The weather has been mild here in the San Francisco Bay Area and so I’ve been spending a lot of time rolling big rocks around what had been a hillside covered with a particularly hideous ground cover. These rocks weigh between fifty and sixty pounds so … I’m kind of an idiot, aren’t I?
One of my first sculptures and not a natural stone!
When my back gives out, I work on the re-writes of my second book now titled The Sloppy American. I think it’s done. Or more to the point, if I keep working on it I will done. Spent and completely mad. Over fifty years have passed since I went on the adventure that spawned the book. Europe was such a different place back then. WWII was still so fresh in so many people’s minds which I, of course, didn’t understand. Love was going to save the world and the Nazis had been driven underground and would never rise again. Ha!
I’m going to try to digitize the story which requires figuring out how to use a new software program. Ha! I’d be better off rolling rocks around the garden.
Rejoice America – the Executioners have arrived. You can tell from their smug expressions that their fun has only just begun. You can tell from their colorful attire what to expect for the next four years – if you live through those long and painful years (after all, Daddy is home which means the switch for all you disobedient children.) And on this happy day, to show their compassion, one thousand federal workers were fired. Seniors lost the ability to negotiate lower drug prices.
And this the only the beginning! Rejoice … there’s plenty more to come!
I’m okay. Really I am. My heart breaks for those who tried to warn us.
My father, who would have turned one hundred and one years old today, always had “a twinkle in his eye.”
One of the last pictures I have of my dad. He’s the one with the mustache.
His brother-in-law, my Uncle Ralph, wrote at least three books on Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln, What He Stood For, Abraham Lincoln and the Western Territories and Lincoln Quotat (a collection of Lincoln sayings). Uncle Ralph was tall and thin – a lively man who taught speech and debate and, of course, quoted Lincoln at every turn.
And so, this morning as I fuddled about with some bills that needed paying I watched the HBO Max series: Lincoln, Divided We Fall. This series covers Lincoln’s entire life but primarily challenges the myth of Lincoln as a willing and eager abolitionist. While he always felt slavery was an abomination,
He began politics believing that the black race was inferior and that the two races could never peacefully coexist. The expansion of slavery to new territories was the issue that forced him to listen to his heart over his head. If they couldn’t erase slavery without severe consequences, they must not allow the abomination to spread. It was Frederick Douglass who convinced him the black man was not inferior and so he changed his mind. Changed his mind. Imagine. Such an impossible thing for a politician to do in this era of nonstop armchair quarterbacking.
Anyway Happy Birthday Dad. If there is an afterlife, I imagine you’re listening to Uncle Ralph tell another Lincoln anecdote, or perhaps debating the man himself! Wish I was there.
My favorite Christmas gift this year was a Washi calendar from Japan. The graphic is actually an embedded postcard and so at the end of each month I going to try to send a postcard to someone somewhere in the world. That sounds like a task I can accomplish without too much stress!
Maybe I’ll even learn a little Japanese in so doing.
Unless I’m wrong, this is going to be a year filled with quite enough stress, thank you very much GOP. The agents of chaos have won powerful positions by inciting hatred and feelings of superiority over “the other.” The Blue Meanies walk amongst us. Therefore, the only answer is – LOVE.
I remember when this song was released, the Beatles were at the end of one of the most productive artistic runs ever. And there was John saying it didn’t matter if there wasn’t enough love in the world. Such a simple lesson and yet true.
2025 – the year the Blue Meanies meet their match. One can only dream.
Let’s see if you can guess the name of the movie I’ve decided to end the year with.
It was based on a three act play by Noel Coward
The title is from a poem called “To a Skylark” by Percy Bliss Shelley
It was the screen debut of Margaret Rutherford
The plot in a nutshell: The ghost of a writer’s first wife is conjured forth by a bumbling spiritualist causing great distress to his second wife.
By far the best thing about this film is the performance of Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972) as the spiritualist. She was a “big boned” actress with so-called “spaniel jaws” who nonetheless, stole every scene she was ever in … although she never meant to. She once wrote of being called a comedian: “I never intended to play for laughs. I am always surprised that the audience thinks me funny at all.”
She’s probably most famous for playing Miss Marple, Agatha Christie’s aging and unconventional detective.
Many other actresses have played Miss Marple but Rutherford was different. Perhaps because she was not a dainty, prim and proper old lady.
I didn’t get much done this year and so I’m not sorry to see it end. According to my first blog (“The Celestial Smooth”) I began the year watching “The Full Monty,” a dark comedy about a group of unemployed steel workers who become strippers. The movie ends with the men exposing themselves to an audience filled with cheering women as a line of policemen prepare to arrest them.
For just one moment they are triumphant. But you know … there could never be a believable sequel. These are ordinary men, not Chippendale models.
In April I shattered a filling on a Jordan Almond requiring an emergency visit to the dentist. His first question was: “How are you other than falling apart?”
In August I decided to post snippets from the sequel to Flipka, my first novel. Eleven posts which only a few of you were kind enough to comment on. I was sad but perhaps, like “The Full Monty,” that book could have no believable sequel.
September rolled along and with it the long lost contractor we’d hired back in March to fix the retaining wall and drainage in the front of our house. A job projected to take a week took over a month and, despite repeated assurances, his men managed to find and break both the water and gas lines. Imagine that? They could handle the water line but the gas line breakage required visits from the fire department, sirens blaring, and the gas company. A new gas line, a new gas meter. Road blocked for gigantic gas truck. Neighbors upset. And what did the sheepish contractor say: yadiyadi, yadiyadi,whine, whine, I have to pay a fine, whine whine.
In October I took a break and flew to Hawaii. Oahu seems to be getting more and more crowded which is sad but there’s something eternal about the South Pacific, isn’t there?
Let’s not talk about November and here we are in December, trying to be merry and bright. Me, mostly failing. So, I’ve decided on New Year’s Day I’m going to watch a movie with a believable sequel. Any suggestions? The only one I can think of is “The Return of the King” (part three of “The Lord of the Rings”). Good prevails and the evil ring of power is thrown into the fires of Mordor.
As I promised, a couple of pieces from Malverde Days by Duke Miller.
the flowers pine
The Double Deers by Tres Miller (on the original back cover)
I sat with juan, my gardener We were talking about how flowers could love a person, how to gently prune them like you were removing a woman’s clothes He was as old as Cervantes, rode a burro to my house every Thursday He had no family, lived on the highway connecting the capital, where cars passed at one hundred miles per hour of complete indifference Juan had shrapnel in his knees He was shopping for rat poison when a bomb went off in front of a business being extorted by the gangs As he got older the knee joints stiffened, he could hardly get up from the ground, the earth waiting for him, not a problem, but plants were another matter, almost no patience when it came to the growing, the nurturing As we talked he told me he felt exhausted, his heart beating wild like birds overhead He said there was nothing wrong with him, no fever, no stomach pain, no trouble breathing, nothing except he felt tired We sat together for about an hour, discussing this and that, and then his eyes got heavy and he rolled over, passed out I called a taxi, we went to the hospital When we were trying to get him out of the car he came around and walked into the admitting room and promptly threw up a bucket of blood, but he didn’t die, that came later, when he climbed a cliff and jumped Poor Juan had been depressed about his knees and how the government cheated him out of his measly pension Juan lay at the bottom of the cliff for a year before they found him Most of his body had leaked into the wet cracks along the stream bed and filtered down into the aquifer beneath Malverde When I think of the water I wash my face with, I think of Juan, his knees and flowers in my garden who miss their lover
Under Malverde Time
time is tricky here January seems like Monday to me February is Tuesday and so on I went to Dr. Pablo for some answers I was thinking it might be the weather or the food He made a meta-diagnosis and wrote a prescription for 100 kg of nails and a carpenters hammer He told me that I should start nailing down the days just after midnight Hammer them squarely into the darkest part of the night as it spreads across your bedroom floor The nails will slow things down considerably I said that sounded like a lot of work to me and couldn’t he write a prescription for a nail gun He said sure, but he very much doubted if my insurance would cover it
A rejected idea for the cover, also artwork by Tres Miller.
Many years ago I read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a long book with a seemingly endless cast of characters. Generations are born, procreate and die and everything they’ve created is eventually devoured by fast-growing vines, mosses and fungi. Sounds depressing, doesn’t it? It would have been if Marquez had focused only on the world we can see and the realities we can comprehend but he didn’t. He combined the mundane with the mythical which is one of the many definitions of magical realism.
I was curious to see what Netflix would do with Marquez’ masterpiece, primarily because magical realism is one of the least understood of the literary genres. So far, it’s fairly dark and heavy on the realism. But it’s put me in mind of a book published by my friend Duke in 2019.
Duke’s book is far shorter but just as memorable as One Hundred Years of Solitude and the ebook is only $2.99.
Below are some reviews:
In Malverde Days Dylan Thomas exits Milkwood through a vortex and crash lands in the tropical, surreal town of Malverde on the opposite side of the planet. Here too, like their Welsh counterparts, the locals are restless, haunted by dreams that they would nail down if only they possessed a nail gun. In this surreal montage of life in a town cursed by violence death is never far. The pretty young woman in the ice cream shop is shot through the head while making a strawberry sundae. “Citizens of Malverde, do not worry”‘ announces the newspaper the next day. “They are only killing themselves.” Then there is Alice “the only woman who ever tried to kill me with a can opener, so I mourn her in my own way.” This is Duke Miller at his most incomparably irreverent self. His view of humanity is as bleak as the future, but we may as well go out laughing, or at least smiling, and Malverde Days delivers these moments in hallucinogenic spades.
Reviewed in the United States on July 26, 2019
Malverde Days will stop you in your tracks. “Wait! You need to re-read that part.” It’s heavy and yet translucent, letting in the light, illuminating those shadowy corners you feared as a child. And yet proposes that there are closets, dirt roads, alleys that end with your hand to your own throat. Duke’s words must be savored. Take it easy. Take it slow. But take it.
Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2019
Duke pulls no punches in this rich dense poetry. One piece made me cry. Another made me laugh out loud, something that words on a page rarely are able to do. Always his writing is worth returning to see how the words wash through your mind this time.
Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2019
Malverde Days is part prose, part poetry and follows a group of disparate souls as they live, love, work and die beside each other in a sometimes magical, sometimes deadly town which feels south of the border although the exact location seems unimportant. I read many of the chapters on the author’s blog as they were randomly posted. But when I saw the cover I just had to buy the paperback. It’s a good thing I did because in the final product Miller has pulled together a group of blog posts (or cuttings as he calls them) into a plot stream that flows well. He also added a few pieces not posted on the blog that help readers get to know the characters and their motivations. It’s not a long book but you will want to read it again and again just to delight in Mr. Miller’s musical use of words and gentle depictions of even the most retched of souls.
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2019
I have both Malverde Days and Neil Gaimin’s bestseller American Gods on my Kindle, and was switching between them. Just realized I haven’t even opened American Gods in a week, because Malverde is so much more interesting, engaging, and enjoyable.
Saying nothing in particular 