Thx Thx Thx

I am going to buy this book, Thx Thx Thx: Thank Goodness for Everything. I am going to give it to everyone I love! For instant gratification, there's also the blog.

Here are a few of my favorites:

 

Thank you, Leah!

The Word Made Flesh

This book looks amazing and comes out October 12, 2010. I may have to finally get a tattoo. After all, says the Buddha, "Nothing is Permanent.

Charles Bukowski

ee cummings

{bluebird in my heart tattoo :: not even the rain tattoo}

Who Knows What Treasures Lie Beneath?

Be still, my heart. Though the books are better (heh-heh), these Penguin Classic Postcards are a dream come true, and all in one little box! Thank you Cup of Jo and Design Crush! My Friday is now complete.

More Than Books

I love this little lady at (Inside a Black Apple) , especially this illustration. What a talent.

I'm a Fan {Eating is an Art, Like Everything Else (I Do It Exceptionally Well)}

I read a lot. I read good books. Good writing. Which means I'm not often surprised by a book, not all that much anyway. So, I am happy to report, that while my news is late, Julie & Julia by Julie Powell surprised me endlessly, joyfully, sweetly, delightedly, and completely. Though I heard all the buzz when the book came out, I failed to get to it until last night. Ms. Powell is as much a joy to read as Ruth Reichl and David Sedaris, two writers whose works and lives are feasts of humor and hunger all by themselves. But put the two together? Out of this world. Julie & Julia will soon be a movie. Check out the video below:




Julie Powell still blogs (the book was born out of her "Julie/Julia Project, " blogging about conquering all 500-and-some-odd recipes in the wonderful Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking), and she has a new book forthcoming, titled Cleave. I am late to the Julie party, but I am most certainly a boisterous guest. Who won't leave). Go. Get. It. Now. xoxo Ama

Heavy Boots Wow!

I often take awhile to pick up a well-hyped book, especially by a.) a guy and b.) someone younger than me. (Because I have a huge ego and googoleplex issues). However, this is the most beautiful and beloved and unforgettable book I've read since I picked up Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body when I was in high school. Oh, the heavy boots. Soveryperfect.

I read the first chapter of A Brief History of Time when Dad was still alive,
and I got increadibly heavy boots about how relatively insignificant life is,
and how compared to the universe and compared to time, it didn't even matter if
I existed at all. When Dad was tucking me in that night and we were
talking about the book, I asked if he could think of a solution to that
problem. "Which problem?" "The problem of how relatively
insignificant we are." He said, "Well, what would happen if a plane
dropped you in the middle of the Sahara Desert and you picked up a single grain
of sand with tweezers and moved it one millimeter?" I said, "I'd probably
die of dehydration." He said, "I just mean right then, when you moved that
single grain of sand. What would that mean?" I said, "I dunno,
what?" He said, "Think about it." I thought about it. "I guess
I would have moved one grain of sand." "Which would mean?" "Which
would mean I moved a grain of sand?" "Which would mean you changed the
Sahara." "So?" "So? So the Sahara is a vast desert. And
it has existed for millions of years. And you changed it!" "That's
true!" I said, sitting up. "I changed the Sahara!" "Which
means?" he said. "What? Tell me." "Well I'm not talking
about painting the Mona Lisa or curing cancer. I'm just talking
about moving that one grain of sand one millimeter." "Yeah?" "If you
hadn't done it, human history would have been one way..." "Uh-huh?"
"But you did do it, so...?" I stood on the bed, pointing one of my fingers
at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!"
"That's right." "I changed the universe!" "You did." "I'm
God!" "You're an atheist." "I don't exist!" I feel back onto
the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together.

Speaking of Faith

Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippet. Completely brilliant. My friend Matt Kane turned me on to this program. Elevate yourself. Remember your purity and truth. This week's program is a conversation with physician and storyteller Rachel Naomi Nemen. Her books include Kitchen Table Wisdom and Lessons from My Grandfather. This is what she had to say about STORY, a subject that's very special to me:

• Stories are a container for wisdom.


• They touch something human and unchangeable in us.


• Stories are what hold a culture together


• The world is made of stories, not of facts.


• Facts are only the bones of stories.


• Our wholeness is never lost; only forgotten.


• Integrity simply means "what is true."
  
  Check it out.

Book Lust

Just one, for today. Elizabeth McCracken, the incredibly brilliant and soulful and cantankerous author of The Giant's House and Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry, has a new memoir out, titled An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, chronicling the conception and untimely in utero death of her first son, Pudding. I want to read it up.

{Read More Books}

Everyone should. Not enough reading goes on 'round here. And by here, I mean, the general populace. But this isn't an order, or a judgment, just a suggestion. Like therapy, ice cream, laughing, and friends, you always have room for more books in your life. Plus, Polyvore, where I made this little bunch o' books, is so fun...like collage online. I love it and have just gotten into playing with it, thanks to Creature Comforts. 'Kay, for the list o' books...it's just random. Some are my favorites of all time, some are favorite recent reads, and one is one that I want to read. Plus, we've got some art and clothes in there, too.

1.0
This is from designer Jean Jullien's "Don't Protest (Please)" poster series.
2.0
I don't care how popular this book is, nor do I care that someone out there actually threw Alice Sebold into the classification of "factory" writers, this, The Lovely Bones, is a complete and utterly beautiful, tender classic for all ages, and should be popular. Even this writer's name, though, in day-to-day conversation, will most likely not be instantly recognized, like say, somebody on television. Just sayin'.
3.0
Oh, this fabulous t-shirt can be found on Shana Logic, a place that specializes in cute.
4.0
David Sedaris is my hero. He spent his thirties on drugs and performance art. Was a voracious smoker and drinker for many years, and doesn't drive a car. There are so many reasons to love this brilliant man, including his latest collection of brilliant personal essays, gone a little more tender and dark than his earlier works of staggering genius, titled When You are Engulfed in Flames.
5.0
Carson McCullers is one of my favorite all-time writers and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favorite all-time novels. When you never forget the story, when the characters stay with you for years, when what those characters saw and felt become part of what you see and feel from then on out, you know you've read something straight from the heart of the divine. So tender. So rich. So vast and kind and knowing and sad. An absolute masterwork.
6.0
Well, there are many reasons to read this book. It's a must-read, isn't it? If only to find out why, as Eef Barzalay of Clem Snide sings in the brilliant "The End of Love," pop gem, "the first book every killer reads is Catcher in the Rye," or as my dad penned in a copy to my brother, to take, "a step into the world and apart from it." Go on. You know you want to.
7.0
Another classic. Much myth surrounds Sylvia Plath. Because of that whole head in the oven thing that ended her life. But, for me, it's the work, not the myth, that keeps me entranced, and The Bell Jar is an incredible testament to many things, including the amazing corset of conformity breaking the breath of every artist alive in the 1950s, as well as the incredible paths Plath blazed for the serious women writers to follow her. A brilliant, fiery poet, Plath's passion carries this fine work of biographical fiction along like a comet or something. Also, it's not her only work of fiction.
8.0
Cormac McCarthy is just terrifying in every way. His language, his force, his imagination, and his power. Awe. The Road, amazingly enough was an Oprah favorite, and this post-apocolypse rendered so masterfully by McCarthy is terrifyingly realistic, and stark, and insanely fucking brilliant.
9.0
Haven't read this yet, but it's by Geraldine Brooks and won the Pulitzer Prize. It's probably pretty good. Not as good as Danielle Steele, but up there, you know? According to Dave at Powells.com (p.s. shop online at Powell's or other independent bookstores online instead of Amazon...trust me), this is what March: A Novel is all about: In her follow-up to Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks has taken historical fiction to another dimension altogether. Using America's Civil War as her frame, she plants a famous (but deeply mysterious) literary figure at its center: Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's classic, Little Women. The result is a wholly original novel, a rich re-imagining of the nation's political and literary foundations, and arguably Brooks's finest work to date(Dave, Powells.com).
10.0
This was made into a fine film by director Sofia Coppola. But before The Virgin Suicides became a film, it was an even sweeter, softer, impossibly aching novel by the Greek Jeffrey Eugenides. One of my favorite books ever, ever, ever.
11.0
I picked this book up at the library when I was in high school, thinking it was a love story about geeky people, not the people who eat chicken heads, which is what this story's talking about when it talks about geeks. It's all about a family of self-made circus freaks. I had the incredible pleasure of seeing this book's adaptation performed life in Atlanta...a performance as equally powerful and unforgettable as the book, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, is itself.
12.0
Again, yeah, sure, Atonement was an amazing movie. But the book's way, way better, because you get to see inside the mind of one of the best-written characters in modern history, the narrator, the little girl, the storyteller, the liar, the innocent who ruins lives. You totally don't get that in the movie. I have an incredible affection for this character, and Ian McEwan is a genius writer.
13.0
The third in a series of hilarious, thouching meditations on author Anne Lamott's wayward paths into faith and love, this is another book I want to read...have read her previous two, Traveling Mercies: Thoughts on Faith; Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, as well as her brilliant Bird by Bird writing companion plus all her novels (I want her to be my best friend). It's called Grace (Eventually), in it she writes, "I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scotch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark."

fin.

{The Harumph. Outmoded? Discuss.}

{The book discussed below is one I'd certainly love to read. While reviewing the review, the mention of the harumph was just too funny not to share. I immediately thought of Disapproving Rabbits, and tried myself to harumph, to little success.}

From Robert Fulford's book review of The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head by Raymond Tallis published on National Post:

"Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes 'the most sign-packed surface in the universe.' Consider the way a human face speaks with silent eloquence. In the view of Raymond Tallis, an eminent British doctor and a talented writer, the face of a man or woman constitutes 'the most sign-packed surface in the universe.'

"In his new book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey Around Your Head (Yale University Press), Tallis sets out to make his readers into 'astonished tourists of the piece of the world that is closest to them, so they never again take for granted the head that looks at them from the mirror.' He begins his examination with the face.

He also examines willed behaviour, providing detailed data on kissing and possibly the first analysis ever of harrumphing. Oxford defines a harrumph as an ostentatious clearing of the throat, expressing disapproval. Tallis says it's close to a suppressed bark, typically triggered by a newspaper item about a fashion or trend the harrumpher deplores. "Harrumphs are particularly associated with the idea of a member of the Establishment, whose overweight body provides the perfect instrument for manufacturing it," complete with jowls that shake while the sound emerges.

Few harrumphers practise this favourite tic in private. Like laughing, it's not often a solitary indulgence. (Tallis says we laugh 30 times more frequently when we are with others than when we are alone.) The harrumph probably deserves more space than Tallis gives it. Is it dying out? Does it express social attitudes only of the old and cranky? I have heard people fail miserably when trying to produce a satisfactory harrumph. All they can manage is a pathetic snort. Harrumphing is no simple matter. There is a rumour they still teach it in the better private schools."

{What of the Homes Awash in a Silver Light}

(Photo By ExpatFlaneur Found on Flickr)

One of my most beloved poems of all time appeared on http://www.writersalmanac.org/ today.

The Continuous Life
by Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.

"The Continuous Life" by Mark Strand from New Selected Poems. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

Beatrix Potter

Miss Moppet ties up her head in a duster, and sits before the fire.

Happy Birthday to Beatrix Potter. The Story of Miss Moppet is definitely my favorite. She once said, "Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest."

I Am Not Done With My Changes

The Layers By Stanley Kunitz (Courtesy of Writers Almanac)

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.

When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."

Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

The Ecstacy, The Remorse, and The Sorrow

Today is Hemingway's Birthday.
Hemingway said, "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."

Hunter S. Thompson

His beat, he once said was "the death of the American dream." --Washington Post

No wonder he shot himself in the head. Today would have been the great gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson's 69th birthday. I first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when I was about 13 or 14 years old. If you know me, this isn't surprising, given my father's occupation, loves, and habits. Thompson's writing, his truth, his documentation. Nothing like it. Nothing like it at all. But for all his love and experimentation and reverence for states altered, the power of writing, he said, beats all. "I haven't found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as a sitting at a desk writing, trying to imagine a story no matter how bizarre it is, [or] going out and getting into the weirdness of reality and doing a little time on the Proud Highway," he once said. Long live this fire, this fervor, this razor's edge. Most of today's journalists can only dream of writing the truth you lived. Happy birthday, Hunter. I hope you're in a better place.

Tell People What They Do Not Want to Hear

Excerpted from Writer'sAlmanac.org

It's the birthday of the man who wrote Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), George Orwell, born Eric Blair in a small village in Bengal, India (1903). He spent a few years living in poverty in London and Paris, working as a dishwasher and hanging around with hobos and prostitutes, and he wrote his first book about the experience, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Worried about what his parents would think of the book, he published it under the pseudonym George Orwell, the name he wrote under for the rest of his life.

He spent the last years of his life writing 1984 (1949), about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known only as Big Brother. He knew he didn't have much time left to write the book, so he wrote constantly, even when his doctors forbade him to work. They took away his typewriter, and when he switched to a ballpoint pen, they put his arm in plaster.

When he finished it, he told his publisher that 1984 was too dark a novel to make much money, but it became an immediate best seller. He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into 62 languages and has sold more than 10 million copies. With all of his work still in print in so many different languages, critics have estimated that every year 1 million people read George Orwell for the first time.

Orwell said, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

And he said, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

Lo. Li. Ta.

Big Ups to Humbert Humbert
Today is Vladimr Nabokov's birthday. His opening lines of Lolita are among my favorite novel-openers. It's hard for me to describe the passion I have for this story, but maybe it's all right here. From a my perspective, the pull is that of that just discovered power of youth and beauty you have no idea what do with until it's almost (almost) too late.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing 4-foot-10 in one sock; she was Dolly at school; she was Doris on the dotted line; but in my arms, she was always Lolita.

Big Ups to Sonnets
It's also supposed to be the believed date of William Shakespeare's birth. Below is Writer's Almanac's poem of the day.

Poem: "Sonnet 104" by William Shakespeare. Public domain.
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April pérfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred,
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.

And in other news, do you own a pair of New Balance?
Are you white? Read more about your kind here at Stuff White People Like.

And my favorite song these days. Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" from The Future, 1992 album.

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."

That's how the light gets in. And it's Spring.