Fall (down) again.

 

Watercolor leaf, Renilde De Peuter.

Dear Today,

A few days into Fall, now, and here is that old feeling.  The summer this year was hot, relentless, bleak (although everything is relative, and no summer yet has been as bleak as the smoky-hot summer of 2021).  Fall makes me see that my Romantic proclivities are partly, maybe increasingly, Melancholic.  

The years I spent in graduate study on the Palouse painting and reading difficult post-modern texts could have been subtitled: Discourses on Melancholia, The Sublime, and The Void.  Those were the things to grapple with, vis a vis meaning in art and existence in general.  It isn't really important now, except as a signpost of where I found that to recall is to experience melancholia, and Fall, ooh Fall was made for melancholy!  It is delicious, actually, if you can keep in mind that sadness is sometimes a choice.

So, the sun lessens, the days slow down, growing things are disintegrating, with only a few stubborn ones continuing to bloom; the longer darkness gives us time to reflect, and boom!  You have your melancholy!  Add a cherry and whipped cream, while it is still hot, because soon it will be too cold for even these cold and benumbing thoughts, and you will have to focus on the turn, the solstice and the starting up of the signs of spring.  It happens very fast here; it has barely become that lovely complicated gray tan, and then boom! again, you have green fuddling up the subtle winter colors. But that is later, for now, baby, let me follow you down into the sweet melancholy of fall and the gorgeous autumn leaves.

Skate Day 2300 -Autumnal Equinox

 

Dear People,

Here we are again, where we meet every one hundred days and I try to encourage/exhort you to roller skate!  It's the first day of Fall, too, and isn't that an auspicious day to begin your own daily roller skating thing?

I know, I know, you have your reasons, but let's begin by throwing out all the big excuses!  Just for one day, one hour, one minute, you are not afraid of falling, you are not afraid of looking silly, and you are not 'too busy.'  Oh, and you don't have any place to skate, well, that's not valid today either.  You can use anything flat and nearby: a garage, a street, a tennis court, a basketball court, a living room.  I, as I have most days this last year, will be skating in my house- is it big enough?  No, not really, but any skating is better than no skating.

Now that the place and the objections are overcome, what do we do next?  How about watching this short clip?  This kind of small group thing is often called shuffle skating, and it is kind of the pinnacle of what I aspire to- early on when I got my adult pair of roller skates (16 years ago or so now) we had a rink in town that was open every weekend for three-quarters of the year, and one day a group of these kind of skaters came in and left in their wake total awe and admiration.  They were 5 people skating as one- impossibly, magically- to this great song, your song for today, which, with any luck at all, you will listen to while you skate around your small or large, in or out door, glassy smooth or asphalted bumpy, space!

PS  Here's a sweet new spot to skate- it just opened!  Fresh pavement!  And, if you feel nostalgic, try this little memory, which includes a clip from Charlie's Angels with a roller skating chase scene.

guest list

 

Dear Celebrants,

It's weird, but for the first time, the Naked Ladies were late for my birthday!  They are so late, that I had given them up for lost.  I have been out under the window looking, prodding at their swollen bulbs, for weeks!  Nothing.  Last week, I stopped bothering to look- and I know you know where this is going- and today, I looked at them quite by accident, the way you might glance at an unwatched pot, and, there were the buds!  They bloomed at my Mother's a few weeks ago, right on time, and along the road at the place where there used to be a house, and in ditches, yards, and gardens for 300 miles, but the ones here, the ones I call 'mine' were late; I mean, they are late.  We will have a cake anyway, I think, to celebrate their arrival!  This cake, which I call Valerie's Vanilla Cake, because it is based on Valerie Gordon's recipe from her fine cookbook Sweet.

Valerie's Vanilla Cake

7.5 ounces of butter (if you use salted, and you can, don't add the salt in the recipe)

1 cup of granulated sugar

1 tablespoon of golden syrup (or light corn syrup, or honey, or just skip it anyway, this isn't rocket fuel!) 2 tablespoons vanilla extract (or the fabulous vanilla paste)

Beat it all up to fluffy.

2 tablespoons sour cream (or crème fraîche*, or heavy cream, or yogurt)

3 whole eggs

1/3 teaspoon salt (or not, see butter above)

Whisk the eggs and cream together, in a separate bowl.

1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/3 teaspoon baking powder

Mix that up a bit, in a separate bowl, and then add the dry ingredients and the eggy mix to the fluffy butter/sugar in three or four alternating batches.  Once it is combined, smooth it down into a 9 inch diameter, 2 inch deep greased and floured pan.  Bake it for 28 to 35 minutes, at 350, rotating it halfway through the baking.  Let it cool in the pan, then unmold the cake and frost it, or eat it.  

I put a cream cheese icing on this one; and you can too, by beating up some butter and cream cheese with confectioner's sugar and adding vanilla.  I use a lot of vanilla, the lovely paste kind, about a tablespoon, and I am not at all measuring in my proportions of the rest, but, say 3 ounces of cream cheese, and 2 or 3 of butter, a pinch of salt, and then maybe 2 to 3 cups of confectioner's sugar?  Add the sugar in 1/2 cup increments, and stop when you think it tastes right.    

* Make your own, if you like: a video, a written recipe.

9/13 through 9/16

 

My Black Sedan

 

Notebook Page: Addendum- a thing added or to be added, ca. 1968.  Eva Hesse.

Dear People,

If you are 'my people' you will know exactly what I mean, and maybe you don't even need to read this letter, but, if you are anyone else, you will want to hop into my Black Sedan, and let me tell you about the things I have been reading.  It is all memoir and auto fiction for me at this location in the mapping of my present via a fitful and clumsy reviewing of my past (revisionist history?).  Okay, you can call it the same old existential crisis, but I think maybe it is just living.  In any case, I am waiting for the leaves to fall, like I do, and I am reading all these great women writing their experience of living.  The thing that is so wonderful is that it feels like home; like a mirror; like this mirror.  

Maybe all we can ever have is reflections, but these images feel close to what I think could be true.  Jenny Erpenbeck says "...we want to write because we find it hard to make ourselves understood.  Because we find that things fall by the wayside when we speak."  Sing it, sister!  My wayside is littered with the things I meant to say and the questions I wanted to ask.  Like this one:  What, then, do I do instead of trying to get people to like me?  Or this one;  Why did you keep on giving me all that false hope? 

Claire Dederer writes that you find yourself "...flying the flag of idleness and melancholy.  You find yourself not just wanting to do nothing but somehow needing to do nothing.  Maybe a woman's version of a midlife crisis involves stopping doing stuff?"  And haven't we said things that amount to this to each other nearly every time we meet?  Déjà vu!*

Which, because I am reading also Biography of X, brings me to the notion of conviction in making art.  I have often found intention to matter, to be required for making art, but I am ready to let conviction be the one that got away.  I wish someone had told me it was fine to let ambivalence be my muse, but, let's not cry over that spilled milk, let us instead assert that ambivalence is just the ticket for art making, and even for living.  My years of desperately seeking conviction should not be your story; maybe you will want to tell a story that goes like this:

One fine Spring day I set out to make my way in the world, and I met many strange and wonderful beings along the way, and I hoped they would like me, but I also knew it was okay if they didn't.  I could give them things, little trinkets I found, an acorn cap, or a stone, and it was only just that: a giving that neither made or unmade me; their acquisition was not my diminishment.  The little things they might give me, magic passwords and permissions, well I was free to use them as long as I liked, but also free to discard them if they began to feel confining.  The continuing exchange of ideas and words and deeds was the main thing, the quest was just sort of there so if any dolts should ask you what you were doing, you could answer that you were seeking the fair princess imprisoned in her turret.

  

*  Olivia Rodrigo is another of the real, non-animated Disney Princesses, like Annette Funicello, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Demi Levato, Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, etc.  

Notes:  Erpenbeck, Jenny.  Not a Novel- A Memoir in Pieces, New Directions, New York, page 143.                    Dederer, Claire, Love and Trouble- A Midlife Reckoning, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 9. 

 

Ground Plane XIX

 

a whole lot of medicine

 

Three Sheep, Henri Moore, 1972.

Dear People,

Your song for today.  While we are listening, let's pretend we are somebody else.  I'll go first:  I am a shepherdess, camped in the high mountains, but soon it will be time for me and my flock to head to the foothills.  I have a little caravan I live in; there is room only for slow things; a guitar, pens and paper, knitting needles, some watercolor paints.  I have been writing to you all summer, trying to tell you about the deep quiet in the darkest part of the night; how it is sometimes broken by a disturbance in the flock.  When I get down to the foothills in a few more weeks, there will be people to talk with and spend time with, and I wonder, will I remember how to speak in the language I haven't used since May?  What will I say when they ask 'what have you been doing?'

on outdoor sofas

                              







Dear Furnished,

The couch on the porch is gone now.  How did it come to be on the porch, I would ask myself-  it is a marker, I believe, of white trashdom.  It was one of only two sofas we had growing up.  The first place I remember, a house; had two sofas.  One was a dark blue, nearly a night blue, with orange and other, less indistinct colors of flowers on it.  I think there was a red, a purple.  It had a flounce, a ruffle at the bottom.  The other couch was a bamboo armed thing, with a chair that matched, in a kind of bumpy green striped upholstery.  Celery green, a pale gold, dun, and off white narrow stripes.  I remember both of these fabrics, the feel, the look, with an intense fondness, even though the stripe was rather scratchy in a polyester way, and the floral was a canvasy twill that you couldn't call soft, either.  I think maybe it was the closeness I am fond of.  I could lie face down on these fabrics, I could turn and face the back cushion, I could pull my legs up under me on these fabrics.  There was a snugness.  Also, it was a place to be near other beings.  A communal coziness, then.

There was a couch on my best friend's porch when I was growing up; it was astoundingly long, with orange and ochre flowers on cream; bordering on chintz in its exuberance.  We would sleep there, on that couch, on hot nights.  

I do not know what became of the dark blue floral, but the bamboo moved with us to the house I spent most of my childhood in, and when my parents moved to a bigger, newer, closer to town place with horrible carpet, wallpaper, and generally soulless spaces (a downsizing of charm, even as it upsized radically in every other way), the old sofa was given to me, because the new house's rooms demanded new, larger things.*  

I had already been given an old couch, a kind of overly ornate carved oak thing from maybe 1910, that my Mom acquired in a lovely wine colored velvet, which she re-upholstered in carmine fabric with green and blue dashes running through it diagonally.  After 6 or 7 years of that davenport, I gave it to a friend of my Mom's, and I bought a walnut stained old thing circa 1960.  It came with gold-green fabric that cat claws snagged on sight.  I had it re-covered in boat vinyl; a warm gray fake ostrich.  It was an unusual kind of sectional: two identical halves; one with a right hand arm and the other with a left, two seats in each half.  I liked to put our fuchsia painted coffee table into the corner position.  Which is why, when I was given the bamboo couch, the only place it could go was the porch.  Which was fine, because all we had for porch furniture was some collapsing wicker chairs, and a wooden rocker whose seat was giving way.

A handful of years ago, we put a respectable piece of 'outdoor furniture' on the porch where the outdoor couch had been; a beige sort of futon thing in sturdy fade-proof outdoor upholstery: if I didn't know it wasn't, I would call it a couch.  It is bland, and purpose made for being on porches, and the stray cat sits on it when we aren't looking.

 *I think maybe I still hate that big house for being so needy.

September

 

Dear Ones,

Your song for today is Silver Dagger  (also known as Katie Dear, Awake, Ye Drowsy Sleepers, etc.)!  From every link, a heart doth dangle.

Katie Dear #1

O! Molly Dear Go Ask Your Mother

Awake Ye Drowsy Sleepers

Who Is at My Window Weeping

Little Satchel

Oh Katy Dear

Silver Dagger (2)

Who's That Knocking

Awake, Awake You Drowsy Sleepers

Silver Dagger (3)

Silver Dagger (4)