Kristen Iskandrian
Kristen Iskandrian is the author of Motherest. She is the co-owner of Thank You Books, a newish independent bookstore in Birmingham, Alabama.
Splat in the Memory
From Strange-1's Flickr
This happened to my daughter, who is under 2, two weeks ago. She is still talking about it: “I-cream fell. I-cream. FELL. I. Cream. ISE. FELL.” When she wakes up, it’s one of the first things she says, and repeats, as though she’d relived the experience during her sleep. If something else falls, she mentions the ice cream fall again. It has become Something in her mind, an event, perhaps a trauma, certainly a point of reference. An image that has stayed.
It has been asked before, but it’s worthwhile to re-up: what is one image from a book that has become indelible in your mind?
And here’s the B-Side: do we put too much importance on “the memorable image,” or “memorability” in general, with regard to the books we read? Are the ones that stay with us automatically “better”? Because I’ve read plenty of books that have absorbed me fully in the reading, in the moment, but that seem to vaporize as soon as I’m done. Are such works somehow inferior? Which ones are you more likely to re-read, the ones that you remember, or the ones that you don’t? Is re-read value adequate for determining a book’s worth?
Review This
I don’t write reviews. I don’t write reviews because I don’t like writing reviews. Maybe if I got paid to write reviews I would write them and eventually enjoy myself. But in general I’d rather write fan mail or get drunk with my friends and talk about the books I love or the ones that disappointed me. The process of writing a review feels a little like having sex with someone you barely know under the glare of a bare bulb on a hot afternoon in an apartment with no AC after having scarfed a bunch of Mexican food. You know, gross! Embarrassing. READ MORE >
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July 15th, 2010 / 7:17 pm
July 15th, 2010 / 7:17 pm
Kristen Iskandrian—
This should have thrilled, but rather bored. I think it’s the use of “luminaries”? More about the shop’s history than the actual festival? And the closing quote by Pullman? I’m grumpy?
Things & Stuff
There’s a deep and abiding chasm, I think, between materialism and consumerism. It has to do with the how and the why. And also, with shame. I have a fierce attachment to my things, and I’m frequently consumed by a desire for more things. I have walked into shops and trembled. I consider myself a materialist. I am also a consumer, vulnerable to marketing tactics, but when I give in to them, I feel embarrassed. There are certain objects that mean a lot to me, but probably wouldn’t mean much to anyone else. These objects are reifications of my experience, evidence that I exist: how would I or anyone know that I went to the bazaar, figuratively speaking, if I didn’t bring back the miniature tin kettle and cup and saucer, figuratively speaking, to prove it?
I like knowing that Walter Benjamin collected so many books, but didn’t read many of them. The collecting is greater than the book.
Reading (&) the Body
Courtesy of Penelope Illustration
I’m re-reading a little Peter Brooks in column A and in column B thinking a lot about reading and the body, reading as consumption, reading while eating, reading while shitting, reading while smoking, the frenetic idleness of reading finding its counterpoint in various bodily acts/needs/processes.
From Brooks’s Reading for the Plot:
Speaking reductively, without nuance, one might say that on the one hand narrative tends toward a thematics of the desired, potentially possessable body, and on the other toward a readerly experience of consuming, a having that, in an era of triumphant capitalism, is bound to take on commercial forms, giving to the commerce in narrative understandings a specifically commercial tinge.
What do you do when you read? Or do you just read?
“…so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles, now return them.”
This, from the AP, via NPR:
A lone thief stole five paintings possibly worth more than half a billion dollars, including major works by Picasso and Matisse, in a brazen overnight heist at a Paris modern art museum, police and prosecutors said Thursday.
[…]
The director of the neighboring modern art museum Palais de Tokyo, Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, called the thief or thieves “fools.”
“You cannot do anything with these paintings. All countries in the world are aware, and no collector is stupid enough to buy a painting that, one, he can’t show to other collectors, and two, risks sending him to prison,” he said on LCI television.
“In general, you find these paintings,” he said. “These five paintings are unsellable, so thieves, sirs, you are imbeciles, now return them.”
The assumption here, of course, is that the thieves would want to sell the work. Maybe they just wanted the paintings for their living room? Maybe they just wanted to steal them, to see if they could? Such an act of daring, commodified. Shame.
What’s your fantasy heist?
An Open, Earnest Letter to People Who Like Gruesomeness in Books & Film
This is your brain on fear. As it turns out, Hippocampus isn't fat camp for Latin nerds.
Dear People,
I’m the pain in the ass who makes deciding on a movie en masse impossible. But is it violent? How violent is it, if it is? Do animals get murdered? Do children get murdered? Eventually we’ll decide on a bonehead comedy or a beautifully shot Icelandic film about rafts in the gloaming.