Going to take some time off of this blog to work on some other projects, writing and otherwise. Have a great summer!

Well, didn’t get around to doing this post on Friday. That’s not a good sign to begin with. Didn’t get much done at all writing-wise and not too much reading either, for some reason. I was so exhausted all week and when I have that ongoing whole-body tiredness I get very uninterested in everything and TV seems to be my only respite. How sad. It may just be a mood too. I wandered all around the Strand not being able to drum up enough enthusiasm for anything (but ended up buying On Beauty by Zadie Smith anyway because I had seen someone reading it on the plane from San Fran and remembered that I had wanted to get to it at some point, having been completely wowed by White Teeth). But hell, this has inspired me. I’m going to go write for as long as it takes my hair to dry! Here’s a good quote to get me started:

The writer is either a practicing recluse or a delinquent guilt-ridden one–or both. Usually both.
-Susan Sontag

As seen on GalleyCat today, Michael Ian Black is starting a war with David Sedaris. It’s funny. He makes me miss watching The State.

This poem, this city, it’s a mood. Foggy morning in San Francisco today… once my friend said that she loved the fog because it was like another character in the play that is this city. But I live in New York now where tall buildings tend to obscure the sky anyway so here it kind of makes me feel a little dreamy and soulful. Despite the rawness of some of the images, I love the way this poem in Juked by Rod Peckman, Revealing the Spine, harnesses so many emotions. There’s the sense of so much roiling beneath the surface and that injects a violence into the poem–a breaking and hewing of something new. All shuffled together, there is a luridness to the images but also these starkly vulnerable phrases and admissions. Plus I’m kind of fascinated (obviously) by what “spine” as a word connotes. I’ve found the same mix of vulgarity and vulnerability in Sylvia Plath–raw images and and then intensely honest moments in the text. Remember Lady Lazarus?

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it–

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?–

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot–

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart–

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash–

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there–

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

I adore teen angst. I like reading about it, writing about it, watching movies and TV shows about it and sometimes reminiscing about it. I like the cringe-effect. It makes me feel good about who I am today but also keeps me humble. The other day my best friend was graduating from her residency program and her mentor spoke about her, mentioning that her laughter was ‘maniacal.’ I remember the first time hearing her laugh in junior high and being taken aback by its berzerk, staccato atonality: omigod someone is expressing unabandoned pleasure! But then later its infectiousness totally drew me in and I became a disciple of unbridled laughter that may or may not have included a snort here and there. Reading Julie Orringer’s collection of stories, How to Breathe Underwater, has me thinking about those gangly tween years. She relates those ”small and tight and wrong” moments without flinching or cringing. Here’s a story that she published this past year in the Washington Post Magazine: Ask for Pain.

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

My review

I also love birthday books. I got this one from a good friend who usually doesn’t like my book recommendations and vice versa, but this time we are in agreement. That says something. I’m currently reading another birthday book–a collection of short stories by Julie Orringer.

Rating: 5 of 5 stars
The amazing part of this book is its simplicity. I don’t often use the term ‘yarn’ seriously but that’s what this story is, starting with one small end and raveling up into a large ball that seems to signify the globe. It begins in the slow and steady manner that Isak begins to till the soil, putting down roots with Inger, his loyal woman, disfigured from birth by a harelip. From there, the plot becomes more complicated as their lives and relationships increase in complexity. The reader senses the stirrings of civilization in them–they are an Adam and Eve–but while their surroundings are wild and pristine in the beginning, industry and modernity encroaches on their rural settlement. After having two sons, Inger commits infanticide in a hysterical state after giving birth to a disfigured child and is sent to jail in a far-off city. An interesting element in the novel is the Scandinavian sensibilities throughout: modesty, privacy, independence, justice and equity. When Inger comes back, she brings home with her an upsetting sense of the wide world as well as a young daughter. Their life on the farm unfolds and these humble farmers end up becoming to richest and most respected family in the area, which for them causes a domino effect. There is nothing tragic in this story that isn’t a part of life, and it’s this naturalness that makes the book such a fascinating read. It has the candor and measured wisdom of a parable, making its scope biblical but its gist like a parable.

View all my reviews.

The Literate Kitten is leading the charge on getting some writing done (or not) and then confessing on Friday. Having once been a Catholic school girl, I know exactly how confession works–you keep on the straight and narrow so that you don’t have to sit in the confessional long enough for anyone to notice. And if not, you admit what you did, let it go, move on and try and do better next time. Monday has sort of turned into my big reading and writing night, but here’s what I got to ‘fess up to this week:

-Monday I worked on the second section of my novel for about an hour and a half and then finished a book I’d been reading. After that, I wrote an inspirational quote from Haruki Murakami in my journal. (Yay!)

-Tuesday. Umm. Does Guitar Hero count for anything? Eh, no.

-Wednesday I went to a New Yorker panel about political satire and then me and my friend talked books and lit. (That totally counts, I don’t care what you say.)

-Thursday, i blogged. Friday too! I may write a review for the book I just read. And I started a new book of short stories this morning.

 Also, I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to end this blog. I just have so many projects that I want to work on, but I haven’t decided if I’ve gotten everything I want out of working on this. When do you know when to say when?

Strawberry Shortcake and her perfumed-haired buddies are totally back in style now so I recently gave my 4-year-old niece my old Strawberry Shortcake toys like the Trolley (though kept the glassware for myself, thank you). But then noticed that when she put it with the rest of her SS toys, it looked helplessly old-fashioned since all the new stuff has a very different aesthetic–bright purples and rounded, intricate parts. In today’s NYT there’s an article about how children’s characters like Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears are getting a 21st Century Facelift. And it made me think–what if beloved characters from novels were given a 21st century makeover too?

Like Jane Eyre… maybe now she’d be a Serbian 18-year-old who loses most of her family in the war and decides to ditch her uncle’s abusive family and shitty makeup factory job in Novi Sad where her boss is constantly hitting on her and the other female workers and then bankrupts the factory after embezzling money. She applies online for an pair job and moves to England to care for the only child of a rich Russian mobster who also has an old Welsh housekeeper in his employment. He’s often gone, travelling in Eastern Europe, but when he’s there, they begin flirting and he asks her to marry him, but finds out one day when she accidentally opens his email that his psycho ex-wife is living in St. Petersburg and is extorting him for money because she knows about a lot of his mobster crimes. The truth is that he has really reformed since the old days and now only makes retail deals on the black market in order to fund his legitimate investments in the oil business. But Jane (or Jana) is scared by his dark past and runs away from the house and finds herself at the London Serbian Community Centre in Notting Hill in London. There, she happens to reconnect with old family friends of her parents’, who take her in until Rochester finds her…

Or how about Holden Caulfield? My guess is that he’d be this totally emo skater kid who gets thrown out of boarding school in the Northeast. After getting chewed out by his teacher, he goes back to his dorm room and plays video games with his roommate who beats him soundly in Wii Boxing. He then hops on Amtrak and goes to New York where he gets a room at the Gansevoort using his father’s credit card. Wandering around the Meatpacking District late at night, he starts talking to a trannie prostitute that he takes back to his hotel. The next morning he meets some LaRouche activists on the street and gets to talking to them and thinks that he might join the ever-continuing LaRouche presidential campaign and that will giving some meaning to his life, and later at a Lou Reed show at the Beacon Theater, he invites his ex-girlfriend to join him but she’s already planning to work for the Obama campaign in the summer and declines. He decides that he’s going to work on an organic farm in Montana and plans to leave the next day…

Oodles of great stuff in the New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue, including a heretofore (what a great word) unpublished story by Vladmir Nabokov, called Natasha. I’m visiting my brother and family this weekend and I know on the train ride home tomorrow I’ll be listening to this podcast on the site of Mary Gaitskill reading the first story Nabokov published in the New Yorker and then discussing it. In the print version, Gaitskill has a story of her own and although I haven’t read a volume of hers before, I think I’ll be adding her to my TBR list. Also in the print version is a story by Annie Proulx called Tits-up in a Ditch (abstract only) that involves a girl raised by her rancher grandparents and wounded in the Iraq War, so the timeliness is an interesting meld with Proulx’s kind of timeless writing–you sometimes don’t know what era she is writing about because, well, all of her characters are so ass-backwards. Anyway, it stuck with me the past couple of days. Sometimes her writing really hits me and other times it couldn’t be more boring for her, but today when I found myself driving on country backroads out in the farmland of central Maryland, her story about this lost girl named Dakotah, seemed so much closer.

…are lovely and hard. It’s my birthday tomorrow! And it’s a biggie. I’ve been consumed with partying, basically. But every free moment I was reading The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, which I quoted in my last post. It was funny, for awhile I hadn’t read anything that I really connected with, prose-wise or plot-wise, but with this book I did from the beginning. The premise is perhaps a bit off-putting but the novel is so much more than the plot summary–I explain why here. Connecting with  book is like meeting a new person that you suddenly find yourself having so much to talk about with. It’s rare and to be treasured.  And I think that’s kind of what life is about: leaving behind your own tiny existence and entering into a realm where you see and feel and hear collectively, even if just for a little bit. Alone, we mean so little; together, we are a force.