do you know: it’s scrump season
Bitter Water Opera, by Nicolette Polek, is 5 x 7 x 0.3 inches & 128 pages.
Welcome to Purse Book, a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go. If you haven’t already, you absolutely may subscribe now:
In a certain way, Bitter Water Opera — a wisp of a novel! — begins in 1967, when the dancer Marta Becket drives through Death Valley, finds an abandoned opera house, and transforms it into a setting for her performance. She paints murals of her audience on the walls and dances there for years and years, until she dies. In other ways, the novel begins when a film professor named Gia takes a temporary leave from her job, a permanent leave from her boyfriend, and summons the ghost of Marta Becket to keep her company.
It’s a book with impeccable themes such as: waiting, solitude, loneliness, ruins, tourism, the magic of certain places, the seizing of a moment. One of my favorite narrative excursions was about gardening/ foraging/ harvesting the fruits of the earth. And reading this book coincided with my discovery of a useful, niche verb: to scump. Scumping is the theft of fruit from trees (specifically apples) for personal immediate consumption.
Scumping involves spotting something that might otherwise go unnoticed, and then allowing a little demonic desire to come over you—where noticing of potential becomes action! Maybe the most important action of the book—Marta Becket swooping into this abandoned opera house and making it her own—is a scumping of sorts. It’s just scumping of a building:
I live in a neighborhood in Philadelphia where there’s lots of scumping of figs, sour cherries, oddly shaped peaches. It’s currently scumping season. And this book (about melancholy interrupted by life force, about looking to the world for potentials and running off these potentials!) was the perfect companion for the time.
& a final segment I may never do again called Neither Here Nor There, but on page 75, I was just thinking my thoughts & I was like: I bet this author’s favorite movie is Babette’s Feast. And guess what happened on page 81:
Thought attributed to narrator’s mother, but!! But!! Am I not intuitive and right?
And, we are lucky!! The author, Nicolette (who is teaching a class on the novella this fall!) recommends two favorite Purse Books:
— Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
— Devotional Cinema by Nathaniel Dorsky
!! They look good!