I was browsing Greenlight bookstore when I had the thought "there are so many books I still want to read." This was a surprisingly positive thought, one I hope that will sustain me in the coming months.

 ^^^^

When one of your favorite publishers is also a writer and writes a story that feels like it was written just for you but it is about vampires: Blue is a Darkness Weakened by Light by Sarah McCarry
In other news, a new Guillotine is scheduled to print in January, which is a new year treat I can actually look forward to.

 ^^^^

The second Atlas book came out and I grabbed it. Reading Planetfall was such a serious, immersive experience that I'm looking forward to a similar experience. I'm never sure about first-person books, but I was pulled in hard to Planetfall and hope the same thing can happen with After Atlas.

 ^^^^

The colors are still good out on the streets. I'm trying to go outside while I can convince myself that being in nature will be pleasant. I haven't cobbled together a winter survival plan yet. Have you?

Daucus carota, my favorite trash flower

I don't believe in weeds.

++++++++

I remember the squinting face of some asshole not quite drunk enough to not notice me as he recommended that I take the Queen Anne's Lace bloom from behind my ear. I kept my eyes on him. What could he possibly be talking about? How ugly was this going to get?

A series of words I can't quite remember relayed to me that he thought my flower was poisonous.  I think I laughed, or maybe waved him away, or maybe busted some botanical knowledge, but I know I did not remove that flower from its perch. I definitely took another sip of my drink.

++++++++

Did you know that all the little flowers that make up the Queen Anne's Lace bloom are the softest thing? Find the biggest, flattest flower you can, check for bees and run it across your cheek. Now your forehead. Now your lips. You'll see.

++++++++ 

I am a child, alone and lonely, wandering through the abandoned tennis courts near my house, or the woods behind the high school football field, or the spaces near my grandparents' house in Trafford. I am looking for things to know. I am looking for secret treasures. I am looking for a world of my own. I find a little black dot in the center of the flower, a little black dot in the center of every big one. I pull up a few and see a little carrot. A little dot, a little carrot, holy shit.

And it is all mine.

++++++++

My Brooklyn is a bad place to find lace. It grows where other things don't, along with thistle and morning glory. It hangs out near fences and broken glass, underpasses and hidden places. It is a roadside gift; other people try to make it trashy but it just resists with all that airy whiteness. Or, perhaps, it is trashy and that just means something bigger (better) in the summer than it usually does.

++++++++ 

For more scientific words on Queen Anne's Lace, check out the Brooklyn Botanical Garden's weed of the month post.

Photo from Minnesota Seasons

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Oh, Penn Station bookstore, why are you so awful? I wandered around looking for something to buy in paperback and not a thing caught my eye until I saw Lauren Beukes' name popping out from the spine of The Shining Girls. I have been meaning to read her for awhile, so I bought it, hoping for a good escape from reality during a recent Philly trip.

I don't read jacket copy, so when I dove into the story about a time-traveling serial killer I was disappointed to find that it wasn't inspired by The Shining.  Where my supposition came from, who knows, but those two books do have one common theme--an evil house.

When I was a child, I loved to turn off the lights, close my myopic eyes and wander the house I grew up in.  I do the same now. Dreams are stuffed with the houses of relatives and childhood friends. I contain many houses and some of them are traps.

Is the house in The Shining Girls a trap for a certain kind of man or did the house itself come from his desires? Well, hm.

Though the pacing is excellent, The Shining Girls doesn't hold together in the end for a few reasons. The book has a Chicago setting, it really could have been set Major Anycity, U.S.A. and the Chicago-y things that do appear just seem like excuses to show the research that went into them appearing in the first place, as do some of the characters. Is it cool that there is a pre-legal abortion provider's POV included? Yes. But since we only get a little time with each of the victims--with the exception of out final girl, Kirby, who survived a childhood attack by Harper, the killer--the inclusion of that fact about her detracts from the otherwise excellent characterization. There are too many POVs, period. I really appreciate the work it must have taken to give each victim a individual voice and make the violence done to each less about the killer and more about what was taken from the world when each was killed. But we spend too much time with Harper for this to work and the result is distracting. A focus on Harper and the house, just the house, or our final girl, alone or in opposition to either, would have been considerably deeper and more meaningful to me and allowed Beukes's excellent attention to the telling detail to work a longer lasting magic. While I understand that this organization makes the time-travel element easier to follow, it also makes it less weird and, therefore, less interesting.

And now we've come to my major issue with The Shining Girls: The thing that pushes the book from straight horror into SF territory, the time travel element, doesn't feel integral to the plot. Why do these women have to be from different times for the murders to mean something to the killer or to the house? If it were simply a matter of providing a way to escape from the consequences of murdering another person, why aren't there more murders in the book? Harper's dull acceptance of time travel tells us a little about him, but nothing we couldn't learn in another way. When Kirby, who, let's remember, has had her entire life bounded by having been chosen by the house, finally encounters the house and its door to other times, she isn't tempted by the power at all.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed reading this book. I wanted to get to the end and stayed up until four in the morning to do so. But the more I thought about the book after that frenzied night, the plot followed through to its end, the less satisfied I became.

Some off-the-top-of-my-head additional reading:
The best: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

A recent evil house story on Pseudopod: The Unfinished Room by Joshua Rex, read by Bob Eccles. (explicit child murder in this one)

An examination of horror tropes with an emphasis on bad houses: Horror 101, heard on Tales to Terrify

I'm sorry, Paul

This year I picked up no leaves to tuck into the pages of my journal. I love doing that for some reason, but this year I missed it. Not totally, of course, the trees are still raining down colorful bookmarks, but I still find myself thinking more about doing it than actually looking at the ground for something pretty.
 
***

This is how you interview an author. Kameelah Rasheed balances familiarity and interrogation well while talking with Wendy C. Ortiz and the end result makes me want to read more by both.
"I have the courage in my late 30s and now at age 40 that I did not have in my 20s. To be honest, some of it—maybe most of it—is a feeling of what do I have to lose?" 

***

An excellent dead brother essay by Karen R. Tolchin.
Like a pervert poised to cop a feel, I looked around to make sure no one was watching and then I put my hand on Paul’s coffin. It looked as if it had been buffed smooth as a river rock but felt rough as a cat’s tongue to my fingertips.
“I’m sorry, Paul,” I whispered, rubbing my finger across the grain. “I miss my brother."

***

I greatly enjoyed listening to this story about alien abduction over at Clarkesworld: "The Aftermath" by Maggie Clark, read by Kate Baker.
Mostly, you recall, you were left in a garden of some kind—communal, or just large—and you could not tell the owners’ children from other pets allowed to roam within. 

***

Oh shit this is a great essay about reading and grieving over at Bookslut: Magic and Loss: Reading Akilah Oliver by Mairead Case
“My grandma died,” I’d say, or “I had a family emergency,” or else I just wouldn’t go out. It is impossible to talk about everything a person is, or everyone they were to you. Especially right after they go. Once I told my doctor I was late because the alarm was working wrong, which was a lie unless you count my brain as the alarm.

Some thoughts on Joy Williams

This year has been seasoned with a sprinkle of Joy Williams. I love checking out writers that were widely read in the past, then fell off the tongues of the book talkers. I picked up Breaking & Entering mostly for the name and concept: a couple breaks into houses in Florida and live a drifting life. The Changeling came recommended (and was in the library) and I thought, why not pick up some short stories, so Honored Guest it was.

The thing I find challenging about Williams' writing is encapsulated in this passage from the story "Claro" that takes place in a resort library after the main character asks for some children's books:

"Are you kidding? Take them all. No one's been in this place since the Second Annual Chili Cookout we had int he garden last week, a great turnout. People love their food booths. May I suggest what I believe? There was once a single language which all creatures possessed. It was highly complex and exceedingly beautiful. Latin was a gross simplification of its glories. Then some sort of cataclysm, we can't even guess.Overnight, a soiled, simpler world of cruder possibilities. Words had to be invented, they became artificial. Over centuries we appeared to evolve but our language didn't. Words aren't much more than a waste product now, space junk. We're living post-literaly. It's all gleanings and tailings. It's boring, it's transitory, but a counterliterate future is at hand. It's what's coming. The only thing language does now is separate us from the animals. We require something that separates us from ourselves."

Woof.

In Williams' writing, minor characters appear, monologue, disappear and what they say seems to have little bearing on how the story progresses. The character Poe in Breaking & Entering speaks entirely in this fashion and simply hangs out at the end of the book, being annoying, or as the main character Liberty thinks " It was nonsense the woman was speaking. She was just an old, rich, crazy woman." As a fan of digression, I still haven't come to any conclusion about whether I like this or not. The balance of her writing is steeped in sensory details, specific moments of pleasure or discomfort--hairs in the mouth, the taste of a drink--so the monologue moments can wrench me out of an otherwise compelling story.

This bumps up against the other thing: women characters that just float around. In both The Changeling and Breaking & Entering, the main character is a young woman, completely willless and ambivalent, who gets attached to a strange, powerful, and usually somewhat malevolent, male character and then led on an adventure. Sure, the women act act with drinking and wandering, but they don't have much inside and that gets boring. The short stories don't fall victim to this which is why I like them better.

I enjoy that dogs appear in many of her stories. I still think about the quiet whiteness of Clem, the dog in Breaking & Entering. His presence was always noted, but he never moved plot points along. Clem was a fun, silent shepherd that accompanies the reader through an increasingly twisted story. The story "Hammer" includes a dog and some terrible speechifying, most egregiously from the daughter character.

Speaking of "Hammer," I really liked that story for its set up and insight into the parent-child relationship. Much of Honored Guest focuses on permutations of that relationship. The most charming and terrible is the title story. About a teenager, Helen, with a cancer-ridden mom, I read this at the best/worst time: while abroad with my dad for a cancer treatment. The many mundane horrors of watching your parent die, high school, dying yourself and the slow burn of cancer are explored here with a sense of compassion and humor that sings along with the sharp-eyed observations. The last paragraph of the story expresses what I love about her writing:

"The girl with the gum had been the one that told Helen how ashes came back. Her uncle had died and came back in a red shellacked box. I looked cheap but it cost fifty-five dollars and there was an envelope taped to the box with his name typed on it beneath a glassine window as though he was being addressed to himself. The girl considered herself to be somewhat of an authority on the way these things were handled, for she had also lost a couple of godparents and knew how things were done as far south as Boston."

Writing poetry, riding in cars, comparing columns of numbers to rows of desires, picking up dog shit, reading Angela Carter, dreaming of old friends and, this:

And you?

cleaning, cleaning my brain

Comics from one or two years ago to read and shelve, or read and recycle:

|||||||||||

Found this paper doll by Susie Oh and put it together, sans two grommets. Check out her animations with the dolls. Botanical boojangles.

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I found a first draft of a poem I wrote deep in my grieving:

Hello?
No.
I meant to say yes, but,
you're too late.
I'm sorry that you are stuck,
a few years behind.
The train still goes there, yes,
all the way to the end of the line,
but what was there
isn't anymore.
Yes, I was a mother but now I am just a mouth.
Were you in bed, were you wrapped up tight,
were you dead for minutes that stretched and stretched?
No.
Not sorrier than I.

|||||||||||

Titular:

I was walking in the woods with my main man. The trail was narrow and beset by deer flies or it was wide and sandy, I promise that it doesn't matter which, and we couldn't hold hands because it was too hot or I was too sick or that sort of thing simply wouldn't fit. I thought about all of the trees I know the name of and at the same time how soft a bed pine needles can make when you are too young to get home on your own and no one is going to pick you up any where near on time. The tiny frog I caught waited just until her close-up to hop off of my hand and into an inkberry bush or a beech tree grove with all the other frogs I didn't step on and some memories that flood flood flooded my brain while we watched our feet. My shoulders swung like a weather vane and I pointed out things I knew and wanted to know, all the while trying to avoid shit-in shorts and more embarrassing things because you never know which one will be too much. Why have maps when you can get lost in a paradise is a nice thought but my body never wants to sit down and let such ideas have an orderly hike by. I blew mosquitoes away with loud, huffing breath—all the better to not talk with. But that sort of thing never works, does it? Still, mishearing a woodpecker is better than never even considering one, never even looking and trying to find the culprit.

It was that kind of walk.

1. The light through the schefflera is not as charming as it should be.

2. My nose is dripping onto my upper lip and the dust is thick on the walls and I smell mold and other things, mostly gross things, like butts and fish and it makes me want to take off my face and put it away for the night.

3. There is a space in my life where Scrabble used to be.  Remember when we played?

4. I'm thinking about an essay that started in a half-dream in my friend Ray's guest room. In my mind I was running through the halls of my dead grandmother's L-shaped home in California. Everything was eye-level and I was going really fast. I am writing this on a tablecloth brought from her place that I never saw before. It is possible that it was never used while she was alive.

5. I don't feel like writing about what I've read. Sorry.

friends of try harder: good stuff

Amanda Well-Tailored wrote an excellent essay on expectations for new years and her 2012 resolve: Chop Wood, Carry Water. She also makes ramen while she talks.

SEC, or Sara Edward-Corbett, has an excellent new blog, blunderbustle.









 

Zane Grant has been writing a fun supernatural comic, Detective Warlock, Warlock Detective. It is in its fourth chapter now, but you should start here.

Click, read, buy

1) The Rumpus has been kicking it out 70s-Heart-style. So many of their offerings help me think better. Here are a few of my recent favorites:
The Throwaways by Melissa Chadburn
When Barbara Jean Was Missing by Rebecca K. OConnor
Night Shifts by Elissa Wald
Transformation and Transcendence: The Power of Female Friendship by Emily Rapp

2) In other excellent news, Roxane Gay, one of my favorite essayists, is now their essay editor. This can only mean good things.

3) Here are some books that I am looking forward to reading:
At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson--I've heard many of these stories on various science fiction podcasts and I hope that they will be as good on paper.
Baby Geisha by Trinie Dalton--I really enjoyed Wide Eyed in 2010.
Three Messages and a Warning Eduardo Jiménez Mayo and Chris. N. Brown, editors--Short stories from authors I've not heard about before, published by Small Beer Press. Sign me up.
Nurse Nurse by Katie Skelly--Being the jerko that I occasionally am, I never picked up Nurse Nurse while it was in minis. Now we can get the book from Sparkplug Books and support Skelly and a great press.
The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford--NYRB rarely lets me down. Plus an afterword by Kathryn Davis, what could be better?

4) Dang, Red Lemonade has republished Lynne Tillman's Haunted Houses? I loved that book, especially when the characters kept going to the movies. If you aren't going to get it from the library check it out in this way with one caveat--if you buy the print version, expect the cover to be wimpy. Seriously, the pages of Zazen were creamy and strong, but the cover curled like dead leaf in the autumn of everyday toting. Come on with that.

5) I am working on two things right now that I am excited about. This is unusual and probably means that both are terrible writing. Still, finishing things is the main thing for right now.

What is your thing for right now?

                                                 

Some things I want to happen in 2012

1) Maureen F. McHugh writes another book and it makes her a household name.
2) Everyone reads this essay by Roxane Gay and takes it to heart: "When you really think about it, though, the condescension and trivializing in the faux apology are kind of outrageous. In the time it took Grossman to point at his list and acknowledge the lack of diversity, he could have simply added two or three books to his list by women or writers of color that also interested him. Surely such titles exist." Everyone reads everything by Roxane Gay.
3) Vanessa Veselka writes a short story collection and it is illustrated.
4) I make some homemade shelves and paint them red.
5) Pitching essays and reviews out again becomes a thing I do.
6) Eleanor Davis makes comics again.
7) I start reviewing minis again in a safe n sane way.
8) Shelley Jackson makes a comic or writes a novel or both!
9) After getting Breathers published in a nice edition by an awesome small press with a big PR team, Justin Madson busts out another big, smart book.
10) My friends and I-wish-they-were-friends keep on making things, no one feels defeated and we all know each other.

(((())))

This is not an exhaustive list by any means. I forget names all the time. The best things become part of my brain and lose their identifiers, but even so they are there. I will keep you posted if I think of anything else.

What's on your list?

Here is something I did:

I decided that I actually wanted access to my minis and some reliable way to find them. Arranging them alphabetically by author seemed the way to go, and these corrugated cardboard boxes (acid content be damned)  were convenient receptacles for most sizes of minis. The tinies & humongoes are on the bookshelf above in no order,  but the bulk of my collection is now here. I was able to do a bunch of weeding as well. The compilations, like my beloved Papercutters, are on another shelf right now, but will end up in a box too when a suitable one arrives.

Now I have one big box of unread stuff to go through, and I am sure that I will need at least two more browsing boxes of this size when I am through. As I hinted at above, this is not a great longterm preservation solution, but it is cheap. Perhaps when I have a little more archive money (hire me!), I will splurge on some acid free boxes.

I also weeded my fiction collection and arranged that alphabetically by author as well. I tried to get rid of the Pynchon and other such things, but B wouldn't let me go all the way. As punishment, he must read Gravity's Rainbow in 2012.

All this talk of minis may have you wondering when I am going to start reviewing them again. I promise to have gained a new PO box by the end of January. See you in the mail.

-ettes

I got my first fiction rejection yesterday. This was just as expected, and strangely inspiring. While I wish that I had gotten some comments in my rejection, I understand that one can't have everything. The other two stories that I have been working on have absorbed the energy of that hard sell and might even be first-draft-finished this week.

###

oh.no.not.again

###

Speaking of making stuff, have you started work on your contest entry? Here are the details. Images of a full inbox are dancing about my head...

I'm stuck in the land of tiny bits with huge universes attached to them. Not only does this mean paper scraps, phrases pulled out of conversations, garlic, raw & cooked, it means short stories.

Start stopping through Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler makes me go back to What I Didn't See (buy this book) and the two are making me want to try more stories. There is something invigorating about how the reader can feel the harnessed anger and sadness thrumming underneath the stories. My favorite thing about her stories are that they never go where I think that they are going. Surprise is the really the nicest treat.

&&&

The seasons are truly screwing with me. How about you?

&&&

This is an excellent essay about the Penn State child abuse conspiracy and the seemingly incomprehensible reaction of students to the firing of Joe Paterno by Brian Spears. My only complaint is that it is too short.

An awesome comic about depression, rendered in Paint, by the hi-lar Allie Brosh.


Fuck. The. Fucking. Beaches. A Tessa Brunton comic about chronic illness and the bullshit of being "positive" when life is awful.

And for something a bit lighter, here's a story about ghostbusting college kids in Malaysia over at PodCastle by Zen Cho, which shows how a great reading can change a story for the better. Reading by Tracey Yuen.

Reading House of Fear & Tales from Down Below by Leonora Carrington

This book, as I've mentioned before, seems to be the only borrowable copy of Leonora Carrington's fiction in the five boroughs that is not the delightful The Hearing Trumpet. The collection is made up of several short stories and a memoir of her time in a Spanish asylum in the 1940s. The memoir section, dictated in French, three years after her incarceration, is called Down Below or Notes from Down Below. Let me say here that there is no question that Carrington suffered from mental illness. Reading Notes from Down Below reminded me of a lost summer I spent in the company of someone going into a manic phase and how that could have easily slid into psychosis. Even though I have no connection to the mystical and religious figures that populate her delusions, it's the kind of reading that gives me a growing sense of dread because it makes me feel a little crazy too.

Besides that effect, and despite the actual illness that it depicts, this memoir also gives a good picture of what it was (is) like to be a creative person, to create towards sanity, in a uncreative world. This quote breaks my heart with truth: "I gave little thought to the effect my experiments might have on the humans by whom I was surrounded, and, in the end, they won."

To the left is a map, a drawing made of the boundaries of Carrington's prison. It shows how hard she was trying to make a story out of the terrible things happening to her. It freaks me out with its details--the same reality as the clandestine cigarettes and paralyzing injections, but not the same at all.

How others view her sanity or insanity is totally informed by her femaleness, and this comes through in how she is treated and mistreated. Everybody just wants her to be quiet, maybe get better, maybe not. I wish I had some more quotes for this, but the library police were breathing down my neck... The second section of the memoir, all about the time shortly after the institution, is shocking in its clarity about the concessions one has to make for safety in wartime and how shitty it is to have a family that cares more about propriety than your health and happiness. There is much more to say about Notes from Down Below—it demands a reread some time when I can think about it more.


### The stories in the collection were not as interesting to me as the memoir. They play with dimensions and time, as surrealist fiction does, and nothing is as it appears. Horses appear over and over. Everything has many adjectives odd attached to it, but all come off as flat and juvenile. I wish I could get at more of her later fiction. Why must I to be constantly thwarted by my monolingualism?

Two things about Lynne Tillman's Some Day This Will Be Funny

1. In this book there are stories that include characters making tea, drinking tea and watching the things in your house move or not move ('That’s How Wrong My Love Is'). This is important to me. it is diffcult to write about thoughts and the spaces between them.

2. Sometimes Tillman uses words like "trousers" and "make love" and loses me ('Love Sentence'). But then, the perfect description of a feeling will pull me right back in. She writes about psychoanalysis and I don't care. It is too New York to be real, so I discard it. In 'The Substitute,' however, the character's time with the analyst, scraping away at him and herself, is part of an altered reality, so it works for me.

Recent accomplishments

1) Successful pie tasting night. Ate many pie pieces in low light, didn't become ill, and had a wonderful hour with SEC.

2) "Today only" comics bin at Housing Works netted a copy of Bitchy Bitch 13 and Duplex Planet Illustrated 9 for 54 cents. Then I read them on the couch, under the fan.

3) Initiated an interview for try harder. I think it is going to be grand.

4) Did not read Someday This Will Be Funny and The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse in one sitting.

5) Gave a young Rolling Stone intern a pep talk about writing that was not bullshit. I think I inspired myself as well.

What have you done recently?

looking like septuagenarian hip priests

At the 49th St. Q station I saw one of my old neighbors. The station has finally been cleansed of its terrible smell. Three-quarters of the platform reeked of the fecal matter of big cats—an aging lion maybe, depressed from too many years in a cage—or perhaps a rotting corpse. I once saw a man in that station with such bad necrosis of the legs, his open sores glistening, that asleep, he looked long dead. I wondered if he had somehow deposited his legs in the airshaft between the exits in a final bit of New York magic.

(Since I started writing this the smell and returned and been conquered at least twice. The possibility of its return weighs heavily on me when it has disappeared for a bit.)

My old neighbor used to be one of a matched set. He and his partner reliably wore matching glasses and Mao hats. They both had short grey hair and button noses. They would walk east on 48th St. holding hands. They were probably just going to the grocery store, but they looked like they embarking calmly on an adventure for two. My boyfriend and I liked to spot them on our street looking like septuagenarian hip priests, not saying how they embodied our wish and our fear.

Now, my old neighbor is just an old man—the twosome spell broken. He’s shuffling on a hot platform and looking like he could blow down onto the tracks at any moment. Concern and revulsion and pity are fighting in me, but that’s just because I made this story of him and her and them. I wonder what is downtown. Another adventure, I hope.


Image from the NYPL Digital Gallery, Image ID G91F381_501ZF

Old toothbrushes and elbow grease

I have been discovering crannies and nooks unknown to me. Spring cleaning is going on, a few months late by the calendar, a few months early by the weather. In my home, things are being mended and scrutinized, discarded and displayed. I am spending time alone with my (our) things, and being the sentimental type, this means spending time with my memories and attitudes. I prefer working on the present—the past is pitfalls and prattfalls—so, ways of being are being refined and defined and this is surprisingly rewarding. And, just like the freshened result of cleaning out the dryer's internal filter, you'd never know from the outside.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

It is planting season. I am too chilled to venture on to the roof, so my little plants and unpopped seeds are having an inside day:

In addition to my Gaia-like nurturing of food and beauty, I've been bringing home shopping bags of fruit and vegetables that, with their bright colors and healthy odors, amplify both my righteousness and sexual appeal tenfold.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Best of all, I heard that Maureen F. McHugh will be coming out with a new collection of short stories from Small Beer Press in October 2011. It is called After the Apocalypse and you will preorder it now.

I am reading Half the Day is Night by her right now and enjoying its underwater murkiness, if not the other trappings of the book's world. More on that later.