“Only Love Can Break Your Heart” by Ed Tarkington

Funnily enough I meant to read a different book called Only Love Can Break Your Heart, but I ended up with this one and I read through it anyways. It wasn’t a bad read, but it didn’t really stick out to me either. A solid, middle-of-the-road work, which we always need some of those.

Our narrator is Richard, or Rocky for short. It starts with him as a child with his mother, father that he only calls “the Old Man”, and a troublemaker brother Paul. In particular there is one instance where Paul and Rocky go to investigate an abandoned house across the street and Rocky sees someone creep in and shoot Paul. That turns out to be the wealthy new owner of the place. Paul recovers, and Rocky tells how he starts dating Leigh in high school and they all hang out and listen to records together. Eventually, Paul’s mom (from Old Man’s first marriage) dies and he goes to the funeral alone. After that Paul disappears, taking Leigh with him. Leigh eventually reappears, but no sign of Paul. Leigh gets engaged to the son of the family across the street, and meanwhile Rocky starts a friendship with Patricia, the daughter of the new owners across the street. Their relationship turns sexual. It comes crashing down then when Leigh confides to Rocky that she had a hippie wedding to Paul in a cult commune in New Mexico where the leader was also sleeping with everyone, including molesting kids. Leigh came back and had an abortion immediately. Rocky tells Patricia, word gets out, and the wedding ends in disaster with Leigh having a mental crisis in the middle of it. To top it off, Old Man has a stroke at the reception.

Leigh returns and starts reading to the elderly in town, including Old Man. Her ex-fiancee leaves town for a while, along with Patricia. Paul amazingly returns out of nowhere, and starts to help around the house now that money is tight. Rocky manages to get kicked out of his rich school in an attempt to help as well. Suddenly there’s a double murder across the street of the couple in there. Everyone suspects Paul and Leigh. Meanwhile Rocky gets back into acting and is cast as the lead in “Equus”, a play about a lovesick stable boy and his horse god. Patricia accidentally incriminates herself to Leigh and skips town to avoid being arrested, but those two are off the hook. Patricia writes Rocky a letter saying her father was taking advantage of her, and that’s why that happened. Rocky grows up, Old Man eventually dies, and the book ends with Paul marrying Leigh and dying as well.

The genre of this is hard to pin down, some sort of Southern gothic for sure, but there’s a small murder mystery as well. Definitely coming-of-age too. It is a cool mix that really keeps you reading for sure. Patricia frustrated me to no end, but having Paul and Leigh as constants really helps. And gives you something to root for. I found it to be an easy read overall.

The best part of the book is the play. When Rocky describes opening night, the actors all get swept up in the energy of it and Rocky really becomes this character. But even in the embodiment, he acknowledges that this is really Paul he is playing. The outcast, maligned son fits him even better. I loved the use of the play and the overlap of it with the characters and how the play falls right at the climax where Paul is actually in jail and Patricia is just being suspected. It is a great use of the story.

Overall, fun and easy read. I didn’t mean to pick it up but I sure don’t regret it.

This Is Beautiful: Growing Mushrooms

 I finally FINALLY have had more success with growing my own mushrooms! I bought a kit from The Mushroom Conservatory a while ago and my first attempt was a dud. The first step is to get your mycelium to colonize a bag of rice, then you cut it open to start fruiting and getting lil mushroom guys. The mycelium I grew just didn't go much of anywhere, so when I cut it open I ended up growing mold. Cute. Anyways I read through the instructions again and turns out that you have to let the rice cool before adding the mushroom soup, and now I have some gorgeous mycelium growing! It is fluffy, white, and beautiful! I'm so excited to finally have some success here!

“The Bone Cave” by Dougie Strang

This book I bought in Dunkeld at a combination coffee shop and bookstore. It only felt appropriate to buy a book about wandering around the Highlands while we did the same thing. I talked more about our experiences in Dunkeld in this post.

The book narrates Strang’s experiences with a huge hiking trip through the Highlands, making stops at places with myths about them. He ends up making a kind of figure 8 through the area, there is a map at the beginning and he refers to things like towns and highways as he goes. I only recognized Inverness and Loch Lochy/Loch Ness.

The narration is equal parts describing the hike, talking about the folk tales, and telling the tale of Strang’s life. I thought the last bit was the most interesting, for a few reasons, among them being that I’m not as familiar with the scenery or stories. But my main apprehension with the book was that I knew it’d be different if a woman was doing this in terms of approaching the stories and how travel risks are thought about. But Strang is more aware than I thought, he talks about having daughters and how they likely would assess things like hitchhiking very differently. Strang also discusses how he grew up and was in an apprenticeship but felt it to be soul sucking. He applied to a job on a whim and ended up heading out to the woods to live there. Through that, he decides to get a degree in Scottish tales, leading directly to this journey through several myths.

The book certainly isn’t a thorough discussion of Scottish history or folklore, but it gives a very interesting intersection of them. The whole thing is driven by place and as he travels Strang can recount both the history of the location and how it has stuck around as well as myths mentioning it. It is interesting how history can stick around in the imagination of contemporary individuals, to this day folks have feelings about the massacre at Glencoe and discriminating against those descended from the general leading that effort. It’s honestly kind of amusing.

So I really liked reading this book as it paralleled my travels. I certainly didn’t go on any trips as noteworthy, but I like to learn about where I’m traveling. And this was a great way to get a little knowledge of Scotland and it’s culture as I’m no expert.

This Is Beautiful: Exercise

 My schedule is finally evening out and it is honestly so nice having access to more things. I'm able to take 3 different dance classes at 3 different places plus aerial circus and it feels amazing to have exercise that I want to do. Near me! It's wonderful. I hope that over time it'll just be a lot like healthier for me to be doing all of this, and it's not so time consuming I can't also do non-exercise things as well. Anyways, I feel great, I love what I'm doing, and it's shaping up quite nicely.

“Ayiti” by Roxanne Gay

This is a collection of short stories by Roxanne Gay, whose other works I have also read previously if you want to find those posts. This is the only fiction that I have read from her, and she mentioned when she visited campus for a talk that she does consider herself a fiction writer.

Ayiti itself is the indigenous name for Haiti, which is where Gay is from. Hence, all of the stories have to do with being Haitian, and most of them are about Haiti’s relationship to the US. People wanting to immigrate, those that have immigrated, those with other family members that immigrated, all of those stories are in here.

Reading this immediately after Hunger, which Italked about in this post, was really striking. There’s a longer story about a woman from Haiti who marries a rich man from the US. They have their honeymoon on Haiti where the woman is kidnapped by a group of men who rape her repeatedly. She returns and is traumatized by this, and eventually gives birth to a baby boy. The story is difficult, but also really beautiful. The way Gay talks about this protagonist and her own assault in Hunger is really strikingly similar, I have to wonder if that was her way of processing it. Or if it was her way of representing her own experiences.

I really liked this book, it is a quick read but there’s a huge variety of stories here that give a depth to the Haitian experience. I would recommend, especially if you are like me and hadn’t read Gay’s fiction before.

This Is Beautiful: Local Comedy Show

 Last weekend I got tickets to a local comedy troupe at a nearby venue. I wasn't sure what to expect, comedy can be kinda hit or miss. I was hoping this would be better since it's a local group that performs pretty regularly, from what I can tell. And it was so fun! I had a really great time, I'm checking out when that group is performing next. Sometimes it can be so rewarding to just go to a random show!

Edinburgh Fringe

The follow up to my previous post about Scotland is that we spent the second half of vacation in Edinburgh at the Fringe festival. I had never been and I loved it! It felt very much like just trying to absorb as much art as I can in a few days.

We stayed in student housing, which wasn’t great, honestly. It did the job but the bed was uncomfortable, plus there were two of us in there. But we got our own (tiny) bathroom and a shared kitchen. It definitely worked for our purposes, but maybe a hotel if we ever make more money.

The shows themselves were really the highlight. There was such a cool mix of different genres, we saw multiple circus shows and audience participation shows for sure. Most of them were comedies also, and based on other IP. So for example, one of my favorite shows was “Fly you Fools!” which was a group of four actors reenacting “The Fellowship of the Ring” that was equally faithful to the movie and funny. Unfortunately a lot of the Fringe fest is very DIY, actors flyer for themselves and run a lot of the tech themselves, there is some venue staff as well who also work very hard. But it seems logical that independent shows not based on something the public has familiarity with would have a harder time.

I loved this experience so much, I could have been there all month and not gotten tired of it. And spent too much money. But it was really delightful to just take it all in and focus on art for a week. I hope I can go back sometime!