What it means
“Fly melon” is a Southernism I only learned about yesterday. As explained to me by my mother, experienced picnic-ers will cut open a cantaloupe or some such, fill the flesh with poison, and set it out a little ways away from the fesitivities. Flies settle in, eat, and pop off (as the freshly-Nobeled Doris Lessing would say) so that the picnic-ers can enjoy their outdoor spread in peace.
So the question on any given day might be, who do you identify with–the picnic-ers? the flies? the melon? Are you even the sort of person to go on picnics and, if so, would you be comfortable glancing over, between bites of potato salad and angel food cake, at this open mellon teeming with doomed flies and maybe a malicious yellow jacket or two?
Speaking of Doris Lessing, last night I picked up The Golden Notebook again. I’d spotted it in many a library, but I only bought the book when she won the prize. (Sales must have shot up that week.) I put it down almost immediately–there’s a heavy-handedness and an earnestness that I couldn’t stomach–and shelved it. It stuck in my mind though, and last night I was trying to read Mating by Norman Rush (another enormous novel that I have no business getting into when I have report on a 500-page ms due tomorrow). So I was settling in with the Norman Rush when I realized I had this yen or craving for something else–something, something, what could it be–and it was The Golden Notebook. Those slightly off-putting qualities were still there, but it was exactly what I wanted to read, and I have just had a minor personal literary epiphany, dawdling here over my first blog post…The first scenes of The Golden Notebook resonate with those of another bulky, uncomfortably sincere book of ideas for which I have an overwhelming and perhaps irrational love and which, further more, I credit with changing my life in ways both major and minor, get ready for it, Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence. Thoughts? I’ll let you know after I finish the Lessing, but twenty dollars says she isn’t Lawrence’s equal for sheer emotive power and, I’ll just say it, genius, however rough-hewn.
As a reader, I wonder which role I occupy as I read Fly Melon. Am I the fly attracted to something that will destroy me? Am I the guest at the party, happily eating and drink untainted food? Is life all about things that look pleasant, but that should not be actually ingested? Or is life simply dangerous, and we are enjoying it at the expense of other creatures whose lives are expendable? Is this about the G-8’s domination of the world’s natural resources?
lm
July 9, 2008 at 7:18 pm