First Day of Autumn

This month we had one crazy torrential night and day of rain, complete with thunder, lightening, and blissful drenching. Now it's back to the dry days of the golden hillsides.

Today is the first day of autumn. They promised us awful heatwaves for yesterday and today, days of torrid heat which have not materialized, but which have managed to keep me from walking to work, and to keep me in a semi-sedentary stupor. I've been watching a lot of movies.

Autumn Leaves (1956, dir. Robert Aldrich) with Joan Crawford, Cliff Robertson, Vera Miles & Lorne Greene. Joan plays an

unmarried middle-aged woman who makes a living typing up copies of manuscripts. She is composed, intelligent and self-sufficient. Along comes dashing, passionate, 20-something Cliff, who sweeps her off her feet, against her better judgement. Both of their performances are beautiful and believable and the plot is very compelling and ultimately satisfying. Alongside the themes of fall-spring marriage and family betrayal there is a description of American mental health policy in the 1950s. It was apparently quite easy to have someone committed, and while mental health professionals felt more empowered than ever with new perspectives, pharmaceuticals and techniques, it is not clear from the treatments shown in the film that these treatments would ultimately cure anyone.

This film doesn't insult your intelligence by telling you what you should feel. It lets the characters' understanding of the truth and each other evolve with the story. The emotional lives of others are indeed cryptic, foreign things which we should not assume we understand. Even so, with patience, courage, dedication and sacrifice, even the most seemingly unreasonable situations might be salvaged - or so this film seems to say. Knowing a couple of women in very suboptimal emotional relationships where they are constantly hoping to change their abusive partners, I am less convinced of this.

Madame Bovary

This DVR feature of cable television is great. We can record any movies or programs we'd like to watch at our convenience. The Turner Classic Movies channel is one of my favorites. Over the past few months I have watched lots of wonderful movies like The African Queen, Spellbound, Jezebel, A Woman's Face and more.

Lately I have been watching a film version of Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary with James Mason as Flaubert and Jennifer Jones as Madame Bovary. I remember reading the book when I was a teenager and feeling a lot of sympathy for Madame Bovary. She was trapped, yearning for freedom, full of dreams of self-fulfillment and social climbing. While social-climbing wasn't in my goal set, as most teenagers, I yearned for freedom. Since my family had self-destructed as a result of what I thought must have been unfulfilled yearnings and ambitions, somehow I must have considered this all very expected and even acceptable. Flaubert tries to portray Madame Bovary as sympathetic, but I remember also thinking of her as selfish. Watching the movie today she just seems selfish and narcissistic. I find myself wondering about the etiology of that sort of narcissism. Is it undeveloped mirror neurons? Is it being spoiled as a child? Is it associating with selfish role models? I'm not sure.

My Life Story

My life has been a relatively strange one, full of identity shifts and odd relationships. People tell me that I should write my "Life Story". Sofie says, "Don't do it. Let someone else make the movie." Now I am learning a new web technology, Joomla, which is a content management and delivery system for the web. Maybe creating a site telling my life story on there would be a good way to do it. I would include code so that none of the pages would be spidered and then some clues places if anyone needed to find it. That's one idea. Oh, I'm full of ideas, I am.

The reason this came to mind is that yesterday I was reading a review about Michel de Montaigne in The New Yorker. It said that one day, at age 38, he just turned his back on everything and spent the rest of his life in his office with his books writing about everything that came to his mind, for himself. Much of his work is introspective, and he noted how fluid human opinion is, how fickle our attitudes, how malleable our outlook. It reminded me of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in which the protagonist offers all these pithy, passionate, authoritative declarations on the nature of man, woman, humanity - declarations which sometimes contradict one another depending on how his life is going.

Coyote alarm clock

This time of year we're woken at night by sudden howls and syncopated shrieks. The hills are dry and the coyotes have come down to rest by the creek. They must sleep by day or they're drowned out by the cars. It's at night that we hear them screeching to the stars. Early on, like eight or nine a siren might set them off. Just what does it at 2 am, I couldn't say. There must be a whole den of pups - I hear them whining, piteously crying, sometimes one by one, sometimes sad in unison. They sound sad and lonely and hungry.

There were some nice, fat quail in the yard today. The coyotes haven't hunted them all down. Let the rain come soon so the coyotes can go crawl back up into the hills.

Blackberries on the way from school

On the way home from school I like to nibble on the blackberry bush by Juvenile Hall. I always feel like some she-bear foraging when I do it. At 1:30 in the afternoon the sun is hitting all the vines and the berries are oh-so-sweet. Such a lovely home-walk treat.

September - Applemoon and Pear

That evil, incompetent old fake landscaper lady wounded our apple tree. There are a few sorry, undersized Gravensteins hanging there but the trunk is all ravaged, the leaves prematurely shrivelled and falling. I wonder if it will make it through the winter. Good thing it had a child on the other side of the fence. Maybe it will make apples next year. Maybe its roots will uproot the new fence. It is awfully close.

The 5-in-one pear, which at this point is a 3-in-one if we're lucky, is faring better. There is a bevy of Boscs, a few Poir William and I think a branchlet of those red pears. They should be ready to harvest soon. This summer was cool though and the watering situation erratic. I might make syrups or sugared liquors from them. I don't think they'll do well for schnapps.

First Day of School - What tree would I be?

Walked to work today. It's the first day of school. On Sunday we went to Half Moon Bay. On the way there (or back) Raji asked us what tree we would be, if we were a tree. It wasn't immediately obvious to me then, what tree I'd be, and I started thinking of stately pines with ponderous cones, curvy-crazy windswept cypresses, a lonesome softly swaying weeping willow, a showy mimosa with flirty pink fringes for flowers. None of them was me though. Today walking to work it hit me. Doh! I'd be a plum.

These days the pretty plums lining Idylberry have their leaves all black, black with the vaguest tinge of maroon through the light. Bruisy purple, dropping slightly, full and thirsty in the late summer heat. All the fruit has long fallen and in a few months it will be the leaves' turn to fall, ripped and rustled in the breeze, flying down the street, gathering in black puddles at our feet. Then the trunks and branches stand there, bare and stately, grasping plaintive at the sky. I've always loved bare branches in winter.

Off to the Beach

Today we're off to Half Moon Bay to celebrate Kathia's birthday.

Sere to Sere, Longing for a New Year

This seems to be the time of year when I get the urge to write again, to reorganize as I hold on tight in the time before the rains. Late August doldrums, a fire season looming, trees bent on dying, plants wilting, drooping in the heavy valley breeze. The California harvest is here. It's time to pick the fruit before it dries on the branches. How are the Gravensteins? Dare I answer?

In the spirit of creating my own calendar, I've decided that my personal New Year is September 1st, the hereby-proclaimed beginning of Seretowet. My goal this year, besides keeping the house in normalcy and the kids well-adjusted and doing well in school, is to greatly increase my translation, research, writing and general creative output. It looks like my job will continue to be computer lab lady at the school so I might as well use that extra time well. Facebook is a hideous timesink, as is even emailing. Gonna go Garbo again. I just want to be alone.

The big problem is that there are so many things I'd like to study and do. Reading and translating news articles is deadly. It's gotten to the point where I, a former news junkie, can't even bear to listen to or watch the news in any language. It doesn't look like I'm going to get hired in a full-time position for something to which I would be appropriately suited. So be it.

Here is a list of things I am interested in studying and doing:

1. Translate poetry and literature. Below are the languages I feel readily comfortable to translate written materials. I should put together a goal schedule for poetry traslation.

• Russian poetry (already doing that a bit on my other blog), short stories?
• Arabic poetry (I'd love to give this a try!)
• Romance language poetry and short stories - Italian, Spanish, French (I've done a little of this, why not more?)

2. Study Other Languages. This part is a little overwhelming since there are so many I would like to study. Here is the list in order of my exposure and inclination:

• Hindi/Sanskrit (Bollywood songs and narrative, Rig Veda, Mahabharata (Bhagavad Gita, Shakuntala), Ramayana, (Hanuman story)
• Biblical Hebrew/Modern Hebrew
• Classical Greek
• Latin
• Avestan?/Old Persian?
• Swedish or Norwegian or Icelandic
• Lithuanian
• The list really could go on and on and on. It's crazy. I need to make a limited list - maybe choose 3 and focus on them. I'll decide in the next week. Right now I'm leaning towards Hindi/Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew and Classical Greek. Then again, Swedish would be a lot of fun. Crap.

3. Zoroastrian Studies. I started a Zoroastrian blog. I want to fill it with entries on my 20+ year fascination with Zoroastrianism and related traditions. Learning Avestan and the other languages is just too much right now, and I'm not sure that I even really want to do that. There's an awful lot of silliness in the Zoroastrian holy texts, as there is in the other holy texts of the world, and fewer people are impacted. I need to keep it in perspective.

4. Read more. People keep throwing these crappy recently-published books at me to read. It's onerous and, being a slow reader as it is, I get bogged down. What I really want to read are more classics and history and grammars, not some cutesy treatment of philosophy written by a bored housewife (haha). Here is my reading plan for the next year. Let's see how it goes

• Finish Dreaming in Hindi
• Read that book Amanda and Sam gave me about stealing the Mona Lisa
• Read The Elegant Hedgehog that Teri gave me and which Geneva is bugging me about (Tell people not to lend me any more books kthxbai)
• Re-read some Dostoevsky, esp. Karamazovy, Double, Possessed
• Re-read selected Chekhov stories and plays (Душенка, Чайка, etc.)
• Books about Zoroastrianism
• SHAKESPEARE - a few plats
• War and Peace? (never read it!)

Then there are activities like music and art. Where would I even begin? The cello is gone. There's a piano, recorders, two balalaikas in the house. I bought a portable easel for a drawing class that ended up being a disaster being given by an awkward incompetent (if not an outright fraud - I could have taught it better). If I were to indulge in music or art again, I would need goals to make it happen. Maybe go back to the Robert Saul opera idea? Write some more songs for it? Work on calligraphy in various writing systems, decorating choice quotes or letters even? There are some ideas.

5. MSS - Make it happen again this year. This one is actually the most time-sensitive. I need to get on bugging potential speakers next week - pronto.

6. Decide on classes to be taught this year. GATE, for fee, both? Classical Philosophy and Greek and Latin roots? Need to put proposals for those together this week too.

Oh, and the adoptee rights thing? I decided forget about it.

Imbolc

Today I walked to work and the magnolias were all in bloom. There were tiny fields of purple muscari on the lawn as I left. The sparrows are drunk on fermented berries. They befoul my car, its windows and doors. Still the sun shines, the breezes blow. The hills are green, green and mosses sneak out into the sidewalk. They say we need more rain. We do. We need more rain, more wet, more soak.

Piove, piove, piove
pitter patter down
llove, llove, llove
I love it - do not drown
Dribble drabble dropping
swishing swashing lush
lashing thrashing bushes
washing earth it must

Let it Rain
Rapping down
Good deep soak
Pelting pour
Give us more
we need it
bring it down
make it rain.