true wisdom

Doppelganger lays it out for the world over at 50 Books with her list of hard-won wisdom:

6. Saying whatever is on your mind all the time is neither "being true to yourself" nor is it "just being honest." It's "being an asshole."

There is no excuse to be a damn fool after reading her post.

The only thing I could possibly add to this list today is this:
_The nice, secluded stall you use at work to take big, nasty dumps in is the same one everybody takes big nasty dumps in. We all know what you are doing in there, even if we can't see your shoes, and I for one do not judge you.

I know I am late

I wanted to post a link to this short interview with Lydia Millet from Bookslut. Ican tell she didn't care for Elizabeth Merrick's questions, but I wish she had tried harder to give some fuller answers. Everybody knows that when an interviewer asks a question you don't like, it's time to just talk about something you want to talk about in lieu of a topical answer.

"And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?

I'd like more people to read my books."

You have too much stuff

The next Freecycle event in NYC:

Spring Cleaning? Don't throw it away!

HARLEM YMCA * FREECYCLE™ NEW YORK CITY *
OFFICE of RECYCLING OUTREACH & EDUCATION
present...

A Spring Cleaning FreeMeet!
Saturday, June 2, 2007, 11am-4pm
Harlem YMCA-The Little Theatre
180 West 135th St. at Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. (7th Ave),
New York City

Directions: M2 Bus, 2, 3 or C to 135th St.

New Yorkers discard some 12,000 tons of waste each day that is
exported to landfills and incinerators in other states! Here's your
chance to help NYC reduce waste and keep our environment clean
by finding new homes for your old stuff, and getting some things
you can use in the process.

WHAT TO BRING: Items that are no longer useful to you, but can be reused
by others. You don't need to bring anything to take anything (though a
tote bag might help). Bring friends and family too!

WHAT NOT TO BRING: No furniture/large items, drugs/medications,
weapons/dangerous objects, adult movies/magazines or pets/pethair
covered items.

For more information, visit www.RecycleThisNYC. org/freemeet
or call 212-788-7989.

Be there!

No More to Roam, for now

Portland, OR:
gyros, stumptown, other people's crushes, the world's tiniest adult shop, Grundel!, arts and crafts architecture, plant wowsers

Road, rock, road, sleep, road, Best Western

Ellensburg, WA and beyond:
bands, wind, cold, sunscreen, "historic downtown," tension, bad food, wavers and butt watchers

Road, tension, drive-by Seattle, road, rock, road

Portland, OR:
other people's work, pizza, hybrids, more plant wowsa, baby lust, mexican, painful math, goodbyes, cool school, bed, breakfast, heat, Powell's: disappointment, then redemption in the comix (I love the nineties) and small press sections (will I like Gary Lutz? Everybody else seems to), Chinese garden not for free, gyros, tea, tea, tea and airplane.

New York City:
sigh, water plants, sleep, sigh

Back to the books!

One of the things I have been doing instead of reading books for fun is working in my garden. Thursday, instead of wrangling words I felt like showing some dirt who’s boss. While being bossy I managed to get filthy and slightly sweaty before the FedEx guy came with a box of more plants that I ordered during a recent, financially unwise spree. Then it was all over for the blank spots between bulb plants. I have another two orders coming in and then I will be able to sit back and enjoy, at least until fall.

My first clematis flower of the season bloomed! It is fuchsia!

I succeeded in waking a number of dormant plants with TLC!

“Muddying up” has now been added to my vocabulary!

I am pretty sure I saw a worm poop!

A number of flies were buzzing around my compost heap and my increasingly filthy body during the hours that I was out there, I saw a giant shiny blue one and a few medium-sized jewel green ones and even a bunch of zebra-striped ones with giant red eyes all of which I would likely consider quite beautiful if I didn’t know that they were feeding off of the corpse of my hipness.

***
Recently I have read a few good things and many mediocre things, most of which I am working on writing about for other places. I have, however, been trolling the blogs of literary import and have come up with a few statements:

1) Of course newspapers say silly, uninformed stuff about lit blogs.
2) I am confused as to why litbloggers care about the above.
3) Things are not often the way they are supposed to be.

***
The last bleeding heart:


***
This weekend, due to traveling and my own forgetfulness, I have read many articles in The Believer. As usual, despite enjoying one or two long articles in each magazine (the May 07 Rick Moody piece on W.G. Sebald’s books comes to mind, especially his bit on textual compulsion and creating reading spaces for each literary obsession), the overall product left me feeling a mixture of envy and a bit shortchanged.

Harrumph.

I really love the sense that Believer writers have the freedom to fail, to fail to reach conclusions, to fail to be constrained by objectivity, to fail to be wholly entertaining. It is a very similar feeling to the one I get when I doodle through the blog roll. I am envious of the beautiful design of each issue and the large pool of artistic talent they seem to be able to draw from. The consistent feeling of fun the magazine maintains is its biggest draw and I am one thousand percent behind fun.

But, at the and of an issue, I do feel a nagging lack of satisfaction, like my Kool Aid was switched with bug juice, but I AM NOT EVEN AT CAMP!

GO!

Tomorrow, there will be what sounds like an awesome event at Rocketship. I will be on a train, so you should go in my place.

8PM @
Rocketship
208 Smith Street
Brooklyn
718 797 1348
Take the F or G to the Bergen Street stop


lauren Weinstien will be reading (i think) "Horse Camp," which is kickass and Ariel and Tania Schrag will be doing the slideshow reading thing too. The book they are promoting is Stuck in the Middle – 17 Comics from an Unpleasant Age, edited by Ariel Schrag. According to my sources, there will be food and drink too.

I haved missed all the Weinstein this week and I am so, so sad for myself.

Dark as night; the internet lives

Outside the sky is dark, yet I still have over an hour of work to go. I believe that this is only a result of having such a wonderful day yesterday.

After weeding the garden as thoroughly as my mild OCD required, I put on some ill-fitting shorts and began walking over to the big buildings as my love for lunch with B requires. As usual he was delayed so I took a detour to Bryant Square Park and who should I see but Amy Ambulette blinking in the sunshine with her boss. I tried to pretend that I was overexposed in the leg-al region and was perhaps on some secret businessy business, but this lasted mere nanoseconds before I possibly endangered Amy's financial welfare with various spoken emoticons and curses. Sorry, lady! clown hat smiley face!

After she went back to slave away in one of the area's towers of power, I went in search of a place to sit down and instead found the Bryant Park Reading Room, an outdoor area supplied with books for people too cool to bring their own props for across the bench romancing. I was apparently so charming that I nabbed a 50-something Slovenian man's attentions, but not before I looked at a giant book of Bresson photos, a SF journal from the 90s and marveled at how many NYBR titles they had. Though many of the volumes were suspiciously dirty, it was still a treat to be able to browse around while waiting to meet B. If I had known I was going to be there for upwards of three hours, I would have worn pants and brought my own book.

Still, on a day that promised to be not more than nice, I had a great time in a park that rivaled many of my times in the world's best park, Rittenhouse Square. I managed to not be overwhelmed by my terminal nostalgia and plan on spending many more sunny afternoons in the park.

After the rain stops, of course.

Back now, still no books

In response to The Big D's post about tunes in one's head, here is my list:

Laid by James
Sexy MF by Prince
"starfish and coffee, maple syrup and jam" by Prince
"when you rock n roll with me, there's no on else I'd rather be, nobody down here can do it for me, I'm in tears" by David Bowie [the album Diamond Dogs is always coursing through my brain from the opening howl. I guess I need a little love in a doorway.]
Dreamer's Ball by Queen
This House that I Call Home by X
"wiggle it til it works" by the Knitters
"if it feels this good gettin used, well then keep on usin me, till you use me up" by a guy I can never remember

I'd take the songs in my head over an iPod anyday...

And you?

ETA:
Roadrunner by The Modern Lovers
I'm Straight by The Modern Lovers
Lady Stardust by David Bowie
and also format it up...

ABANDONED!!!

Sometimes it is just better to stop. I am in the middle of Found in the Street by Patricia Highsmith and for the first time with one of her books, I just don’t want to finish it. Something about the sentences feel labored and worked over and Highsmith’s usual slow burn is just a limp this time.

In a bookstall near NYU I found this kicky little British paperback. I snapped it up and promptly put it away behind a chair on top of a stack of my boy’s Believers, far away from all the other books and destined to be forgotten until a time of need. Well, that TON was last week after a string of disappointing reads. I wanted something creepy but distant seeming, like Poe, but smart like Shirley or Shelley Jackson. I also happened to have that chair in my sight line. Satisfaction was guaranteed, except, well, not exactly.

The main character, Jack, is a man fascinated by the women in his life and he idolizes them ridiculously. Every behavior this guy shows seems to be a rationalization; a reaction to an agreement about “freedom” he made with his wife and child’s mother, Natalia. Say it with me kids, Natahhhhleeeaaaaaaaaa. Natty, by the way, is supposed to be beguiling with her art and possible bisexuality and all, but she just comes off as a somewhat heartless scenester. These flaws don’t deepen the character as they do in, for example Strangers on a Train, they seem like tics on Highsmith’s part or like she was trying to explore something that didn’t work out and just published the B-grade remains.

In particular, this book’s physical character descriptions of women are so weird it is distracting. “She was at least forty-five, and some needed makeup, but underneath, as they say, she was not the made-up type.” Who is they? What do they say? So-and-so doesn’t wear make-up, so-and-so wears this kind of make-up, so-and-so is a natural beauty who didn’t need make-up. Whaaaaaa? Part of this may be that though this book was published in the 80s, it has a distinctly sixties feel, even with a mention of AIDS and an out out out character. She was presumably living overseas when she wrote this, having left America in disgust in 1963, and the New York in this book seems frozen during that time of bohemians in the Village and dirty little secrets just peeking out from under the buttoned-up denim of America.

Maybe sometime I will have the patience to finish this book, disappointing as it is, and just enjoy the tiny bits of Highsmith charm that pop up here and there, but for now: ABANDONED!!!

My work sweater smells like bacon

Extreme procrastination has led me to read the entire internet over the last few days and now I realize it is time to write some letters, finish the kinda blah Patricia Highsmith book I am reading or just plain do some work. This kind of miserable drizzle always makes me want to work, or rather, to have worked and take time to bask in the product.

Last night I made some BEC sandwiches (think about it... and there!) and the apartment hasn't recovered. Neither has my stomach and I dreamt all night of San Francisco, Baltimore, gentrification, drunken mistakes of the losing-precious-possessions kind and thrift stores. And pirate kings. This could have been a result of thehttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif confluence of the aforementioned sandwiches and the pound of grapes I decided to consume with them before falling asleep in front of Dead Man.

But look away from my shame and onto:

Interviews are back at millwhistle!
Gwyneth Jones doesn't say much under the guise of rapping about the SF in our real lives and reminds me of not liking her book which I really wanted to like!
Amy Ambulette has sex in one hour sometimes! (Do you like the way I sell it Amy? Do ya?)
The prog lady still hasn't posted anything new!

Also, for all you writerly, interviewerly people out there:
Please take a long look at Topic wearing its web suit. If this seems like something you would like to be a part of, email me at carrie.jones AT topicmag.com and we will talk. (The site requires a free sign up). If you know some younguns that want to exercise their chops, I am looking for a few good interns as well.

Nice weather signals not only time to get that helmet on and get on a bike, it is also time to sign up for a CSA.

Object Lesson

Saturday night a helmet saved my life. If B had not been wearing a helmet when he had a bike accident only a few blocks from our apartment, I would have likely expired from grief.

In the ambulance, my honey did not know how old he is. He did not know what landed him strapped to a gurney. He did not remember calling me to tell me he "fell off" his bike. Then shock set in and I couldn't warm him up.

The emergency room smelled like rotten fish and barf. Not the best way to spend a Saturday night.


B left the hospital with busted face and hands, and some (possibly) fractured ribs. Two days later he is back to his sharp self but in a lot of pain.

ALWAYS wear your helmet folks. No excuses.

Tonight I am going to this. I cannot imagine an entertainment that connects more of my interests: libraries, musicals (surprise!), obsessions, Philadelphia characters, books, comics (Ben Katchor did the libretto and projected illustrations), um, funny stuff...

THE ROSENBACH COMPANY: A Musical Story of Bibliomania is sold out according to the nypl site, but "tickets may be available at the door." So coy!

ETA: this was totally kick ass. the only downside was that the lyrics were occasionally hard to hear. see it somewhere if you can.

In 1994, David Bowie called his own mind "sponge-like," and Joni Mitchell recommended Kipling. Fascinating.

(Via Return of the Reluctant)

My taxes are done. I hope yours are too.

***
I have been trolling all over the booky internet for the last few hours and I must say I feel a bit defeated, a little shrunken in the brain. With all my attempts to narrow my focus and work harder on fewer things, I seem to be missing out on a lot of fun and interesting thoughts. To make matters worse, my efforts do not seem to be producing much in the way of results. I still feel as stressed, scattered and one-step-behind as usual. In fact, I feel like this in more aspects of my life than usual. It feels bad. What do you do when doing what you do feels bad?

***
Last night I watched a NOVA special on "The First Flower." It was really very visually beautiful and I learned a bit about China and angry paleobotanists while watching it. The best part were all the interior shots of Kew Gardens' buildings, all ornate ironwork and big windows. The last time I was there I really enjoyed myself. The melancholy of a place that is meant to take you far away from another place, a place for whatever reason you can't leave, appeals to me. During my visit some of the glasshouses were being worked on and the workers seemed to take great care with what they were doing, unlike the grubby, glassy-eyed construction guys I see around here. My father and I spoke with one of them for a while. He seemed so perfectly balanced and sensitive beneath all his denim that it was like he sprang from the pages of a bad novel about middle-agers finding love... for the second time.

Sometimes I wonder what my neighbors think of me when they see me squatting around in my garden, stirring compost and molesting my plants. Do they think of chick lit? I hope not.

***
I just started reading H20 by Mark Swartz and enjoying it. I don't have much of a grasp what it is about yet. It was sent to me with the idea that it was SF-y back catalog stuff from Soft Skull press. Last night I finished the other book in that package and brought it with me to the bar where my boy's band was playing. I ended up talking to a group that liked SF and one of the people said that he had brought two SF books along with him to the bar. After I showed him mine, he wouldn't show me his. It was lame. Obviously there was going to be no fun made. He did recommend someone named Dan Simons though. Anyone know anything about him?

Thanks for the thoughts I never would have on my own.

I have been very busy doing non-blog things. Mostly emailing and editing and emailing and pacing and emailing and drinking tea, but sometimes putting labels on things. I am in a tizzy.

In the midle of this tizzy of practicality, it is hard for me to express my thoughts about the death of Kurt Vonnegut. I will try soon. B was a little suprised that I ws upset when I heard the news; he was under the impression that I didn't really like Vonnegut's books. For me, "liking" his stuff... well. it is not that simple.

Though RIPs are a part of life, I am always sad to write those three letters again.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

The gloomy, cold rain reminds me that just a few weeks ago I was in sunny Menlo Park, hanging with my grandmother and eating salad. In Menlo, there is a sweet paperback bookstore that I always stop at during one of my many visiting-grandmother-walks. This place has a dollar bin with Kathy Acker and Emmanuel Carrere right in there with Anne Rice books!

Instead of being smart and buying a dollar bin book, I went deeper into the store and looked over the SF section. Mixed in with a wall of Asimovs, Brins, Cherryhs and other things I don’t read was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It had an inoffensive cover and I had been meaning to read something by Doctorow for a while. I paid my four American dollars plus CA tax and left.

I finished DOMG in a matter of hours. It is only 200 or so pages and the type in my edition was term paper huge. Once I got to the middle of this quickly paced story, I just wanted it to end.

DOMG is about a future world where people never die. Instead of living out the >100 years that we presently have and just dying already, the people in Doctorow’s book download their memories when convenient and have it uploaded to a clone whenever they feel old. Jules, the main character, has died a number of times. In his various lives he’s been married, divorced, fucked in space and drunk on Earth. He is also a bit of a sad sack. Jules’ lameness did not provide depth to his character as it seems to be suggested that such crappy decisions and circumstances, (and the shout out to Orwell’s hard luck memoir in the title), should. Not only is Jules flat, but so is every character, which made the breakneck speed of the plot even harder to take.

The whole Disney World thing left me cold as well. Maybe because I don’t like Disney World? No, even I could get into the idea of a society of “ad-hocs” that live in the theme park and care take centuries-old rides, living the meritocracy dream in sunny Florida. It’s just that though Doctorow brings up a zillion things to ponder (what kind of society would occur when there is no fear of death? What would living in space be like for an Earthling? How will idealism be expressed in a time without a future?), he doesn’t explore any of them deeply enough for it not to matter that his characters suck.

Also, the drug of choice among Doctorow’s futureinos, casually used like chewing gum, is crack.

DOMG is not a horrible book, merely an easily forgotten one. It was Doctorow’s first novel, so I want to give him another try and see if his later work delivers what all the ideas in DOMG promise.

The Carnival of Green is going on at sludgie. See, I knew that people who love the earth were sexier...

Outside

Reading this by Condalmo reminded me of two things:

1) Maybe it is a shame that I don’t read Murakami anymore. Sputnik Sweetheart and many of the After the Quake stories just didn’t do anything for me. Occasionally I would read something of his from the New Yorker and it was the same thing: everything good about the writing was an echo from books past, but made much duller my Murakami’s insistence on not aging his nameless, often befuddled protagonists as he ages. They just stay in an ever more idealized 30s, still obsessed with order, ordinariness, amelioration, ladies, etc, but with an increasingly lack of urgency. Perhaps After Dark is different.

2) Book covers are quite important to me. As almost any genre reader will tell you, it is hard to defend your own taste and intelligence when you are more than occasionally spotted reading a book with a soaring spaceship/green alien/huge-breasted woman in the clutches of a green alien on the cover. My recent utter intimacy with Matthew Sharpe’s Jamestown has left me plenty of moments to ponder the cover designed by Goodloe Byron. I think it works perfectly for the story and is good-looking in its own right, if you like apocalyptic settings or maps or BOTH.
PS>the cover featured on the Soft Skull site is only similar to what's on the front cover of the hardback.

Half Life by Shelley Jackson

After a heavy fine and a few sharp whacks from the librarian’s belt, I released Half Life back into the New York Public Library system only slightly worn. I did not want to return it, mostly because it demanded another read (even after one and a half), but also so I could scoop some quotes for yall so you could have a little taste of heaven.

Heaven for me is this wildly imagined book about a two-headed lady named Nora and Blanche. They are twins and share everything but their heads. The thing is, Blanche opted out of consciousness a while back and Nora isn’t doing so well, even immersed in the borderline-smotheringly welcoming arms of a re-imagined San Francisco. In Half Life’s world, man created a population of Siamese twins by fiddling with atoms and twins created a constant, unappreciated reminder of hubris.

Jackson uses the twins to show us the baldest depiction of how desire can mangle love. She has Nora’s quest for self-hood (aloneness) mirror the struggle of every lady I know—how can I be truly me? Who am I? How can I get where I want to be? When will all this bullshit end? Nora herself is like a triple-barricaded version of everyone who laughs at the party line, tells the “welcoming arms” to fuck off and yet seeks the very comfort pride parades and twin hags offer others. Yes, twin hags—Jackson takes the rainbow flag and sees a noose in it, but shows us all the imperfections of being out and extremely proud in inventive, hilarious and deeply satisfying ways. Reading her version of a press release for a twin film fest, as well as her other entries from Nora’s festering scrapbook of twin-related media, is like biting into the juiciest poison apple given by the sexiest witch.

And then there is sex. Half Life pulsates with eroticism even as it plunges into deeply disturbing territory. Part of this is that so much of this book has to do with bodies, what they mean, how they shape who we are, how they can limit or free us. (She seems to be comfortable in the body. Besides her skin project, her first collection of short stories, The melancholy of anatomy, is based around the four humors.) Jackson doesn’t shy away from gore (like when she describes the “museum” Nora and Blanche make up with decaying desert animals as children), but she somehow makes event he most disgusting eruption seem necessary and part of a larger thing. She gives us sex that is life defining and urgent and sex that is lonely. In short, she gives us real sex clothed in an alternate-present two-necked sweater.

The bondage of women is present everywhere in this book from Nora trapped in the body of an unwanted twin to a caged girl held in the ceiling of a trailer while a normal life goes on under her. She seems to say that no woman escapes all the traps that this world sets, but even so, this confinement is not natural and it is not good. I like a read that makes me think about gender but doesn’t tell me what to think. And doesn’t bore or insult me. Rare? Yes, but that is another post.

This book is full of things to think about and little pockets to get lost in. Jackson’s whole take on America’s purposeful forgetting of atomic weapon use (with ridiculous, yet familiar methods) could have been a book itself (I see a more twisted and fantastic, and maybe better (!) OPRH).

The end was nice and open unlike a lot of wacky books. Like, “well kids, I’ve had a lot of fun showing you my chops and my craaaaaaazy writerly craaaaaziness, but let’s tie this up.” I hate that, as satisfying as it sometimes is, especially when a book was total crap. Some people might see the end as a bit of a cop out, but you’ll have to read it to be allowed to think that, won’t you?