Posted by: Evangeline
January 25th, 2012 >> Fragments
Manuscripts
The pages worn thin by the damp lamp of sudden
Strangers, invisible brille of literature’s oblique slide.
The library’s contrary reluctance lingers: a burning flame
Of soft consciousness overgrown on linguistic
Wag of page. An accidental discovery foretold:
Leather and brine. The hard spill of honor and salt:
A sun’s den scatters along a line of throat white branch.
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Posted by: Evangeline
January 18th, 2012 >> Fragments
In January, February and part of March, Amazon Prime Customers may download the following works for free on kindle:
The Orange Blossom Express
The Appaloosa, a short story from The Whiskey Eaters
Odes to a Princess: The Diana Poems
The Flowers of York: The 9/11 Poems
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Posted by: Evangeline
December 27th, 2011 >> Fragments
http://www.tokeofthetown.com/2011/12/the_5_best_marijuana-related_books_youve_never_rea.php
There are so many books relating, directly and indirectly, to the world of cannabis that it can be tough to know which ones to buy.
With a plethora of volumes on growing, using, concentrating, and cooking with cannabis, as well as tomes related to the culture and lifestyle associated with it, the reader with an adventurous streak can stock a library or fill an e-reader.
But beyond the grow books (I recommend Rosenthal, Cervantes and West) and the basic histories of marijuana (I recommend mine), books which are more about the (counter-) culture surrounding weed rather than weed itself are harder to pigeonhole and, thus, often harder to find.
Here are five of the best books on the culture of marijuana that came to our attention this year.
?The Orange Blossom Express by Evangeline is autobiographical fiction set in the hippie days of 1969. Evangeline returns to her home town, Redlands, in Southern California to weave fragments of memory with fiction to build an intriguing story of two women coming of age with a countercultural backdrop.
The bizarre and edgy realities of life in the Age of Aquarius are tempered with a rugged narrative that brings Evangeline’s story into raw focus.
The book gives modern-day readers a window on another time when reality’s stiff borders slipped into absurdity’s edgier, more-tenuous terrain.
This is a story of the smuggler’s world, survived from a woman’s point of view, where the sheer will, determination, power and strength of two extraordinary women help them survive an era of vivid adventure and apocalyptic change.
The Orange Blossom Express by Evangeline, Carapace Books [2009], $15.95
No Comments | Tags: books on marijuana, marijuana, marlena evangeline, medical marijuana, orangeblossomexpress, toke of the town
Posted by: Evangeline
December 27th, 2011 >> Fragments
An evil black faery, an ironmonger, and a pirate conspire to steal all of the Laughter from the children of Scotland and use it for a King’s ransom . . .
But a group of ragtag children from the winding cobbled neighborhood of Scruncheon Road, where the wonderful and cozy bookstore, Scrunched Up, heralds the morn - join with a strange ragpicker and enlist the aid of the Faery Queen, and begin a quest to save Laughter, and return it to the children of Scotland.
“No one ever said the 1960s were a quiet serene time in America. The Orange Blossom Express is a blend of memoir and fiction from Marlena Evangeline as she reflects on her own summer in the Age of Aquarius through the fictional story of two girls becoming women during the tail-end of one of the most turbulent times in American history. An exciting read about trying to get by in the hippie culture (which isn’t as innocent as it seems.) The Orange Blossom Express is a good read through and through.” By MidWest Book Review.
The Orange Blossom Express, kindle
THE FLOWERS OF YORK: THE 911 POEMS
Poetry to honor the victims of 911.
ODES TO A PRINCESS: THE DIANA POEMS
A chapbook of poetry to celebrate the life of Princess Diana.
Willow viewed the world through thick horn-rimmed glasses, and since he was near-sighted, the glasses made his pale eyes look like two large blue marbles, and those marbles shone like search lights, back and forth, up and down, across the sea of books cluttering the dusty isles as if in constantly seeking the hidden treasure buried there.
Willow liked to scrunch-up the wee children of Scrucheon Road in large oversized chairs with worn and exotic books from all corners of the globe. In fact, you might find old Willow himself, reading out-loud, the pages of some tattered book, delighting the children of the neighborhood with tales old and new. Nothing seemed remarkable about that at all, nor did it seem remarkable that the inhabitants of the street were jolly or happy or gleeful from early misty mornings and stayed that way until the misty night pulled in another foggy dew covered dawn over the cobbled lane. Aye, Scruncheon Road was a delightfully happy place. But it was not remarkably so. Not at all.
1 Comment | Tags: children's books, dragons, faery flag, faery tales, scottish myth
Posted by: Evangeline
April 26th, 2011 >> Fragments
Dover White
Where oceans snug to Dover White
and stones green circle heather bright,
and lanes tree shade in English style,
the centuries linger all the while.
Where castles bred from circumstance
birth human bone and recompense,
sing graveled dirge of fate’s decrees,
and bend what’s human to her knees.
A sharp curtsy to succession,
standing bold in spite repression,
walks a lady to her wedding,
English soil a final bedding.
Where seas green lap twelve hundred years,
and life evolves in veils of tears,
and dungeons toil from ancient grief,
the centuries do not retreat.
Amend the royal, relieve the poor,
and nevermore to ask for more.
Oh, stone and grief and castle’s light,
where water snugs the Dover White,
beds now the bone and now the myth,
in Britain’s chance, and English mist.
No Comments | Tags: altrophe, british royality, poems, Princess Diana, royal wedding, white cliffs of dover
Posted by: Evangeline
March 6th, 2011 >> Fragments
Along with shouting from the street, comes the melody of a tune
she remembers from childhood. The chimes of hollow reed clink in the slight breeze and clatter. She hums. Then forms the words in a high soprano voice that drifts up: drifts along cobbled street, then like a bright paper dragon, weaves down through throngs of drifting people like a festive snake. The voice chimes, clinks a high note, like a hollow desolate reed, carries its lament: a song of desolation. Yet as the geisha turns, silver to the mirror, glimpse of camellias and raw silk, extinguishes the slight breath rising, and she sighs to her reflection below in the black lacquered trunk disappearing in the shimmer.
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Posted by: Evangeline
February 28th, 2011 >> Fragments
Seeped to murky black, the tea is not yet served; the pot simmers
jade blue as the dragon lashes her golden tail around the cream-white curve of its porcelain globe. Sweat forms along delicate enameled filigree, coils like a snake, annoyed, in her eye. She stares in blank irritation as heat within thickens. The geisha has just returned, and stares back at her. The egg-shell porcelain cracks: her flames torch a cathedral of brittle bamboo and she spills golden and blue.
1 Comment |
Posted by: Evangeline
February 28th, 2011 >> Fragments
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Posted by: Evangeline
February 18th, 2011 >> Aquarius, Fragments
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Posted by: Evangeline
February 12th, 2011 >> Fragments
Oxtail Broth
The oxtail broth simmers on the mariner’s stove, oxtail
And potato, a quick dash of century’s reprimand. The present
Unfurls like a tiger’s burning paw, reams of torn flesh:
The staid nurse straddles the gurney somewhere
In a hospital’s corridor, echoes, click of steps amongst
The melding: boatyard, song, rheumatic accumulations
Along the inflammation – wrench of day and light.
A fitting torques tight: a stripe – tiger-like copper tubing.
Light riles on the horizon: each blemished scent rampant
Along the crease of midnight. The sea slow chants
To oblivion, wreckless wonder, and its stubborn revelations of beauty.
2 Comments |
Posted by: Evangeline
February 8th, 2011 >> Fragments
I suggest you read the works of author, John Fowles, to understand these arguments, and give you a fuller understanding of this conversation.
The French Lieutenants Woman
The Ebony Tower
Warm regards . . .
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Posted by: Evangeline
February 8th, 2011 >> Fragments
The words that Fowles uses are vehicles to his imagination–they are the clothes of his thought–and this imagination is in love with the way he wears them. Yet this imagination knows itself and is layered; thus the worlds he creates are illusive and intangible. The reading experience he creates is mysterious and artistic and intelligent. Sarah as the embodiment of language as art and art as language is dressed mysteriously, her clothing moves around her in the disagreeable wind. Fowles uses her to seduce the reader by subtle deceptions, by mystery, and by the distinct context in which he invokes her–her longingness lingers on the edge of a fathomless sea of thought.
This sea of thought is meant to tantalize and engage the reader, yet Fowles cannot and does not let form engulf his reader. Because Fowles insists his reader be a thinking reader, the interruptions in the text suspend the suspension of disbelief and remind the reader that the context is a product of the author’s imagination. But this imagination cannot be penetrated anymore than the mysterious thoughts of Sarah. Her one 90 second sexual encounter is brief, desire is spent, yet the intoxication lingers. The sexual union re-leases the reader, Sarah, and Charles from the tension of the novel and begins another segment of intrigue.
The sexual encounter releases Charles from the restrictions imposed on his character by his impending marriage, the conventions of his society, and his own definition of himself. It releases Sarah in quite another way. In one sense, the ninety-second fuck moves her into the definition created by fellow characters, yet it moves her beyond it as well.
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Posted by: Evangeline
January 31st, 2011 >> Fragments
The writer of fiction describes a world that would indeed have its own existence, as if that world’s existence were a reality, and not the illusions of a fictional dream. The artist/writer embarks on a journey in the creation of a story, that that story is less than reality for the artist/writer writing is not a possibility within creative dynamics of the writing experience. What becomes for the writer an intense reality through the act of writing, however, becomes for the reader a temporality, a reading experience. What that experience renders for the reader is an aspect that the artist/writer may only point to: a direction where artistic impact might leave its impression, where felt-thought might follow. What the artist/writer must, however, attend in the narration is what philosophical possibilities that artistic expression should explore in the rendering of that felt-expression. This includes a philosophical point of view as expressed by the characters emotionally involved in their textual lives, and the manner in which the story tells itself.
1 Comment |
Posted by: Evangeline
January 28th, 2011 >> Fragments
This posture creates a distinct reversal of the way in which Fowles linguistically tends to his heroine, Catherine, of the later story, ‘The Cloud:’
“. . . Catherine lay stretched, as if biered, on flattened wooden beach chairs with orange mattresses, of the kind one sees at Cannes; in dark glasses and bikinis, silent, outside the scope of other activity” (ET 235). Catherine of ‘The Cloud’ is “biered,” (like a corpse) in the sun; she is of two worlds — the world of the dead (biered) and the living (in the sun). Because she is illuminated textually as “outside the scope of other activity”(ET 235), this visual textual image foreshadows the essence of the analytical intellect, once removed, and creates an undercurrent that isolates Catherine in her story, her very own context. This image indicates a static existence, Catherine will not change.
Moreover, her intellectual bearing is bound to the mythos of the twentieth century, the ‘mythologies’ of Roland Barthes which exist in striking opposition to the more primal myth of Sarah and her day. Barthes states that:
Myth is a type of speech
“Of course, it is not any type; language needs special conditions
in order to become myth: we shall see them in a minute. But what
must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive
that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it
is a mode of signification, a form. Later, we shall have to assign to this form historical limits, conditions of use, and reintroduce society into it: we must nevertheless first describe it as a form.”
While I doubt that Fowles would argue the statement that myth is a form, and certainly a mode of signification; the way he presents Sarah and Catherine indicates that Sarah represents a more suitable form of myth, more primitive, less affected by her society and its analysis of itself than Catherine. Moreover, Sarah as a figure from myth is powerful and haunting not because she is created by Fowles, but because he releases her into a literary perspective where she gathers momentum to move into a timeless future — literary history, where she may create her moment of becoming, again and again. She will have her pleasure in her text.
6 Comments | Tags: art and language, art and the intellect, John Fowles, myth and language, The Clouds
Posted by: Evangeline
January 24th, 2011 >> Aquarius, Fragments, The Whiskey Eaters
The heroine Sarah embodies a recurrent longing to movement from the beginning of her text (always longing for the sea and what lies beyond the scope of her immediate horizon). This first glimpse of Sarah foreshadows her movement within and beyond the text; Sarah will have what is beyond her presence in the novel; she will have the future. John Fowles indulges this mysterious heroine and lets her step outside the conventions of her society (just as he steps outside the conventions of the novel by stepping his authorial self into it) by ascribing to her an artful destiny.
In this context, however, Sarah represents more than a ‘figure from myth.’ “The typical myths . . . arise in the earliest stages of social development, just before the verbal controls of logic and evidence are firmly established” (Frye 30). Her placement on the Cobb, precariously close to the ocean in the disagreeable wind, apart from both Charles and Earnestina, signifies a distinct authorial preference for her placement in this primal scenario. Her textual triumph–her own authorship, the place where the novel must by its very convention eventually end (even though it ends three times), guarantees this perspective. However, Fowles gives the reader more than a textual sense of survival for Sarah; he gives the reader a sense of Sarah as timeless, a recurrent mystery embodied in the art of language. This language is bound to the world of events, one that reflects universal knowledge in a historical perspective (the perspective of the novelist, the twentieth century, and the perspective of the protagonists of the Victorian era), and one that embodies the power and vitality of antiquity to clarify not only the present, but the presence in the novel of a primal energy coupled with the reality of human events.
7 Comments |
Posted by: Evangeline
January 9th, 2011 >> Fragments
Evening’s Daw
The dark’s sunspurt, gravitational
Speed of light’s expansion salts
Along the waterwaves: Sea Raven,
Boat 81398, crest the night’s dazzle.
Along Hartford Pier night’s dawn
Beckons: accidental people happen
Beyond reckoning. My telescope
Blinks like Old Hubble, tastes a piece
Of ancient sunlight, light shimmers
Over the teeth-of-time, tongue, mane
Of ripe-moonlight. Orion stretches his
Strong loins across my Universe,
Rides hard the Palomino sky:
A Trojan horse whinnies - galaxy
Of Lumination wrongly won.
Suddenly the edge of midnight laughs
Into its own fresh simmering;
dips forked into the raw brine.
18 Comments | Tags: evangeline, poetry
Posted by: Evangeline
January 8th, 2011 >> Fragments
Lady of the Lake
A dragon’s caldron, untimely condition,
swift as Excaliber’s cutting remorse
lives beneath England’s pomp and circumstance;
deeper than destiny’s waters, turmoil’s
archetypal wonders, inherited,
passed on in modern-light’s embodiment.
An ecclesiastical court’s ancient
province reigns the regal race, consciousness
alert to once and future kings, Merlin’s
greater magic, Arthur’s rounder tables,
weighted in toil’s trouble, now and again,
an eternal past and present monarchy.
Oh, Court of Arches could you not tarry
in elsewhere’s vaster jurisdiction, where
lesser light prevails? Archaean image
written in soil’s incandescent brooding,
arc everlasting, will’s haunting glory;
a Lady’s Lake embalms centurion,
a British Island’s vaster consequence.
16 Comments | Tags: Princess Diana
Posted by: Evangeline
January 1st, 2011 >> Fragments
The thick stars simmer in midnight’s
Ripe thicket, hover like fireflies
On a loud Southern night as the dark leaves
Fall from the horizon, scatter amongst
The mortals below: we slog through
Our autumn, knee high, burn in innocence,
And the soft-bite of eternal loss. A
Blond twig snaps in the twilight,
Willow and light, the sudden spring
Of century on the Ides of March. The
Creature’s frenzy, steel-teeth of time,
Spool of blood’s hard release. A grizzled
Skinner kneels, scrapes scale from
The light, rainbow and shine, flash of nothing.
7 Comments |
Posted by: Evangeline
December 29th, 2010 >> Fragments
Screenplays: Official Selection, 2010, The Beverly Hills Film Festival.
Honorable Mention 2010, LA Movie Awards
Script Pimp Screenplay Competition, 2010, placed top 30.
Nevada Film Festival, Official Finalist, 2010.
5 Comments | Tags: Add new tag, screenplay competitions
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