The Milk Of Paradise

11:33 AM PDT, April 24, 2009

The official drink of the angels, I'm convinced, is St. Germain liqueur. It’s celestial in every way—from its graceful bottle that resembles a fin-de-siècle flacon, to the pale refined gold of its hue, to its exquisitely fresh, heady fragrance, to the mystery of its making which involves hand-picked Alpine elderflowers, to its divine flavor, at once tangy and sweet in perfect balance. Its only drawbacks are its expense and its rarity, but even those seem virtues.

The other night Hub and I shared our last precious drops of this nectar with a favorite couple, making a very heaven of the warm spring evening, candlelight, civilized music playing softly in the background, and a sense of everything being exactly as it should be, however briefly.

Kitsune

5:45 PM PDT, April 20, 2009

My house surely must be blessed by the kami, since I've got a whole family of foxes living in the brush pile out back. The mother is slim and pensive, supervising her brood with mild vigilant care, her russet pelt vivid against the emerging green of the trees. The five little ones romp about adorably, wrestling and pouncing and tumbling. I look at them and can't help but think of the way I grew up; and then I turn my thoughts elsewhere.

April can indeed be the cruelest month, but for me it marks a time of needful endings and wished-for beginnings. The other night I was dancing with Hub at a benefit party teeming with Bright Young Things, feeling the combined bliss of Santana-tinged music and liberal Cuba Libres, when a girl came up to me and said, shouting over the racket, "You're the only one here who looks like they're having any #&@%ing FUN!"

That's just the way I want it, from here on out.

Cheers,

CK

Photo taken by me, a few years before this post.

Information about my other writing can be found here.

La Princesse Lointaine

12:43 PM PDT, April 15, 2009

(Information about my other writing can be found here. Happy reading!)

Life is often irksome, and at such times I take refuge in that which is pleasing and uplifting.

While in Kyoto last summer, I chanced, on a couple of rare occasions when I wasn’t embroiled in extreme sightseeing or sleeping the sleep of the exhausted, to watch a bit of television. One program in particular intrigued me: a historical drama featuring court ladies in splendid kimono, indulging in behavior dismally typical of people with too much time on their hands--gossiping, scheming, maligning, betraying. Among these craven weeds one woman stood out like a sweet, slender flower, taking no part in the pettiness, fulfilling a higher destiny.

There were, of course, no English subtitles. I knew the period was Tokugawa, but other than that I was lost. Once I returned home, I did some Internet sleuthing to find out just which program it was, and with only a little trouble learned I’d been watching Atsuhime (Princess Atsu), a multi-segment story set in the 1850s when Commodore Perry and his black ships were threatening a status quo unchanged for centuries. Just the other day, to my surprise and pleasure, I stumbled upon a site featuring English-subtitled videos of every episode. It’s heaven.

Atsuhime moves at a deliberate, almost dreamlike pace. So far I’m at Episode 11 and haven’t yet witnessed a single usually de rigeur multi-samurai katana battle, nor any overt exertion at all save for a great deal of carefully calibrated bowing. It’s wonderfully restful. The beauteous young princess is admirably wise and noble, and defies convention in various charming ways. Although she and her family exhibit no physical affection whatsoever, the bonds of the heart are clearly deep-rooted and unshakeable. This restraint is shown by everyone: deadly enemies never come to blows, and desperate lovers never touch. Honor, sacrifice, and loyalty are emphasized and exalted. The production values are quietly stunning, and the acting topnotch; the only off note, so to speak, is the Westernized musical score in a milieu demanding koto, shamisen, and hyoshigi.

Elegant, informative and pleasurable Atsuhime eminently is, in ways American television can never comprehend. Only when one stirs the inscrutable surface of the princess' world does one remember that this was a pivotal, terrible point in Japanese history, marking the end of the nation’s lofty seclusion and the wholesale influx of all that now makes the culture so uniquely strange—Shangri-La crossed with Bartertown.

CK

(Photo was taken by me at a Kyoto shopping arcade during the visit described above. Click image for a larger view.)

Petals on a wet, black bough

2:56 PM PDT, April 11, 2009

Mildly seasonal as this post's title may seem, Ezra Pound's poem about faces packs all kinds of brooding angst in its two short lines and perfectly sums up my present mood. I admire Pound most because without his censoring pen like a refiner's fire, Eliot's The Waste Land would have ended up a negligible ditherfest.

I never thought of myself as the Facebook type, but life can be either a luxury cruise or dinghy ordeal of self-discovery, depending on viewpoint. So far my profile page is an abject blank, but I'll add to it once I get over the social anxiety I never have in person.

And there's always the Delete feature. Would that all of life's events had one.

Writing is coming along wonderfully, given much recent inspiration.

CK

Dear Shadow

11:45 AM PDT, April 8, 2009

Note: The tale referred to in this post is "The Kind Gods," published in Bewildering Stories and free to read on my website (http://carolynkephart.com). (Update: It can also be read here on my blog, at https://carolynkephart.blogspot.com/2022/01/short-fiction-kind-gods.html. I created the cover art using an image of the Sutton Hoo helmet.)

_____________

It came like a flash—and ended in flash fiction. By sheer accident I chanced to listen the other day to a song I’d never heard before by a group I’d never heard about, and in another moment I was writing a story. It’s been a very long time since I've done that.

“Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” is by Fleet Foxes, a Seattle-based band who debuted in 2008. Its lone-guitar, single-voice slow waltz, poignant chords, and evocative lyrics rife with ambiguity were simply ensorcelling, bardic, timeless. It took me about twenty minutes to write most of the story, and I thought up the ending last night.

Perhaps it’s the season, or a change of outlook that makes time inestimably precious, or good friends and fan mail, and/or just finally getting my chemical balance right, but to feel like creating again is like being saved from drowning.

Grateful thanks to everything, anything,

CK

Wanderers this morning came by
Where did they go
Graceful in the morning light
To banner fair
To follow you softly
In the cold mountain air

Through the forest
Down to your grave
Where the birds wait
And the tall grasses wave
They do not
know you anymore

Dear shadow alive and well
How can the body die
You tell me everything
Anything true

In the town one morning I went
Staggering through premonitions of my death
I don't see anybody that dear to me

Dear shadow alive and well
How can the body die
You tell me everything
Anything true

Jesse
I don't know what I have done
I'm turning myself to a demon
I don't know what I have done
I'm turning myself to a demon

CK

The Hounds of Spring

4:49 PM PDT, March 24, 2009

[Information about my other writing can be found here. Happy reading!]

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

It never lasts long, this sweet first flowering time. Two days ago the redbud and crabapple trees around the deck were just beginning to bloom; now they’re at their height. From my window I can see their delicate hues, purple and rose, demurely defiant amid the gaunt trunks and branches of oaks and maples still leafless. The daffodils flaunted in their golden hosts weeks ago, and are now shriveling on their stalks. So temporary, and for that very reason so beloved, this fragile, fitful interval.

I can well understand why medieval people always went wild when Spring finally arrived. Even with my modern comforts, winter is a grim and shivering eternity that gets more arduous with each passing year, and this particular year was a bad 'un. My left tympanic cavity is still clogged from the crud that began afflicting me around Thanksgiving, and is only now making an all too leisurely retreat from my mortal clay. To finally feel warm, really and truly warm, is wondrous.

So with my one good ear, my two bad eyes and my cough-rough voice I’ve been reveling in Karl Orff’s Carmina Burana, singing along to the irresistibly upbeat ‘Tempus Est Iocundum.’ Orff’s mainly known for another song in the cycle, ‘O Fortuna,’ but its grim staccato howl that made perfect background music for the last several months has been bumped from my player, replaced by the pagan glee of youths and maidens giddy with the joy of shrugging off heavy itchy rank infested wool breeks and coathardies and frolicking about bare-limbed on the greensward.

Oh, oh, oh!
Totus floreo!

Texts and translations of the Carmina Burana can be found at http://www.tylatin.org/extras/index.html

Swinburne's breathtaking poem about spring's hounds, partially quoted above, can be found here: http://www.bartleby.com/101/808.html


CK

Life, Exquisitely Examined

1:51 PM PDT, March 13, 2009

Like all good torturers, the malaise mentioned in an earlier post granted me a brief respite, during which I took a road trip to Chapel Hill, NC with my hub, who'd been invited to give a colloquium at UNC. I enjoyed every minute of it, my pleasure all the more enhanced by the blessing of complete, actual health. We drove through snowy skies and white-laden stretches of forest by late afternoon, the first real winter I’ve seen all year. Although we outran the weather on our way to town, when I awoke the next morning at UNC's lovely Carolina Inn and looked out the window, all the world was covered in ‘ermine too dear for an earl.’ I wandered about the near-deserted campus (classes were called off until noon) and took photos before the sun shone out and all the wonder melted away.

We met up with many old friends, and three days fled by in a delicious blur. Breakfast at the Inn on the morning of our departure capped the experience with a serendipitious chance encounter. I’d at once noticed the man across from me, whose unruly hair, visionary eyes and civil but strained forbearance with the over-attentive waitstaff presaged singularity. In British-accented tones just above a whisper, he eschewed the communal carafe in favor of a bespoke espresso, and specified fresh eggs made to order—perhaps a covert jab at the scrambled offerings of the buffet, which were pretty visibly heaped on my plate. Amused, I made some remark about the persistence of Southern hospitality, to which he replied with ironic resignation, and then surprised me by asking if Hub and I were with the orchestra. We soon discovered that we were conversing with the founder of the Arditti Quartet, which was visiting UNC for a concert and a master class. The group specializes in contemporary music of a rarefied, difficult, experimental nature, and is widely considered the best in the world at what it does. Hundreds of pieces have been commissioned by and composed for the AQ, most notoriously Karlheinz Stockhausen’s irresistibly weird Helikopter Quartett, which has to be seen on YouTube to be thoroughly appreciated.

I like to define my life as 'Vissi d'arte,' but Irvine Arditti really, truly walks the walk. He formed the quartet in 1973 while barely in his twenties, three years before joining the London Symphony Orchestra, and is now the only original member. He and his group have recorded more than 160 cds. He lives perpetually on tour, never at rest. His skill as a violinist is breathtaking, as this John Cage piece will demonstrate.

Since I'm most at home with Scarlatti and Dowland, the conversation was as much an education as a pleasure, and all too brief. As he departed for morning rehearsals, Mr. Arditti noted that I’d find a lot of contemporary composers mentioned on his website, and gave both Hub’s and my hand a slight but cordial clasp. Since then I’ve been enjoying a new realm of music, and value the maestro's farewell gesture all the more. I hope to see the quartet in concert as soon as may be.

How I admire people who live big, dedicated, beautiful lives.

CK

Free Rice and Fairy Princes

1:01 PM PST, February 28, 2009

(Information about my other writing can be found here. Happy reading!)

Having not visited Free Rice for quite a while, I was delighted to find that it's expanded to include more subjects besides English vocabulary. Art, mathematics, geography and other languages have been added to its multiple-choice format, allowing me to feed the world even more lavishly as I bone up on my German and distinguish Cassatt from Caillebotte. (For more information, here's the Wiki article.)

When that world is too much with me--and so often it is, lately--I take my spiffy new imperial-scarlet Dell Vostro for a spin, cyber-escaping to the pagan realms Wordsworth yearned for. What the mild retiring bard would have thought of Prince Nuada Silverlance I can only guess, but my own views are definite. (And yes, I know the prince is an elf, not a fairy, but the alliteration was piquant.)

CK

To Airy Thinness Beat

6:42 PM PST, February 18, 2009

(Information about my other writing can be found here. Happy reading!)

...............

Donne was using gold as a metaphor for distance in his famous love poem that always struck me as the most unromantic effusion ever penned, but airy thinness perfectly describes my mood just now. I've got a cold I can't get over despite weeks of pills and hankies, a half-dozen writing projects that don't feel like being finished and are loafing slackerwise in the basement of my brain; and worst of all, my favorite pine tree where Swoop the Owl used to perch and stare at me as I pestered the muse is reduced to a shattered trunk, victim of last week's high winds. It bent as much as it could, luckless conifer, until it split utterly and its great boughs crashed all over the roof. Now that the branches are neatly chainsawed and piled on the ground, I'm surprised at just how very big a tree it was, and saddened by how much naked space it's left at my window.

Here's the tree with Swoop in it, taken in happier days:

A few lower limbs survive. Maybe he (or she) will come back. Maybe my cold will quit. Maybe that frowsy useless muse will struggle up out of her beanbag and get crackin'.

Hope's a beautiful, silly thing.

CK