Longmire's Magical Realism

I never really expected to like Longmire. But since the advent of DVRs and Netflix I've become a fan of the small screen. With multiple episodes and seasons to delve into character, TV shows have become much more compelling entertainment for me than movies. Now, I—who used to not own a television on principal—enjoy fangirling over my favorite shows.

Back to ... I never really expected to like Longmire. But we were in the middle of seasons with not much to watch and it popped up on our radar. The first show hooked me: the characters, the writing, and that jaw-dropping scenery. I mean, what's not to love about a stoic male hero who looks great in a cowboy hat and boots? Which Robert Taylor does! (What is it with these actors from Down Under ...  Simon Baker?!?) And Longmire is a widower. His wife's ashes reside in a tin box labeled Tea in his kitchen. Her body may have departed from this world, but Martha's memory informs every aspect of who Walt Longmire is and who he remains to become. Did I mention that he refuses to own a cellphone (be still my Luddite heart) and picks up stray beer cans (the treehugger in me beams) because he hates to see them mucking up his beloved Absaroka County?

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And then there's his friend Henry Standing Bear—"It's a beautiful day at the Red Pony and continual soiree"—played by Lou Diamond Phillips. His one-liners are some of the best dialog in the show. I want to take a road trip to Wyoming, hang out at the Red Pony, and drink Ranier beer even though I hate beer!

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Okay, not enough to love in one show? Then add Vic Moretti (played brilliantly by Katee Sackhoff), deputy to Longmire's sheriff. Her hair is always a mess and her mouth is always sharp. In other words she's real. She doesn't go around chasing bad guys and girls in heels with a blow out.

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And then there's deputy Branch Connally, challenging his boss in the upcoming election. He's the prissy one. And Ferg, the young deputy who's trying to find himself, his courage, his sense of purpose.

There are three more elements I love about this show.

Yes, it's a law and order/crime show, but the crimes are not retreads. Each one tugs at your heart and many leave you with a good look at what's wrong with this world. There is little stark us vs. them, cliched dichotomy, right/wrong here. The misguided, wrong-headed, and wrong-hearted wreak havoc on those around them with a reality that is often painful to watch.

Absaroka County borders a Cheyenne reservation. The distrust between the two nations is portrayed with both a simplicity and complexity that feels tense, raw, harsh, and palpable.

The show really shines when it enters the territory of magical realism and brings Native American spirituality and culture into the episodes—Contrary Clowns, Dog Soldiers, Eagle Feathers, and White Warriors. Sigh. I'm so thrilled Netflix picked it up for its fourth season ... which was released on September 10th.

We're currently binge watching Season Four after re-running the first three.

CBB Book Promotions Review Tour: Eleanor by Jason Gurley

Eleanor by Jason Gurley 

450 pages

Time is a river. 

1985. The death of Eleanor's twin sister tears her family apart. Her father blames her mother for the accident. When Eleanor's mother looks at her, she sees only the daughter she lost. Their wounded family crumbles under the weight of their shared grief.

1993. Eleanor is fourteen years old when it happens for the first time... when she walks through an ordinary door at school and finds herself in another world. It happens again and again, but it's only a curiosity until that day at the cliffs. The day when Eleanor dives... and something rips her out of time itself.

And on the other side, someone is waiting for her.

My Comments:

Not only is Eleanor a fantastic read, but it grapples successfully with several challenging themes:

1. How the breakdown of a family affects children.

2. The complexities inherent in a woman's decision to have or not have children.

3. And suicide. With Robin Williams recent passing, suicide has received more attention these days. One person commits suicide every 40 seconds.

Kudos to Jason Gurley for tackling these very human issues with such grace.

My Short & Sweet 5-star review:

Told largely through the eyes of a young girl, Eleanor provides a searing gaze into the the tragedies that have struck a family and darkened three generations of mother/daughter relationships. With added elements of time travel and dream worlds, the novel becomes something quite unique. There are so many beautifully written scenes, it was hard to put down. My absolute favorite parts were the Keeper and her shadow and the mystery that surrounds their world. Highly recommend.

About the Author:

 Jason Gurley is the author of the bestselling novel Greatfall as well as The Man Who Ended the World, the Movement trilogy and Eleanor, a novel thirteen years in the making. His short stories, including The Dark Age, The Caretaker, The Last Rail-Rider and others, appear in his collection Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything. He is work has appeared in a number of anthologies, among them David Gatewood's From the Indie Side and Synchronic and John Joseph Adams's Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Projects. Jason is a designer by trade, and has designed book covers for Amazon Publishing, Subterranean Press, Prime Books and many independent authors, among them bestsellers Hugh Howey, Matthew Mather, Russell Blake, Michael Bunker, Ernie Lindsey and others. Jason lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.

The Girl Who Dreamed of Red Shoes is Free thru July 5th on Amazon!

The Girl Who Dreamed of Red Shoes is the story of an orphan, a wild child of the forest who's taken in by a rich old lady. But all that glitters is not gold. The longer the girl stays with the old woman, the more her spirit withers within the confines of the old lady, her church and her gossipy neighbors... until she finds her red shoes. But how could she ever know that living a life that crushes her spirit will only lead to her destruction?

Our contemporary girl is slowly dying inside trying to live up to society's standard of success. She's drawn to this fairy tale—it's like music to her battered soul. She realizes that she's got to be her real self or she's going drift farther and farther from her spirit to her own despair.

With a strength born of desperation, she walks away from the stockbroker and his red Porsche, praying she'll find her own red and, for the first time in her life, freedom!

Once Upon a Time Today

The Breath of Life

I finish reading The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman. My mouth is filled with grit and sand, my feet are cut and bruised by stone, my fingers grip the breath of life. This is a story about women. This is story about blood and death. This is a story about the lengths to which we must go sometimes to survive. It's scary in that regard. Scary to know what we as human beings are capable of doing to one another—and ourselves. We have enough reminders of that on a daily basis. And yet…

Alice Hoffman is my favorite contemporary author and this is, perhaps, her greatest work, and yet…I've put off reading it. Now, I'll have to read it again someday, this story of Yael, Revka, Aziza, and Shirah. I'll have to read it with more care and devotion. This story of lions and doves.

It's so very layered and intricate. Each sentence explodes with meaning.

If it is indeed: our duty as human beings to see behind the veil to the inside of the world, to the heart of things, then it would seem that Alice Hoffman has fulfilled her duty as a human being and then some.

And FINALLY, a period.

I finally finish reading The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I feel like I have run a marathon up the highest mountain; endured sleeting rain in freezing cold temperatures wrapped in nothing but a measly scarf;  lived on twigs, gruel, and piss for nine months and survived it all. I want some medal.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is Gabo's third masterpiece...if you are counting Leaf Storm as one, which I am, and One Hundred Years of Solitude as two, which everyone else is (I have't read it yet).

It is an awesome and prodigious work. I see four layers in the story.

1. At its most basic, the story is a psychedelic oozing of mixed consciousness', a seething mass of point of view violations.

2. Next, it is like the most brain-bursting collection of metaphors, images, phrasing, words, and writing that I have ever attempted to digest. Often it left me staring at the ceiling, or out the window, or just plain dazed.

3. Then, there is the detailed riveting stomach-churning rubber-necking timeless classic essential portrait of the dictator. When I finish reading, I think...Gabo has captured the inner workings of every single dictator who as ever lived, still lives, is in diapers, and is yet to be born.

4. And the hard reading of the sentences that go on forever, and there is no respite, and you think just the onslaught of all the words is going to make you go crazy which makes the structure of the novel as inaccessible and inscrutable as the psyche of the subject itself.

Wow.

I am left with memories of that patriarch wearing the denim uniform without insignia and the gold spur on the left heel, who is always dragging his feet through the government house full of chickens and cows to the latrines where he and no one else writes on the the toilets long live the general, long live the stud who after selling a sea, sought in native science the only thing that really interested him which was to discover some masterful hair-restorer for his incipient baldness whose life had been seen in the  premonitory waters of basins by his mother of mine Bendicion Alvarado of my heart, he was as deaf as a post not only because I would ask him about one thing and he would answer about another but also that it grieved him that the birds were not singing when in fact it was difficult to breathe with that uproar of birds which was like walking through the jungle at dawn and they created newspapers and tv shows for him just the way that he liked them and every night he slept in his office behind three bolts, three locks, and three bars which is where they finally found him stretched out on the floor, face down, his right arm bent under his head as a pillow where he had realized at the moment of his death his incapacity for love in the enigma of the palm of his mute hands and in the invisible code of the cards and he had tried to compensate for that infamous fate with the burning cultivation of the solitary vice of power.

And FINALLY, a period. That is kind of how you start to feel, and by the end of the book, you are gasping, yearning, craving, needing, dying for that little dot.

Brilliant. But not light. Very heavy.

I am going to indulge in something  extra-super-duper-extremely lite and fluffy for my next read.

Thank you Gabo, wherever you are, for giving up the law. You and Gaugin.

the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited...

I am determined to finish The Autumn of the Patriarch and Gerald Martin's biography of Gabo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Life. But The Autumn of the Patriarch is not an easy read and the biography is thick.

Right now Marquez is in Mexico. He's been working in the news, advertising and movie industries. But it seems his soul yearns for its primary language...literature...

I always thought that the cinema, through its tremendous visual power, was the perfect means of expression. All my books before One Hundred Years of Solitude are hampered by that uncertainty. There is an immoderate desire for the visualization of character and scene, a millimetric account of the time of dialogue and action and an obsession with indicating point of view and frame. While actually working in cinema, however, I came to realize not only what could be done but also what couldn't be done; I saw that the predominance of the image over the other narrative elements was certainly an advantage but also a limitation and this was for me a startling discovery because only then did I become aware of the fact that the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited.

I just about salivate over these words, because I understand, and I agree that "the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited."

That is why we keep reading, that is why we keep searching. That is why the shelves of ereaders all over the world are bursting with books.

The human mind thrives on novelty...we will always crave new stories...and the possibilities are unlimited.

Ah. The master has spoken.

The Death Fairy

Now, I'm reading The Death Fairy by Laird Stevens. Another random pick up for Free on my kindle. I chose it, I think, because Asia's mother committed suicide.

It is ... different. The writing leaves me critical. Too much telling, I say, then have to smile. Writers, bah! But the story is ... interesting. I'm not sure what to think about it. Is it leading me down a primrose path to a groaning cliche. Possibly something sordid? I can't tell, because they're the good bits.

Like the photo albums filled with pictures of her dead mother, and the stories Asia makes up about them, and how she believes that makes her different than her friend Beverly, who has only the one story to tell about her dead mother.

Kind of a dead end, that one crippling story.

And then there's the fun bit about how egocentric the idea of karma is because the idea that  ...  Everything that happens to you in life happens because of something you did ... does kind of make it all about you.

Pop. Burst another bubble.

The Last Story in Leaf Storm...

Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait is a love story between silence and song. A mute girl who drools and a black boy who sings.

When the horse kicks Nabo in the head and that angel calls him to join the choir, he can't leave until that girl cranks the gramophone one more time, shouts his name--the only words she can say--and sets him free.

At least...that's how I read it.

It's the last story about Macondo, so I'm left a little droopy. Endings are always bittersweet and this one's no different.

But...was the saxophone player an angel before or after he died?

Gabo sang.
Maybe he still does.
Maybe Gabo goes to the square every Saturday night to sing in that choir and hear that black angel play the sax.
That would be an ending more sweet than bitter.

Did you hear that?
It's so quiet.
The Leaf Storm has passed.

Who Would Sell a Sea?

There are things that I have learned along the way. One is: No one else can tell the truth of your life. It's because we all have filters, and see things in our own way. So, whenever someone says she did this because of that or when that happened, it may or may not be true. Because they don't really know, do they?

Given that truth, a biography, read with an appropriate sense of caution, can be a fascinating thing.

From Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life by Gerald Martin ...

... he began to collect the details which would eventually make a dictator of his own come to life, fleshing out the obsessions with power and authority, impotence and solitude ... Mendoza recalls that his tireless friend spent a lot of time in those days reading about Latin America's seemingly interminable list of tyrants ... gradually developing a profile of boys without fathers, men with an unhealthy dependence on their mothers and an immense lust for taking possession of the earth ...

and then we get this ... in The Autumn of the Patriarch ...

... it was thought that he was a man of the upland plains because of his immense appetite for power, the nature of his government, his mournful bearing, the inconceivable evil of a heart which had sold the sea to a foreign power and condemned us to live facing this limitless plain of harsh lunar dust where the bottomless sunsets pain us in our souls.

I mean ... WTF.
Who would sell a sea?

It's just me and the words Gabo wrote...

Then I get to Monolgue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo.

It's a steady drip-drip, just like the rain. I want to take a nap. Like when it's raining.

I worry about that poor cow ... that could not fall down because the habit of being alive prevented her ... And really, like Isabel, I never thought the woman ... asking, every Tuesday, for the eternal branch of lemon balm ... would make it through the deluge. But she did. And then there was the sick woman who'd ... disappeared from her bed and had been found floating that afternoon in the courtyard.

So who fell in the well?

I don't know. But I feel like I finally get IT.

The Leaf Storm. The leaf trash. Macondo.
The awareness glows inside me like a smile.
I don't have a degree in English.
I am not sitting in some classroom.
There is not a blackboard within reach, sight, or walking distance.
The professor is at the university. Not here, in my room.
No, it's just me and the words Gabo wrote.
Brilliant.

Six Pages, One Long Line...

I am reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life by Gerald Martin. It's a slow road. There's not a lot of poetry. There are lots of facts, and names, and places. But it's a biography, and it's thorough.

I love the passages that speak directly to Gabo's writing, even better when he's quoted:

There's not a line in any of my books which I can't connect to a real experience. There is always a reference to concrete reality.

This is an important insight to another writer. Maybe to a reader, too. But the first time I read it, it flies right over my head like a startled bird. I drop the book in my lap and laugh.

Because I have just finished reading The Last Voyage of The Ghost Ship... six pages, one long line.

That Gabo, he's got a wicked sense of humor.

The Zany Action, Crazy Contraption of Life...

I am still savoring Leaf Storm, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I don't read in it every day. It's a very rich dessert. So, I taste a few bites and savor.

I finish Blacaman The Good, Vendor of Miracles and think about the Mouse Trap game we had when I was a kid. A Game of Zany Action on a Crazy Contraption. You drop the marble, and it rolls down a standing labyrinth to trip the trap.

That's how the story is written. The zany action, crazy contraption of life leads to the mausoleum for Blacaman the Bad. He's trapped.
Whoa.
That's a story.
I read it again, because I've just got to watch that marble roll one more time.

The Atheist ...

I do a random search on my Kindle for magical realism. All sorts of books come up. One of them is The Atheist by Gabriel Ruiz, translated by Monica Lanshorn.

The book's cover depicts a white stick cross centered in a child-shaped heart superimposed upon a pond of sitting ducks haunted by the ghost of a church. The predominant colors are golds and browns. I download the sample.

The book starts with questions. Few are direct. They are interesting enough to keep me reading. The narrative style is pleasant, matter-of-fact. The narrator himself is thoughtful and introspective. But not too much.

An englishman in a small spanish town with a dead friend, the Atheist. And now two graves are being dug. One just inside the cemetery wall, and one just outside.  His friend will have to decide which grave will be the Atheist's.

Then comes Maria who believes in God.

The story follows a path that reminds me of the streets I walked in Granada. Not straight, but paved with stones that are not flat.

And then there is the boy, so much like the Atheist himself. I know what you're thinking. I was too.
When I finish reading I smile.

Clever.

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings

I love the story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. So far, it is my favorite in Leaf Storm. It is the reason I bought the book, years ago, in the first place. Its seven pages drench us with:

Lyrcial prose-

...a poor woman who since childhood had been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portugese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while wide awake...

Clever humor-

He seemed to be so many places at the same time that they grew to think he'd been duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.

And blistering indictment-

The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead.

We pray, ask, beg, and plead for the divine to reveal itself in our lives.

We bemoan, fret, and sigh that the divine eludes us. Yet if a very old man with enormous wings made a clumsy landing in our yard on a wet afternoon, what would we see?

Not even with an axe...

I finish the story Leaf Storm and think:

These are the memories of how we treat one another. 
Death, the final arbiter arrives for us all.
And then we smell...

Immediately, I begin reading the Gabriel Garcia Marquez biography by Gerald Martin.

I am shocked--why?--to learn just how autobiographical the story Leaf Storm is. I feel disappointed and satisfied. Disappointed because it wasn't imagined from ground zero. Satisfied because perhaps I did get the story, more than I thought.

Then something the biographer observes about Gabo's voice gives me pause.

Many years later, when Garcia Marquez managed to reconstruct those two ways of interpreting and narrating reality, both of them involving a tone of absolute certainty--the worldly, rationalizing sententiousness of his grandfather and the other-worldy oracular declamations of his grandmother--leavened by his own inimitable sense of humor, he would be able to develop a world-view and a corresponding narrative technique which would be instantly recognizable to the readers of each new book.

And I begin absorbing in a new way how there is no becoming who we are. It is always an undoing. An unveiling. A stripping away of flawed pretense. Useless affectation, that fools no one but ourselves, must go. Because we cannot cut ourselves off from our roots.

Not even with an axe.

......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.

I am starving ...

I open Leaf Storm, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and my heart kind of flutters.

I am starving.

After decades of denying myself the power of story, I am reading more and more these days. The stories are waking up something essential. But this essential thing has been asleep for a very long time--maybe since the day I was born—so its sound is faint, easier to feel than hear. I vow not to read anything that can’t spark the “I have to read that” sensation within. There are too many books, and not enough time. Leaf Storm has been sitting on my coffee table, forever. Patient.

When I write, what I read influences me tremendously. I am aware of this, so I try to be careful about what I read when I am writing. It will inevitably seep through, the good and the bad.

But as I said, I am starving, so I open Leaf Storm and read:

Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the center of town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm. A whirling leaf storm had been stirred up, formed out of the human and material dregs of other towns …

In the midst of that blizzard, the tempest of unknown faces ... we were the outsiders, the newcomers … we knew that the leaf storm was sure to come someday, but we did not count on its drive. So when we felt the avalanche arrive, the only thing we could do was set a plate with a knife and fork behind the door and sit patiently waiting for the newcomers to get to know us …