Coffee with the Romantics, Late Spring

It's a gloomy Sunday morning in the Santa Cruz mountains, perfect weather for revisiting some of my favorite Spanish Romantics. This morning will belong to the Duke of Rivas and Carolina Coronado -- author of my favorite Don Juan/Dangerous Lover* story, and favorite Romantic feminist**, respectively. We've been having a particularly dry year, so I need to take advantage of all the overcast gloom and doom I can get. BRING ON THE TEMPEST!!! (and by tempest I mean very slight chance of rain).

* I borrow this term from Deborah Lutz's fantastic 2006 text The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seductive Narrative. 

** I find Coronado -- one of a handful of female Romantics who wrote, published, and was active in literary/political circles in 19th century Spain (others being Rosalía de Castro, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda) -- to be especially compelling due to her personal (and physiological) eccentricities. Coronado suffered from chronic catalepsy, and, on various occasions, experienced such violent bouts that she appeared (to those caring for her) to have died. She became obsessed with death, and was particularly terrified of being buried alive. WITH GOOD REASON. As an adolescent, Coronado had a (maybe) imaginary lover named Alberto, to whom she dedicated more than a few poems, and for whom she took a vow of abstinence after his (imaginary) death at sea. She revoked this vow when she married in her early thirties. She would eventually embalm her deceased husband, refusing to bury him, and have various premonitions in which she would predict her own children's' deaths. My kind of spooky, gothic woman. 

new books, tarot play, and a nesting bird

I've been doing some spring cleaning, both at home and at the office, and recently took an enormous bag-load of books I no longer wanted* down to Logos Books to sell. I made $50 and took a $20 trade coupon as well, then immediately blew a good amount of it on two new books I scoped out while walking through the store towards the exit. IT'S LIKE LOGOS IS BOOBY-TRAPPED. WITH BOOKS. SPECIFICALLY TAILORED TO PEOPLE JUST LIKE ME. 

Uh, did you know that Jules Verne wrote a gothic novel that was serialized in 1892 in a French magazine entitled The Magazine of Education and Recreation? That it was first translated into English as The Castle of the Carpathians in 1894? That it was "the first book to set a gothic horror story, featuring people who may or may not be dead [emphasis mine], in Transylvania"? And that this purple little paperback is the newest translation in over 100 years? Neither did I, and you know what? I was so bewildered and astonished -- by all of these things -- that I had to buy it. It looks like it would be really fun to read aloud (perhaps as originally intended?) and enjoy with an audience. 

I also bought this book from semiotext(e), Sergio González Rodriguez's The Femicide Machine, on the various converging socio-historical mise-an-scenes and cultural and political apparatuses that have caused the horrific and ongoing disappearances and murders of tens of thousands of women and girls in Ciudad Juárez. Guess what? Neoliberalism, NAFTA, and the war on drugs have a lot to do with it (DUH), as do a breathtaking lack of infrastructure and blatant governmental corruption. The writing isn't the best (and I hope that's due to the translation, sorry Michael Parker-Stainback**, man with a name that sounds made up), but the analysis is certainly thought-provoking and I always appreciate a book (title) that plays it as it lays: the mass murders in Juárez are femicide, plain and simple, and only an intellectual hop-skip-and-a-jump away from genocide. Let's just call a spade a spade. We'll see how it reads out; the text is something I may want to work with when planning for the course I'll be putting together for the fall. 

I've also been messing with a friend's tarot reading. It's private and so I won't go into it -- but don't my cards match the crazy 70's carpeting in my office nicely? Beautiful colors, had to take a photo. 

Lastly, I found this sign right outside the entrance to the New Leaf Market in Felton earlier today. HOW NICE AND POLITE AND THOUGHTFUL FOR EVERYONE/BIRD INVOLVED IS THIS SIGN? Mountain people, they're considerate and I like it. 

* I'm very serious about books, and tend to covet and then hoard them, but even I have my limits. Unless a book serves a special purpose, is of a particular subject or genre of interest, was a gift, or has special sentimental value, it's up for elimination from the collection. Case in point: The beautiful little hardcover copy of the I Ching that I bought close to ten years ago... THAT I'VE NEVER USED OR ACTUALLY READ. It's finally gone, and I hope it finds a home with someone who will love it and use it every day very soon. 

** Check out photos of his swanky 60s-fabulous DF apartment at tarde o temprano's site here. It'll kind of make you feel like a creep, but hey, the profile's title is "Closet Voyeur" and there's a mesmerizing video with family photos and old typewriters and it plays swing music.

Humor for aficionados of the Gothic

I like to think of this as the "alternative" opening to every Gothic-novel-of-a-certain-type, and it makes me laugh. If only we could rewrite Rebecca or Frankenstein or Jane Eyre or The Castle of Otranto to start out this way... there really isn't anything stopping us, is there?

This and much more at Married To The Sea.com

Brontë weather.

Misty San Lorenzo Valley, taken from my side yard during a lull in the storm.

After an extended Indian Summer - that even made a reappearance halfway through January, it seriously just didn’t want to go - we’re finally experiencing some winter in Santa Cruz. It’s been raining and storming on and off for weeks now, making everything soupy and misty, sometimes snowy and hail-y, windy and sleet-y, but generally damp and chilly, for a couple of months now. The snow in the mountains rarely sticks (though it did hang out on top of Loma Prieta for a couple of days at the beginning of the month), but the wind gusts and driving rain on their own can be pretty impressive.

Some people hate it, it gives others the S.A.D.s, but I find it thrilling in a beautiful, kind of crazy way. I call it Brontë Weather: beautiful but dangerous, sublime (as characterized by both Burke and Kant), and generally louder and more awesome than you. I think it’s the perfect weather for enjoying the local geography. Picture it: redwoods swaying in the fog, churning seas, craggy, foam-topped shorelines. Brontë weather makes the best beach outings (the beaches are awesomely scary! and devoid of sunbathers! just you and a bunch of other people with dogs!), and, when you’re home, baking and soup making, and candle-lit (you never know when the power’s going to go out and stay out) fire building. Though it sometimes feels spooky and sinister, it’s arrival is my favorite time of year here in the Monterey Bay. Who am I kidding, I love spooky and sinister. When I think of California Gothic, I think of the Monterey Bay under these kinds of weather conditions. I wonder if Steinbeck did so as well. Denis Johnson certainly did (well, not true, his Already Dead was set in Mendocino. whatever, close enough, I digress). 

I originally called it Wuthering Heights Weather, but I’m trying to make an effort to be a bit more inclusive, especially now that Jane Eyre is getting the Hollywood treatment. Wuthering Heights is still my favorite Brontë novel (and Emily my favorite Brontë) but I’m warming up more and more to Charlotte and certain aspects of her Jane Eyre and I’m curious as to how this new film will interpret the original text (I also love director Cary Fukunaga’s other film Sin nombre [2009], so I admit to having high hopes). More on all that to come. 

Anyways. I’m off to nurse this cold with some tea and netflix.