......grocery lists, doodles, short story, novel.....

i will read anything marquez writes......grocery list, doodles, short story, novel..... A review of Leaf Storm by Kerilynn Pederson on Goodreads.

Half-way through Leaf Story, I'm nodding my head.

I'm lying if I say I "get" every word, line, sentence. I don't.

At least not on the rational level. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's story slips and slides through every "how it should be/written" censor within me.

When I read Adelaide's point of view, being raised in a bilingual household, I know her. This outrage of things she has never been told by the inhabitants of her own home. Marquez captures the affront to her dignity better than any reel of film.

Then there is the rhythm--that bassline--steady in the background. Syncopation is as much an art in writing as it is in music. 

And the light plummets through the trees like a bird. And the maliciously premeditated gossip.

He rolls the leaves tights then ignites them. The haze from the smoke alters our sense of perception.

Who is that crazy man just eating grass?

I read several books, because one is not enough. Take a bite from each, and savor.

The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman is creamy, bitter, and crunchy. It is not too sweet, but it is very intense. The world Elv, Meg, and Claire share unites goblins, demons and faerie queens; Paris, hawthorn trees and carriage horses; with wild girls who wear pointy boots and get black wings tatooed on their back. There is a secret language. Ca brava me seen arra? Who among us has the courage to do the right thing?

It tastes just as good the second time.

The Complete Fairy Tales by Oscar Wilde are bursts. Stabs. They hit my tongue like the darkest of chocolates. Less than a single square is plenty. A nightingale presses a thorn to its breast for the blood red rose discarded in a gutter. SIGH. Don't we all know.

Leaf Storm is altogether different. Perhaps the best salad made from the fresh greens and herbs they grow down the road at Tolstoy's Farm. Why not?

The boy, Isabel, the colonel, and Meme provide slivers of Macondo. Slices of tomato.

So who is that crazy man just eating grass?

The world is atwitter with magical realism...

I am going to eat more, I decide. I am going to let myself sit at the table where "the mysterious quality of reality" (Bowers, 2004) is acknowledged. It's often the things that I live, breathe, smell, know, yet cannot touch or see, that sustain me. They fill me up. They make whatever fights within me know peace.

I discover I am not alone.

Film critics are musing about Beasts of The Southern Wild, and whether the decline of a superpower has forced a retreat to our imaginations.

The patron saint of subjective experience has returned, and the imagination is ready to run riot.

Phil Hoad, The Guardian Film Blog

As if this might be a bad thing. Perhaps even a failure. Or comeuppance. But I know better. It is a greeting. It as an embrace. It is a coming home.

Like me, the world is starving, and it is what we imagine that will feed us.

Because imagination is the seed, the font, the alpha, the thing that regenerates, renews, and births hope. The mechanism of change. The vital essence of humanity.

And if there has been a failure, then it has been that we have not imagined enough...

Illialei, Tyrannis, the Great White Sea, these are some of the places where imagination dwells in my world. And the war fought there, will determine whether imagination survives in ours.