Minus the Spine

Sunday-afternoon brain, mushy like overcooked peas. That’s why when I found this new web site that Smith Magazine started called Next-Door Neighbor, I thought, oh I can read this. With a kind of convoluted but cool premise, it publishes web-comics that tell a true story about real life neighbors from the life of the featured artist or collaborating writer. It debuted with a really cool one by New York writer Jonathan Ames and illustrated by Nick Bertozzi , and then the newest one, A print from an old negative by John Cebollero, has some of the coolest illustration ever.

One of the major questions in life that determine someone’s character has always been: James Bond or Indiana Jones? In importance, this is right up there with: Cheese Nips or Cheez-Its? And Pepsi or Coke? (If you choose the latter on all three, we will be lifelong friends.) While I’m scared to see an aged Indy, I’m also kind of excited too. Regardless, this McSweeney’s by piece Andy F. Bryan is pretty hilarious: Back From Yet Another Globe-trotting, Indiana Jones Checks His Mail and Discovers that His Bid for Tenure Has Been Denied. (Thx Babs!) 

Interesting coincidence: about three years ago this time I read a novel by Anthony Doerr called About Grace and was completely entranced by his lilting, careful prose and the sometimes dark and other times tender story of a really sad but messed up guy looking for redemption. Doerr has a way of capturing a moment like a fossil inside amber. When he gets going and cranks out that gorgeous prose that he is capable of, time stands still but you can see the life inside that moment. Here’s a good example from About Grace:

He picked his way down the coral stone path to the beach. Bats, on their final hunts, swung overhead like black motes. Soon there was a horizon, ironed flat as if by the load of the sky, and a sailboat toiling across it. He let himself into the kitchen, crossed the inn, over the glass floor, and climbed to the porch. There he drew open each of the louvered doors, and swept sand from the boards, and watched it sift and disappear into the water below.

Sometimes it’s all in the details.

The other day I read an article on The Morning News by Doerr that is a non-religious, almost newsy account of being in Rome during the days leading up to Pope John Paul’s death–which happened about this time three years ago when I was reading the novel. Ain’t that something? Whether or not you are a papist, you can still soak in Doerr’s evocative recreation of the moment.

Reading Half Life  by Shelley Jackson puts me in the mood for lists. She is to lists what David Foster Wallace is to footnotes. A good example? Messages made with rocks along a highway: Trixie + Henry, Jehovah, I miss you Al, I [heart] my hot dog, UFOs: Please Hurry.

So in the spirit of lists I should do the meme that Jeff from And I Am Not Lying For Real tagged me for… 6 Boring Quirks About Me:

1. Don’t touch my head. No, really, don’t pat it or try to mess up my hair. You can braid it, sure. French braid it even, I don’t care. Just don’t pat it or gently muss. This might have something to do with having older brothers.

2. There are a lot of flowers that I don’t like the smell of–like lilacs and stuff. Roses are cool but I kind of prefer the earthiness of a geranium.

3. I love carcinogous food. Things that are burnt and crispy like brown and bubbly cheese, over-toasted bread and blackened, twisted hot dogs. I would roast everything on a spit over an open fire if I could. Food is very primal for me.

4. It really, really creeps me out when I’m in a restaurant or cafe or something and someone peers through the window to see what it’s like inside but they don’t realize that they are gawking at the patrons like we are gorillas at the zoo.

5. I have this belief about odd and even numbers. All the odd ages of my life (13, 27, etc.)  and all the odd years (1983, 2001) have been really tough but I’ve, of course, learned a lot. An odd age and an odd year is a total recipe for disaster (i.e. 19 in ‘97) while the even age plus the even year (coming up in June!) is like a double blessing. Nobody believes me about this. Or no one cares.

6. For the last, a bookish one of course… When I’m by myself, I can’t fall asleep without reading. And when I’m not by myself I kind of miss it. In the odd moments when I don’t have a book, I’ve been known to pick up a catalog and closely read the descriptions. The Anthropologie catalog is good for that.

Here are the rules for this meme:

1. Tell about six unspectacular quirks of yours
2. Link the person who tagged you
3. Mention the rules in your blog
4. Tag six following bloggers by linking them
5. Leave a comment on each of the tagged blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged

I’m tagging: The Literate Kitten, Incurable Logophilia, Condalmo, Beautiful Desolation, Of Books and Bikes, and Will in the World.

I started Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as summer reading in highschool. Judging from my handwriting, it was just before sophomore or junior year. Sadly, my little notes in the margins leave off after page 15–I didn’t make it past Benjy’s “bellerin’.” I took this off the shelves in my old room at my parents’ house over this past Christmas, and still it took me until April to read it and only then it was because I hadn’t made it to the library or bookstore and didn’t have anything else to read. So it was a bit of an Everest. Still the slog was worth the last half–that comprised the entire book for me; the rest I could have done without, really. Here’s what I have to say about it.

It’s totally National Poetry Month. Did you know that? The Poetry Foundation has a really cool web site. Bravo for making a fun, engaging and un-stuffy portal for poetry. I’m especially loving the Poetry Everywhere mini-videos that are animated or show a clip of the author. I’ve never been super into going to poetry readings, except for spoken word because there’s such a performance aspect to it. I absorb poetry much better by reading because even though I love music I’m not much of an auditory person. But I’m enamored with these two video-poems: one for Richard Wilbur’s Some Words Inside of Words, and also Shiver and You Have Weather by Matthea Harvey (I also really like her reading voice).

Speaking of spoken word, I saw a really exhilarating performance by Guillermo Gomez-Pena last night at El Museo del Barrio near Spanish Harlem. It was more of a one-man show, but he’s an incredible performer. And a total character, chingao.

This passage is precisely why reading The Sound and the Fury is both completely baffling yet totally intriguing:

The draft in the door smelled of water, a damp steady breath. Sometimes I could put myself to sleep saying that over and over until after the honeysuckle got all mixed up in it the whole thing came to symbolise night and unrest I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was was not who.

The language! The imagery! But reading a whole book like this is exhausting. I think I’m going to have to pick up something a little more straightforward and tag-team.

Click something! Via Condalmo: Bushie’s proposed budget for 2009 cuts out all funding for Reading is Fundamental, which provides free books and literacy-promoting materials to low-income families. And has been doing so with funding since the ’60s. Help save their funding. Really, all you have to do is click a couple of things.  

Great first lines are hard to come by. It’s got to pull you in–give you a taste of what’s to come but be nebulous enough to pique your interest. The best lines jump out at you with a left hook or sneak up on you to take you by surprise. Clicking through Pindeldyboz, the first line of Molly Tolsky’s story Stub grabbed me: Traci is the most popular girl in school, with only nine fingers. The story is about the strange power that Traci has over her classmates, using her stub of a finger as a sort of wand. But the unnamed narrator has a little secret about the finger-losing incident. Curious now, aren’t you?

Yes, Friday. So it’s time for something cheerful and hopeful with a little bit of wit and only a hint at something darker that, otherwise, would make a poem way too flimsy. I adore this one by Nikki Giovanni, Possum Crossing. It’s so personable and humble because of the familiarity of the image of driving to work in the morning with a cup of coffee in hand. It sloshes; the world careens. The lightening flashes of observation when she describes the little lives of animals show empathy and astuteness. There’s just something so bright and sensitive about this poem. Love it.

Backing out the driveway
the car lights cast an eerie glow
in the morning fog centering
on movement in the rain slick street

Hitting brakes I anticipate a squirrel or a cat or sometimes
a little raccoon
I once braked for a blind little mole who try though he did
could not escape the cat toying with his life
Mother-to-be possum occasionally lopes home . . . being
naturally . . . slow her condition makes her even more ginger

We need a sign POSSUM CROSSING to warn coffee-gurgling neighbors:
we share the streets with more than trucks and vans and
railroad crossings

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