Gardening in August

 

Gardening in August means two things: Weeding and Keeping Plants healthy and alive. I lost some plants, which is typical. But I did manage to save at least half the coneflowers I planted. This is from a flat of them, which means it was a tiny 3 inch plant. There are actually three plants in this photo but one can't see them well. I focused on the lone bloom among them and one that is not faded by August air and heat. I was so impressed with the coneflowers' outcomes that next year, I'll be planting double what I did this year. These reseed easily, are hardy, and multiply over time. A great perennial.

I always try to highlight a flower that failed miserably and that was the daisy. Not the original Shasta but a sister plant. All of them died before July was over. I will only be buying  the original Shasta next year, probably online because they are difficult to find locally. Even the Shastas I already had were affected by the July heat this year. 

Of course, it was unseasonably hot. I spent $70 in water one month trying to keep all these flowers alive. My water bill is usually $10-17 a month even in the summer, so one can only imagined how many plants I invested in this year and how hot it was.

There are two things in life that can change your mood that are nonpharmaceutical in nature. Gardening and Music. I live by both.

All and all, Gardening 2022 has been a success, mostly due to hard work, my willingness to do daily labor in the dirt, and lots of tender love for these plants. My mental health has definitely benefited.

The End of August

Hey, I am always punch drunk at the end of August, like frigging out of my mind. There are several reasons for this, the first being I just went through summer in Mississippi, with the A/C no lower than 79 Degrees, and I've been working day and night to keep my perennials alive, along with all the soon to die annuals that I planted for color. But that's not the only reason, I start working on August 1 each year, because school starts August 4 in these parts. It's insane. A ritual. I don't even have to. When I was a young girl, we didn't start to school until after Labor Day. And even if the schools started early, my mother was still vacationing somewhere, with all her children in tow, including me, so I ended up starting school late. Speaking of Mother, she died on a hot August day, which was sure as hell inconvenient for me, in fact this date, the 27th, in 2009, just several weeks shy of her 90th birthday. The week prior, she had been in the emergency room, counting on her fingers, trying to explain to the doctor that she really wanted to make 90 and could he help her do that. He said he would try and we were all just standing there, me, my sister, my son, my daughter-in-law, smiling, because that was so mother. She was sure as hell going out fighting and believe me she did. I never like to think of that day, really, but it was August and well, I never forget any August, and I am just about out of my head thinking of what I need to do before the month ends, because August always means I have stuff to do, like when I was young and a bit more sane, I had to go with Mother and the kids to buy school clothes, and shoes, you don't want to hear that story since they all wore some crazy width that meant driving to the most expensive shoe store in town, then we usually hit J.C. Penneys or similar to buy jeans and shirts. It was another ritual. Hours and hours of  the kids trying on shoes and jeans until I wanted to pull my hair out. When I was writing romance full time one summer, a guy called me up and said I had missed a speaking engagement for some writer's group in Memphis and wanted to know what happened. I thought he must be crazier than me. I said "no I had not" because I never commit to anything in August and I knew that like I knew I was breathing. I don't. Because I was probably baking or cleaning house or saving plants or buying shoes and jeans for the boys, all with my mother in tow. Mother was the Master Gardener, that woman that everyone called to come pinch their petunias and look at their roses. I haven't pinched a petunia right since she left this place. I miss my mother. She was the better reader, the better cook, the better gardener, the better traveller, the better storyteller. She was fierce. I cried the day she died, but I didn't cry a single drop the day we buried her. She had experienced an incredible but very hard life and she was just worn out. Instead, I read a poem written by Emily Dickinson and smiled. I always smile when I think of my mother, even in August.

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

The Dance in Only Lover Left Alive

If you have followed me anywhere on social media, I often mention Eve from Only Lovers Left Alive and I have a quote from her on the blog header. Eve and I are very similar in personality. And no I am not a vampire. We are both bookworms and dancers. We both enjoy botany and science. We both love life. I rewatched Only Lovers Left Alive last night because I wanted to look at the film closer. I really have not had the time to do that.  And since I was binging some TV for the aesthetics and the novel, I thought I really need to get a closer look at the film. What makes these two vampires stick together besides vampirism? They are really opposites in many ways. I had a brief discussion with my sister about it this afternoon, and we were mulling over what the film was really about besides addiction, because addiction is there. I need to think about it. I had already asked the question why do vampires read? And I got the usual answers. I do know this. There is a sense of wonder about Eve and her love for life.  I relate to how attentive she is to the world outside herself. I think she reads because of that characteristic. It's just not curiosity. It's a kind of experience for her. It's a way of knowing the other, but also the world she can no longer really belong to. I'll be back with occasional comments on the film in September and October when I celebrate all things Gothic and Halloweenish. I'm doing a Sleepy Hollow themed front yard. For right now, I recommend turning on some music and dancing.

Edited: "I did have a quote. It may come back. Laughing."

The Walkabouts - The Light Will Stay On

Smiling this morning. Writing...

David Jauss on Present Tense in Contemporary Fiction.

 

The second question I have to now ask myself is a nagging one at best. It is the subject of present tense in contemporary fiction, which also goes along with the question of first person or third person, too. It's as if writers no longer have a choice on how to construct and shape their fiction, that we are now limited to first person and present tense, along with overly stylistic prose. I have probably read and analyzed this subject to death in the last five years. And yes, I wrote drafts in different tenses, then revised them, some half way through just to see how the story read and felt to me. Now I have to choose. How strange and small the world feels when I realized that David Jauss, someone I respect, had written this book and devoted a full chapter to the present tense. It's also funny to add that on Twitter the other day, author Phillip Pullman tweeted:

I don't care how many people enjoy it, fiction in the present tense is an ABDICATION OF NARRATIVE RESPONSIBILITY. I resent having to re-calibrate my entire attitude to time whenever I open a novel in the present tense. Away with them!

I just started laughing. The responses was just as funny, most of them defending present tense. Laughing. But still ponderous that so many books are, yes, written in present tense. I once attended a workshop years and years ago that was focused on viewpoint by David Jauss. He says all of this is about the "anxiety of influence" which I might add I first heard from Harold Bloom. It is really about psychology and since I have been studying psychology for a few years now, I can honestly say it's about how people feel about the past, and yes it's worse than anything William Faulkner could have said. Because these contemporary writers just want to erase the past, just as they feel they are erasing people and so forth. The sad thing, it's not true, even if you feel it philosophically or socially or politically, or any of that. Jauss and I agree that we don't have to look to literature to see this trendy and fashionable attitude toward Time and the Past. Just start talking about History. I am going to start laughing again.

The thing about fashion is it never really last, trends comes and go, and being fashionable is sometimes not wise. And one day, a bunch of new writers will come along, and their "anxiety of influence" will shape fiction in other ways.

And so I have to choose. Oh, well. I will be glad to have this behind me.

Aesthetics

 

Today, I have to answer two questions before I can move on with work. I hope the questions do not linger, and if so, no longer than a week at most. One is aesthetics, which sometimes is so great, it changes the "place" and "spaces" of the story. So I am watching Carnival Row. And then some other shows. I've already read several novels, which present aesthetics I like. I've written two drafts in different places. But now I can write no longer. A lot of this is about marketing. A lot of this is how I feel I want to move forward afterwards. A lot of this is my personality and doubt. I own it. All.

A question answered.

 Yes, one could consider my current work Gothic. Let's see, something haunted, witches of a kind, mysterious strangers or people, the grotesque, ghosts of a kind, a curse, romance, Death, decay, madness, drug addiction, the weight of families and history, atmosphere, power dynamics, violence, the supernatural. Subversion though. What?- no fairies! Well, I didn't really say that. A story in progress needs some privacy.

What I am reading this weekend.

 

Richard Holmes is one of my favorite writers, all since I first read his Footsteps, about his journey with the Romantics. Later I read his Shelley, The Pursuit, and I was in love. Holmes became an auto buy. When I read The Age of Wonder, a hundred times, I wept. And now I am reading this book, which is late coming. I bought it for my sister in 2013 as a Christmas present. And well, that was the year my life turned into the whirlwind of circumstances I could not master. Now I am catching up all the books I really wanted to read at that time and never purchased. I have bought them all, though this one was a gift from a sister. I am loved.

There is a feeling about life that I choose now.

It knows no shame.

Trelawny was such a Romantic.

“The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce Shelley to grey ashes. The only portions not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained.”

                           Edward Trelawny, August 16, 1822

August 16, Every Year.

"My fingers sting Where I feel your fingers have been Ghostly fingers Moving my limbs Oh God, I miss you..."

P. J. Harvey

Grinderman/U.N.K.L.E - Hyper Worm Tamer

"A mischievous dedication of love for a female other, who has totally hypnotised the male counterpart who feels inferior to her." Some guy on the Internet (lol)

This has been Molko's goal for many years now.

So I haven't given up But all my choices, my good luck Appear to go and get me stuck In an open prison Now I am tryin' to break free Be in a state of empathy Find the true and inner me Eradicate the schism  

                         —  Brian Molko

                   

Stay Real, Stay Free

Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes I loved you dearly

...[but] if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

Writing is how I decide, how I choose, how I debate.

“Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways. Let’s not forget that writing is convenient. It requires the simplest tools. A young writer sees that with words and sentences on a piece of paper that costs less than a penny he can place himself more clearly in the world. Words on a page, that’s all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.”

                                                               —  Don DeLillo

Books have been my constant companion since age four.

“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.”

— Eudora Welty

THIS.

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all”
                              ― André Breton

Dave Gahan is one of the most powerful frontmen in music.

 This is also a clear representation of Romanticism.

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust (With Lyrics)

Originaly posted in March, 2021, but that video is now private and not available and since this is one of my favorite songs of all time, I had to replace it.

Joey playing a gig.

 July 30, 2022

photo credit: Bryan Huff