Lessing and more
12:29 am | Blog, Video | Places, Reading | 0
The weather in Houston has been exceptionally agreeable of late. It took the Labor Day clue and is now transitioning into fall. I know it’s a cruel joke because Texas summers last well into October, sometimes November and December and January. Texas can’t fool me, but it can get my hopes up.
It is fall in Europe though, and this will be the first time I’ve been to Europe this time of year. Previous trips have always been April-May-July. This will be the first time I’ve gone to Germany. I am super excited about that, although most of what I know about Berlin comes from books like Voluptous Panic, which probably ain’t realistic these days. I am excited to be greeted by my husband in the airport and to spend the next three weeks showing him all the places I visited when I was in school.
I keep thinking it’s been a long time since my last trip to Europe but it was only two years ago. It has been almost a decade since I was last in Paris or London, not counting the airports. I turned 20 in London during a time when I was poorer than I’ve ever been in my life and celebrated with half-price tickets to see “The Graduate” starring a naked, husky-voiced, hot Kathleen Turner.
I am re-learning my French accent with handy pod-classes. I am packing light, bringing a small bag, not nearly enough space for three weeks of travel. I’ve been looking for the perfect book, one book, that will satisfy me over during the trip. In May of 2007 I was staying at a tiny deserted resort in El Nido, Philippines, when I picked up a book called Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me A Writer in the resort’s meager hodge-podge library
I think travel guides and writing guides are kinda hokey, but Incognito Street was a pleasant surprise. The book was far better than it’s genre implied, and I was consumed with author Barbara Sjoholm’s burgeoning feminism and her growing identity as a writer. By the end of the trip I had amassed a pretty long, scribbled list of the numerous references she makes throughout the book to novels, movies, writers, feminists and other influences.
One of the books that moved her most was “The Golden Notebook.” So several months later, while plumbing the shelves at the largest used English-language bookstore in Korea, I was pleased to find a copy of Doris Lessing’s most famous work. I recognized the name immediately from the list I’d made before, and immediately bought the copy, in spite of the fact that it was pretty worn.
I haven’t read it yet but it seems like the perfect book to take on this trip, taking into account current events and travel themes. Plus it’s nice and thick.
Only a few months after my purchase, Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This movie is older than dirt but I’m posting it anyway because of her adorably cranky acceptance speech.
I’m leaving my computer at home and won’t be online much while I’m away. Tomorrow morning before boarding the plane I’m gonna do a little dance to keep Ike away from Houston. Trip pictures and anecdotes will be posted sometime after the 30th. Later, gators.
Vocabulary list
So. I just finished reading Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and here is the list of words, terms and names of interest, which I scribbled on a piece of Crown Plaza Hotel notepad-come-bookmark throughout my reading of the book:
- intaglio
- abattoir
- charnel
- fricatives
- gleet
- mien
- stoat
- pitch
- ersatz
- gibbets
- Karen Greenlee*
- Diego Rivera
*To read a truly disturbing interview with Greenlee, one of the most infamous necrophiliacs of all time, click here. I am NOT kidding about the disturbing part.
Failed bands of Oklahoma
12:01 am | Internerd, Shorts | Reading, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? | 2
Via someone (I can’t remember who, maybe Megan?) comes a truly strange link: Failed Bands of Oklahoma, striving “to garner press coverage for failed bands worldwide.”
Weekend reading
11:55 am | Internerd, Shorts | Reading | 0
Weekend reading assignment: Flying Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll by Patti Smith.
Sandy ego
2:31 am | Blog | Friends, Places, Reading | 5
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 | Internerd, Shorts | Reading | 0
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 | Internerd, Shorts | Reading, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? | 0
This is one crazy story.
Couplings
12:19 am | Internerd | Reading | 0
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 | Internerd | Reading | 0
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 | Internerd | Reading | 0
Your guide to 2008. Thank me later.