READING MORE THAN THE STORY

 

I love writers that play with their craft.  I just finished the novel Blindness by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Jose Saramago.   He has a punctuation structure that I haven’t seen before – He only used a period at the end of paragraphs – the only punctuation within the paragraph was commas.    He began a new sentence with a capital letter following a comma.

 

“Of course I looked properly, there’s nothing wrong with my eyesight, these last words came out inadvertently, You told me the car was in the next street, she corrected herself, and it isn’t, unless they’ve left it in some other street, No, no I’m certain it was left in this street, Well then it has disappeared, In that case, what about the keys, He took advantage of your confusion and distress and robbed us, And to think I didn’t want him in the flat for fear he might steal something yet if he had kept me company until you arrived home, he could not have stolen our car, Let’s go, we have a taxi waiting, I swear to you that I’d give a year of my life to see this rogue go blind as well.” 

 

After getting used to this style I found it flowed well and was easy to read. 

the Ol'Buzzard

 

EXPERIMENTAL GARDEN

 

It has been many years since I planted a garden.   Western Maine has many small family farms and the farmer’s market is always well stocked with everything – except tomatoes.

Our last frost is usually late May and the first frost is mid to late September.   This doesn’t leave much time for growing, ripening and harvesting tomatoes.

 

This winter, browsing YouTube, I came across numerous sites of people planting patio gardens using grow bags and decided to give them a try. 

I laid out a patch using landscaping cloth.   I ordered five seven gallon grow bags online.  Locally I purchased potting soil, two dwarf tomato plants, two Sweet 100 cherry tomato plants, one pepper plant, one cucumber plant, and a squash plant.  Then there was fertilizer, bonemeal, and accessories.  All total about seventy dollars.  

 

The sweet 100 cherry tomatoes came in early with a heavy crop and are still producing to this day.  The dwarf tomato plants are just now ready for picking, and will probably have to be ripened in the house.  We got a few cucumbers, four tiny squash, ten peppers, and we will end up with perhaps twenty early girl tomatoes.   

I am not sure I will do this again next year.   I say that now, but when the snow finally goes and we are past the dreary days of mud season, the idea of getting into the soil and growing something may be more appealing.

the Ol’Buzzard 

BANNED BOOK WEEK SEPTEMBER 22-28

 

 

Banning books and burning books have been a hallmark of religious leaders as long as books have been published.

 

Book banning is not uncommon in Canada or the United States, but in the U.S. book banning has been normalized in Republican-led school districts.

 

By the mid-1950s the Catholic Church had banned over 4000 books.  Today fundamentalist Christians have taken up the torch.

 

Even here in liberal Maine, a Republican State Representative (Amy Arata) introduced a bill ‘to criminalize educators who would teach Kafka on the Shore by Marakimi.’ 

 

Some of the more notable books being banned today are:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

The Outlander by Joana Galbaldon

The Harry Potter series by J. K. Roling

To Kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee

Maus by by Art Speigelman

And of course, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

As a protest against Book banning Penguin Random House has produced a fire-proof version of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Join me in reading a banned book this month

the Ol’Buzzard