The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

The title of the second book in Beaver's line-up of sizzling summer reading is curiously apropos to Domo's latest photographs. Reading the book jacket will make any struggling writer sigh- the author, Carson McCullers, published it at the tender age of 23, decades before young female writers became as common as mosquitoes after a rainstorm. 

A brilliant portrayal of a kaleidoscope of lives and loves in a Georgia mill town, it's a timeless, color-blind and very readable classic exploring the communal needs of individual souls.  The title alone is a firefly-filled night in August. Flawless and thirst-quenching. A great book for a seaside vacation. 

Death becomes us

There is life throughout the Southern Berkshires- peonies, unstoppable grass, tomato plants and storm-happy slugs, crawling towards their prey. And there is Mylo- an eager adolescent just learning how to caw. Domo has been tracking his movements through the killing fields of summer. And on and on it goes.

How does your garden grow?

My garden grows very well....so far. Et le vôtre?

It's a long road

If rising gas prices, declining supply of clean drinking water, global warming and terrestrial temper-tantrums cause you to wonder if the apocalypse is near, Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" will convince you that it is.

A boy and his father wander through the wastelands of the American West, searching for canned food and water, hiding from an unnamed human enemy who feasts on human flesh. Wheels are rolled and carts are pushed- the future has become a hopeless version of a darker past.

This is a poem, a catastrophic treatise whose message is such a bleak one, it becomes difficult to remember that a single person can change: change himself, change herself, change something extraneous, but hope and imagination march hand in hand. Look forward. Look forward to change.

Reject me not

For the 2nd year in a row, little Beaver has been declined a scholarship to the elevated wonderland of the Breadloaf Writer's Conference at Middlebury College. She went once as a matted teenager, with jean shorts and high hopes, but it would seem that the value of her fiction has decreased since the glory days of that long-ago August. Ever since she pulled herself out of the gloppy slops of mopey land and traded in self-absorbed, depressing words for the dark and comic, it's been no-thanks and few wins with each application.

Oh well. Beaver has a garden and a duck and her beloved Domo, snuggled inside a drafty, magic cabin. Her words drift up the chimney into the thick night where they mingle with mosquitos and fly, faraway, far.

BIFFMA Day 4- Don't drink the water

A sit-in that lasted two years and resulted in the triumphant relocation of a Coca Cola plant in India. Chemical waste dressed up as fertilizer given to a population displaced for the construction of a dam. Thirty-thousand deaths per day, 21 deaths per minute; the hearts of children stopping from a water-borne disease.

In FLOW: For Love of Water, Director Irena Salina investigates the state of water management across the world, with a focus on the aftermath of privatization in Bolivia, India and Africa. This film is currently awaiting a distribution deal, but it is a documentary to look out for. The statistics it reveals are horrifying and timely, and should not be ignored. Today our brows fret as we travel past the gas station, reading the numbers, evergoing upwards. But today is a time to worry about water. Listen for a moment. It is running out.

Concerned? Visit http://www.flowthefilm.com/ or http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/ for ways that you can help.

BIFFMA Day 2- An Ordinary Life

Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Tennis Shoes. In this labyrinth of a documentary, director Peter Rosen follows Garrison Keillor through the hobbit holes of his many-faceted life. One walks away with the impression that Keillor achieves things without ever really working, that he walks, talks and breathes the act of writing through his very existence. Beside a brief appearance by his daughter and an off-camera comment by the director about Keillor's third wife, there is no evidence to contest the impression that Keillor is an alien, shuttled to Earth from a planet of geniuses who function and invent in a time system of their own.

Towards the end of the film, Keillor admits that he once feared living an ordinary life. And then he realized that "that's what we all get; an ordinary life. And it's good enough. It's good enough." This sentiment echoed with our matted Beaver, whose new life in the country has turned out to be extraordinary in its simplicity. A cabin on a small plot, a voice on the radio, a companion in the darkness, stirring us on.