Spread

Brush with greatness.

I had to take a screenshot of UFR today. Because there's Cheryl Strayed – Dear Sugar – and then right below her, check out the first story under "Latest Fiction." That juxtaposition will never happen again. (Oh, and note that JDL in the nonfiction column is my student, my thesis advisee, though he wrote the piece in another class, so I can't take any credit for how good it is.)

I wrote this story a long time ago. So long ago, that it almost seems retro now, with its references to cordless phones and perfect bound literary journals. Though not retro enough to be the cool kind of retro. Like, it's hard to get nostalgic for 2006.

Well, I can get nostalgic for personal reasons: Noni reading the Little House series and peanut night with cards and my cats still kittens. But it takes longer than a matter of years for a story to feel like it represents another time.

On lies, secrets, and silence.

On the Passages Facebook page, lots of our "friends" are posting about the passing of poet Adrienne Rich. (This news made me sad too. I saw her read in Detroit once, and if anybody could have gotten me into poetry, it was her. She definitely got me into trying to tell the truth on the page.) But Facebook is stupid. Because so many of the posts refer to her poem "Diving into the Wreck," the headline thingie says, "So-and-so and 7 other friends posted about Scuba Diving." Just not true.

Submitted.

Spent a lot of my spring break reading good stuff – books I'd been waiting for time to get to, and books so I can keep up with my daughter's tastes. But today marked the return to real life, to reading stuff-in-progress, junk needing to be judged yes or no, crap to be marked up, shit to be evaluated. I've come to hate having to simultaneously read and think. I for sure hate my couch.

Books on CD in the car are the best cure for constant editing while reading, because without the page in front of me, there's no way I can even try to worry about whether dialogue is formatted correctly, and even if there's a pen in my hand, the unnecessary adverb just flies by before I can grab it. If I'm lucky, I can forget the reader is even talking in paragraphs or without consciously noting the point of view. But anything on paper is tough. Students always say that reading critically takes away all the fun. I promise them it won't, every time they complain that learning to read like a writer will ruin their ability to sink into stories for pleasure, and I think doing it over the course of a semester they'll be safe. But long term, man, they may want to watch out.

Actually, some stew sounds all right.

Wanted to check out Dinty Moore's new book. Can't think of another search term that amazon.com responds to with "in Books" or "in Groceries"?

Conversation?

Fun tweets from someone who thinks I'm someone I'm not.

@Chobsky the author of perks Of Being a Wall flower !

@chbosky i feel 12x smarter every time i finish a conversation with you plz write more i can read your novels over and over again =]

@Chbosky i think u are my favorite person 2talk 2 bkuz ur so freaking intriguing &crazy intellectual =]

@chbosky ur so amazing &blow my mind when i read ur brilliance how bout u mak me look a lil more like a mentally retarded chimpanzee eh? Ha

Anybody clicking on my Twitter link and coming to Spread to learn more about a successful (male) YA author is going to be sadly disappointed. All this chit-chat about going to the dentist and grading papers. Though I wonder: would I want to make anybody reading my stuff feel like a mentally retarded chimpanzee? Is that a goal of some writers?

Might as well search “words.”

How frustrating is it that the story by Lydia Davis I want to find online is called "Story"? Google has no idea I actually *am* being specific.

No see.

The worst thing about being sick for a week: not enjoying my morning coffee.

But I'm finally on the mend and will start paying attention to the world again any minute, I'm sure. Until then, here's a story from the latest PANK.

So it goes.

If I was the kind of person who had some stupid quote in the signature line of my email, it might be this, from Kurt Vonnegut: "The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is." I'm thinking particularly, of course, about my daughter. I suppose my own mom couldn't have known what about my teenage years was indicative of my character and what I just needed to grow out of. Or what was an important moment and what was hormones. Or how to do anything about any of it. Poor her, but I think she survived me. Me, I'm always less sure about, but I'm trying.

I thought I heard somebody calling in the dark.

I found a sticky note with singer/songwriter Josh Ritter's address (a P.O. Box in Moscow, Idaho) in a used book I bought. I got excited that I had been given secret info. Thought about sending him a postcard. (Okay, to be honest, I got excited mostly at first because I thought I had Mandy Moore's address, because I mix up Josh Ritter and Ryan Adams sometimes.) But in the course of my fact-checking, I discovered Ritter posted the address on his website, for all the world to use. So if you want to write him a letter, it turns out you don't need me at all.

Home, Jeeves.

Went to lunch in Big Bay yesterday, riding in the back seat of a rental car. There were two brothers in the front, and they had catching up to do, so I read a book. Maybe that sounds rude, but it was also the most wonderful thing (and I think they were fine). I haven't gotten to read a book in a car for a million years, though I feel like this is how I spent most of my childhood. Nowadays, I'm always driving. Maybe somebody else drives once in a while, but in those cases, I can't just ignore them and sink into a book. I always have a book on CD going in the car, so I still get stories, but I also have to be doing the job of paying attention to the road. To have two people entertaining each other in the front seat, like parents, so I could lose all track of where we were and just read was a rare, rare treat. I almost wished I was reading Stephen King or V. C. Andrews, just to complete the flashback.

It also made me a little more understanding of Little Sweet, how she reads when we're in the car, even when we're listening to a novel on CD. (Sometimes, she'll have the exact same book on her Kindle that we're listening to, and she'll read ahead, so that by the time we get where we're going, she's chapters beyond what I've heard.) I guess I can see that she's probably not trying to ignore me so much as she's just reading.

Heading to Esky later today for Georgia's dance recital. So excited, but now I'm almost wishing I could take a cab there, so I could zone out with a book in the back.

Not a guest star on Will and Grace: Mariah Carey.

On the drive to the dentist this morning, I had this weird fantasy that they'd put me with the Fox-News-brainwashed hygienist, and that she'd make some outlandish homophobic or hateful comment, and that I'd get one of the dentist bosses in there and rat her out and threaten to find a new practice and get her in trouble. What a dumb thing to daydream about – being angry at some stranger. Though, I guess it's not the worst to practice being mad at someone I don't even know, for a made-up reason, if maybe someday down the road I can learn to express actual anger out loud. Working on it. And besides, they gave me my usual sweetheart lady, whose daughters go to my school. We watched Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Talked weather and Good Books. Tres civil.

Speaking of dentists, I finally got around to reading James Frey's A Million Little Pieces last night. Well, the first 80 pages or so – which contained every scene I'd ever heard referenced in any review (waking up on the plane, having torturous dental surgery without any anesthesia), so I'm assuming most people stopped reading it about where I did. I mostly just found the writing boring in a hostile way. Like, I was tired of trying to understand why he'd capitalize Kitchen and Orderly. And don't even get me started on the paragraph indenting.

You exist?

When Little Sweet and I listened to The Alchemist on CD, I kept wondering – how has J. K. Rowling not sued this author (Michael Scott, btw, though not that one) for using her character Nicholas Flamel. J.K can be litigious, even about fan fiction, and yet Flamel's one of the main characters of this series. So we finally wikipedia'd the guy, who turns out to be an actual fourteenth-century alchemist.

This happens all the time, the other way, at least, where I think something invented is real. A student will write a story about a famous musician – who they made up – and I'll try to look him up on iTunes. Or Nora will joke she wants a sonic screwdriver for her birthday, and I'll try to find one on Amazon. But I wonder how much real stuff I'm dismissing as fiction: Do clans of warrior cats really live in the woods? Are there secret schools for young magicians hidden in fog around the world? Did Etgar Keret's girlfriend really superglue herself to the ceiling?

And of course, now that I know Flamel is a historical character (as much as I can know that, I guess, given one quick skim on a page on the internet), I have to start wondering about the other parts of his story: how he turned lead into gold with his philosopher's stone, how he and his wife invented an immortality elixir. No wonder he's such a popular character in fiction. He seems about as real as Doctor Who.

Blush and bashful.

Well that was embarrassing. If you read the comments, you know the editor I mentioned in my last post read my blog, which is not at all what I meant to happen. The good news is that I wrote him and apologized, and he was completely gracious and kind about the whole debacle. He's a nice guy.

At first, I thought it was Twitter that ratted me out, but it was a simple Google Alert to the name of his journal. Doh. And me contending to be all careful and whatnot with my links and my failure to name people. The silly thing is that I should have known. I wouldn't even have heard of my doppelganger except for a Google Alert I have on my own name. That's what lead me to her in the first place (that, and a few people at work telling me how cool it was I wrote for the Chronicle).

Mostly, I get alerts on some third woman with my name plus a hyphenated other name, a business professor who writes articles about management (whatever that is). But sometimes it's the real me that Google alerts me about. This is my favorite, wherein my story became a failed lesson plan.

The editor above (who knows where my blog is now, but who I won't name anyway, just so he is not Google-alerted to this post, even though he could find it anyway), actually said that part of the reason he turned down my story was that it was too soon to publish another piece by the me who I am not. Which made me feel good, though I think the other reason is that it's 100 words too fat, but I'll keep working on it.

Anyway, to distract you from my faux pas, I will now make you look at pictures of the shoes I bought in Denver. I only wish I had somewhere to wear them.

 
 
 

My literary doppelganger.

I follow a woman with my very name on Twitter. She writes for the Chronicle of Higher Ed, plus publishes fiction and nonfiction, and anybody who googles me probably finds her and thinks I'm way cooler than I actually am. She's like who I could have been in a better, more productive life.

A couple months ago, she tweets that she wants to submit some flash fiction, and asks her followers about good markets. She says she's already submitted the The Collagist, but wants to know where else. So of course, what do I do but straightaway send a short-short story to The Collagist. I don't know why.

And I got a rejection last night. The editor was all "it's good to see new work from you" and "it's been great getting to know your work this year," neither of which are actually directed at me but at the other woman with my name who he thinks I am.

(You can find her stories online in the December 2009 issue of The Collagist. I'd link to them, but I don't want to be traced back here. I'm all about the short stuff, but hers are like 100 words, and pretty abstract. I liked my story better, but clearly, what do I know.)

I'm fine with the rejection (that's common enough), but I feel a little bad that I may have slurried this woman's good name by making them think she wrote my story. All apologies, cooler me. Really didn't mean to drag you down.

Not that one.

A few years ago, I read this marvelous story called "Trompe L'Oiel" in Hayden's Ferry. Broke my heart and I never really forgot it. Then a few months ago, I was in Good Will and found a novel by the author and snatched it up, excited. It was about the Unabomber, kind of, or what the story of the daughter and step-son of the Unabomber might be, if they were in love and the daughter was a stripper. It might not have been the kind of thing I picked up without recognizing the author's name, but I read it, and it was a beautiful novel, so I l just looked her up to see what else she had written.

Turns out I had it all wrong. Liza Weiland, author of Bombshell, is not the same person and Liza Kleinman, author of the short story. Oh.

But I love when I'm lucky like that. When I'm completely off base but something good comes of it anyway. I wish I could make that kind of thing happen more often, but I suppose that's not possible. You have to be genuinely wrong in order to be sincerely surprised.

Kids these days.

Little Sweet has more than 100 karma points on her Warriors website, so she's no longer an apprentice. It's all based on her contributions to the discussion boards dedicated to her favorite cat-clan series of books. Anyway, she was annoyed by the following post in the off-topic area: "blogging moms bug me." The person asked, "Who has a mom who has a blog and never seems to do anything other than blog? Tell me, is it annoying?" LS found this offensive, I guess, since she responded with this: ":mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:"

You're wondering who puts that stuff online that you just don't understand, and I'm telling you the answer is somebody's eleven year old. Thank goodness I have one of my own to at least try to explain it to me.

That’s me.

N and I were messing with iGoogle. She has a page with fish you can feed and whatnot. The best thing is that we discovered we can play remote Scrabble, without waiting for her to turn 14 and get a Facebook account. But, dumbly, while I was waiting for her to make a play, I changed my profile, adding a picture of an Andy Warhol cat and changing my name and etc. I forgot how everything is connected, because later that day, I sent an email, via gmail, to an editor who's publishing one of my pieces and I realized only later that I sent it from "Mama Chbosky." Oh lord. She wrote back without making a fuss over it, but still, I feel silly.

Read something.

Check out the latest nonfiction at Literary Mama.

Hair, health, body, money, life.

I haven't bought a women's magazine for a long time, but Britney looking all healthy and pretty in white in this month's Glamour sucked me in. Then I remembered why they are so boring. There was honest-to-god an article called Seven Ways to Wear a T-Shirt. (Just looked it up for accuracy's sake: "7 Ways to Work that Tee!") There's with jeans, with pants, with a long skirt, with a short skirt, under a jacket. I guess there were two more (with sweatpants? under a flannel?), but I promise they weren't any more revolutionary.

Exactly.

There's a cartoon in the latest New Yorker. One person says to the other one, "I want to be a better person, but then what – a much better person?"

A little reading.

Check out this story about Andy Gibb on Night Train. If you happen to be a regular reader and have a brother named Bill, yes that's him in the story.

The things I say.

How fun is this – a site that not only makes you a word cloud, but makes it pretty. Some of my stories:

One finch’s trash.

Found a copy of On the Origin of Species on the for-sale table at the library this morning. What are they making room for by getting rid of this? Better be good. I took it home, like a puppy who would've gotten the gas chamber if I hadn't. (Plus the next in the Lemony Snicket series. I'm so in love with these books, and can't wait for my niece to learn to read so I can give her all 13 volumes.) OtOoS (this is a 1963 edition) has all these pretty woodcut illustrations. If I ever decide to get a tattoo (do I need one in time for Rubapalooza?), I'll look for it in this book first.

Going up.

Suddenly being a magazine subscriber twice over is a little overwhelming. (My dad gave me a subscription to National Geographic for Christmas, and I already told you about how I ended up with the New Yorker.) There's so much to know, and if it weren't all printed on paper inside my house, I wouldn't feel bad about not knowing it. Chimp tools, volcanoes, ballet, Iceland, golf accessories manufactured in China as reported by Jonathan Franzen. I just can't get to it all. I'm starting to forgive myself for flipping forward if the first page of an article doesn't really and truly capture me. Though sometimes it does: this last issue, a whole expose on elevators had me fascinated. Did you know that in elevators made in the last fifteen years or so, the Door Close button doesn't actually do anything but is merely there to give passengers the illusion of control? And new systems, I guess, have you input your destination floor in the lobby and point you toward the appropriate elevator car, so when you get in there are no buttons at all, which is more efficient but freaks some people out.

The New Yorker's review of The Hills, though, was really annoying. The writer ended it by admitting she didn't know why people watched this show. Which is fine for a grown-up woman to say in conversation, but why not assign the article to someone who is more willing to throw around some ideas? My devotion to this show is just beginning (I'm not even caught up with the old episodes yet), but I can already say that there's something incredibly – and I suspect inadvertently – brilliant about it.

Which I'll have to come back to. I'm caught up on my grading till tomorrow, when I'll get more exams and papers, so I'm heading out for a walk, maybe to work in my yard some.

Physical description.

I'm reading this novel, a manuscript for my other job, and I can't help but picture the lead woman as Markie Post, Night Court era. (Not that "Markie Post when" probably needs clarifying. I mean, what does "Markie Post, circa 2002" look like?) Not that there's really any reason to imagine this woman this way. The writer never describes her as petite or having a feathered mullet or wearing skirted suits with blouses that tie in bows at the neck. I don't even think much at all of the novel takes place in the 80s.

Who knows why these things happen. I don't regularly see characters as celebrities. The guy in this novel doesn't even really have a clear face to me, and I don't care. Oskar, from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, though, is obviously my neighbor kid.

[Well, I guess I have to take that back. I just imdb'd MP, and she's been working pretty consistently ever since her heyday, and she was on Scrubs in 2002, which I totally remember and can picture. All apologies then.]

Odd rejection form letter.

"And, once again, please believe me when I say -- we would enjoy reading your work in the future. This is not a come-on or an idle gesture."

This sentence is in bold. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate being asked to send again, though I prefer it in handwriting, or in a "this is not our usual rejection letter" form. But a come-on? It never occurred to me. For it to be a come-on, they'd have to say something much sexier about my writing. Slick verbs, girl, or something. Though now that I think about it, I'd like to see how an editor would come on to a person (this phrase is starting to sound nonsensical in my head) in a letter. I loved your story so much that I think I actually love you. I might like this more than an acceptance.

Tall tales.

N was spinning some faux science on the phone the other day: air is light matter, she said, or somesuch something. She was convincing about it, though. All sorts of jibber jabber about protons and magnetism and the universe. I said, where'd you learn that? School?

No, she told me, it's called the encyclopedia of things you should know even though you don't have to.

Get me a copy.

“I would rather be overturned by him…

…than driven safely by anybody else."

I have this weird other job that I do too quickly, so to slow myself down, I click over and read something in another window. Yesterday, it was the entire history of this crabby blog about literary rejections and every link that looked interesting. Today, the first twelve chapters of Persuasion by Jane Austen. In another window, I stole phrases for titles. When it got dark, I lit candles.

Boy dogs are from Mars...

Check out my transcript of N's latest animated movie. It's only two shots, about ten seconds long:

Close-up of Boy Dog: "I am going to marry the beautiful princess Sallion of France."

Close-up of Girl Pig: "I have a feeling that the tramp, Frankie, wants to kidnap me."

The end.

Old news.

I keep meaning to post, but you don't know how much longer it takes to live your life when you have to climb in and out of the passenger side of your car because the driver's-side door is bungeed shut. And plus it's really cold outside.

But I did finally get around to paging through a bunch of Utne Readers that my local library was getting rid of last summer. I was feeling all politically aware (I can't believe they opened a KFC in India!) until I realized the magazines were from 1996-97. I did keep wondering why they kept capitalizing all their Internet jargon, like Home Page and Hyperlinks, and part of me wondered, is the BMG music club still around, and is that Men are from Mars book really still a main selection in the paperback book of the month club? But now I feel like I can see the future. When they complain about Bill Clinton, I want to write them Electronic Mail Message from the future about the 2000 election they have to look forward to. And tell them how they're going to have such a great big crush on Al Gore someday.

Eskypades.

I was an editor of my eighth-grade yearbook. Which means me and the other girls cut photographs of people into irregular shapes with regular scissors and tilted them in fancy overlapping ways onto pages on oversized tables in the school's sewing room. The sewing room was across the courtyard from my English class, and my English teacher used to look out across the way and laugh at the fact that home ec students had to wear safety glasses when they used the machines. Us yearbook editors would cut brazenly, after school, without goggles. And then these pages would go to some sort of printer (though I don't really know how this old-school bookmaking worked) via the art teacher. Because, I guess, the art teacher was the only person in the junior high with handwriting cool enough (read: calligraphy skills, because Olde English was the font that best represented early-eighties thirteen-year-olds) to write out the captions. And those of us in charge really didn't like that we lost control of our book at this point in the process. We were certain he'd spell cleverly instead of correctly – "School Daze!" – and so we wrote him strident notes with many multiple exclamation marks to make sure he spelled it D-a-y-s. Bossy enough to make demands but not clever enough to think of better captions, that was us.

Reading rainbow.

I guess I never really knew what they meant by "chick lit." And by "they," I mean Wal-mart, because they seem to be the primary purveyors of the pink trade-sized paperbacks. But I needed a book on tape for my trip to visit my niece, so I swung by the library and picked something up. Oh, Meg Cabot. If chick lit means taking a perfectly harmless mystery and chocking it full of tedious interior monologues about the narrator's cellulite, then I'm against it.

Mom always said don’t play ball in the house.

Ask a student to write an essay about how we learn, and they'll give you the "hot stove" example, i.e. once a child touches a hot stove once, they learn to never do it again. If the topic is discovering the truth, they'll tell you about two siblings, a broken vase, and a mother who has to decide who broke it. Where do we get these classic examples? I mean, I don't think most of us actually touched hot stoves, and I don't know that vases are really our mothers' prized possessions. They're not fables. Did The Brady Bunch writers write the broken vase storyline and thus invent the classic example, or did they have Peter break the vase because it was already one of our culture's fave stories? And where's the I Love Lucy or whatever where somebody burns his baby hand? I hope nowhere, because that wouldn't be funny.

The Annexe

My little girl's not one for suspense. When she' knows I've read a book before or I've seen a movie, she'll ask me to tell her what happens. Even if we're reading it together and it would ruin the fun for her. Usually, I say no way. Books aren't just about what happens, the final twist. But this weekend she brought with her The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. "How does it end?" seemed a proper question this time. She knows, of course, how it ends – who this girl is and why we read her diary. But it was the saddest thing to me, to think that she ever even had to know about anything bad in the world, let alone things that bad. So we talked about it, how it ends, the ending even beyond the diary, and she read to me, the voice of a young girl cuddled in bed against me. And I'm sorry, but because I'm not as brave as her, the next day we went to Snowbound and got her tons of new fiction: books about owls, and the science of dust, and Narnia.

Not for English-speaking ears.

Little girl suggested I buy Chicken Soup for the Rat Lover's Soul for my student whose rat has a bladder tumor. It's way too easy to make fun of a series that includes Chicken Soup for the NASCAR/American Idol/Woman Golfer's/Preteen: The Tuff Stuff/Shopper's/Steven Jackson Fantasy Owner's Soul. But when she suggested Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul, I fell in love with her all over again.

Purple waves.

These days, we're phone-reading The Westing Game. I loved this book when I was little, but I doubt I was very savvy about the point of view. It's crazy omniscient, which in lots of ways is necessary given the sixteen main characters paired up behind closed doors. But it's also going to feel pretty cheap and selectively convenient, if I remember the solution to the puzzle, which includes some characters turning out to be not who they say they are. My girl, though, is much more aware of these things than I was. "We get into everybody's mind in this book," she told me with exasperation. And when one character's ears are described as "elfin" (in not a flattering way (and not an accurate way, either, if you ask N)), she asked, "Who's calling them elfin? She wouldn't say that about herself." And she was right on, given the character alone in this scene and no other voice there to insult the poor seamstress.

Sleuths.

When we can't figure out the solution to a Donald J. Sobol mystery, it's not always a lack of smarts on our part. Oftentimes, it's an ignorance of proper etiquette. From today's solution: "When a man and a woman sit at a table for two by the wall, good manners call for the woman to face out so she can see and be seen. The man faces the wall." I had no idea.

 

There's probably so much I do wrong that would mark me as a crook if Dr. Haledjian saw it. Though in this case, it was an adherence to etiquette that got the couple caught. He dressed as a woman so he could follow his prey into the ladies room, and his wife (who they kept referring to as "beefy") dressed as a man, I guess because she wanted to play too. But they forgot to adjust where they sat. The jig was up.

All stories are about wolves.

All good things: the little girl actually got me to go swimming today, and I found out I can still ride a bike no-handed, and we visited Hover's two newly adopted five-week-old kittens. I got myself a camera and the vet says my fat cat isn't too fat after all and I'm getting practice wearing my hair down. And Margaret Atwood, whose Blind Assassin I'm making last all summer, molding it around the space made for other books. The last sentence of each chapter is a hand on my throat. How can I explain this one, for example, how I wanted to read it over and over: "She's seen ashtrays carved out of wood like that."

How to Be Good.

Wonderful and weird, this book by Nick Hornby about, you know, marriage and love and charity and the human condition and all the good stuff, which seemingly makes as one of its big claims that without making time to read, you open yourself more to dissatisfaction with yourself and the people you love.

And he doesn't mean in that literature-makes-you-a-better-person way. It's not a moral issue. Rather, it's that reading books opens up private rooms in your own head that all those other annoying people in your world can't get to. It's about selfish space. Good fences against even the person in your bed.

 

It just wasn't where I was expecting this story to go.

 

P.S. Between this book, the British The Office and Harry Potter, I'm all in love with what feels like the extra word at the end of the phrase, "should have done." You didn't win? I could have done. I like what feels like excess even in a grouping of fairly empty words.

Flowers in the Attic

You all know this V.C. Andrews book, don’t you? I read it – and the series that followed – when I was probably twelve, and some of it comes back to me every now and again. If I had a brother perhaps it would be more creepy that this incest story was my first real dirty book. Though I’m sure the details of the sex scenes were not so detailed because they were in love and blonde and teenagers. They were trapped in an attic for years, by their own mother. What are you going to do – not have sex with your brother, and find a way to break the lock or climb out a window? What kind of story is that? 

But I bring it up because I dreamt about it last night. Which has happened before, this awful scene that I have all mixed up in my waking head and which probably gets even more mixed up when I’m asleep. See, even though she’s spent all of her teenage years trapped in an attic, big sister Cathy is a dancer. And when they finally escape (in a later book in the series), she auditions for a ballet company. She’s twirling and leaping in front of the hot dance instructor, and I’m not sure where she’d have learned any technique in the attic, but she’s got some sort of je ne sais quoi only a ballerina trapped in an attic with only her brother to fuck can possess. Like a bird.

But see, she’s been malnourished (if not celibate) and denied sunlight and recess for years, so even though she’s in her late teens, she has yet to start her period. So somehow (and I read this before I got my own, so the science of it all was never quite clear to me, not that it is now) her body balks and springs some sort of leak and she (again, this is not how it happened so much as how I made sense of it back then) expels all the blood her body has been shoring up for five, seven years. At once. She practically explodes blood, mid-air, and collapses into the pool on the floor. Of course, she’s been trapped in an attic; she doesn’t know what’s what. (Not that knowing what’s what would make such an event more understandable.) Luckily, the hot dance instructor scoops her off the floor and takes her to the doctor, and the two men – the dance instructor and the doctor -- go on to vie for her love, such a pretty vision she is, like Carrie if she’d actually been dancing at the prom.

It’s just an anxiety dream, right? About feeling exposed and vulnerable in some way. What isn’t? Or maybe it’s about not understanding something about being a woman. A creative idea about how to get a man (or two)? Eh. It's probably merely a warning that I should cross ballet off my list of next career ideas.

Adieu, adieu, to…

Sometimes I get sad that there’s no real good plural of “you” at my disposal. Sure, I’ll type “y’all” or “all y’all” here, but that’s pretty disingenuous coming from an upper Midwesterner. The UP does have “yous,” but I was trained pretty early on that this was a laughable word. I think my dad kept a running tally of how many times waitresses would say “yous” at a restaurant and that her tip and the number of times she said it were inversely related.  “Would yous guys like anything else?”

Though, you know what, I don’t think I’ve heard "yous guys" at all lately. Is it more specific to the UP’s banana belt (because I’m way up here on a whole nother great lake – all of freaking 67 miles from where I started)? Do I not eat out enough? Is there some other phrase replacing it that I don’t know about? Or am I just by myself so much that nobody needs to get all plural around me?

I guess I fall back most often on “you guys,” and that’s fine enough. I don’t have any real trouble with the genderedness of that one. But I still don’t really like it. Help me out. I want the notion of “you and you and you” all boiled down into one bite-sized word.

Gentle readers.

You’ve all been a helpful resource for me (I think of y’all every time I use my dryer), so here’s a question I’m posting on behalf of Peter. He wants to know (and I can’t help him on my own): What might it mean to refer to somebody’s banjo music as “Rousseauian”?

Me again.

I know: two posts in one day. It’s excessive. But I won’t be around the next few days to ramble on about all things weekend, like Marques Colston or grocery shopping. Who wants to watch the cats?

My question today is this. Why do my vacuum bags come in a resealable package, as if to keep them fresh? That, and why “resealable” doesn’t appear in either my Word dictionary (I’m getting the red squiggly here) or in Merriam Webster. (What would have been great, though, is if I got the red squiggly for the word Merriam (which I did, when I spelled it “Mirriam”), as if Microsoft was holding some sort of grudge against competing dictionaries by suggesting even their own titles were spelled wrong. Which I think they do, with some rivals. Try typing "Mozilla Firefox" or "iTunes" in Word and see if Microsoft considers those to be real words. They don’t. Hell, they've named the product "Word." That's laying claim to a lot right there.)

[Pause.]

I just told my nonfiction students last night that that’s one of the pleasures of the genre: getting to see the particular path one person takes to get from this idea to the other, but when they started saying, “Ah, we get to write stream of consciousness,” I had to pull back and say that I don’t want to really know how they get from here to there, with every little “oh, my nose is running” in between incomplete sentences, but that things should be crafted as if the path is natural and makes sense. Which is advice I’m clearly not following right here right now.

Get Smart with monkeys.

What books do you give a person’s whose house has burned down? I had some clothes for him (mostly XL t-shirts I stopped wearing once Stacey and Clinton convinced me it was a bad idea), and there’s furniture of his in the garage and the basement (most notably that damn forest green lazy-boy). But what he needed yesterday was something to read. 

If it didn’t belong to Netflix, I would have also given him a Lancelot Link: Secret Chimp DVD. Anybody remember this show? I didn’t, but how happy am I to have been introduced to it. I feel unable to summarize it well, so here’s a lifted synopsis:

"In a world where there are chimpanzees instead of humans, Lancelot Link was one of the top agents of A.P.E. (Agency to Prevent Evil), an secret organization that protected the world from evil wrongdoers. Link's partner was Marta Hairi and his supervisor was Commander Darwin. A.P.E.'s evil counterpart was C.H.U.M.P. (Criminal Headquarters for Underworld Master Plan), an evil organization bent on world conquest. Baron Von Butcher was the evil leader of C.H.U.M.P. and was assisted by other evil apes including Creto, Wang Fu, the Duchess, Ali Assa Seen, and Dr. Strangemind. Most episodes consisted of Lancelot and Marta Hairi fighting the evil members of C.H.U.M.P. Besides the main story, the chimps also appeared in musical segments of the show as the psychedelic Evolution Revolution (they even released an album)."

Brilliant, huh? Monkeys acting. What they don’t tell you is that Bernie Koepel did a lot of the voices. Ten blog points to the first person to express excitement about that moment in his career.

Here’s the Evolution Revolution doing Roller Coaster.

P.S. I chose Klosterman and Palahniuk. This isn’t the time to get all Richard Powers on somebody.

Issue Thirteen

Go ahead and check out the new issue of SmokeLong Quarterly. And feel free to let me know how you would have answered the desert island questions here.

Summer reading.

My daughter's all about the American Girls these days. Colonial girls, prairie girls, scrappy Depression-era newsgirls. Who knows. But what I like is no matter the girl or the time period, every series of six books follows the same pattern. The introductory book is called Meet Felicity (or Samantha or Kit or Kaya), then Felicity (or Josefina or Addy) Learns a Lesson, then Felicity's Surprise, followed by Happy Birthday, Felicity!, Felicity Saves the Day, and Changes for Felicity. What I like to do is imagine what happens in each of these books when it's my people who are the title characters. In Meet Sparky, for example, we discover our title character is the only other smoker in our teacher-training seminar, so we spend lots of time getting to know her out by the dumpsters. And there's Changes for Ruby, in which Ruby drops out of school and moves away from her UP hothouse to find herself dogless and knocked up. I can't quite figure out the plot to Rocco Saves the Day, unless he maybe installs a new browser for a girl with computer troubles. But what I most look forward to is Peter Learns a Lesson, which I think should be the title of his new blog.

Hot cup of fools.

That headline is stolen, and not even really applicable here, but someday in the future, when I see it on the cover of a book about the shenanigans at my local coffee shop, I'll be able to say that I lifted it first. 

That place really is full of characters. There's the lady yesterday who's all concerned that her 18-year-old stepson is reading her journal. She was just kind of expressing the worry out loud to whoever would listen, and I knew better than to even look up from my laptop for fear of being roped into a conversation, but I did want to leave her a little note on my way out and tell her, "He's not." I mean, really. I can't imagine this kid has any desire to track the deep thoughts (she read some of it out loud) of the lady sleeping with his dad.

Because as much as a journal sounds like an tempting thing to run across, there's only a handful (maybe an armful) of people whose diaries I would actually want to read page by page. And not because I'm not interested in what people think, but because I'd have to love someone an awful lot to want the unabridged version. I realize the irony here, having this blog and rambling on to you guys at all hours, but if this was a journal, full of unedited abstract emotions, I don't think many of you would keep coming back either.  

Even with little locks on our diaries and password-protected computers, I suspect that, like this new step-mom, people are only half-sincere about wanting that privacy, because what might be really nice is finding someone who was actually compelled to wade through every mundane thing we think. 

Anyway, when the coffee shop retrospective comes out, I hope they refer to my character as something cool like the Queen of Clubs.

Abandoned texts.

I love the free book table at school. Today's treasure: Word Power Made Easy, initially published in 1949. The subtitle alone assures me I'll get a good dose of synonyms: "The complete three-week vocabulary builder presented in a simple, easy, step-by-step method that will increase your knowledge and mastery of English intensively and permanently." Whew.

I don't know which chapter to start with, "How to Insult Your Enemies" (which includes disciplinarians, toadies, dabblers, troublesome women, flag-wavers, possessors of one-track minds, freethinkers, as well as words relating to your parents, murder, sexual desires, and God), "How to Talk about Liars and Lying" (words concerning fame, artistry, reform, heredity, time, place, and suffering), or "How to Talk about Doctors" (including experts in the female organs and skeletal deformities).

I did pretty well on the present-vocabulary pre-test, though I don't find it surprising that I missed "uxorious," given the definition doesn't even make sense to me. Why do we need a word to describe excessive fondness for one's wife?

Just so you know.

How much am I charmed by the note below, today's featured find from Found Magazine? I love a letter that includes an abstract.  I feel like this one in particular should be taped on many an email I've sent.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.

"Love requited is a short circuit."  -- Samuel Beckett, who would have turned 100 yesterday, if he hadn't died in 1989.

I threw myself into the dramatic highs and lows of a one-girl celebratory Beckett reading last night, and it got me so worked up that I cried later when Bernard proposed to Rose on Lost. Regardless, this morning is sunny and the cats are sitting in the open window, and I'm only sad for them that I'll have to close it when I leave.  I'm wearing my monkey t-shirt and heading down to Ruby's tonight for a Group Junior planning session.  My girl's really gunning to be leader, and I doubt baby Ella will put up much of a counter-campaign yet.  Will post the minutes next week.