September mornings: Beadwork. Rainbow. Jewel. Necklace.






























From wiki: "The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity."

Last spring I found a forsythia petal swinging by a gossamer strand in the middle of the orchard far away from its anchor:



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