Things that go Gulp in the night.

If you're going to spend October 31st sitting on the floor with a pile of books, and if your sci-fi pulp turns out to be horror fiction, don't keep on reading.
            It might be cheesy in the daylight, but at night you might just have to sleep with the bathroom light on, with mirrors carefully angled to point the light directly at your face. On account of tentacles.
            And your husband might get fed up and leave the bed and go sleep in the living room where it is dark. Without you. Which is even worse. On account of tentacles.

Introducing Surf Sounds: Poems by Roger Higgins

Today is all about a party invitation – 

I am very proud to be introducing Surf Sounds, the newest volume of poetry by Australian poet Roger Higgins!

Tonight we’re celebrating the book’s south American launch.  Please join us the Café Musetti in Providencia for an evening of fine wine and finer words!
 
Jenno, the fabulous new owner of Musetti has selected some seriously nice wines to sip on his primary-colored sofas, and the evening is going to be as solidly pleasurable as Roger’s poetry. 
Come on by!

Date: Thursday 23 April 2015

Time: 20h30 – 23h00 

Venue: Cafe Musetti, Santa Magdalena 87, Local 1, Providencia, Santiago 

Roger Higgins is an Australian who has traveled widely and lived in (alphabetically) Canada, Chile, Papua New Guinea, Scotland, and the USA.  Roger is an engineer by vocation, and has utilized his pen rather more than his camera on many of his travels, bringing together his physical and emotional responses to the environments and situations which he has encountered.  First versions may be written on paper napkins or pieces of paper tablecloths, the backs of boarding passes or the notes screen of a mobile phone. Roger has been published in both magazines and journals. His irst collection Hieroglyphs, was published by Friendly Street Poets 2008. His most recent collection Surf Sounds, is published by Liquid Light Press 2014.

Roger Higgins' poetry is both day by day and exotic. The poet washes his socks and jocks when he showers. He prefers description, narrative and irony to self-dramatization; there’s a lot more to Surf Sounds than ocean, beach and desert.
~ Graham Rowlands, Poet


Surf Sounds can be purchased through amazon, Liquid light Press and Lulu.

Post-Poetics

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

And Ogden Nash can just go jump off the edge of the Ultima Esperanza Sound.

Poetry; the need for, in excess(es).

At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the far south of Chile.  We were heading into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands, going to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine.
We were going tower hunting.

Sometimes it’s all about poetry. At the end of April, while our Aussie guests were here, we all flew together down to the to the city of Punta Arenas (lit. Sandy Point) in Patagonia in the south of Chile. Punta Arenas is situated right on the Strait of Magallenes -  a stout little town with neoclassical houses wrapped around a tidy Plaza de Armas, a university, the Chilean Antarctic Institute, and rather a lot of military. 

(I rather like the Antarctic Institute. The sign on their front door is refrigerated, so that the continent in their logo can have a polar icecap.)

The military protects Chile’s southern flank: the strait, the Drake Passage and the southern ocean generally (or at least as far as Argentina lets them.)  We weren’t going that way. We were heading away from the sea into the pampas – the thousands on thousands of rolling kilometers of open southern grasslands.  We were going north to Puerto Natales and the Torres del Paine, where the spine of the Andes mountains breaks the plains and makes a border with Argentina. We were going tower hunting.

            I have been here once before.  Nine years ago, on Boxing Day (December 26), I flew down here with my parents and my sister for a mid-summer week in Patagonia. These southern pampas are grazing country – on maps the rolling lands is broken into estancias (ranches, or stations) for sheep and cattle.  At that point in the year, the spring weather was tuned to maximum, and we drove out across endless, undulating plains of waving grass. Thunderheads moved across the sky at a rolling gallop, faster than the wind that came in waves and shook the grass from green to russet to gold and back to green again.            
            This time around, at the end of April, the short summer was done, and we were heading at that same rolling gallop headfirst into winter.  The grass was brown and silver, short and broken, and the line between the sky and the horizon was so sharp you could have marked it out with a pencil and carried away with you.

Poetry would come in handy here. Puerto Natales is a small town sitting on the shore of the Ultima Esperanza (lit. Last Hope) Sound, two hundred and fifty kilometers Punta Arenas. Puerto Natales serves as a base camp for the great National Park of Torres del Paine – lying another hundred-odd kilometers to the north.  The views from the town across the fjord are tremendous – the hills on the far side show as thick patches of bruised blue and purple and the air is so thick with oxygen that the sky lays down layers of color, one on top of the other, until the hills and sky all run together like watercolor paints –

And when the sun comes down-  here descriptions fail, and you have to turn to poetry – the wrong sort of poetry, poetry that has nothing to do with it, that shouldn’t ever suit -
            Do you know the poem about the Assyrians?   
            “The Assyrian came all down like the wolf on the fold/ And his cohorts were gleaming, in purple and gold-” 
            and goes on to Angels of Death and wailing widows and forests scattered on autumn winds and sprays of surf on bloody rocks?
            Just like that.  The sunsets were exactly like that.

Flying Crooked

Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
He has -who knows so well as I?-
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
-- Robert Graves

When I was small, Dad would read this poem to me at night before I went to bed. (I had low tastes.) The words hit me in the funny bone like a reflex hammer hits that little bone in your knee - the one that contains electricity so that when the doctor taps it with the hammer a spark flies up and closes a circuit and your leg leaps up of its own accord and hits the doctor in the chin.
I just couldn't help myself.  The kicker was that line "he lurches here and here by guess and god and hope and HOPELESSNESS-  Dad would read it and I woud be off, my mind full of bits of color that didn't know the faintest thing about direction, rolling across my bed and shrieking with laughter at the cleverness of Mr Grave's understanding of butterflies.

Yesterday I saw an out of season bit of orange fluttering myopically along our back fence.
It reminded me.

Taylor Lautner Says Some Stuff!

I spent yesterday afternoon supervising an eighth grade girl working on a project for her Religious Education class.  She wasn't half as interested in her essay on Representations of Good and Evil In The Media as she was in the new issue of her tween magazine.

            Eventually, I was forced to confiscate. Walking it over to the other side of the classroom, I leafed through it idly, and it fell open to a well-thumbed page - a feature on the new Twilight movie.

Red letters screamed out at me -

            "Taylor Lautner Says Some Stuff That Makes Us Fall In Love With Him Even More!"

            Seriously?  I've read a few snarky criticisms about teen journalism and I though the bloggers were writing parodies.  I had no idea they were quoting!

            I turned the page and saw a sidebar feature on the next-most-upcoming Twilight film Breaking Dawn:

             "FYI & BTW.  Bella and Edward get married, go on their honeymoon and then, well, things start to get a bit ca-razy.   Like, freaky-half-vampire babies crazy.  Some Freaky Shiz goes down - cue scary red eyes and even pastier skin for KStew.   Cool much?"

            Blaaaaaah. Madam Eighth-Grade was typing diligently, and fascinated, I read on - 

            "Tell us a secret from the set.  What do you do when you're not filming?"

            "I catch grapes in my mouth."

            "Sounds like quite a talent you've go there!"

            After this less than stellar kick off, the interviewer dug deep and plumbed the depths of the boy's soul:

            "What's the craziest moment you've ever had with a fan?"

            I think the most difficult thing is when they pass out.  It's broken into levels.  The first level is screaming.  The second level is crying.  When they start crying, you feel really bad for them, so you touch them because you want to make them feel better and then they pass out."

            "That's got to be awkward."

            "Well, when they pass out, you feel really bad."

            Snorting, I flipped back toward the cover and ran into a full page advertisement for pimple cream:  

            "OMG!  Proactiv is my BFF!  Heart, Delta.  XOXO."

            Right after that came a very pink page:  

            "The Art of the Perfect Kiss: A Seven Step Guide.  A perfect first kiss should be less raging thunderstorm than slow sunrise.  Think soft, short, gentle movements, with your mouth open only a little.  You don't want things to get too slobbery…"
            The Taylor Lautner stuff was harmlessly puerile, but this - !  My brain hurt.

            Against all expectations, sandwiched between the garbage the magazine contains some moderately sensible and compassionate advice (tricked out in baby-talk and rotten spelling) on the perils of anonymous chat-rooms, and several advice columns dealing with Defining your Own Self-Worth (ironic, in context) and coping with the emotional ramifications of your divorced Mum dating a new man.  
            But the bulk of the magazine is acres and acres of cosmetics and hair products - surely unaffordable for the 11 year-old target audience - that are absolutely seriously not in any way being peddled by outside advertisers (This is my absolute for real FAVE nail polish! -"the only downer is that I have to commit to one color for a whole two weeks.  Starts from $35.") and other advice columns that while outwardly pushing healthy family relationships, subvert the good intentions with the clear message that normal tweens see any sort of family relationship as just, well, eewwwww:  
            "A study compiled by the Federal Government reveals that teens spend an average of 40 hours a week with their family.   Thinking about spending that much time with your 'rents is enough to make you cry…"

            I say again: blaaaaah.  Even a kissing seminar for the prepubescent set can't be as bad as that.

            "Your first step to makeout magic is to find the actual problem.  Is he a teeth cracker?  Tonsil tackler?  Or maybe he has an unfortunate problem with, um, saliva?  PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE!  The boy can't get any better if you screw up your face in disgust every time he comes near! Like all good sports, the only way to ace it is to practice up.  So get onto it!" 

            No diagrams? I confess to feeling disappointment. I was looking forward to seeing how an illustrator could make tongues and tonsils come across all kawaii with hearts and flowers.

In a flash of empathy, I understood my own mother's  blanket and unyielding objection to the YM Magazine I bought so religiously every month the year that  I was thirteen.

            "What are you giggling about over there?"

            "It's the My Most Embarrassing Experience page.  This one - oh, it's soooooo bad - in this one, this one girl was at sports camp and she had her period while she was there and the boy she had a crush banged into her during a basketball game and he noticed that she was wearing a pad."

            "May I see that?"

            I passed the magazine over.

            "Three quarters of these stories are about girls dying of embarrassment because someone saw a pack of tampons in the bottom of their bag!"

            "Well - yeah."

            Mum looked at the magazine rather coldly.  "Why, exactly, is it embarrassing for someone to grasp that the writer is a biologically functioning female?"

            She appeared to have an incredibly loose grasp of the obvious.  I floundered.  
            "Because, well - they're just - well... read the magazine! If it wasn't embarrassing, why would people be writing to the magazine about being embarrassed?" (At thirteen, I accepted everything I read in print as gospel.  I was a very trusting child.)

            "Look at it this way," I said, trying to make her understand. "If you think about it, YM is actually offering a public service.  It's like a support group for all the teenage girls in America - if I can read about how other girls suffer this too, I won't feel so bad if a pad falls out of my locker and someone sees it. "

            Mum's lips thinned.  "Is stress making you fat?"  She read aloud. "Get Lucky in Love: 7 Moves to Make Guys Melt! For the love of-  Tabubilgirl, you're thirteen!"

            "It's important."  I argued.  "If I don't learn it all now, how will I know all this stuff later when I need it?"

Approximately three issues later, and two weeks before my fourteenth birthday, my family moved from California to Northern Chile.

            "What do you want as a birthday present?" My friend Theadora asked me.

            "O.MG."  I said. "What I really really want is a subscription to YM magazine. You can't buy it down there."

            "You can't get YM in Chile?!" Theadora looked suitably horrified.  "Don't you worry, Tabubilgirl. I personally guarantee to keep you supplied.  One subscription, tied up in a ribbon, on your birthday.  I promise."*

            There were no words for my relief. She had taken one major moving worry right off my mind.

            Theadora came round to see me the very next day. "I'm not allowed to give you YM for your birthday."

            "Why?!"

            "I told my mom about it last night, and she went straight to the phone and called your Mom, and she says that your Mom says I'm not allowed to give it to you. It was absolutely none of their business, but now I'm not allowed-"

            "Can't you just secretly get it anyway?  And give me another little birthday present to hide the real one?"

            Theadora looked glum. "I thought of that too.  But your mom will see the magazine when it gets delivered to your place, and then we'll both be in trouble. And she'll hide it on you anyway."

            We sat silently on my bed, morbidly envisioning a future empty of YM Magazine.

Thank You, O Mothers of California, for insisting that I grow up free of tween journalism and forced to make - or not make - my own opinions about boys, movies, makeup and the subtle sartorial differences between brushed and stretch denim skirts.  I had to figure out kissing all on my own.  In my own time.  And I'm sure I'm not morbidly embarrassed about half the things I ought to be.

            But I don't feel deprived.  I managed to pick up a heart-stopping crush on Jonathan Brandis from SeaQuest all on my own initiative.  I had two posters - one on my wall and one in a crush-proof poster roll, for when I got old and grey and the first one faded. I muddled by.

* Fourteen year old girls talked in italics in 1994.  Things haven't changed much since.

The Lion's Lady

I’m wending my incredulous way through one of my sister’s romance novels.  It's called The Lion's Lady, and was written by a writer with the suitably harlequin-esque name of Julie Garwood.  I like romance novels. They're the only sort of book I feel comfortable reading in the bathtub.  If I drop one in the water, it improves the plot. 
            The book concerns a charming young English lady raised in America among the Dakota, so that she may one day return to England in order to dispatch her father (deposed king of an ambiguous principality) for the crime of torturing his populace, having her mother declared insane and then leaving a bloody trail in his wake as he chased his actually-completely-sane wife all the way to the colonies.
            Naturally, on her return to Fair Albion, our comely heroine is seriously distracted by the most eligible bachelor in England, only he’s not generally regarded as particularly eligible, because his countenance is so steep and stern and cold that he sends debutantes squeaking in fright.  Except that he’s not really cold and cruel, he’s just tormented by the nightmares engraved on his soul by his years in His Majesty’s Service.  Honestly, in almost every single regency romance novel ever written, the aristocratic hero is a double agent posing as a roué to hide his work for the secret service.  It’s a wonder that people didn’t, as a matter of course, address aristos with the words “Ah, my dear Lord _____.  Been rattling off to the continent and topping venal traitors to the crown this week, eh, what?”  
            With the deep spiritual understanding given to her by her years among the Indians, Christine instinctively understands all this and the two of them fall passionately into bed – or a convenient bathtub - every 15 pages all the way through the book. And because he’s eligible she thinks the fuss and bother of marrying him would be a good smokescreen for her real mission in England. It’s not as if she’s actually attracted to him.  Goodness, no.  That passionate grope on the balcony on page 32 was just a once-off. Seriously.
            In the course of their romance, the eligible bachelor foils carriage-loads of ruffians bent on mayhem and ravishment, and she proves how capable she is by foiling even more ruffians, while simultaneously driving him demented by making lots of obscure pronouncements about Great Spirits and Buffaloes (Mr. Eligible needs cease to let himself be sidetracked wondering where a proper English Miss met real live buffaloes, and start being infuriated by the idiocies that she spouts as deep spiritual Indian wisdom.)
            The book is a real bodice-ripper.  I counted three dresses lost to passionate shredding, ditto two dressing gowns, and another dress lost to an amorous encounter with bathwater.  (That’s another thing about Regency romances; the characters bathe so often that they present their calling cards with pruney fingers.  And tread the floorboards of their Inigo Jones townhouses with pruney toes, because the heroines are far too postmodern to wear slippers!)
            Ah yes, the denoument. The His Majesty's Secret Service helps Christine to top her dad (because he turned out to have previously topped an awful lot of the secret service) and they find lots of jewels that he buried under a rosebush (which they send to his destitute nation - to buy bread and powdered milk and disposable diapers, I presume) and Christine and Mr Eligible get married and live happily (but not too happily, because then she wouldn’t have any more excuses to look feisty and coy and trip him onto hearth rugs for passionate make-up sex) ever after.

Laughter and Life Goals

My sister, just back from eight weeks studying medicine in Rarotonga (Lord, she has a tough life), came to spend a week with us before her next rotation (infectious diseases) began. She is freckled all over, and brown between, as if she'd been baked in an oven to a tropical finish.
            She brought photographs!  Tropical sunsets. Tropical sunrises. My sister on a beach, her hair pinned full of hibiscus flowers. Bucketing up and down mountain roads on a scooter. Mushrooms growing in her shower. Tropical downpours turning the world into soup under a white wall of water.  Mr Tabubil and I breathed very deeply and imagined chucking everything and buying a pup-tent on the beach at Titikaveka. But over there Mr Tabubil wouldn't have his DSL connection, and things would pall, I think.
            She earned her PADI certification on the island, and brought a folder of photos of herself scuba-diving with sharks and moray eels and octopuses and eagle rays, but the most extraordinary photo was one of my sister hanging in mid-water over the edge of the island shelf - she was a stream of bubbles almost lost in a field of blue - a pale butterfly drowned in four thousand meters of dark water.
            It was purely elsewhere.
            It curled my hair.  Echoed inside of my head and shot through my belly like a stream of fireworks.  It made me want to ride tramp steamers into the steaming jungle and ride rocket ships up among the stars.

In the evenings, my sister and I cooked stir-fries out of a book I'd been given as a wedding present.  We went shopping every afternoon for fresh ingredients.  Waiting at the checkout, we grazed the horrible weekly gossip magazines.
            "O.M.G!"  She gasped.  "I can't believe how long I've been out of touch!  Look at how many celebrity couples broke up while I was away!"
            My sister has an amazing laugh.  It ripples, like a brook I met once in Arkansas.  Or like a magpie, swinging at the top of a tree and singing a gurgling song into the wind.  You'd do or say just about anything to make it happen again.  To hear more of it.

She helped us pack for our move, boxing books in the living room while I wrapped wine glasses in the kitchen.   I heard her Howl.
            "You have disgraced me as a sister! How could you- of all people?! - " and then I heard an incoherent wail of outrage.
            "You found the Paris Hilton Biography?" I called cheerfully.
            A gasp. "How did you know?"
            There's only one book on our shelves that would win me a reaction like that.  The book is a masterpiece whose perfection of form brings real tears to my eyes: Paris Hilton - the Blue Banner Biography, by Jennifer Torres.  Regular bookstores don't stock it.  I had to order it specially.
            The back cover says: "Paris Hilton was born into the life of luxury, and right from the start she embraced life and everything it had to offer her.  Growing up in a fancy hotel with maids, butlers and posh surroundings, Hilton wanted her own identity and she struggled to find it.  Photographers began to notice the tall blonde with the piercing blue eyes who started showing up at all the best parties with her equally beautiful sister.  Paris was eventually appearing in magazines everywhere.  She was becoming a fashion icon. Modeling jobs soon followed, but Paris’s true desire was to be an actress.   She was used to getting what she wanted and movie offers began coming in.  Paris discovered that you can make your own destiny with a little hard work and a whole lot of dazzle."
            The book goes on to teach young girls that the greatest dream a woman can dream is to be a very wealthy socialite with your photograph on a perfume advertisement and to have lots of designer handbags.   My very favorite thing about this book is that I first found it in the library of an Ontario Public School. On the Recommended Reading shelf. I have been devoutly praying for a mis-filing ever since.
            I heard that laugh again.
            Then my sister and I packed our kitchen, and she flew away, taking her laugh away with her.