I hear from The Lawn Guy but wondering about the fate of my U.S. Mail

Thanks for Neil over at Liquid Lawn for sending me some mail. This is the third flyer I've received from his company since I moved to Ormond Station. I have another service I'm using for my new lawn, They have seen to my yard but never send me mail, not even a bill. I never get any bills and I should be getting a ton as a new homeowner. I also should be getting rejections from various literary magazines. Come to think of it, I should be getting some magazines too, like the one from AARP that arrives without fail, AARP particularly fond of Florida. I expected some summer postcards -- Wish You Were Here With Us in the Tetons! -- and greetings from other companies welcoming us to the neighborhood. Forwarded mail is the biggest issue. Nice person from Ormond Beach P.O. called today, a response to my inquiry about lack of mail. She said it should be catching up to us any day. I asked if it was SOP for forwarded mail all the way from Ormond-by-the-Sea to take from June 3 to July 9 to catch up with the consumer. She said it takes time, noting that her office has done everything possible to make sure I get my stuff, that the mail delivery person is making his appointed rounds, stuffing our mail into our mail station out there on Airport Road. She said he could be a bit confused that my address is 65 but my box number is 88 and maybe 65 is chock full of my mail although the mailman has delivered a missive from the mortgage company to 88 so I think he knows what's going on numbers-wise. The P.O. spokesperson said incoming mail deliveries by truck from various locales have been cut from three per day to just one. Probably the doings of Elon and the DOGE, but she didn't say. I guess I will will just look forward to hearing from Neil over at Liquid Lawn. I mean, he's a Guaranteed Weed Killer and I can Bundle + save! Not a bad deal. Not bad at all.

"Old Girls and Palm Trees" by Meg Pokrass is a dream

I am reviewing a new book today but first wanted to outline the pleasures and dangers of late-night reading on the Fourth of July weekend.

I've read about the gender gap among White American Male Literary Fiction Writers, notably novelists. Upstarts such as Salinger, Hemingway, and Updike seem to be a vanishing breed. Guys whom you can't wait to read. Guys that hog the bestseller charts. 

I made the mistake of choosing Marc Tracy's July 3 New York Times article for late-night reading. My wife Chris was asleep, or trying to get to sleep as fireworks exploded around us in Ormond Beach suburbia. A few hours earlier we'd joined friends for dinner at a Flagler Beach bistro with a view of the rickety old pier under reconstruction. Made me wonder about hurricane season. The sky burned red as we drove west toward home. Should have taken that as an omen.

"The Death and Life of the Straight White Man's Novel" was compelling reading. I am an old straight white man fiction writer who has published one story collection and written two as-yet-unpublished novels. I've published a number of short stories and a smattering of flash fiction and prose poetry. I left the corporate world to get my M.F.A. in creative writing. I wrote and raised a family while working full-time as an arts administrator, a rapidly dissolving field thanks to MAGA. Agents and editors will admit over late-night beers at writers' conferences that white guys aren't getting published because it's a new world out there, a new multigenerational, multiethnic, gender-neutral world out there. And young white guys are spending their 10,000 hours gaming and not sitting alone in a cafe populating their journals with trenchant observations. So suck it up, buttercup (what is a buttercup anyway? Must Google it). 

I am including a photo of a buttercup.

This buttercup looks happy. Or surprised. Or maybe it's surrendering. They can be poisonous and in the South they are seen as an invasive species. On the plus side, kids like to hold the flower up to their chins and the reflective petals turn skin the color of butter. Like butter!

Since I'm a buttercup, I ordered a nifty little chapbook by Meg Pokrass, "Old Girls and Palm Trees." Published by Bamboo Dart Press, a nifty little outfit with offices in Claremont, Calif. It's illustrated by artist Cooper Renner, who has a playful style. I tackled this book late at night and it pleased me. Meg is a writer friend I met a dozen years ago on Facebook who wasn't afraid to put her flash fiction on display for all the e-world to see. She's from California but now lives in Scotland. Many writers, me included, were a bit concerned about placing our work on social media. Into what dark and dreary and corporate place will it end up? Any Tom or Dick, Harry or Sally, can scoop it up and claim it as their own. That occurred to Meg but didn't faze her, probably because she is represented by crackerjack agent Peg Mokrass who sports huge eyeglasses and looks a bit like Meg. So here it is, years later, and Meg had published some 900 pieces in various mags and online sites. And she's published eight flash collections and two novellas. I brought her to Casper, Wyoming, in September 2014, as a presenter at the Equality State Book Festival.  

The book is delightful. Can a SWMW say delightful? I await your response.

Meg's book features flash pieces about her imagined life with an old friend in California. In the opening piece, she imagines this old friend behind her, "a friend who had become a shadow that needed to be sewn back on." I had to stop there because this is a scene from the black-and-white "Peter Pan" I grew up on. Peter loses his/her/their shadow and has to sew it back on. I watched my own shadow for weeks after that, afraid if it came off I wouldn't know how to sew it back on. I close my eyes and remember that feeling. I'm scared, but also aware that my shadow is a living thing with its own life. It may have turned me to writing, as my Mom read Peter Pan to us after and I saw that words were kind of like a shadow of life, that the writer has thoughts and it travels down the arm for finger to make imprints on the page. Did I think that at five? No, I am imagining that now. Something magical was going on, I knew that much. Somehow I understood that knowing how to read those shadow words could open up new worlds to me. I was a nuisance. I read everything: cereal boxes, candy wrappers, billboards, and eventually magazines and books. I am still a nuisance; any printed matter within reach is not safe. I can read upside-down like a noir detective. So much joy and heartache comes from reading and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There is joy and heartache on the pages of "Old Girls and Palm Trees." It is a dream, basically, and dreamily written. 

About the book: It's a chapbook, 6.5 x 6.5 inches. Well constructed, with a sturdy coated cover, and easy to carry on the Metro or to the beach (as we retirees do) in your E-Cycle or E-Tricycle basket. Nice gifts at $10.99. E-book version available but that kind of defeats the idea of having a nice little chapbook to carry around. As I mentioned, art is by Cooper Renner. Cover art by Meg and Dennis Callaci. 

Support small presses: www.bamboodartpress.com

How to choose art for the bare walls of a new house

It began with a June 19 Facebook post by artist Linda Anne Lopez of Winchester, Virginia. Linda and I met several times over the years. She's married to diehard reader and biker Ben Lopez, a longtime friend of my late brother Dan and his wife Nancy. They met in Santa Barbara while going to UCSB. Turns out they all moved to Florida for work and kids and riding motorcycles year-round. 

Ben is the most voracious reader I know and we trade book titles on FB. His most recent: a biography of Rudyard Kipling. My most recent is a novel The Sleeping Car Porter by Canadian author Suzette Mayr. I am now hip-deep in Carl Hiaasen's newest, Fever Beach. Ben sticks mainly to non-fiction and I'm a creature of fiction as that is what I write. And, sometimes, like these crazy times right now, who can tell the difference?

Linda got serious about her art after retirement. Photography was her thing. Along the way she discovered encaustic mixed media and that's what you're seeing here. 

Linda is  a bird-and-flower person which carries a lot of weight with me, a hummingbird admirer and gardener. She describes her specialty as Encaustic Mixed Media. She combines her love of photography with the ancient arts of encaustic. See further explanation below. Find out more at Lindalopezartist.com

And I spent most of my professional career in the art world, mostly in the realm of state arts agencies (SAAs), local arts funding, a stint at the National Endowment for the Arts, and dabs in arts and literary criticism. All of these worlds are being decimated by Trump and his goons but I will leave my political critiques to other posts on Hummingbirdminds and other rabble-rousing sites.

Linda got my attention with this FB post on June 19:

Hummingbird and flowers, encaustic mixed media, 8-by-8 inches, Linda Lopez

It got my attention because it is beautiful and because it features a hummingbird and flowers. I must have it, I told my PC, and contacted Linda. It was for sale and she also had a companion piece, shown in this June 25 FB post by Linda: 

Encaustic mixed media, Linda Lopez, work at left is 9-by-17 inches.

The new home this refers to is mine in Ormond Beach, Florida. They will be the first works of art to go up in our new home in a woodsy place called Groveside at Ormond Station. I plan to turn these bare walls into a gallery of sorts, one that will feature groups of pieces celebrating my wife Chris and me. These two pieces will hang above our dining room table which, strangely enough, matches the color schemes of the art. It will feature work by Florida and Wyoming artists with a Virginia and Colorado artist in the ranks. 

You might ask: Hey Mike, what, exactly, is encaustic? I will let Linda answer that:

Explanation and History of Encaustic 

Encaustic is a wax-based paint (composed of beeswax, damar resin, and pigment), which is kept molten on a heated palette. It is applied to an absorbent surface and then reheated to fuse the paint.  The word ‘encaustic’ comes from the Greek word enkaiein, meaning to burn in, referring to the process of fusing the paint.  

 

Encaustic painting was practiced by Greek artists as far back as the 5th century B.C. The Fayum portraits are the best-known encaustic works. These funeral portraits were painted in the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D. by Greek painters in Egypt. 

 

Modern encaustic painting was made possible by the invention of portable electric heating implements and the availability of commercial encaustic paint and popularized by its usage among many prominent artists. Encaustic paintings do not need varnishing or protection with glass. Beeswax is impervious to moisture, which is one of the major causes of deterioration in a paint film. Wax resists moisture far more than resin varnish or oil. Buffing encaustic will give luster and saturation to color in just the same way resin varnish does. 

 

Encaustic can be used as a traditional painting medium, but it can also be used to create sculptures, with photography (transfers and prints), drawing, and printmaking (monotypes). Painting with encaustic is a multi-step process. First, the paint must be melted. Then the molten paint is applied to a porous surface. The wax is then fused into the working surface, allowing it to form a bond. As a final option, the cooled paint can be buffed to bring up the luster of the wax and resin. Every layer of encaustic wax must be fused. 

Thumbs up to new public art on National Mall

 

New sculpture on National Mall in D.C. This is the kind of public art
we want to see. 

A Writer Orders a Birthday Cake

She’s pretty but doesn’t know it yet or maybe she does, maybe her new spouse told her that this morning before she hustled off to a new job. But she’s still in college, I think, summer break from FSU, a job making and decorating cakes. Could be worse, with her skin, working out in the Florida sun in June. A head taller than the slight Indian woman in a sari she helps. The woman wants a birthday greeting on a whipped cream cake. She spells out her granddaughter’s name and the clerk writes it down, says that’s a pretty name and then admires the women’s shiny hoop bracelets. The clerk tries to write on whipped cream but it’s not going well and she summons the head baker, a white-clad bearded guy old enough to be her father. I think they would like to tell the customer that she might try another cake, you know, one of those solid bar cakes or maybe a sheet cake with buttercream frosting, the ones you can write on. They come up with a solution, placing a plastic oval over the cake and writing on that. A bald Indian man rolls by on his store scooter that matches the one I ride on. He speaks brusquely and then rolls past the doughnuts and disappears down an aisle. Minutes later he returns but the woman from India is patient and keeps at it. He rolls away again. The Indian man is about my age, maybe even younger. I want to be a watcher at the counter, quiet, as I wait to order my cake. The woman customer turns to me. She is beautiful and tells me that it’s her granddaughter’s birthday and she is 10. Happy birthday to her, I say, and she smiles. The baker and the clerk finish their work and I draw close to admire it. Pink greeting on clear plastic over a white cake. High art. She turns and leaves. I order a sheet cake for my siblings’ birthday. A quarter sheet? Enough for 25? The clerk isn’t sure, looks for the baker and he’s in the back and she fetches a cake from the cooler and shows it to me. I know it is not the size I want and I think she knows it too but then consults with the baker and he comes out and tells me it feeds 20 when you cut 2-inch-by-2-inch pieces. If it’s not enough, you can grab some of our cupcakes. He points to a table piled high with them. I like that solution. I order my cake, the clerk writes down the birthday greeting, and I leave them for the day, a day that will lead to other days and other stories. I pass the Indian woman on the cereal aisle. She smiles, raises the cake in a salute, and peers down the rows of Cheerios and Fruity Pebbles, looking for the bald man in the scooter.

"In My Room:" Brian Wilson spent most of his time looking out his bedroom window

Rob Tannenbaum wrote June 12 in the New York Times:

In songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.

Wilson tried surfing once and his board conked him on the head. He liked looking out windows at other people surfing and driving hot rods. Tannenbaum went on:

The songs, he added, tell stories about teenagers. 'We base them on activities of healthy California kids who like to surf, hot rod, and engage in other outdoor fun.' He saw these activities the same way he saw the ocean — through a window.

This caught my attention because it says a lot of what writers do: watching activities through their window of imagination and not actually taking part in that activity. As Wilson wrote ("In My Room") he spent a lot of time in his room imagining what was happening outside.

I grew up surfing in Daytona Beach, Florida. I surfed for five years, 13-18-years-old. I gave it up the summer of 1969. My surfboard, a Greg Noll Bug, was stolen out of my family's garage. It was the last board I owned and the only short board. I also sold my beat-up old car that summer as freshmen weren't allowed to have cars on campus. Our house burned down, destroying the kitchen, my school clothes, and my father's Barracuda, 'Cuda as the cool kids called it. My eight brothers and sisters and my parents survived and we moved to cramped motel rooms. The End Times were coming, or so it seemed. I began to have dark thoughts, imagined a black ball rotating in my chest. My girlfriend was pretty and nice but she was going off to the state school and I was going to another state's school 400 miles away. I was slated to be a NROTC midshipman and I had no idea why except the Navy agreed to pay my way if I agreed to get ship-shape and squared-away which I failed at miserably.

Depression came to call. I returned home to my beach town, lied in bed, listening to surf sounds drifting up from the beach and rolling through my jalousie windows.

Brian Wilson suffered with crippling depression. I know how that feels. Wilson laid in bed and looked through windows and saw different lives. His head was populated with beaches and endless streets to race cars and meet girls. His head and heart were also populated with monsters and he didn't really write about them. He looked out windows and saw himself. 

When he was 20, Canadian Steven Page wrote the song "Brian Wilson" which was later recorded by his band, Barenaked Ladies. When he heard it, Wilson wrote his own version. But lyrics in the original go like this:

So I’m lyin’ here 

Just starin’ at the ceiling tiles

And I’m thinkin’ about

What to think about

Just listenin’ and relistenin’

To smiley smile

And I’m wonderin’ if this is

Some kind of creative drought because

I’m lyin’ in bed

Just like Brian Wilson did

Well I’m

I’m lyin’ in bed, just like Brian Wilson did, oh

So,

If everybody had an ocean

Across the USA

Everybody'd be surfin'

In Cal-if-or-ni-a

Or lyin' in bed, just like Brian Wilson did.

 R.I.P. Brian.

America's Big Weekend: Tanks roll on D.C. streets, Marines protect L.A. from old hippies carrying signs

Top part of an image posted by an old friend from L.A. I told the friend I wouldn't use his/her/their name due to the fact that it's not a great idea to name names right now. If U.S. Senators can get arrested and  cuffed for asking questions of Fuhrerin K. Noem, than none of us are safe. My name is on this blog and has been floating in Cyberspace for 20 years. I cropped this to remove the bottom part of the poster because it was more inflammatory than necessary, or so says the editor. Something about betrayal, what some of us are feeling as Trump sends Marines to L.A. to shoot protesters. He is holding his grand birthday parade in D.C. tomorrow. Wonder how close it will pass to the Vietnam War Memorial just off Constitution Avenue, or the World War II Memorial at the far end of the Reflecting Pool? Will you be able to see those monuments from the tanks clanking down the pavement? I need to mention the name JOLEA on the image. Anyone know who that is, an artist or maybe an organization's acronym?