The other day I mentioned a book called The Beginning Of Us by Sarah Brooks:

Even though it's only 93 pages, I'm still reading it. Last night I found myself actually crying over the story, though I still have no clue how it's going to end or why I care so much about the characters.

I think, perhaps, it's hit a personal nerve that I've never experienced something so mutually reciprocated and tender, with both people clearly adoring and caring about each other, yet both women seriously denying what they are emotionally and romantically experiencing.

The other thing is this is the kind of title I'd give anyone who says two people of the same gender can't possibly fall in love. Ironically, the people I'd want to give it to would probably never read it...but it shows, rather than tells, exactly how beautiful feelings can be. It's so good it makes 90% of the other lesfic I've read (even some of the better stuff) seem like absolute trash.

There are so many wonderful passages, such as this one:

I think you playfully hit my backpack then, and when I turned around to grin at you, I caught something in your gaze that I didn’t understand—and know now you didn’t either. That early, I saw love in your eyes.

The Iowa woods are enchanting. My grandmother, a lover of nature and especially of the woods, had taught me to love the names of the oaks—bur, red, northern pin. I love their thick grooved trunks and their broad prayers of branches. I recognized lindens and hawthorn, buckeye and hickory. Near the ground, witch hazel. The path, dirt now, wove gently beneath the green, arched cathedral ceiling of those great trees, and somewhere nearby a house wren sang.

“What do you see?” you asked. I wanted to be poetic. In class, you read poetry like others read aloud religious texts, and I wanted you to understand how beautiful I found those woods, how connected and grounded they made me feel.

“Tara?”

Why did it surprise me to hear you use my name? It was as if I thought you didn’t know it...some quality to your voice just then, some softness, some tenderness, startled me into silence. The house wren, too.

There's a purity to The Beginning Of Us that you don't see in too many love stories these days (gay or straight) and I think that's what resonates with me the most...

Learning about things new to me often gets me out of a funk.  There are so many great things undiscovered out there and so little time to find them. I am so glad I've started reading The Sunday Times or I might not have discovered Pergolesi-Stabat Mater and its awesome, calming yet overwhelming beauty.

I did not know a thing about  this recording (or any performance of it), but am  so enthralled I cannot stop listening...soprano Margaret Marshall performs on this particular release.

Wikipedia explains more about the original music:

Stabat Mater Dolorosa, often referred to as Stabat Mater, is a 13th-century Catholic hymn to Mary, variously attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi and to Innocent III. It is about the Sorrows of Mary.^[1][2][3]
The title of the sorrowful hymn is an incipit of the first line, Stabat mater dolorosa ("The sorrowful mother stood").^[4] The Stabat Mater hymn, one of the most powerful and immediate of extant medieval poems, meditates on the suffering of Mary, Jesus Christ's mother, during his crucifixion. It is sung at the liturgy on the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows. The Stabat Mater has been set to music by many composers, with the most famous settings being those by Palestrina, Pergolesi, Alessandro Scarlatti and Domenico Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Haydn, Rossini, Poulenc, and Dvořák.
The Stabat Mater was well known by the end of the 14th century and Georgius Stella wrote of its use in 1388, while other historians note its use later in the same century. In Provence, about 1399, it was used during the nine days processions.^[5]
As a liturgical sequence, the Stabat Mater was suppressed, along with hundreds of other sequences, by the Council of Trent, but restored to the missal by Pope Benedict XIII in 1727 for the Feast of the Seven Dolours of the Blessed Virgin Mary.^[6]
 

It appeared on a playlist of  actress Janet McTeer's favorite songs , one of which is "Nothing Compares 2 U," something I usually avoid at all costs since it has to be one of the most emotionally draining listening experiences ever. She also cites "Hallelujah" (particularly Jeff Buckley's cover) as another strong favorite.



It's only 93 pages, but this little book (where the narrator addresses the entire story to the woman she loves who has just left her) is so heartbreaking in scope...though I suppose 'heartbreaking' is defined more by your experience and perspective in these matters. One person's heartbreak can be another's idea of eye-rolling melodrama.
 

Between the constant use of "you" and the mad rush from the very start I had my misgivings at first:

I never told you this, either. I thought you would think I was crazy, to be so emotional about you the first day I met you.

but now I'm totally swept in and can't help but see how different it is from what would have been its lesfic counterpart more than 50 years ago:

Solely because I have read other novels by the same author, I bought an ebook version of Insatiable, discovering it's nowhere near as wonderfully written as These Curious Pleasures or 3rd Sex 1st Person.

Sloane Britain's personal backstory is a haunting one. At the age of 32, apparently bereft that her family could not accept her being gay, Elaine Williams (Britain's real name) killed herself. A likable, if extremely private, editor for "sleaze paperback" publisher Midwood Books in the 1960s, Williams used the pseudonym Sloane Britain (with other variations on the same name) to write lesbian pulp. Some of it is so simply terrific (3rd Sex 1st Person, for sure) that, next to it, Insatiable lacks heart and soul and is merely a product of its time.

You can sense some of the writer's internal homophobia in Insatiable where lesbianism is clearly portrayed as something "perverted," to be hidden and only even partially acceptable when there are no men around to "satisfy" you. People who knew Elaine Williams said she lost some of the optimism she had early in her career and that cynicism, desperation and gritty hard luck themes took over her later work.

Unlike These Curious Pleasures, which suggested lesbians could love just as much as anyone else does and dared to hint at happiness for its main character, Insatiable is basically a train wreck of emotions and poor reactions to life. Even so, there are still traces here of a talented writer, if one who seems to have lost any enthusiasm or interest in the world around her.

I would so love to think that if Elaine Williams and her alter ego Sloane Britain had lived today, they'd be thriving both personally and professionally. That doesn't change what happened to her, of course, but it's something I pretend anyway as I realize people in my generation have it much easier (comparatively speaking, of course) than earlier gays and lesbians did.

Sunday papers...

Spending the late morning listening to music (thanks to Pandora I discovered<<this<<album) with The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and Wall Street Journal papers, I'm finding some neat articles. I mostly go through all the major papers to get a feel for the book reviews, but sometimes the more feature-oriented pieces appeal to me:

*The last album imaginable you'd picture impressing a member of The Ramones:

http://online.wsj.com/articles/richie-ramone-on-herb-alpert-and-the-tijuana-brass-1405100157?tesla=y&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304574504580001542897793352.html

* Can you use the rules of Poker in every day life? I hope so. I don't play cards, but I would love to know how humans can better hide how we really feel: (from Parade magazine):

*I have become addicted to reading the Sunday Times these past few weeks. There's something about the 'other side of the pond' I just can't enough of...You can't really learn anything from this, but it's still a funny and surprisingly poignant article written by a man wondering if hitting forty means things are going downhill:

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/columnists/article1433375.ece



*There's an absolutely fascinating examination of great forgotten reads in "Good reads go Dutch," an article I can't find online anywhere, but is well worth getting your hands on if you can find a print copy. Among the many "good reads" mentioned are gems like these:

http://www.amazon.com/Discovery-Heaven-Harry-Mulisch/dp/0140239375/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405273506&sr=1-1&keywords=the+discovery+of+heaven


*A very interesting, compassionate look at obesity as a massive health scare that nevertheless often brings ridicule and judgment from those who do not understand:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/13/overweight-people-help-malice-gastric-bands-nhs


Pandora got my hopes up when I heard this beautiful cover of "Ave Maria" by Siphiwo off his album Hope. But in an example of maddening searches over the Internet the bring nothing back, I can't find the song anywhere for purchase (digitally) or even to play on You Tube. Pandora's Opera Radio is good, but often plays certain selections over a lot so maybe it will play again soon. It is so lovely, even for how lovely "Ave Maria" is...

Saturday night music...

 album cover for Incorruptible by Lavender Diamond

What a nice album Incorruptible Heart is, a really, really nice album that just sounds so sincere you can't help but like Lavender Diamond immediately. I can't put my finger on why it's such a refreshing album...maybe just because every song is somehow a throwback to girl groups, Linda Ronstandt and even a little bit Karen Carpenter, but with modern sensibilities.

There are sooo many stand-outs on here: "Everybody's Heart's Breaking Now" (highlighted in Amazon's Free Music From Artists On The Rise) is spectacular! I figured when I went to listen to the rest of the album it wouldn't measure up, but boy does it! "I Don't Recall" is as sweet as a soda shop, but not at all precious. "Teach Me How To Waken" is airy, almost mystical, definitely haunting. "Forgive" is downright gorgeous and "Perfect Love" is quite adorable, in a Connie Francis kind of way.

Lavender Diamond's frontwoman Becky Stark's distinctive voice makes the album unforgettable. When she was seventeen, her vocal teacher told Becky her ribcage was too small for classical singing, but I beg to differ, especially on the last track with its echoes of opera. Closing with the lovely "All The Stars," Incorruptible Heart is perfectly titled. Can anyone who sings like this be anything but good-hearted? I love, love, love this album! :)

Here's what allmusic.com has to say, as the review actually appears on the website (no paragraph breaks):

Review by Fred Thomas  [-]

Upon their emergence in the early 2000s, Los Angeles-based Lavender Diamond were immediately lumped into the "New Weird America" movement that included warped indie folkies like Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Vetiver, among many others. The band, based around the creative force of bandleader Becky Stark, wasn't quite all the way weird, folk, feral, or drugged-out enough to fit into the confines of the New Weird ghetto, but their achingly positive songs soared with childlike simplicity and a crushingly beautiful straightforwardness in Stark's lyrics and lush vocals. Maybe the nakedness of the songs weirded people out enough, and not offering enough of a context or a gimmick to fit in with the Sufjan Stevenses or Clap Your Hands Say Yeahs of that particular moment in time, Lavender Diamond were shuffled off to sit with the weird kids at the freak folk table. Returning after a five-year space between records with Incorruptible Heart, all the elements of Stark and company's uniquely direct sound have been brought into higher definition, still relying on both playfulness and open-hearted honesty in the songwriting, but bringing with it a refined sophistication absent on earlier work. Songs like the piano-driven "Forgive" and "Oh My Beautiful World" with its update on girl group sounds bring Stark's voice into the forefront, as usual, but here they bear a sadness or world-weary understanding that was missing in the band's more naïve songs. Production was handled by OK Go's Damian Kulash Jr. and Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann, and it's apparent from signature blown-out drum sounds and a combination of dazzlingly psychedelic yet crystal-clear touches. While being relatively spare, Incorruptible Heart sounds huge. "Light My Way" flirts with electro-pop, but sounds a little out of place next to more stripped-down songs. M. Ward shows up to duet on the whimsically upbeat "Perfect Love," which may be a little too giggly and cute for its own good in comparison to the rest of the album, which comes off in turns as mysterious as some of Kate Bush's moments of storminess or as somber as Nick Drake's early orchestral pop bummers. Album opener "Everybody's Heart's Breaking Now" sets the scene of the album with its gorgeously simple electric piano and melancholic ripples of delayed percussion and pulsing electronics bounding like rocky waves beneath Stark's voice. Lavender Diamond still aren't weird enough for their wild-eyed brethren, but maybe a little too weird (or more likely not quite disposable enough) for Target commercials. Incorruptible Heart exists, much as the band does, in an in-between space that's not easy to pigeonhole. There's always been an inexplicable brightness to Stark's songs, and here that light is near blinding, even when the songs themselves aren't particularly happy. This long-labored album is a thoughtful and contemplative breed of off-kilter pop that becomes both more interesting and increasingly complex with repeat listening.