Category: Writing

Alma Lolloon: 5th Installment of Work in Progress – Epigraphs

The novel “Alma Lolloon” opens with two epigraphs, both of which serve the ordinary purpose of the epigraph but are also part of the fiction being created. In each, the original is given, followed by an “interpretive translation” by the narrator of “Alma Lolloon,” who is Alma Lolloon:

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in marriage…
But yet I praye to al this compaignye,
If that I speke after my fantasye,
As taketh not agrief of that I seye,
For myn entente nys but for to pleye.

from Chaucer’s The Prologe
of the Wyves Tale of Bathe

What atrocity this insult of experience
As if somehow right for me and all
Wode talk woe of the marriage camp.
But complain not in present company,
For all tales told in pitiful woe
Tell not a whole story
If want is not to please.

from interpretive translation of Chaucer,
by Alma Lolloon, 1966

Die Erste Elegie

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nähme einer mich plötzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.

from Duineser Elegien by Rainer Maria Rilke

The First Elegy

Who, if I cracked my little mouth, would listen to me in the din of rules of angels? And quickly so near his heart home of pounding hammers, sparkling nails, and gargantuan waves, I would fade in the muscle of his gaze, or in the back seat of his dark ride.

from Duino Elegies, interpretive translation of Rilke,
by Alma Lolloon, 1996.

I’m still working on editing and proofing and design.

November 12, 2017
Alma Lolloon: 4th Installment of Work in Progress

Awaiting new hardcopy to proof. Meantime, here is another installment of the forthcoming novel, Alma Lolloon. (Alma has told her knitting group she is writing a book. The book is to be about her five husbands, and the knitters agree to hear Alma reading from her book in installments at their Saturday knitting sits.)

Well, Hattie, I said, but I was talking to all of them again, of all genres, I like fiction most. What a gas! I like novels for their mystery, the dialogue, the atmosphere, the unfolding of the story, like opening a table cloth and when you get it spread out all across the table there’s a wonderful pattern you had not expected to see. There’s that moment when preparing dinner, not sure how it’s going to come out, and it’s time to set the table, and the cloth is unfurled, and the table and the light in the room is clean and soft and hopeful. This is picking up a book. And around the table sit a dozen characters you don’t recognize chatting away, one prim, another slurping, one passing notes under the table, a couple playing footsie no doubt. I like books you don’t have to necessarily understand to enjoy or comprehend. And it doesn’t bother me when writers split your attention. I like a style that breaks or belies or betrays convention, just wants of some fixed eyeballs you want to push rolling. I like when I see something my eye did not expect to see. I like other kinds of reading as well, books on music and the mind, children’s books, comic books, graphic novels. I like talking about things I like more than talking about things I don’t like. I liked each of my five husbands, each in his own way. What did you expect me to say, I loved them? Please. What is love? Perhaps that will be my argument, Hattie.

Speaking of love, Curly said, what about these raspberry scones Starky has buttered up for us?

Love, love, love! Rufa declared.

I’m taking a couple home for Angel.

I come from a long line of circuit riders that ends in the dust bowl years, and we rode as hillbillies and Okies, carnies or enlisted men and women, or kept to the road as musicians and tinkers. My dad was a handyman, a plumber and carpenter and electrician and mechanic, and a sign painter and had a talent with brush painting and wound up out west where he got on with the studios painting backdrops for majestic movie scenes, a kind of scenic artist. He also did sketch portraits. He often spent Sunday afternoons down near the beach on the walkway where he’d set up an easel and for a quarter or fifty cents or a buck would draw character portraits for passing tourists. And of course he was a drunkard and left us early on, came back, and left us again. My mother was one of those wives who seemed like she was just along for the ride while she was really the differential gear. She knew how to do all kinds of things. She could cook, sew, knit, quilt, garden, herbal doctor and nurse, dance, sing, play guitar and piano, work carpentry and plumbing and tinker with cars. I suppose I have kinfolk spread like dandelions and poppies across the countryside and up and down city streets and out in the suburbs and up in the mountains and all around the coastlines, but I don’t know them, or I’m not close to any of them, and I was an only child, my folks are long gone, and I’m pretty much on my own these days but for the three kids left me by my first three husbands, one each, dandelions, all of us. I have grandchildren, and Freddy has a daughter, Marylu, who has a toddler, Molly, and they live nearby and sometimes come over for tea or for me to babysit for a spell and we walk to the park and play in the sun. Freddy was my first child, Mary and Gabriel’s son, my roommate and the boy she met and hooked up with my failed college year.

But so you had five husbands, Annie said, what of it? Life with one husband might make an even more gruesome tale.

She didn’t say gruesome, did she? Curly said.

A life with no husband the one I might have wished for to write about, Rufa said, and we all looked at Hattie.

Oh, sorry, Hattie.

And not for the first time we saw Hattie nonplussed by something Rufa said seemed packed full of meaning but no way out.

~~~

November 4, 2017
Fall Comics

Dodgers

Yankees

patio tomato

late summer

TV’s

heartburn potus

pumpkin patch

the apartment

hooked up

Swiss Army guitar

meteor shower

pizza night

Astro turf

November 3, 2017
Alma Lolloon: 3rd Installment of Work in Progress

I’m still proofing and editing my new novel, Alma Lolloon. I hope to have it out by December. Meantime, I’m posting installments Saturdays here on the blog. Here is the third installment.

(Alma has told her knitting group she is writing a book. The book is to be about her five husbands, and the knitters agree to hear Alma reading from her book in installments at their Saturday knitting sits.)

3rd Installment of Alma Lolloon:

I simply would like to have someone to talk to, someone who actually listens to me. Is that too much to ask? So even though I don’t know you, and you might not be listening anyway, I’m talking to you, and I’m going to share everything. That’s not a trigger warning. Simply a goal. You might safely skip parts, your attention wandering. I’ve already skipped a few beginnings. But I want you to get your money’s worth. Even if you’re reading on-line for free or something, or you picked up this abused paperback copy you’re holding in the neighborhood library box. Go on, take it, read it on the bus. It takes time to read, and most of us value time. The thing is to sit down and relax. Breathe. Smell the paper and the ink, or whatever it is they print words on and with these days. Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea, a glass of wine, or pop a can of beer, or pour a juice or a clean clear glass of fresh water. Feel my hands kneading your shoulders. You carry tension there. I know. Let it go. Drop the shoulders. I know you have your own story. Let that go, too, for now.

We must have ritual. Ritual is what stops the crazy traffic on the bridge so the tall lovely ship can slip quietly by. Make some space in your day for reading as a kind of ritual. Nothing serious, of course, on the contrary, just a few quiet moments to yourself, for some peace and silence, to get away from your scares for a few moments, those voices in your head that won’t shut the hell up, or to find yourself, or to forget yourself, or to remember something you maybe should have never forgotten and is such a joy to find again. I’m well aware you could be reading something else, something more dramatic, sexy, literary, trashy, or some delightful ichor with goor and geer from some silly battle zone somewhere, or some soapy sap television shows are often stuck together with, if that’s what you like. Sure, and you’ll find soap here. I’ve eaten plenty of soap in my lifetime. My mouth is clean. Or non-fiction, some people prefer because it’s supposedly true. Nothing like getting one’s facts straight. We all need ritual, but we should not consider ritual what is merely compulsive.

October 28, 2017
Plein-air on Mt Tabor

Late summer in the Northwest finished hot and dry, smoke and ash drifting from the wildfires drizzling down onto our outdoor evening tête-à-têtes in the city. The Gorge fire was the closest to us. Ash blew with the east winds and if windows were left open you awoke with ash on the sills and furniture and floor. Down south one of my brothers and his family were safe but dramatically affected by the wine country fires. Now in Portland we’ve had a few days of sweeping rains, and suddenly flood alerts replace air quality alerts, but today is a lovely fall day, and I took a walk through Mt Tabor Park.

I wanted to walk in the sun, so in the afternoon I climbed over to the road above Reservoir Number 5, around its south end, to the flat road up above Reservoir Number 6. I stopped to take a picture overlooking the water, across the Hawthorne neighborhoods to the city and West Hills beyond. Now walking north, I noticed an artist standing at an easel, working.

I took a few pics of him working and got his permission to post them to my blog. The artist is Jonathan Luczycki, who paints in the plein-air style, which means he paints outdoors and tries to catch the light and colors, shadows and shapes, of a particular moment, before that exact image changes and is lost forever. I thought to myself, “This guy is a poet who paints.” Jonathan explained the plein-air artist must work quickly before the moving lights and colors change. It strikes me as a very physical kind of painting. Because of the speed with which they must work, the plein-air artist canvas is often smaller in size.

Painting from a photograph will not produce the same effects the plein-air artist achieves. For one thing, a camera rarely captures true color (indeed, what even is “true-color,” when we all see things so differently). More importantly, the camera is too quick, works too fast, freezes the image. The plein-air work breathes, catches subtle changes, of a human view.

I talked with Jonathan for just a few minutes, and he continued to work as we talked. But he was personable, friendly, outgoing. That is the beauty of working outdoors. I promised myself I will get back to writing some sidewalk cafe poems, some plein-air poems.

October 24, 2017
Alma Lolloon – Work in Progress

Continuing from last Saturday’s installment, from chapter one of my work in progress titled “Alma Lolloon,” the first chapter titled “Casting On.” The book is finished, but I’m still proofing and editing. I hope to have it out in December. Meantime, I plan to continue putting up excerpts here on Saturdays:

from chapter one of the novel “Alma Lolloon”:

My first marriage was annulled within a couple of months. I never saw Mary or Gabriel again. We all signed complex legal documents sealing the moment. My second marriage was to a draftee. Joe wasn’t so much love or even a decision or a choice. But he adored Freddy and was a fun guy who made Freddy and me laugh and when we were together my bad thoughts vanished. Joe was a high school dropout, but he had a car, a 1953 Chevy, two toned, cream over turquoise blue. Joe walked off to boot camp, marched home and we married, and off he flew to Vietnam where he was fried up in napalm, his squad a straw basket of squids. Leaving me pregnant with Sally and a fragment of a family. My third husband drowned in a fishing accident, the sun that hot August day scalding, not a single blade of shade, the sand boiling, not a breath of breeze, and the rocks seething with seaweed and foam, Murphy’s body trapped in the eddies below the cliff, finally coming to rest atop a barnacled rock perch, the waves running on and on the tide coming in they couldn’t reach him and the water lifted him up and floated his body flotsam out to sea. My fourth husband took his own life. How could so many neurotic demons occupy one man’s mind? His head was an ant farm, ants like tiny cars digging tunnels through the clay. Wags was possessed by his corporate gig and rig and regalia and risk. He stuck a hose in the tail pipe in the garage, the other end through a wind wing, the car windows and doors all shut up, and Wags turned fifty shades of bluefish-purple. My fifth husband was shot and killed by a private eye, who mistook him for a wise guy at a poker game, shot him coming out of an outhouse between hands. Well, Jack was a bit of a joker, but not the kind the dick was thinking. Jack was a wild card.

Yes, and I told the knitting ladies I am writing a book, and they laughed. Rufa called to ask why I missed Saturday knitting group three weeks in a row and did I need a noise session. I told her I was writing a book. I went down to Lards Coffee to sit with them again, and they asked what I was up to, and I told them I was writing a book, and they all laughed. Why did they laugh? I’m not sure. Maybe they think I don’t have a story or a voice to tell it with. Or maybe they think no one reads books anymore, at least not one written by an old woman who has never traveled much, never finished college, never finished a marriage, a career part time waitress. But I’ve read a few books over the years, some over and over, the ones I really like.

But just because you can climb into a dress and maybe even look good in it, doesn’t mean you have any idea how to cut and sew a pattern together, Hattie said.

Hattie’s in a book club, Rufa said, so she reads books, presumably. I don’t recall her ever talking much in knitting group about the books her club reads. Do you think the rest of us can’t read, then, Hattie?

Who’s to say who should talk and who should keep quiet? Who should try their hand at a book or grow flowers, swing a bat, or go after the dogs and beer? Curly said.

Why are you writing this book? Hattie said. Do you not realize how difficult it is to publish anything these days? There’s a reading crisis in this country, newspapers disappearing, book shops closing up, kids born with a cell phone stitched into their palm, though there’s still a chance of some success with a children’s book, they say. So what are you writing, Alma, your memoir with all these husbands of yours? But I still don’t understand why. What do you get out of writing? Isn’t writing rather boring, actually, sitting, sitting, sitting? Oh, shit, I dropped a stitch. I never imagined you one with the imagination for it, anyway. So what is it? Memoir? Or some science fiction horror fantasy about these five husbands you’ve been through? And at that they all had another good laugh.

But why don’t you read it to us, Rufa said, on the installment plan? Saturday mornings with Alma.

Hattie laughed barkedly at that. Annie and Curly didn’t seem to get it.

October 21, 2017
Alma Lolloon – Work in Progress

“Alma Lolloon” is the title of my next novel, which is in the final proofreading and editing stages. I’m using the same publishing platform (CreateSpace) as I used for “Penina’s Letters” and “Coconut Oil,” but I’ve decided to roll chapter one onto the Toads blog to introduce the new work and to spark interest. I hope to have completed hard copies ready in December. Meantime, I’ll be posting excerpts here on the blog.

From Chapter One of the novel “Alma Lolloon”: Casting On

“Words is just sounds,” I heard Annie was saying, coming back from the lanterloo to rejoin them on the stuffed couches in the picture window at Lard’s Coffee they were Saturday morning, the knitting ladies.

“Words are noise,” Rufa nodded.

“Ah, fiddlesticks, I left my notebook in the loo,” and when I came back again they hushed like people do when they’ve been talking about you and suddenly you appear in their midst and there’s that pregnant pause.

“So you’re writing a book, then, are you, Alma,” Annie breaks the water of that wait and you could feel the rupture spill and spread across the hardwood floor.

“How long does one give labor to a book before quitting?” Hattie said with her know better than you ever will crooked smile.

“But what do you possibly have to fill a book with, Alma?” Rufa said.

“But I married five times, didn’t I, one selfish boy and four hapless men? Surely that ought to hold enough to fill a few chapters.”

“Ah, but what is good, what is marriage, what is a boy or a man? There must be some argument,” said Hattie.

“And what, pray leave me, is a wife?” Hattie went on, as is her wont, questioning everything but leaving no time for an answer before moving on to another question. Times she could be such the rhetorical bitch, and always jumping to the supposed hidden meaning of something when you hadn’t even discussed what was actually happening yet. But that Hattie was the book club hostess. The knitting Hattie was rarely so contrary. But the idea of my doing a book seems stuck in her professorial craw and she’s having trouble swallowing it.

“And I never divorced a one of my hopeless helpmates, wouldn’t you like to know?” I said, amplifying my voice a bit to hold the floor while I got something all out.

October 14, 2017
One Page Guitar Scales and Chords

There are of course already a near infinite number of guitar fretboard studies available, and scads of 5,000 Guitar Chords and Scale books. What’s unique about this spreadsheet I put together is that it’s a one page reference. It helps if you first memorize the fretboard notes, but from there the “number system,” probably a simplification of the “Nashville system,” provides an efficient map for chord and scale fingering possibilities. I also wanted to learn how to attach a .pdf file to the blog. Click link below and check it out.

One Page Guitar Scales and Chords

October 5, 2017
The Flags of Our Dispositions

Some talk again
about the end
of this world
but yr rapture
might not be
his rapture &
maybe he’ll be
happy as hops
to see you go.

Kneel, stand, or
dodge the show
weekend TV
questions for
the status quo
diversion plays
reductio ad absurdum
the flags of our
dispositions.

More disposed
to please or dis
now a word
from the sponsor
who decides
penultimately
what is ok
& what
unacceptable.

The crickets’
crackles
diminish
lights off but
sounds off
continue
the broadcast
day now
infinite.

September 25, 2017

Triad Inversion Study for Guitar

Place root note of chord on selected fret and use the number system to play triads moveable along the fretboard as indicated. Raise 5 to augment. Flat 3 for minor. Flat 3 and 5 to diminish.

string
1st	R				3		5
2nd	5					R			3
3rd		3			5				R

2nd		R			3		5
3rd	5				R			3
4th			3		5				R

3rd	R			3			5
4th	5				R				3
5th			3		5					R

4th	R			3			5
5th	5				R				3
6th			3		5					R

September 22, 2017

Starting with No

Starting out at nine
in search of yes watches
synched to 21:00
another night problem
to hug and home by one.

Starting out at no
thing was ever what
it seemed to be
the toilet by the back gate
not plant pot nor art.

Starting out ending up
in the same place

it might have been
most anywhere

but here the sound plenty
of yeses in the hibiscuses
and sitting on the big
maple tree branch
all the kids ever were

hanging out watching
for the yeses to come
home game tied
one yes to one no not
anyone scores promises.

August 29, 2017

Category: Writing

3rd Installment of Alma Lolloon: