Goodbye, Lavurn

For Those Who Love Scraps More Than Wholes

Agnes Varda's documentary The Gleaners and I takes the viewer across France to visit fields after harvest and the people who find food in them - or sculptural materials in trash bins, or dinner in trash bins for themselves and their neighbors, or heart-shaped potatoes and clocks without hands.

The film resonated with my favorite biblical quote as of late - "The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone" (Psalm 118:22).

What is discarded is essential. . .

Not Shopping

We went to the aquarium at the Mall of America on my daughter's 15th birthday. We were practically underwater together - my partner, daughter, sister-in-law, nephews and I - encountering turtles, sharks, stingrays, and all kinds of fish. Fish with whiskers, fish with purple spots, fish that were calligraphy, silky bumpy fish. I had a raging headache from the mall, but it was dulled by all the water. The hand above is not my daughter's, but it captures our encounter - touching life just on the other side of glass.

Art of Recovery

On April 26 from 1:30-3 pm, I'll be reading prose poetry at the sixth annual Art of Recovery literary reading (Minnesota State Arts Board - 400 Sibley Street - downtown St. Paul).

The poems are part of a series entitled Thin Bits of Evidence, which I wrote off of objects purchased at a thrift shop in Mandan, North Dakota. Our neighbor worked at this thrift shop, and he also set our house on fire. (Rather unsuccessfully, I'm glad to say.)

Further information about the reading and exhibit -

http://www.arts.state.mn.us/calendar/2009_AOR_invitation.htm

Deep Sea Jelly Candle, 30¢

Main Street, under construction, is suddenly underwater in an early morning dream. Waves drench signs for the fall election. The mayor almost died from heart failure last year, his daughter from cancer this summer. Now they coach sixth grade girls’ basketball. I love to watch them breathe. The rumor flies he is out on bail, but I walk to the store anyway. My partner keeps fixing the porch. Our daughter plays in her Halloween wig and everything moves a bit slow. I return home with canned sauerkraut and call the county jail. It is not true. See how we go on.

- from Thin Bits of Evidence by Julie Gard

Good Work

http://faculty.evansville.edu/rl29/art105/img/nevelson_skycathedral.jpg

You see, I think that we have measurements in our bodies. Measurements in our eyes. Look, dear, we walk on two feet. So we're vertical. That doesn't mean the work has to be vertical, but it means there is a weight within ourselves, or this flight. All these things are within the being: weight and measure and color. And if the work is good work, it is built on these laws and principles that we have within ourselves. So when you use a vertical line or a horizontal line, or a texture or the way the shadow falls or a thinner piece or a heavier piece, it all kind of satisfies something in the soul - or, I don't like the word soul, satisfies something within the deed.

You add or subtract until you feel. . . the form, the principle, that something that makes the house stand, that makes you stand.

- Louise Nevelson. Dawns and Dusks: Conversations with Diana McKown. New York: Scribner's, 1976 (120).

On Earth

Enough said.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/44715000/jpg/_44715109_obhug_getty466.jpg

Wild Food

http://www.wildfoods.info/wildfoods/chokecherry.html

My latest obsession is stuff you can pick off trees and eat, like chokecherries and wild apples. Blackberries are heavenly too, though they grow on bushes, prickly ones. I am apparently willing to bleed for food. Sweet, tart, rich, juicy food, anyway.
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There's a chokecherry tree across the street from our house, in a patch of brush and trees that (I believe) is public land. . . No one scolded me, anyway, when I planted the ladder to pick the higher berries. There were still ones far above my head I couldn't reach, which was frustrating and I felt like I was living a parable. I could suddenly understand why people do dangerous things for foolish reasons. Just a little bit higher; just a few more chokecherries. . .

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They are very good boiled and strained into a syrup made with fructose. Of course, you can also use sugar. The syrup is excellent on vanilla ice cream; it is fine on pork chops. You can also drink it straight and collapse on the kitchen floor in wild fruit ecstasy.

Novgorod Is Old

We took our daughter to Russia this summer; it's where she's from. Here's a small church in Novgorod which I thought was exceptionally nice, and a mural on the wall of the disabled children's center/part-time tourist hostel where we stayed. Novgorod means "new city," yet it's the oldest city in Russia. I brought home sand from the banks of the Volkhov River, and a stone for AnnMarie.

House of Fools

You must see this movie - directed by Andrei Konchalovsky and starring Julia Vysotsky - if you're into accordions, mental institutions, Chechnya, and/or Bryan Adams. See it even if you're not into Bryan Adams, as long as you value the divinely and absurdly tragi-comic. I've started dreaming about this movie - not good dreams, exactly, but ones I want to have.