A room of one’s own
Hi. Welcome to dervala.net. I just moved in, and I can’t find the kettle. My archive links are broken, my error pages don’t work yet, and I’ve still got this civil servant template. But soon it will be a palace built of blink tags and vistor counters! I was grateful for the space at blogspot.com, but you can only couch-surf for so long. Eventually, you long for your own place, where you can paint the walls and leave enormous jpgs lying around.

Advice, gentle reader: do not buy domain names as gifts, unless you can put them in the recipients’ names. I ended up registering www.dervala.net because of the hassle of transferring dervala.com first to me and then to my ISP. Network Solutions’ business model is to make the process so difficult that you need to pay $200 for premium service customer support. Grr.

‘I don’t mind dying. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’
Spike Milligan is dead. From The Guardian:

Born in India on April 16, 1918, Milligan was 16 when he was brought to Britain.

His Irish father was an army captain, and Spike adopted his nationality after immigration laws declared him “stateless” in 1960, even though he had spent seven years as a gunner on active service in the British Army.

He obstinately refused to take the oath of allegiance which stood between him and a British passport. Prince Charles pointed out to him that even he had to swear the oath and urged him to think again.

“Yes, but it’s your mother isn’t it? You don’t get board and lodging at Buckingham Palace if you don’t swear an oath,” he told the prince.

In primary school, we used to learn things ‘off by heart’. I do not know From Blossoms off by heart yet, but that is how a poem that is so joyful about living life should be held. I want to bypass the neurons processing printed text and carry the poem inside me, like the peach. I want to know it off by heart.

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

by Li-Young Lee

Behind me in the Ditmars Boulevard Starbucks (ahem), a high school teacher is befriending an old Turkish man in what seems to be one of those voluntary programs that Americans do so well. He doesn’t say much as she chats about her students.

‘I teach history. Grades 9-12 now, so big kids this time. I have this one kid, he’s from Sierra Leone. He saw his father being shot. He saw his brother getting his arm chopped off. He was brought to a camp and forced to be a soldier. He escaped with only the clothes on his back. Took him a month, running through the middle of nowhere, to reach a village where he could get to a UN refugee camp. And he’s fifteen years old. He’s the sweetest kid. He works so hard. Speaks five or six languages. He wants to be an archaeologist. We take him to the Natural History Museum. A sweet kid.’
‘They’re not the best students, a lot of ‘em. But they’re good kids.’

The sun is higher in the sky now, and the birds are staking out their territory like Crips and Bloods. They’re fat from our false winter. Here in New York, their predators are mostly the baleful skyscraper windows that urge them to dash their brains out. But not always. Yesterday I watched a merlin eat a sparrow. She perched on the church railing, silhouetted against the Manhattan skyline, and banged the sparrow’s head against a stone. She was barely bigger than her victim; her boyfriend, hovering nearby, was even smaller. Feathers flew. Merlins, like terriers, don’t realize they’re small.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at the merlin’s ambition. I am, after all, considerably smaller than most cows. Though bigger than the average chicken.

Doing time
Ever since I accidentally grew up, I’ve fantasized about being put in jail. This dream jail owes more to junk bond kings than to Joliet. My whitewashed cell would be starkly beautiful: just a bed, a desk, an upright chair and a modest bookshelf, like Van Gogh’s room in Arles. My meals and bills would be taken care of. (It’s beginning to sound a lot like the Spanish farmhouse where I spent my honeymoon.)

Freed from the obligation to live a productive life, I would become ascetic, meditating daily. I would write and contemplate my wrongdoing. I would read hard books, not subway books. I would carry myself with dignity, my calm expression hinting at sorrow and regret, and I would never complain. Other prisoners would hush when I walked by. They would gaze with awe on my disciplined form, but they would leave me alone. I would befriend one jailer, a hulking brute with the soul of a misunderstood poet, and he would smuggle in books for me. Occasionally, I would write hurtin’ songs.

‘But what crime would you commit?’ asked Paul when I confessed this vile, self-indulgent nonsense. Reality intruded. I’m mostly law-abiding, unless you count my quality of life crimes—aggressive jaywalking and riding my bike on the sidewalk late at night. My obedience is not born out of a strong sense of right and wrong. Rather, I have a good girl’s fear of getting caught. And I never needed to rustle sheep to feed a starving family.

I might rob a bank if it were a sweet-talking, no-guns holdup like George Clooney’s in Out of Sight, not a shambolic bullet-ridden affair like Bonnie and Clyde. But I shriek uncontrollably when someone pops a balloon nearby, so I’d be a liability in a heist. I could evade my taxes, I suppose. I could embezzle from The Man, though in a 22-person company run by my husband, that wouldn’t achieve much. I thought about organizing a violent protest in a Starbucks—so chic, so now—but my Starbucks hatred has lessened now that I realize not everywhere is as blessed with local cafés as Brooklyn and Manhattan (e.g., Queens). And no one forces people to order four dollar ‘coffee drinks’.

So what does that leave for my life of crime? I could run a brothel, like Julie Christie in McCabe and Mrs Miller. I could smuggle tormented Irish women across the sea for abortions. But I think I’ll settle for being put under house arrest for courageous, non-specific defiance of despotism. Just please don’t hit me.

Getting up
On Thursday night, on West 13th St., I found a woman lying quietly across the sidewalk. She was seventyish, and her shopping bags were close by. I asked if she needed help to get up. Standing upright, she seemed confused and grateful. No, she didn’t want to be walked home. Thank you very much. She was fine now.

On Friday night, I found a man lying on the crosswalk at F.I.T. I could see him from blocks away. People were stepping over him. His legs were draped on 27th St, his body was on the sidewalk. I thought he must be raving or covered in vomit, but he wasn’t. He was patiently trying to pick up the pennies and quarters that had scattered from his change cup when he fell. His cane was hooked in the mouth of the paper coffee cup. I knelt down to help him pick up his change and we chatted. He was uncomfortable, lying on his belly like a fish, but he wanted to get his change first.
‘I have arthritis in my back. That’s why I couldn’t get up when I fell. And the wind took my money.’
As we scrabbled at the sidewalk, more people stopped to help. Some of them made me cringe. ‘Oh my goodness, sir, here’s a penny we almost missed.’
Finally, I tried to haul him to his feet. He was much bigger than me, and I wasn’t sure how to grab him. I knew his back was bad, so I took his elbow, trying to help him back onto his knees first.
‘Don’t worry sweetheart. I ain’t dirty. I had a shower.’

I’m embarrassed that he had to tell me that.

Am getting really cranky with Network Solutions. How hard can it be to make www.dervala.com point to my web host? I feel like such an English major with my wussy blogspot domain.

There were seven people in the huge Union Square theater for yesterday’s 9pm show of Last Orders. New Yorkers do not have much appetite for physical decay. They should; they might learn something.

Last Orders is touching, funny, and beautiful. The cast is perfect, except for the actress who plays Helen Mirren’s character as a girl, whose weak-chinned softness could not grow into a woman of Mirren’s depth. All the way home, jump-cut memories of the movie played for me just as memories of their dead friend Jack had played for the characters. Life is long, but we don’t often get to see the cumulative effect of youthful choices—for good and bad—played out at the cinema.

Charles Taylor’s Salon review captures it better than I can. If you see it, tell me what you think.

Jason writes: ‘‘The unloved live off our waste heat. The Parasite is a real affront to our way of life: it’s shocking that anyone should need such a thing in a rich city, but it wouldn’t be any use in a poor one. Poor communities recycle everything. Only in New York do people casually discard enough energy to keep someone else alive.’

The piece is from an exhibition of young designers’ work at Felissimo on 56th Street.