The Glittering Cloud

Hearing about the locust plague-to-be in western NSW on the radio this morning made me think of Laura Ingalls Wilder's brilliant description of the grasshopper plague ( actually, Rocky Mountain locusts ) that beset the family in On The Banks Of Plum Creek.

A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before.  It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, but they were larger than snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each glittering particle. 
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came on across the sky faster than wind. The hair stood up on Jack's neck. All at once he made a frightful sound up at that cloud, a growl and a whine.
Plunk! something hit Laura's head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen.  Then huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her, hitting her head and her face and her arms. They came thudding down like hail.
The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness.  Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.


Say what you like about questions of  authenticity and the  political incorrectness of the Little House books, Laura writes good, clear descriptive prose.

Daybook

Listening to - Kasey Chamber's new CD, Little Bird, especially the title song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq9On3uYI8Q

Reading - An Alison Lurie novel, borrowed from my sister, Foreign Affairs.

Creating -  plans for a Jane Austen themed book club next term.

Wondering - how long I have until Snowy  catches chickenpox. Arwen is better but Lucy came down with it today.

Researching -  Tuckman's theories of small group development. Novels dealing with relational aggression.

Hoping -  to have a finished bathroom by the middle of the week. And for the house fairy to come by and deal with the layers and layers of renovation dust.


A thought -  'Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them - every day begin the task anew.'
- Saint Francis de Sales

Poetry Friday

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.
      - Louise Gluck

What We're Reading This Week

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen - stayed up way too late to finish this book. Not because I particularly liked it - the first quarter was funny and involving but after that, Franzen got carried away with his broad canvas - but because I just can't go to bed until I find out how a book ends. This one - shmaltzy. Lost it's way with the whole zero population/save the warbler section, redeemed itself with some portraits of unusual relationships. And with skillful handling of moral ambiguity.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte - one of Lucy's birthday books. She appreciated the happy ending...there is no way I would give a 13yr old a copy of Wuthering Heights for a birthday present - Heathcliff is just too awful and Cathy just a wee bit too stupid - but Jane Eyre ? No problem. Except for the sappy ending, in my personal opinion,  but as you've just heard, not Lucy's.  She's reading The Book Thief now.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens -  started reading this aloud to the girls this week. You have to love a serialized novel with its nice, short chapters. Snowy was playing Lego in the loungeroom whilst I was reading and I thought he might be perturbed by shackled and murderous convicts and physically abusive parent-figures, but apparently not...

The girls are also listening to Pride and Prejudice on CD, which Arwen says is slightly funny. She only likes one character - Charlotte - and she only likes her because she has the same name as her ballet teacher. Still, I said Arwen couldn't read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies until she's at least listened to the original. Keep going, honey!  This was another one of Lucy's presents and I know she likes it because of how happy she got when she was given a set of P&P paper dolls last birthday.

Snowy and I are not reading the second half of The Incredible Journey, because I think we are both slightly bored with the travails of dogs and cat. We are revisiting Milly-Molly-Mandy stories instead, which I actually know off by heart now and can read aloud whilst thinking of other things, like....

A post justifying my shameful Jodi Picoult addiction. Stay tuned.

Strawberry and Coconut Loaf

I found this recipe when I was looking for a way to use up some squishy strawberries. It's delicious and it comes from this website www.beerenberg.com.au

* 1 punnet of strawberries
* 1 1/2 cups plain flour
* 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
* 3/4 cup caster sugar
* 1/2 cup desiccated coconut
* 2 eggs, lightly beaten
* 1 tsp vanilla essence
* 1/2 cup olive oil
* 3/4 cup buttermilk

Method: 1. Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and line the base of a 30 x 15cm loaf tin.
2. Puree strawberries in a food processor.
3. Sift flour and bicarbonate into a large bowl along with a pinch of salt. Stir through caster sugar and coconut.
4. Mix together eggs, vanilla essence, olive oil and buttermilk. Make a well in the centre of the sifted ingredients. Mix until mixture comes together. Lightly fold through pureed strawberries (do this by stirring only 2 or 3 times).
5. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 50 minutes - 1 hour or until a skewer inserted comes out clean.
6. Serve sliced, plain or toasted, with a dollop of mascarpone.


I use one of Nigella's  suggestions when a recipe calls for buttermilk,  and simply stir 1tsp of lemon juice into a cup of milk and let it sit 5 mins. Not quite as nice as buttermilk but perfectly adequate.

My Year of Meat

Read this on Thursday; an odd read but a good one, hard to explain. It's a portrait of two contemporary women, Jane (of Japanese-American background) and Akiko (a Japanese housewife), and it also manages to be an expose and an indictment of the feedlot meat industry in America. That's a juggling act for sure, and author Ruth L. Ozeki manages it skillfully, even incorporating into the book extracts from The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon in true postmodern fashion.

Jane wants to be a documentary maker and so she accepts an offer to work on a program sponsored by Beef-Ex, called American Wife. Aimed at Japanese homemakers, she must film a different American wife each episode, detailing her life in general and her favourite meat recipe ("Pork is possible but beef is best!") in particular. Akiko is married to the bullying producer of the show who requires her to watch each episode on a Saturday morning, fill out a questionnaire with ratings for Authenticity, Wholesomeness and  Deliciousness, and then cook the featured meat that night.

As Jane begins to discover more about Meat and how the hormones used in meat production have affected her own life, she begins to subvert the aims of the show in her choice of wife, even featuring a lesbian, vegetarian family at one point. Akiko, watching, begins to think about her own life and choices, culminating in revelation of brutal circumstance.


The Year of Meat brings changes, sorrow and awakening to Jane and Akiko. Ozeki casts a critical but compassionate eye over American and Japanese society and their various forms of denial, which are contrasted with the painful honesty of The Pillow Book, read in secret by Akiko.

The only problem with this book is that exposure to  Sei Shonagon's form of observational list writing is addictive. Since Thursday I haven't been able to stop thinking of my life in lists. Shonagon's are better.

Surprising and Distressing Things
Things that give a Pathetic Impression
Things that are Near yet Distant
Things that Gain by Being Painted
Things that Make One's heart Beat Faster

Funny

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

Poetry Friday

Raleigh Was Right

We cannot go into the country
for the country will bring us no peace
What can the small violets tell us
that grow on furry stems in
the long grass among lance shaped leaves?

Though you praise us
and call to mind the poets
who sung of our loveliness
it was long ago!
long ago! when country people
would plow and sow
with flowering minds and pockets at ease —
if ever this were true.
Not now.  Love itself a flower
with roots in a parched ground.
Empty pockets make empty heads.
Cure it if you can but
do not believe that we can live
today in the country
for the country will bring us no peace
— William Carlos Williams

No Creative Writing in the House!

Two writers live in this house, and because of this, people sometimes ask me to recommend a creative writing program for their child. To which I have learnt to say, gently, "Oh, there are many good writing programs out there but we don't actually teach creative writing to our kids."

It's not that I actively discourage them from writing, and they have often written - letters, diary entries, stories, poetry, even plays - just that I don't teach them.

It's like painting, or music composition or mime. Everyone should be able to appreciate an art form, to have a language to think about it, discuss it, enjoy it...but we don't all have to produce art. It's nice to have the opportunity to participate in art but it isn't compulsory, or at least it isn't compulsory to participate to a professional standard.

How can I give my school-age  kids the language to enjoy creative writing without making them do it ? Well, really easily, just by reading to them. Reading often, different forms, different voices, always of a high literary standard and  by writers who know their craft. It sinks in, it changes their brains for the good, truly it does. It gives their minds a variety of models to draw on if they feel the urge to create. Writers need to be readers first, and they need to be good, careful, close readers for a long time if they are to write well.

Maybe my child is never going to write a poem. So what ?  Maybe she'll be a reader of poetry and buy the books of poets who really want to write. I cannot make my child love poems by forcing her to write one.

I'm not talking here about written expression. Everyone needs to develop the skill of expressing their thoughts clearly, orally and in written form. A story can be narrated. Essay skills can be taught. That's different. It's a skill at school level and not a calling of the type that talented adult academics and essayists develop and display.

What about the child who wants to write, who comes to you asking for resources in this area ? Well, keep them supplied with pencil and paper, read to them, choose great books for them to read, take them to the library often, set up a book club or a writers circle for them, give them an audience (let them blog or read their poem at a family event or host a reading of their play or find out about short story competitions or help them send their novel to an agent, find them a writing mentor or send them to college to do a writing degree), just don't make them slave over a creative writing program. It's expensive, it kills the joy, it gets them running before they can walk, it's unnecessary.

Especially for homeschoolers, it's just another area for conflict and stress. "No, you may not play until you've finished that haiku!" Ridiculous. If you have money to spend on resources, buy more books. Buy a book that teaches you how to think about books.  Remember that writers have a vested interest in getting you to attend their workshops/buy their 'how to' book/use their program. It's how they make a living. I sympathise with that. Making a living for most artists is hard.

Yet a child's imagination, their response to art, needs to live as well and the writer's mind lives and grows best in the pages of other writers, and in the consideration of those pages. And if your child doesn't write, they will surely grow up to read. Just as the music you play to your children, the galleries you take them to,  may not produce a cellist or a sculptor, your children may never write a creative word. Despite that, if they have the exposure and the tools to appreciate the creative word,  their lives and the world will never be the poorer for it.

Can You Guess

why I just googled, at Arwen's request,  "can my guinea pigs catch chicken pox ?"

Google says no. Thank God, because calamine-ing the guinea pigs is not in my job description. Unlike calamine-ing the children, which is.

Happy Almost 13th

Frog and Toad and Snowy and I Are Friends

Dear Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Your Child To Read,
Please don't take this personally but Snowy and I are moving on.  Frog and Toad and Snowy and I are friends now. Good-humoured. Expressively sketched. Imbued with a sense of the ridiculous.

One day in summer
Frog was not feeling well.
Toad said, "Frog,
you are looking quite green."
"But I always look green,"
said Frog. "I am a frog."

Sincerely yours.

Blog Analysis

Not mine, other people's.  This is what comes of spending 5 plus hours watching episodes of In Treatment, which has fantastic performances by Dianne Wiest and Mia Wasikowska, and is marred only by Melissa George's trout lips.

A friend recommended a blog to me, a witty blog, an impolite and wild and eccentric and lively blog, a daring blog written by a an arty sort of wife and mother, a London sort of wife and mother. It's funny. And either Antonia ( it's alright to use her name as she doesn't know me, or this blog, from a bar of soap) has a devoted following because of her wit and sardonic take on life, or she has a lot of fond-of-commenting friends. Probably both.

Antonia lost me, however, when I read her very amusing post about recovering from post-natal irritation with her toddler by flying from London to New York for a weekend of cocktails with her gal pals.  Suddenly, a blog that had read as subversive - of motherhood, art, suburban life, marriage - seemed to suddenly reveal itself as a blog of privilege instead, full of  a sort of high class sneering.

Which is of course, a ridiculous thing to think, as anyone blogging for fun in the Western world is automatically writing from their broadband enabled position of privilege.

Yet somehow I prefer a blog like Helena's (it's alright to use her name because I'm about to say nice things) that isn't funny and doesn't mock but delves into our vulnerabilities as humans with compassion, hopeful images, beautiful and carefully chosen words.  It's still a privileged form of writing but easier for me to swallow.

You can make up your own mind. I think I'm trying to make up mine about what blogs are for, what the best use is of this time we sit at our computers and write. And a deadly, earnest sort of work (much like this post!)  isn't the answer to the mock-brave work of wealthy women, I know that too.

http://respectlovelearning.blogspot.com/

http://yetanotherbloomingblog.blogspot.com/  - please don't click on this link if you're likely to be offended by 'language' or 'themes'...

World's Best Craft for Children Website

http://belladia.typepad.com/crafty_crow/

Enjoy!

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

In our household of avowed C.S.Lewis worshippers, this comes as heresy, but The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was never a favourite of mine.

Certainly, climbing into a wardrobe only to find it a portal to another world was interesting, in the way that Dr Who's ever-expanding Tardis was interesting. And it was always pleasant to read about Turkish Delight. But the books I read over and again were more likely to feature heroines away in the exotic land of boarding school or dancing school, or in the unreachable past.

I didn't read it to the girls. They listened to it on tape again and again, utterly inhabiting the land of Narnia. They drew pictures and maps of it, made bows and arrows and shields and daggers, designed scenes and plays, wrote and posted letters to Aslan, creating a culture of Narnia in the privacy of their own conversations and their own room.  I never asked them if they had tried to enter Narnia through their own wardrobe but imagined their great disappointment when they discovered they could not.

It was the girls' devotion that put it on my list of Books To Read To Snowy. And this time I did read it, chapter by chapter, lunchtimes.

It's an odd book, dated in its language, full of nursery reassurances - meals, for example, continue to be regular and battles are concluded in time for the Pevensie's bedtime.  The dialogue is old fashioned to a 21st century ear, almost priggish, as when Edmund is speaking to Lucy:

"I say Lu! I'm sorry I didn't believe you. I see now you were right all along . Do come out. Make it Pax."

See kids, there is a point to Latin...


Yet when we reach the climax of the book,  when Aslan makes a  sacrifice of himself, murdered by the White Witch on the Stone Table,  to save the traitor Edmund,  Lewis reaches deep into the wellspring of  human sorrow and wisdom to give us a subversive, anti-cultural hero, in the way that Christ ( this story  being a Christian allegory after all ) or Gandhi  or the Buddha or Aung San Suu Kyi is a hero.

And this archetype, surrounded by talking beavers and marmalade rolls and Father Christmas, is what gives the novel its power and makes it endure. The moral of  this story being  that my daughters recognised the majesty of such a hero long before I did.