2 Things Good Today
1. When I was little, I loved for my mom to read me this poem by Elinor Wylie before bed:
SEA LULLABY
The old moon is tarnished
With smoke of the flood,
The dead leaves are varnished
With color like blood,
A treacherous smiler
With teeth white as milk,
A savage beguiler
In sheathing of silk,
The sea creeps to pillage,
She leaps on her prey;
A child of the village
Was murdered today.
She came up to meet him
In a smooth golden cloak,
She choked him and beat him
To death, for a joke.
Her bright locks were tangled,
She shouted for joy,
With one hand she strangled
A strong little boy.
Now in silence she lingers
Beside him all night
To wash her long fingers
In silvery light.
2. A wonderful essay, “Landscape and Narrative,” by Barry Lopez. Lopez writes, “The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.”
Franzen v. Internet v. Love v. Iskandrian
Someone I dearly love alerted me to this op-ed which ran yesterday in the NYTimes. At the grave risk of preaching to the converted I want to say a few things about it. READ MORE >
3 Things Good Today
1. Michael Rapaport in the movie Special.
2. Isak Dinesen’s short story, “The Blank Page.” Read it here.
3. The first paragraph of Winter’s Bone, a book I was given before it made the now-infamous and stupidly misguided List, which I began reading today. At least it has a female protagonist? Nice sounds:
…Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs…
Catching Up with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, a novella of sexual passion and transaction in Bulgaria, which calls to mind the richly textured fictions of Imre Kertesz, W.G. Sebald, and Marguerite Duras. Greenwell grew up in Kentucky, studied poetry at Harvard, and taught high school in Michigan, before settling (for now) in Bulgaria, where he teaches at the American College of Sofia. Mitko is available in bookstores, and also through Small Press Distribution, Amazon, and the publisher. We corresponded last week by Facebook messaging.
MINOR: I first became acquainted with you through your poetry, but your first book, Mitko, is a work of fiction, a novella, which reads in some ways like that variety of fiction that hews close to autobiography.
GREENWELL: Until coming to Bulgaria, all of my creative work was in verse, and in some way I don’t fully understand I think that moving to a place so free from things I recognized or understood READ MORE >
The Well Read Man
Books are popular fodder for lists, and why not? There are so many books being published. Book-related lists can be useful in cutting through some of the noise in a time when more than 200,000 new books are released each year, in the United States alone.
Yesterday, Esquire released a list of 75 books every man should read. They make such lists regularly so the list, in and of itself, is not remarkable. There are some really great books included like Lolita and Call of the Wild and The Things They Carried and Winter’s Bone and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. The list offers a nice blend of contemporary and classic fiction. I was particularly pleased to see Edward P. Jones’s outstanding The Known World mentioned. I cannot say there’s a book on that list that doesn’t deserve the recognition. The list is certainly very masculine in tone, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Great books are great books and there’s something to be said for muscular prose. My list would probably look somewhat different but so would yours. Reading is personal and taste is subjective.
It is curious, though, that out of all 75 books every man should read, only one, not two or five or seventeen, but one of those books, A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, is written by a woman. I should be surprised by this imbalance but I’m not. Is anyone?
My hometown Borders got closed
They were selling everything, including the bookshelves. (This is how any number of blog posts begin.) There were people in large hooded sweatshirts on corners waving signs that said “80-90% off,” and, in the store’s windows, there were giant yellow banners saying the same thing. I went on the third to last day. Large sections of the store were roped off, like the cafe area and the music section (though that section had been irrelevant since 2005 anyways). People wandered around aimlessly, looking totally lost, which was really the only way to inhabit the store since the selection had been so thoroughly decimated it was impossible to look for anything specific.
Bookshelf Special
80% off is no joke
3 teensy reviews
Tight Times is a children’s book about a kid who wants a dog. His mom says don’t talk to her because she is busy. She wears a bra around the house. The family makes the kid eat a cereal called MR. BULK. Dad gets laid off and comes home and smokes a cigarette and makes a stiff drink. Mom tells the kid to stay outside. Kid finds a cat in a garbage can. Some nosy aging hipster woman stranger says he should just keep the cat. Parents say, fine, OK, keep the damn cat. Kid does so and names it Dog. Kid feeds Dog lima beans.
Vivisection is the controversial act of operating on a living animal. People have performed vivisection on humans, primarily as some demented form of medical “experimentation” or as torture. Anesthesia usually not applied during these surgeries. The term is also the title of a poetry chapbook by Eric Weinstein, winner of the 2010 New Michigan Press chapbook contest.
Strawberries Are Delicious
For Short Story Month, Matt Bell has been posting reviews of short stories, guest posts, and quotations from renowned writers on the craft of short story writing. Yesterday, Bell wrote an amazing post about Eduoard Levé’s When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue which appeared in Paris Review 196. You should read both the excerpt (genre indeterminate, sort of, you’ll see) and Matt’s commentary.
I am drinking gin & wrote about 7 songs as they came up on random in my itunes while they played until they ended
“Slow Down” Snoop Dogg, Da Game is to Be Sold Not to be Told
I remember when this album came out like while I was in high school or right after I got out, a bunch of my friends liked Snoop and felt curious to find out what Snoop sounded like on No Limit having moved from Death Row after all that weird shit was going on. We went into a Media Play that since has closed and not been replaced as a business near where I hung out when I was in high school and shit, we took it out and immediately listened to it in my Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot without driving anywhere, we just sat there and like listened to the beginning of the tracks and I remember feeling more and more pissed off by each, how he had changed, there was all this UNHHHHH from Master P on it, and like on this song there was this weird production singing, it felt synthetic, I think we took it out after only really previewing each track and I never listened to it again, I might have returned the CD to Media Play like was so easy to do back then, even with severely used shit, I had a good scam system going where I could buy used and return for full store credit, I’m kind of digging this track right now though does that mean I got older or that I was stupid then or that I appreciate cheesiness in a different way or
“Trapped Under Ice” Metallica, Ride the Lightning
Damn I used to listen to this album on repeat after I finally was able to get a copy of it from one of my friends, I think I tried to buy it at Turtles once with a Turtles coin I got for my birthday but my mom saw the weird death penalty cover and looked at the song titles and probably asked the guy at the counter what was up with the CD and ended up deciding I wasn’t old enough to buy it yet, though she never really censored anything else I did she was careful about music at least until i was in high school or some shit though she didn’t stop me from getting it elsewhere, I think I bought C&C Music Factory instead that day which in retrospect seems more vulgar. Ride the Lightning is still a solid metal record, you can’t really fault a dude wearing a Ride the Lightning T or putting these songs on, I think I remember this album less than Master of Puppets or And Justice For All, I even liked the Black Album but pretty much after that I didn’t listen as much, this song is making me feel further away from the computer screen or maybe it’s because I’ve been sitting still for 7 minutes so far typing without taking a break. Seems like James Hetfield would be chill to hang out with but probably the other guys would be less chill and kind of interested in doing their own things
“Horse” Brian Eno, Small Craft on a Milk Sea
I downloaded this album the other day off of google blog search and I think previewed two of the tracks and it seemed okay but I didn’t really explore it much after that, I kind of prefer Eno’s pop albums though Music for Airports kind of got me through the first half of 2008. This sounds too much like it was influenced by Venetian Snares or something. It makes me want to go eat tacos but that might be unrelated to the music because I always want to do that. I don’t like the way the main background melody is reminding me of Egypt while the bassline reminds me of standing in a small room looking at vegetables. I wonder what Brian Eno does during the day, if he likes to go outside or if he’s mainly an inside kind of guy. I wonder if he ever still calls David Bowie or if they’re not cool. I like the name of this album better than this song. I need to check my email cuz my gmail tab says two new emails since I started writing this.