So much of life in its meshes!
She called in her soul to come and see.
--Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

My Love, My Postmark, My Hands...

There is little, besides, of course, the living breathing aliveness of all my best beloveds near and far, that I love and cherish and NEED more than poetry. Its fullness, its prominence, its heartbeat in my life lo, these many years, has been painfully--and I mean nearly deathly in its lacking--lacking. Never, ever, however, never, never, never is it or can it be gone until I am gone. It is, as Anne Sexton once said, "my love, my postmark, my kitchen, my face." This, in spite of many uncertainties, endless uncertainties, is one thing I know to be true. So, without further ado, is a blessed poem from one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, featured on Writer's Almanac today.

Coming Home
by Mary Oliver

When we're driving, in the dark,
on the long road
to Provincetown, which lies empty
for miles, when we're weary,
when the buildings
and the scrub pines lose
their familiar look,
I imagine us rising from the speeding car,
I imagine us seeing everything from another place — the top
of one of the pale dunes
or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea —
and what we see is the world
that cannot cherish us
but which we cherish,
and what we see is our life
moving like that,
along the dark edges
of everything — the headlights
like lanterns
sweeping the blackness —
believing in a thousand
fragile and unprovable things,
looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping
barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongsto you and me.

Literary Jewelry and Yes!

From Lioness Den Jewelry's Etsy shoppe. Famous last works from fine works of literature. My heart beats so that I can hardly speak.

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.

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."

Upon All the Living and The Dead

{Flickr Photo}

In my opinion, the last paragraphs of James Joyce's short story The Dead from Dubliners (which was also legendary director John Huston's final hushed blessing upon the living, released after his death in 1987), is among the most beautiful string of words and sense in all of language. I had to look it up to solace my cubicle-addled soul this morning. Words like these balm the fear, and make my heart swoon to a bird's-eye view of wonder, reminding me, reminding me, reminding me...

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Ahhh. I can breathe again.

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.