Extreme Weather -- Movie Review

Trailer from National Geographic

I like weather. I like movies. I like 3D  IMAX movies. And I love the Denver Museum of Nature and Science where National Geographic's Extreme Weather is currently showing.

Upholding National Geographic's reputation for photographic excellence, Extreme Weather moves from one amazing visual to another and another. Calving glaciers in Alaska, tornadoes on the Oklahoma prairie, hurricanes as seen from the International Space Station, raging forest fires in California. Each terrifying in its own way.

There is discussion of the weather system that envelopes our Earth and how it is being affected by climate change, the warming of our Earth.

A seemingly slight change in our oceans' temperatures causes changes in precipitation patterns across the land portions of the Earth. Droughts can be more extensive and of longer duration increasing the risk of wild fires in forests and across the plains. Causing loss of life and property. Increasing ash in the atmosphere which settles on the glaciers darkening them so that they absorb more of the sun's heat causing more melting causing ocean rise causing flooding of low tidal lands.

Having grown up in Central Oklahoma, often referred to as Tornado Alley, and having lived in the piney woods of Southeast Arkansas, the scenes of tornadoes and forest fires were particularly heart-wrenching for me to watch.

This film's format not only puts us into the midst of catastrophic reality, it captures the heart-stopping intense beauty of Extreme Weather.

#atozchallenge

Dialog -- Flash Fiction

Image from Johns Hopkins University

Jacqueline Mitchard was the Guest of Honor at the 2014 Rose State Writing Short Course in Midwest City, Oklahoma. She wrote The Deep End of the Ocean, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club.

She's not only a good writer, but a good teacher, too. One of the exercises she gave us to do was to write twelve lines of dialogue. Dialogue only. We could not use attributions or other narrative. It was to be an argument between two people, one of whom has a secret. The secret could not be that they were pregnant or having an affair.

From the dialogue, the reader should be able to identify the relationship of the two people, their gender, their ages, and what the secret was. These people are not arguing but here goes....


"May I sit here?"

"Sure. It's pretty full."

"Are you all right? You seem nervous. A little harried."

"My first flight. Going to ask my high school sweetheart to marry me."

"First marriage?"

"God, no. My wife and I were married forty-three years. Mary passed away two years ago."

"I'm sorry about your wife. My Bill and I are coming up on fifty-one years next month. October third."

"It was hard at first. Living alone, I mean. Not the marriage. These seats are nice. A little tight, but .... Then in June was my high school's fifty-year reunion. The bathrooms in the airport are nice. They're clean. Mary would have liked that. Do you know where the bathroom on here is?"

"There's one in the very front and one in the very back. So do you think someone should say something to someone if her slip were showing? Or, say, she noticed that someone had spinach stuck between their teeth?"

"Sure."

"What about if she noticed that a man's fly was unzipped?"

"Oh, God."

#atozchallenge

Cat Toys -- Flash Nonfiction

Kočka

Kočka, that's my name. I've been told it's Czech for cat. 

I first came to live with these people in the hot time almost two years ago. I was very small and very sick. I don't remember much about it, but I've heard stories.

"Heat stroke," the man told the young woman who found me. He said to bathe me in cool water.

She asked him what she should do with me then. She said she couldn't keep me because they already had three cats.

He said, "Take him to the animal shelter." But his woman said to bring me by their house first.

They didn't have any pets and that woman wanted me to stay with them.

"Happy Father's Day, Dad," the young woman said, handing me to him.

                           

When I was little I'd let them hold me some. I never did like pettin'. Mostly I'd rather play. Not with fancy, store-bought toys. I don't know why humans bring those things home. Personally I prefer used drinking straws, or wine corks. I like twist ties. And I like those plastic packing straps.

Once I found a toy mouse. Nobody knows where it came from.

My favorite toy was always the little foil balls that the man made for me. Sometimes I could get him to play fetch. He usually got tired of throwing it down the stairs before I'd get tired of bringing it back to him. 

I also liked to bat those balls underneath the cook stove. Then if I sat and looked expectantly at the stove, eventually one of the humans would notice. Humans are so much fun to watch. They'd get a long stick, hunker down, and fish around under the stove until they retrieved the foil ball. And sometimes there's not even a foil ball under there!

I like the man's fish tank, too. I've never caught one but if I jump at the side of the tank they swim away really fast. I've checked that tank out from every angle. Haven't found a way in yet.

                           

One day the man said "Let's go to the pet store and get some fish."

I'd never heard of rescue dogs or adoption events, but that's apparently what they were having at the pet store. My humans brought home two puppies. They didn't get any new fish that day.

Lily's the one with feathers and Cooper's the smooth-coated one. They like to wrestle and play chase. They are the best cat toys ever.

#atozchallenge

Betrayal -- Book Review

Those of you who know me, know I like John Lescroart's police procedurals.

Goodreads calls this one a "thriller." And I suppose it is, but it's not the kind of thriller that will leave your stomach tied in knots or make you dread the morning's news. It may, however, just keep you up too late because you gotta see what happens next.

I do have the same complaint about it that I had the first time I read it. Uncharacteristically (pun intended) we don't really get Dismas Hardy or Abe Glitsky until Chapter 16. Of course, all that stuff that comes before is important to the plot.

Oh, his plots, his plots. Lescroart does really good plots. He doesn't spoon feed us readers, but if he puts it in the book, it is important to the plot. He definitely takes Chekhov's advice, "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there."

Betrayal was published in February, 2008. So Lescroart wrote it during the fourth year of the Iraq war. As a writer, I can understand the attraction of using current news stories in your work. And war seems to be a lucrative field, shot through with second-hand adrenaline for both writers and readers. Lethal flashes in the night. Explosions. Bullets peppering the ground around the new characters. Life and death -- conflict, conflict, conflict.

For me, I don't like it so much. But, it is necessary to the plot of Betrayal.

I was so glad when we got through the war part of the book. But then it was necessary to get through a trial without Dismas Hardy, our canny defense lawyer. In a courtroom not in our familiar San Francisco Hall of Justice.

The epigraph is a part of the book, I think, would better have been left out. In my opinion, there are some bits of a mystery best left to the readers imagination.

To be honest, I'd rather spend time with Lescroart's Hardy and Abe Glitsky, the dour police lieutenant, than with Lescroart himself. He's probably a very nice man, but I know his characters much better than I know him. I have a history with them.

To develop your own relationship with them, it's best to start with the first book in the series, Dead Irish. Each book is complete in itself, but the characters continue through the series -- maturing, losing loved ones, marrying, having babies, dying. And all the while searching for the truth. What really happened.

Again. Again. And Yet Again.

C. Weber Wagner

This is me and this is my fourth year to participate in the A to Z Blogging Challenge. If you're reading this, you're probably participating in it, too.

Welcome.

Do read the other bloggers participating. You'll enjoy their work and probably make some good friends to boot.

My blog thebookwright.blogspot.com is about writing which is a wonderful subject, because it's completely unlimited. Anything and everything can be related to writing. There is fiction, nonfiction, poetry, screen writing, memoir, self-help, religion.... I could go on for hours. I don't write all those different things, but it's safe to say, I read them all.

On my blog, I do not include recipes, housekeeping tips, car repair how-to's, or hunting guides. What I do do are flash fiction; flash nonfiction; book, movie, and TV show reviews; grammar discussions; writing tips I've learned from others or discovered on my own; and rants and raves about the publishing business.

I'm glad you stopped by. Please leave a comment and include a link to your blog so I can visit you.

Write on!

House Made of Dawn -- Book Review and Memory

image from Paperback Swap

I depend on friends, relatives, and NPR interviews and reviews, for book recommendations. So when a writer friend (Dan Alexander, you know who you are) asked me via email if I had read House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, I had to confess that I had not. Nor, in fact, did I even know it existed.

The N. Scott Momaday, I knew was a poet. A poet I met some thirty-three or -four years ago. Back when I was studying poetry under Dr. Norman H. Russell at, what was then Central State University, and is now the University of Central Oklahoma.

Dr. Russell was a botanist and a well-respected Native American poet. He taught me two very important concepts. 1.) Science and art are not mutually exclusive. 2.) There are poets alive and well and still writing poetry.

Anytime one of Dr. Russell's fellow poets passed through Oklahoma, he dragged them to our poetry classes. Among them: Joe Bruchac a Native American from New York (who knew there were Indians in New York?), the Western poet Paul "Red" Shuttleworth (who kept Irish Wolfhounds as muses), the Cheyenne-Arapaho artist Edgar Heap of Birds (who also wrote poetry), and N. Scott Momaday.

When I met Momaday in Dr. Russell's class, he had long since received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and was "widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream." (Wikipedia) But I met him as a poet and did not know about this novel or its attendant acclaim.

House Made of Dawn is the story of Abel, a young man raised in the old ways of his native Pueblo by his grandfather. The structure of the book reminds me of Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Like the character Olive Kitteridge, Abel's story is told by the people around him who tell a little of their own stories.

And it is like Carmac McCarthy's Border trilogy about the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Southwest, but with a greater fullness of language.

A young Pueblo man returns to his home from World War II. Abel is changed by that wrenching experience as must all the young men be who return from war no matter what community they were born into. The dislocation by war makes Abel an outsider in his own Pueblo. He no longer fits, or maybe the Pueblo no longer fits him.

Things happen and he is removed again from his home and eventually relocated in Los Angeles. He is relegated to the Native American community which is itself a community of outsiders within the resident white majority. Abel does not fit even in the Los Angeles Native American community, because it is an amalgam of many disparate nations and cultures unreasonably lumped together as Native American. Each of them different from his own.

Abel's friend Ben Benally describes Abel's situation in Los Angeles "You have to get used to everything, you know; it's like starting out some place where you've never been before." And "Everybody's looking at you, waiting for you . . . . And they can't help you because you don't know how to talk to them. They have a lot of words, and you know they mean something, but you don't know what and your own words are no good because they're not the same . . . ."  Even though those words are all English.

In the end, for better or for worse, Abel returns to his Pueblo and his grandfather and the old ways.

Like other poet/novelists Momaday created this novel in the language of poetry. And it is beautiful.

The character Reverend John Big Bluff Tosamah, Priest of the Sun, describes perfectly the feeling of the first Kiowa man to step out onto the Great Plains: "There is something about the heart of the continent that resides always at the end of vision, some essence of the sun and wind."

That is the prairie that I know and love. A sense of vastness washed by the sun and the wind.

I've read several reviews of House Made of Dawn. Some describe it as disjointed, hard to follow. And it did take me a bit to get into the rhythm of the story-telling. This is not a book to be read while you watch TV. Giving it your undivided attention, though, will return great rewards.

Cliche Phrases -- Nonfiction

And I do.  I ❤️️ cliches.

I raised my children on cliches. (You'll notice I'm not going to the trouble to figure out how to get the accent mark over the 'e.' Or is it a L'accent grave? I googled "grave mark." Got lots of search results on grave markers. Headstones! Obviously Google is English and not grammarly inclined. Twenty minutes later I found that 'cliche' is correctly written as cliché. That's the L’accent aigu. I bet you didn't know that mark's full name either.) But I digress.

Yes, I also raised my children on digressions.

"But that's not what I come here to talk about." I come to talk about cliches and their meanings.

"Hook, line, and sinker" A cliche that everyone understands, right? Even though they may not understand what it actually originally meant. (In which case they must have grown up without a brother who fished and then married someone who didn't fish. You notice I didn't say "married a man" because I gotta say one of the most avid fishermen I've ever known was my Aunt Roberta.) The hook is, of course, the bit of curved metal that hides in the bait to catch a fish. The line is the bit of string that attaches the hook to a fishing rod so the fisherman can reel the fish in. And the sinker? That's usually a small bit of lead attached to the line a bit above the hook to keep the bait, hook, and line from floating to the surface where unwary fish are less likely to wander by. Of course this cliche is often used to refer to a human who like a fish is either so hungry or so dumb that they swallow not only the bait, but the hook, the line, and the sinker, too. Sorta like last year's American electorate.

Then there's "lock, stock, and barrel." Now it wasn't until I married my current husband that I learned what this refers to. I thought it meant like when a farmer loses his farm, they sell off everything, lock, stock, and barrel. I took it to mean literally the lock on his front door, his animals, and even that empty barrel that's way in the back of almost every barn I've ever been in.

But, no. It started with black powder guns. In fact, all guns, even today's guns, have a lock. That's the mechanical part of the gun that causes it to fire -- the trigger, hammer, firing pin, etc. The stock is the part of a long gun that you hold against your shoulder. And the barrel is -- well it's the barrel of the gun.

And, how about "Long row to hoe?" How often have you heard someone misspeak this cliche as "long road to hoe?" ROW, people, ROW. As in those long, beautifully straight lines of cotton plants in a cotton field. Or maybe those folks that say "road" don't know what a hoe is or what it does. Hoes are used to cut out unwanted plants from between the wanted plants, like weeds that are likely to compete for that most precious commodity in a New Mexico cotton field -- water. Hoes are also used to break up compacted soil around plants which improves the plant's opportunity to take up water and grow.

Nobody wants to break up a road. Compaction on a road is a good thing. It allows water to run off without undermining and carrying away whatever material the road is made of. It also allows for a smoother ride.

And take it from me "a long row to hoe" is exactly like it sounds. On a cotton farm in New Mexico, four rows can be so long that they equal one acre. And those fields easily run to more than a hundred acres. Through the 1950s it was done by hand with a hoe. Migrant workers, mostly. Braceros. In our youth, my brother and I got to hoe only part of a row under that unforgiving sun. It was enough to understand that that work would make a long, hot, dusty, exhausting day of work. But we also knew that when you got through, you would have done something to improve the chances of a good harvest and make enough money to take care of your family.

That "long row to hoe" still refers to any difficult time we're likely to need to endure in our lives. Especially with the possibility of success at it's end.

Cliches! Writing teachers the world over (there's one) threaten writers to within an inch of their lives (there's another) to avoid cliches at all cost (and another) or we'll never make the New York Times Best Seller list (maybe the biggest cliche of all!)

The thing is, cliches enjoy broad understanding and the main point of writing, indeed language, is to be understood. An original and elegant or, for that matter, crude but evocative turn of phrase may give me a flutter of excitement. But cliches are like that warm place in front of a fire, while you drink a cup of something satisfying with your best friend. They are familiar.