Poetry and biking

I've just finished up a wonderful week long poetry class at U Maine Orono. Great people, good poetry, 650 miles of driving but worth it to be concentrating on hearing and writing poems. We had such an interesting range of ages, regions, personalities and styles of writing which made for great discussions each day. Rich Kent was as usual a delightful leader; he set up three poet/teachers guest workshops as well demonstrating the variety of ways writers get writing done in the real world!

Here is my favorite that I wrote for the week.

Summer’s Essence

Wading up

the Carrabassett’s

strong current,

my old Lab follows

from the shoreline

to save her strength.

Sun sparkles water

shaping rocks

and river beds

perpetually.

A geography lesson

in the glacial movement

of stone

seen through a clear

liquid prism.

Ahead a slanting slab

of rock.

I slide down

into a deep channel

and swim upstream

tracing the age-old path

of fish and water.

After all that classroom time I spent the whole weekend outside in Carrabassett Valley. Yay! Both days we did different trails starting from the Outdoor Center. First day was mostly singletrack- some a little too hard as Ron had me try a lighter weight 26 inch wheel bike. Singletrack is a confidence game and the rocks, roots and turns were winning.  The next day we did a more open climb soaking up being in the mountains. Sugarloaf and the Bigelows' peaks looked forbidding- catching the clouds and steep. The trails were gorgeous. The bikegroup making and keeping up the trails is doing an amazing job. Check it out.

 

 This is an easy trail - too bad they aren't all like this! Though that would get boring. There are no shots of me crashing and catching myself between tree limbs. Ron was too busy laughing.

 Water break after a 30 minute uphill ride. Where was that junction?

a summer weekend in Maine

I have to end the suspense on what has been eating my garden. Here is a picture of the brazen creature who has consumed three varieties of lettuce, half of my Swiss chard and all of our broccoli. This groundhog's downfall was some Swiss chard which led him into this cage.  Ron considerately took him over to a nature preserve 4 miles from here. I was feeling less charitable.

We went paddling at Lake St. George and it was idyllic. The water is so clear you can see 10-15 feet down easily. The cool lake temps were an antidote to a week long muggy sticky sweaty heat wave.

We found a little island to swim off. Usually the blueberries are ripe, but it was a few weeks early. Eileen, Leah, Ron and I had a leisurely time catching up on news and hearing details about the upcoming wedding.  Maybe that's why I look so serious here!

Here is the champion canoe crew enjoying their upper body workout. The wind came up on the way back and we had to paddle pretty hard to get back to the landing.

Having the girls visit was a perfect reason to stay down in Vassalboro for the weekend and enjoy lake activities.  Of course one cannot go on a lake without fishing and Leah happily caught a nice size bass fishing with Ron around the corner from "our" island. There was also a popular rope swing on the tree behind her that people were boating over to try with a variety of outcomes! 

The weather with the heat and humidity has been tumultuous and many afternoons or evenings have ended with big storms.  This was the Saturday evening variety.

 There were different levels of clouds you could see slightly mixing but staying in layers.

 The blackness should have been a signal to get inside but of course we stood there watching the wind and rain come through the field until it was pouring on us as we ran in the house.

The drenching rains caused an invasion of big black ants into the porch where the girls were sleeping so as it was storming outside we were vacuming up ants, and I was spraying with a mint oil poison. It was a blur of excitement.

Poor Leah, our city girl from Boston, the night before we lost power during dinner until the following morning, then her bedroom is invaded by insects. In the middle of the ant invasion to make herself feel more comfortable she said out loud to no one, "Well that's okay we'll sleep upstairs tonight." 

All in all  a great weekend with family, water, gardening, stories, and plenty of good drink and food. What's a few bugs or storms when you're with friends : )

Maine International Film Festival

MIFF is a Waterville buzz in mid-July. The Maine International Film Festival, in town from July 12 - 21, has over 60 films showing on three screens at the Railroad Square Cinema and a fourth screen at the Waterville Opera House.

The event includes honors for actors, directors, editors, live music, and after-movie parties/receptions. There is also a student component called the Maine Student Film and Video Festival, a competition, and talks on screenplay writing and filming.

This amounts to lots of excitement for our little town of 17,000 or so. Many visitors wander around downtown using up the normal parking spaces, looking for food and coffee, or a drink. Movie buffs buy passes and compare notes for how many each has seen, tips for getting through 2-4 movies a day for ten days, and of course, talk about the good movies.

I saw Viola yesterday, an Argentine film directed by Matías Piñeiro about an all female Shakespearean troupe in Buenos Ares rehearsing their lines for an interpretation of Twelfth Night. Primarily staying with lines from the play that the actresses are memorizing, the film shifts back and forth between the play and real life with certain lines being repeated over and over for various effects.

One woman seduces another to win a bet- or prove the other woman’s ideas about love to be wrong. Another actress, a bicycle carrier, fires up her romance by playing a little hard to get at the advice of the other women.

The movie is wonderfully contemporary and foreign- city scenes, bisexuality, unfamiliar actors- just modern city life. Because it is Shakespeare’s lines doing the seducing the audience can revel in the timelessness of art and sexual attraction.

I cannot tell you who played what parts, but they were all very good. The emotion of the women was captured stunningly by steady close shots on just the actresses’ faces showing the effect of the lines.

It was a wonder to hear Spanish for 65 minutes. The length was just right for an afternoon viewing. English viewers will have all they can do to follow the subtitles- though this gets simpler once you relax into the storyline of the play and realize much repeats. The Spanish sounds so exotic and rapid that it takes a bit to reconcile the audio with the subtitles. 

The director Piñeiro comments, “I have not yet come up with a way of totally fixing the situation. There is always some loss by the time the viewer is reading the subtitles. Also, because Viola has so much repetition, and the viewer understands that, and they’ve already read the subtitles, I thought about just cutting out some sections of subtitles. Thus, the formal idea would take over and all people, Spanish-speakers and not, would be watching the same thing, the things, the faces that really interest me”(Film Comment).

Overall, this is a fun movie with a South American flavor. Check out the MIFF schedule and make your way to Waterville- early to get seats.

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

In Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son, prepare to learn about the brutal and extraordinary effects on ordinary people of living under the dictatorship of Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Is the propaganda and brainwashing believable? Comforting? Beatable? The author conveys the utter poverty and deprivation of the ordinary N. Korean people. The subjugation of the country by the dictator- prison camps, kidnapping of women for the pleasure of powerful men, total submission by the people to the demands of the state- all are described matter-of-factly.

Johnson creates a surreal story where readers understand not only, the western, and perhaps more realistic, interpretation of N. Korea’s situation but also what the citizens  themselves hear- that they are in the land of plenty surrounded by aggressors who want to attack N. Korea. As one official Dr. Song says, “Where we are from, stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music maestro by the state, everyone had better start calling him a maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano (121).  Reality is in the hands of the dictator to name.

Accordingly the stark hunger of the citizens and lack of self-determination is unremarkable to Koreans. One privileged character, a movie actress, witnesses a starving family in a park. “Their fingernails were white with malnutrition, and even the girl’s teeth had gone grey. The boy’s shirt hung on him as from a wire hanger. Both women had lost much hair, and the father was nothing but cords under taut skin (300). They have been surprised with a dead squirrel which is a grave offense considered stealing from the state.

With Jun Do, Johnson creates a protagonist that we don’t understand or always like. “My file perhaps suggests I’m an expert kidnapper, and it’s true. I led a lot of missions, and only a couple of targets died on my watch (120). It takes the whole novel to understand the creative genius of Jun Do. He subverts for his own purpose the reality of his existence thereby mirroring Dear Leader Kim Jong Il’s fictional benevolence in the story and real world.  “ ‘ I don’t understand who you are,’ the Dear Leader said to him, “You killed my nemesis. You escaped Prison 33. You could have gotten away for good. But you came here. What kind of person would do that? Who would make their way to me, who would throw away his own life, just to spoil mine?’”(438).

Within this bleak environment, Jun Do’s, or Commander Ga as he is known in the second half of the book, infatuation and love for the movie star Sun Moon seems all the more romantic and fantastical. That he achieves his impossible goal of being with her shows an irrepressible imagination in human nature. His is a story of survival against incredible forces guided by techniques one of his teachers taught him during training. "Never let pain push you into darkness, Kim San said. There you are nobody and you are alone. Once you turn from the flame, it is over"(86).

The writing in Orphan Master’s Son is challenging and in a first read, the tricks of narration and twists in the plot are probably not all understood. Varying levels of reality told through different points of view, brutal detail, and political espionage all require alertness on the reader’s part. The reward is a reaffirmation of the human desire to not only survive but to determine the story that will unfold for each of our lives. This 2013 Pulitzer prize winner for fiction gives us a convincing view inside a secretive country through an amazing narrative that surprises at every turn.