Back Monday...

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend, coming up with one of your favorite passages to read next week.

And don't worry, I won't post days and days of stories about this long weekend away.
I promise!

Just a snippet or two, and some pictures of the ocean.

Voices - a group anniversary AND...a link I forgot to put on.

Last June I sent this one out...

Thursday, June 19, 2008
I'm (sort of) reading you a story...

Voices and accents matter. It's not like this is big news. We all know it - and I think it's something I miss with you guys. (Also, I knew 'as if in a dream' that you were just dying to see our front hallway.)

I've seen one of you, spoken to two others of you, and heard one of your voices on a link thing (paca); it was nice to confirm that we're not only ether.

So....here's my voice, reading you the paragraphs I wrote about in 'Edit Me' earlier on. (Just pretend that last year's first YouTube is inserted here.)

This is my first attempt at one of these, so I sound a bit like I'm hollering out from inside a nice cozy tin can. But the only reason I chose YouTubing is because I don't know how to use anything else and get it into the blog (actually, I don't know how to use this either, which is why it sounds louder than I sounded when I was reading it. And Blondster did the whole thing for me on her Mac. If she hadn't been around, there'd be no sound going on, I can tell you.)

If any of you guys know how to embed any other sound things, let me know. And now, it's somebody else's turn...

It's been close to a year since we started; and I think it would be great if we did a group anniversary post for this.

Looks like we were having fun for a good reason, with a long history - reading aloud as a means of deaper communication. I found this article/opinion piece in the New York Times recently about the resonance and the meaning only found when words are spoken:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/opinion/16sat4.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

I'm thinking this week is gonna be a busy one, so how about Wednesday, June 3rd and Thursday, June 4th, we do voice posts as a group, this time with our own writing; a favorite piece, either because of the difficulty in getting the voice there where we wanted it, or because it came out, as it sometimes does, like automatic writing; something that makes the words close to us.

How does that sound?

The first anniversary of my blog... what’s the point?

"This is a work of fiction. A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of the truth."

(Quote on the copyright page of the 2009 Random House Trade Paperback Edition of The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.)

The point, to me is and always has been that the truth is fiction, or, fiction is the truth.

From the time I first started reading, once I got past the age of five or so, the 'I can read' sentences time, like See Dick and Jane run. Run Dick run. Run Jane run. Run run run...



I’ve read fiction to go away to find separated places that meant I’d found the truth of life when I found their far countries, and stayed to live down inside their pages and pages. And that's where I found connection.


When Boo Radley shuffled to his feet, light from the living room windows glistened on his forehead. Every move he made was uncertain, as if he were not sure his hands and feet could make proper contact with the things he touched. He coughed his dreadful railing cough, and was so shaken he had to sit down again. His hand searched for his hip pocket, and he pulled out a handkerchief. He coughed into it, then he wiped his forehead.
Having been so accustomed to his absence, I found it incredible that he had been sitting beside me all this time, present. He had not made a sound. ----- from To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee




It seems I've spent most of my lifetime with an inner monologue spinning along inside; speaking and thinking differently than anything I ever did say, or felt permitted to say. Inside the separated places in fiction, I found compatibility; realities often more palpable and more palatable, and more real than whatever current reality I happened to be inhabiting.



It is his extremity that I seemed to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all the truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.
Perhaps! I like to think my summing-up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry - much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory. ----
from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

My guess is, most people have this feeling - hence the need for fictions built as temporary buttresses against the world, or as explanations, or as excuses; perhaps finessed accompinaments - written words, film, songs and the theater. Most of all, for me, the form of the novel, holding words on bound pages in my hands, because that is where I am able to do my own world-building, never mind another's picture, or idea of set scene.




He stood hat in hand over the unmarked earth. This woman who had worked for his family fifty years. She had cared for his mother as a baby and she had worked for his family long before his mother was born and she had known and cared for the wild Grady boys who were his mother's uncles and who had all died so long ago and he stood holding his hat and he called her his abuela and he said goodbye to her in spanish and then turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young or the rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing for their names. -----
from All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

I guess that's why we're all here together, isn't it, and why we all know each other.

We all love stories - fiction, what passes for non-fiction, and the mixture in-between.

So happy anniversary, you all, and thanks for being around.

And thanks, BT, for helping me figure out how to get this set up in the first place, a year ago tomorrow.

Amazon's Wack-Eloquent Reviews

www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3QR3AC2WXWHIT

I actually tried to put a link on here. And I didn't even whine or curse this time, so maybe that gave me good luck. (I'll know when I press publish.)

Anyway, JB told me about a couple of tongue in cheek, funny reviews on Amazon. This one is for Bic pens.

There's another one for T-shirts with wolves on it. The 3 Wolves T-Shirt. Hot hot hot.

It's a hoot:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NZW3IY/ref=s9_sims_gw_s1_p193_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=12F68E2XCFND078ETW1S&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

It might be fun to do this as a group. Converge on an item, showcase our communal splendiferous writing, and have some good grins.

What do you think?

(And hey, apparently, if you order the 3 Wolves T-Shirt, women at Walmart will fawn all over you, baby. I'm just saying.)

P.S. Dammit. I somehow, using voodoo or something, made the first link actually work.
The second link, when I clicked publish and looked so I could see my sudden techno-genius skills a-shining, screwed up. But it's worth a cut and paste, you all.

Or, if you have my code thingie to get on here, please feel free to make this thing a link. Thanks!

Pics tonight...words tomorrow.

Sorry - too sleepy for coherence.

Short version: We had a good and long weekend in Cymru.
Long version: when I'm awake.



Three of our girls, walking to JB's party.


The venue, overlooking the Bristol Channel.


Woods near Castle Combe, in Wiltshire, England, where we stopped on Monday after leaving Wales, on the way to Heathrow.


Our table at The Inn in Castle Combe.


Turns out, the village was the site for the filming of much of Dr. Doolittle (the Rex Harrison version), and many others.


There were lots of reasons why.

I know, I know. Life isn't this perfect. But sometimes, visiting a physically perfect place feels necessary in a very basic way, maybe in order to see for yourself in a large picture way that striving actually works sometimes.

Anyway, more tomorrow.

From the London Book Fair to the Aileen Wuornos Look-Alike Contest Winner From Hell…

Before the week in review starts - Pete has given me an award (thanks!) called I Love Your Blog (for the rules, please go visit Pete's blog)(for the Award - look to the right) - and I am supposed to pass the award on to 7 bloggers - so I looked at Pete's list, and went from there. Well, and I cheated, too.

Here they are:
Chris, FH, freddie, Jan, Janey, Sarah, Sylvia and Whirl. If you already have one of these puppies, feel free to ignore me. If your name is EE, you would've gotten one, but you won't use it.

Now for the post:
(a/k/a: a short version of what happened the rest of the week)

After a nice breakfast at the French place in Mayfair (Jan told me it was called Richoux, so here's the link: http://www.richoux.co.uk/mayfair.htm. We sat at one of the tables in the third picture. I know this is mindblowingly important to you and to this narrative!) we checked out of the hotel and went on over to the London Book Fair.

Note: If you're female and you ever do go to the London Book Fair (LBF from now on), a word to the wise is in order here - DON'T wear a smart black pantsuit. Why? Because 99% of the women aged 19 to 90 in the book fair were wearing black pantsuits - smart, unsmart, fitted, unfitted, buttoned, unbuttoned, but bottom-line: black. I'm just saying, as a marketing effort, or even making sure you looked pretty good, it was a big sop of a failure. Unless you wanna blend in and be forgettable - and actually, that worked out pretty well.

I was massively hung over from the South Bank White Wine Society meeting the day before. I'm talking el draino, baby.

I'd taken aspirin, had boatloads of bottled water, peed the requisite follow-on river, eaten a decent breakfast at Richoux, walked some to clear my head, but even so, when Jan and I arrived at the LBF, apprently I still looked a little lost. Some bright, cheerful kid/pretend-do-you-actually-have-pubic-hair-yet-no-no-I-don't-wanna-see-I'm just-asking-kind-of-boy-man (in a black suit) at the entrance said "You look a little lost" and I smiled at him and said "Actually, honey, I'm a lot hungover", and that was my black-suited entrance to the book fair, headache and all.

I won't go into the full meal deal on the book fair once we got inside (and you know I could, but anyway) I was pretty sure I'd died and gone to heaven. Aisle upon aisle of publishers, large and small.

I kept wanting to genuflect and hold my arms up to a heaven I don't actually believe in, seeing all these publishing names (but hey, in a place like this, worship was my ingrained response) but worrying I'd be arrested or sent to the London version of the asylum kept me on my feet.

HOWEVER, and it's a big however, a bummer soon occurred.

I was planning on taking a gander at the literary agents there - not to pester them, just to check them out and see who was who. But guess what - someone had already figured out people might wanna do just that - or maybe more - infringing on time and being all-around potentially irritating in a place that was supposed to be a trade show, and so they stowed all the agents away upstairs, and you had to set up a meeting to get up to see them at all. I might've done that off the cuff - I chat people up and then write to them later for a living - but I was out of my element, still in happy shock at where I was standing, and, uh, there was the little matter of my mind-muddling hangover. So this part was a bust.

Had I known I couldn't have gone gandering, I wouldn't have bothered going at all, to be honest, but it turned out all right. It's like I always say: Recon is always a good thing, as long as you're not spotted. And, as no one even knew to look for me, or cared to either, I was safe.

So Jan and I walked around London and did other stuff -Chelsea is pretty - came back later in the afternoon, and her amazingly nice Cockney-accented, suited taxi driver friend Jim picked us up and drove us down to Somerset.

We slept most of the way home.

Jan and her husband own a gorgeous B&B, Berachah, tucked into the side of the hill beside the Tor on the outskirts of Glastonbury. I slept in the Green Room, and when I woke up and looked outside the next morning, this was my view...



For perspective purposes, or something, here's a view from the top of the Tor - Jan and Conrad's B&B is down this path and slightly to the right...



Anyway, I'm not gonna do a play-by-play on the rest of the week - because I'm about to go over again on Thursday, but there were a few things I can't pass by without mentioning. For example - this village called Godney, and the pub/inn there:
http://www.godneyvillage.co.uk/sheppey.htm

There was a gnarly olive tree just by where we sat out back, drinking and looking over the River Sheppey...



This is my niece (Jan's daughter) Rachel - an absolutely AMAZING artist, and a darling person to boot, in the shop she and Jan have in Glastonbury.



One day, she babysat us and took us to a pub called the Royal George in a beautiful village called West Coker. The flag kinda surprised me...



I mean, the Stars & Stripes and the Royal George? So I asked the bartender and it turned out they'd hung it a couple of days before because this singer from Texas had been performing there, and he gave them the flag. Interesting gift, but there ya go.

And this was the first place I'd ever noticed food (and I've been in Britain quite a lot over the past eleven or so years) called Bubble & Squeak:



One night I met a friend of Jan's. She came over and we sat in Jan's roof garden in the dark, each with our own warm blankie, talking about South Africa and drinking and wine and friends and men and masturbation. Wish I could tell you I wasn't sloshed, but I'd be lying. It was a wine week.

And Jan and her friend and I met another friend in the George & Pilgrim in Glastonbury, on St. George's Day, and we sat watching drunk guys climbing in the window...



...which of course made it seem super important that we meet back there in the evening, for the festivities. So we did.



They'd given away the table we reserved, so they gave us another one, and about a minute after the four of us sat down (with our wine) this Gargantua of a Brunhilda bitch, and I mean by that - she could've been in a Harry Potter novel, cast as Hagrid's long lost sister - no kidding - came trouncing up to us, leaned over and glared and told us to 'git the 'el off mye tabel'.

Uh, no. Fuck, no, actually. We just looked at her - and I knew, even though I'd only just met Jan's friends over the last day or two, that we would get along just fine.
So she stomped and clomped around and hollered, and I did wonder if she was planning on beating the crap out of us (or trying to), and it was kinda weird, because the place was decked out for a medieval night, and there were medieval singers singing, and it was all supposed to be peace and love and la la la, and here was Gigantica Slutnick, but there ya go. Her little weenie boyfriend (and yes, it DID occur to me that there was no way in hell that guy could mount her without a ladder), came over and apologized later. He looked like he was used to doing a one-man cleanup committee apology-a-thon in her wide wake. Poor guy.

Yeah. You're right. I enjoyed the whole thing. I love it when weird shit happens. My only criteria is - I have to live through it - and as you can see since I'm writing this, so far, so good.

Anyway, lots more good stuff happened, just a rolling of days into nights, a warm relaxing pause, and then it was Saturday and time to go.

I've flown a lot - with and without friends and family - and this time, of course, I was alone, and gonna cherish it, these last hours to close up shop on my singular and good week.

And it worked for about 15 minutes after boarding. Then SHE came. I swear to you this chick looked like Aileen Wuornos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aileen_Wuornos.

I mean so much so that I looked again. And again. And I have to tell you, after hearing about all the horrible things that happened to this woman as she grew up and after, I've always felt so sorry about her and her life, so sick about it, thinking, hell, what would almost anyone have done in her shoes?, so I was predisposed to try and be nice, even though this was certainly not said person. But she dressed like an aging hooker, and she was rude and abrupt and her hair was dirty and uncombed, and she was obviously on something, so...

So she drank and drank - the little bottles - and she tossed and turned and stared at me, so I stared at her - and she went through rum, then vodka, then went back to the back and came back with more - and I walked back and told the attendants I was actually a little worried about being seated next to her. They said they'd watch her.

Then, I got pissed. I was pissed that she was the person putting the period on my goddamned last day of freedom for a while, and I was pissed that she was pissed. And that's when she was in real trouble.

I waited for her to flounce her ass around once more; she accomodated. She popped her elbow, again, over on my side of the seat.

Move.

That's all I said. No yelling, no ferocity in voice. I just said it. She looked over at me, about to pop off at the mouth. I just looked at her. She moved.

And I didn't have another problem.

So...that was my week. I promise I won't tell you all about the next one.

But if you guys have one to tell, have at it!