Reading Archives
Weekend reading
11:55 am | 0 | Internerd, Shorts | Reading
Weekend reading assignment: Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll by Patti Smith.
Sandy ego
2:31 am | 5 | Blog | Friends, Reading
First, you should go to Eyeshot and read this wonderful short story by my friend, Megan Tria Andrews.
I haven’t seen Megan in, what, six years, but she lives in San Diego and that is where I will be for the next five days. I hope I can see her. I have many friends and family in California but most of them are far away from San Diego.
I am going to San Diego to attend Tiki Oasis. I am going because I have thousands of frequent flier miles to use and friends to see and also I need to find some way to burn up the four weeks between right now and my reunion with my husband in Germany.
I’ve never been to San Diego, or that far in south in California before. I am planning to eat at taco trucks for every meal. The weather there is supposed to be 75 degrees every day. That astounds and confuses me. It’s been so hot in Houston for so long that I have no idea what 75 degrees feels like. I have no idea what to pack (and I’m supposed to be leaving in seven hours. I should be sleeping). Seventy-five degrees sounds awfully cold to me. Seventy-five degrees sounds like winter!
Eternal Sunshine
11:17 pm | 0 | Internerd | Reading
Nick at Square America (who has a new book of snapshots out) posts excerpts from a series of vintage photos albums in which all evidence of former loves has been imperfectly, and often violently, erased.
Crazy dog lady might be crazy Mormon kidnapper
7:03 pm | 0 | Internerd | Reading, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
This is one crazy story.
Couplings
12:19 am | 0 | Internerd | Reading
oo la la how they want me to be blacker and blacker, even Georges, his pipe on the bed stand and his hands all over my naked butt and I just have to make my cheeks tremble there and he will cry out in French as wildly as Genevieve and she will answer from across the room in Monkey, but I keep them both quiet tonight, I am myself quiet inside and I cannot stop my mind, for tonight I danced as I always dance — some Charleston some Black Bottom, some Mess Around and Tack Annie and Shim Sham Break and some things I tell myself are Africa but are St. Louis, for all that, are me just knocking my knees and camel-walking and vibrating my butt and flailing my arms and legs — I danced as always but at the same time I was somewhere up in the balcony with these ravenous French watching me dance, which is something I almost never do, but just because I dance in a trance most of the time don’t mean the dance has anything to do with what I am and what I am driven to want, which is something I got from St. Louis, as well: my hair is conked flat and lacquered, which the French don’t understand the meaning of, and at the end I cross my eyes at them and I flap my arms like a backyard chicken, and they don’t understand that either, but after it’s all over and the night is gone and the sun comes up in Paris, each morning I get into my hotel bathtub and I soak in hot water and goat’s milk and lemon and honey and Eau de Javel that they scour their sinks with and I soak and I soak till my pussy’s on fire just so I can be white
— Josephine Baker, as imagined in Robert Olen Butler’s forthcoming book Intercourse
Yellow is the color of my true love’s hair
1:41 am | 0 | Internerd | Reading
Discovering some interesting things about my genetics:
Blondes to “die out” in 200 years, (although Snopes seems to think this one’s a fake).
All blue-eyed humans share a single common ancestor.
It’s a little late, but…
12:25 am | 0 | Internerd | Reading
Your guide to 2008. Thank me later.
The Raven, Alma and Hemingway-esque
10:04 pm | 1 | Video | Reading, Watching
The Raven (1963) has pretty fantastic credentials. It’s four main stars are Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and a very young Jack Nicholson, and it was directed by Sixties B-movie deity Roger Corman. Only loosly based on the Poe poem (like, only the first and last lines), the movie fails to live up to it’s potential, though it might make an entertaining Saturday-afternoon special for that five-year-old in your life with an extreme appreciation for Hollywood horror royalty and a really long attention span.
After reading Jessa at Bookslut and Maud Newton’s raves about Junot Diaz I finally had the chance to read one of his short stories. You can too. It’s pretty good.
Up until a few days ago the only thing I knew about George Plimpton was that he gained his fame by being an active participant in his own stories. I had a minor-league crush on him after watching “When We Were Kings” (those blue eyes and that proper demeanor slayed me, especially in contrast to the gruff Norman Mailer), but this infamous story by Gay Talese about Plimpton and his friends at The Paris Review is pretty inspiring, in that I should have been born four decades ago kinda way.
Happy New Year!
6:22 pm | 1 | Photo Album | Reading
Happy New Year!, originally uploaded by ~BostonBill~
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thanksgiving Prayer
Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.
— William S. Burroughs
Listen to him reading it live and ponder what you are thankful for this year.