Author Archives: Naptimewriting

That stings…

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Every once in a while I check DeadAtYourAge.com
It’s an amusing (usually) look at the people who died at about your age and whom you have now outlived. Yeehaw, I guess. Except that they list rather accomplished people, who did more in their limited years than I have yet to even try. But I’m letting that slide for now.

Today, deadatyouraage.com told me this:

You’ve outlived Judith Resnik by almost a month. She was a second U.S. female astronaut and victim of shuttle Challenger explosion. She died on January 28, 1986, when you were 13 years old.

Oh, wow, that made me cry. Then and now. Like most of the nation, I watched that on T.V. And was confused by what I saw because I had never for a moment considered their deaths possible. That day ranks right up there with some of the major national traumas—Iran hostages, Sept. 11, the heat shield astronaut deaths…

I don’t really want to think about that today. I don’t.

So I updated my “most popular posts” links. Go read something I wrote a while ago, when I had something to say. Right now I have nothing.

No, seriously.

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You read how my day went down yesterday. I’m not kidding, at all, when I narrate for you now the way the evening after that rather trying day proceeded:

After Peanut’s in bed and Spouse is settled, I head to the main library on campus to pick up a book on hold and to (hopefully) nab another book someone returned before anyone else notices it’s back.  I arrive at the main door and walk through the glorious and stately halls  to get to the circulation desk. Time: 8:45.  I watch as the metal gate descends, too far away to holler or run or be otherwise indecorous. I get to the entrance and read that closing time is 8:45. Well, I guess I should have checked that online. Book on hold will have to wait. (Phlebotomist rants replay in my head…)

So I walk down the hill to the lowly undergrad library, through the catacombs of which I can still access the main stacks even after closing. I search for the book purportedly returned. Not on the shelf. Nowhere to be seen. To whom does one report that? The circulation desk at the main library. But they are at home with their phlebotomy and philately and whatnot.

So I research underground or a while, collecting articles that I’m not allowed to access from home, due to the vast conspiracy between the online critical journals and the babysitting lobby. I subvert them all with my free sitter, the father of my freaking child.

I recheck the shelf, just in case. No luck. But good thinking on rechecking, eh? Wouldn’t want it checked out this morning before I can peel the lad from my leg or anything like that.

And on a whim last night, after an hour or so of journal trolling, I search for a free reading book I’ve been coveting. In luck: it’s housed in the aforementioned lowly undergrad library. I navigate catacombs, climb stairs, survive glares that remind me a nigh-on 40 year old pregnant alumnae is not a quote-unquote normal site on campus after hours. If ever. I find the book. I descent the stairs and head to undergrad circulation. Time: 10:07. Sign on the desk informs me that circ. closes at 10:00. Guess I should have checked that before I leisurely used the stairs instead of the elevator. I’m really tempted to issue forth with a SCREW YOU, AL GORE here, but I hold back. Bottle it up. It’s of more use to me there. I contemplate, I grouse, and I drop the book into the return slot. Hope that confuses them for weeks, those loser philatelists.

And, I swear to all things chocolate and marshmallowy, I showed up on campus this morning to get both books and to report the missing text: marquis sporting event of the year ongoing; library apparently closes for such nonsense. There were lawns full of food vendors and grand entrances full of dancers and drummers. On the marble steps of the oldest University in California. Drummers. Dancers. Where are the books? It’s unseemly but true: the library closes for football. This ain’t one of those Big Ten schools where they go to college as an excuse to have an alma mater to support all football season. Our football prowess is not exactly our calling card. Nobel Laureates, sure. number of periodic elements named by and for our graduates, yup. Holdings of original Mark Twain manuscripts. Yes. History of protest and disorderly conduct? You betcha. Football? No. But you’re gonna close the library. I see. I guess I should have checked that online. Wherever library closures due to gridiron conflict are listed, I suppose.

I smell a new dotcom.

I have now slogged to campus, up and down the north hill twice, carrying 40 lbs. of briefcase during precious writing/childcare hours yet left with none of the three books I desire.  Not one.

And I can’t even rant about it. They’ve beaten me down, fair readers. Librarians and phlebotomists and veterinarians and quarterbacks. Seriously, I’m waiting for the cosmic payback. Better be one cute f—ing baby, one Lazarus-like cat, and one awesome journal that publishes my paper for all this b.s.

Look! It’s rant time!

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To whomever wrote: “You’re probably feeling a whole lot better as you settle into your second trimester. Less nausea, fewer mood swings, and “glowing” skin contribute to an overall sense of well-being.” SCREW YOU, LIAR!

To the cat whose illness has led to feces on my bed, urine all over my house, and a $400 vet bill with a shrug and an “I’m not sure what’s wrong with him,” SCREW YOU! Next time you get sick I’m spending the money on an iPod and you get a brick in a pillow case.

To the vet clinic who told me to collect feces and urine for my cat then forgot to give me the kit and locked the doors before I had even gotten to the car: Screw you, too. I’m not coming back for the kit then going home then coming back with samples. Screw you a lot. Now YOU get to come over and collect feces and urine. For all the family members. I do it every other day; now it’s your turn.

To the phlebotomist who closed the lab ten minutes before we got there: Screw you. No, I didn’t check your hours by calling or anything. But who the hell runs a lab open 9am to 4:30pm, closed for lunch 12-1? Seriously? Do you do any work? I collected a toddler and a sick cat, both of whom needed more than the usual amount of fecal clean up today, got the noisier of the two into the car and drove half an hour for your stupid one vial of blood intended to scare me about all the things that could, hypothetically, but we can’t tell you with any certainty, what might be wrong with my poor, maligned, nauseating Hazelnut. Screw you, lab tech. You give phlebotomy a bad name. and sphignomenometers. And sternocleidomastoids. And stuff like that.

To the librarian who accused us of returning a DVD case with no DVD: SCREW YOU! I always double check because I don’t want to walk all the way down here and have to go back for a stupid disc. AND, I don’t rent baby Einstein crap. No, I didn’t. No, I didn’t. Stop telling me I need to go home to get it. I’ve never IN MY LIFE checked that crap out of your library. I’ve never seen that DVD in my existence. No, I didn’t. Oh, and how do you propose I do that? Buy a new one and give it to you? Screw you. I may have mentioned that, but it bears repeating. SCREW YOU. Oh, you’ll double check? That’s so thoughtful. Oh, it wasn’t me? Oh, you’re paging a different library patron without apologizing to me? You’re ignoring me now? SCREW YOU! I’ve never liked you. You’re greasy, icky, and rather creepy and give my kid a bad image of the few male librarians on this planet. You know what? I’ve taken bibliographic methods. I’ve aced out of all the methodological and theory-based library sciences courses. I could OWN you if I felt like it. Don’t ever accuse me of Baby Einstein Forgetting again.

You know what, world? Screw you. Screw all the nasty people and the yucky people and the rude people. Screw all y’all. Cuz I don’t have the patience for your asinine driving, ugly looks, rude cell phone talking, and general in-my-way-getting. Get off this planet, you jerks. Especially the dude who took the last jar of m—-f—ing olives today. Screw you. You’d think I’d have something new or clever to say, wouldn’t you? Nope. Screw you. You people are killing me. And you don’t need those olives like I do.
I hope global warming takes out, like, 85% of you by next year.

(And to the little emotional sponge who lives in my house, who is way intense and way sensitive and way perceptive and way neophobic, I’m sorry dude. I know when I’m way off my rocker it’s even harder for you. I watched as each of these little wrongs in our day sent me further and further from reacting well, you absolutely melted down. Sorry, friend. We’ll both get some sleep and one of us will have a really, really dreamy can of caramel colored sugar water and tomorrow will be better. That said, if you ask “why” one more time I’m ripping your arms off and shoving them down your throat.)

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Words to ponder; William Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech:

“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work–a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. “

I had never read this until Inktopia pointed Acadammit to this link.

Discuss.

Ooooh! Shiny new quiz!

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Over at Inktopia, one of my favorite bloggers took a quiz and was proclaimed to be one of my favorite books. I couldn’t wait…

and doesn’t it just figure.


You’re Ulysses!
by James Joyce
Most people are convinced that you don’t make any sense, but compared
to what else you could say, what you’re saying now makes tons of sense. What people do
understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once
brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in
the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you
additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I don’t know whether to cry or celebrate. I’m inscrutable and loathed except by a few*, many of whom may actually be poseurs the likes of whom I’d never tolerate?
*(And now The KitchWitch will put that last nail in the coffin of her affection for me. Sigh. And I was getting to like Meatless Mondays on her site. Cuz the Joyceian innards for breakfast thing ain’t my cuppa.)
I disagree with their analysis of the book and of its popular repute, but whatever. Finding the universal and mythic in the banal isn’t…oh never mind. Who am I debating here?
I guess it’s a good thing I think Ulysses is a masterpiece in the top 10 of all time.

I guess.

Here’s the quiz. Good luck.

This week in Peanut 9/29

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Peanut told me yesterday that his rules are:

No holding hands in the street
Yell every time Daddy talks
Only give people money when you want to
People can only skateboard everywhere
Pinch the cats every day
Everybody wears only fancy pants
Only eat yucky things
No pants; only nude
You have to eat grass if you say no to things
No eating cereal, ever
and
Get under the blankets even if you’re too hot

I asked when he thought he got to make the rules.
When he’s 46, he says.

*****
P: Thank you for making me lunch, Mommy.
M: Wow. Thank you. That is really nice to say. That makes me feel good.
P: I know. That’s why I said it.

After the cat got sick all over his bed: “If he does that ever again, I will just poop in his bed.”

Parading through the house, banging pots: “Here I go on a outing without Mommies or boys and it’s fun and you can’t come!”

In the tub tonight: “My penis has wings!”

[Update: Spouse, who was manning the bath, has informed me that Peanut was playing ring toss with inflatable rings and was marveling at the RINGS not WINGS. Not sure which is funnier.]

Slow food or real life?

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Compelling article in the East Bay Express this week: Back to the Microwave by Sierra Filucci.
The author talks about how she was torn between doing what is right for her family and the planet…and doing what’s actually right for her family. She even argues that, though slow, local food movement is outstanding for young urbanites and energetic retirees, it may actually be pushing already overwhelmed women back into the kitchen for a full 1950s three-hour meal prep.

Great read. Glad her family did the one month of microwave and one month of Pollan eating to show how it really affects a family. Mostly grateful so I didn’t have to do the experiment. Interesting results.

During the convenience month, Filucci feels “pressed into an unworkable space. The space between a smashed keyboard and preservatives—between time and health.” Everything was easy, not always fast, and universally tasted the same.

During the grow it and cook it yourself month, she remembers “that the pleasure of cooking is soon overwhelmed by the reality of eating with two small children.” But once they hit their stride, the food “was polyphonic, with the volume cranked up high.”

Filucci notes the silence about gender within the slow food movement, ignoring that in the typical family, women handle 63% of the food prep and cleanup. The men and women are exhausted after a long day and sometimes, even though cooking is faster, takeout is more tempting. She wants the sustainable food movement to realize “that what they ask of communities and households—while worthy and noble—falls unequally at women’s feet.”

I believe we all need to talk more about the costs, too, not just to families and time and the environment, but to families’ wallets. Eating locally and fresh, in dismissing the terrifically unbalanced and outrageous food policy in the U.S. (all GMO, poison-ridden corn. potatoes, and soy all the time), is designed to be unbearably expensive for most families. It costs too much for us to buy everything at the farmer’s market and through local farm delivery programs. That’s because of where we live, where people pay a premium for local and fresh. Damn them.

Back to the Microwave

Best fiction of the millennium

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Over at The Millions, they’re revealing the fiction they feel is the best of the millennium so far.

What they’ve come up with:
20 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
19 American Genius, A Comedy by Lynne Tillman
18 Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link
17 The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
16 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
15 Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis
14 Atonement by Ian McEwan
13 Mortals by Norman Rush
12 Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
11 The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
10 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
9 Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
8 Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
7 Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
6 The Road by Cormac McCarthy
5 Pastoralia by George Saunders
4 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
3 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2 The Known World by Edward P. Jones
1 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

I’ve only read four things from this decade (variety of reasons), and only really liked one (sorry, Wallace fans, Oblivion is not my favorite…a few pieces are outstanding, but overall I didn’t get attached to many of the stories, and my favorite chapter within is from the early 90s.) I’m beginning to think I need to go back to Modernism where I belong. But I will reenter this decade with the new Margaret Atwood, then venture one by one down this list from The Millions.

Here’s the problem. I’ve read The Corrections. Liked it. For a lot of reasons was compelled by it. Didn’t love it. But that’s the best this millennium has to offer? Uh-oh. 2666 is on my stack, and I’ll willingly tackle it this month (okay, next month, and only if I finish my conference paper which is woefully behind). But I want to hear from you about whether I should tackle this list out of order or not at all or…

What do you think of them? The books, I mean. Anything missing? Anything on this list rock your world?

[Update, years later: from this list I’ve finished 2666 and Cloud Atlas. The former is impressive and not my cup of tea. The latter rocked my world and I will read it again soon. Awesome book.]

least favorite “best” plays and better alternatives

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We just did a bang up job on narrowing the Western canon to 20 or so books. Let’s please winnow the stage’s best known plays to those that are actually worth producing and watching…

Five plays others love that I can’t stand:
“A Streetcar Named Desire”
“The Death of a Salesman”
“Waiting for Godot” (Good lord, wait for Lefty instead.)
“Three Sisters” (Russians don’t have the depression market cornered. Oh, wait, yes they do. Try “The Cherry Orchard,” instead.)
“Hamlet” That’s right. I said it. Can’t stand Hamlet. Like most of Shakes, except the histories, but can’t be bothered by Hamlet.

Nine much, much better “best”s:
“Raisin in the Sun”
“Of Mice and Men”
“And Baby Makes Seven” (some prefer “Baltimore Waltz” or “How I Learned to Drive”, and I honor those preferences, but I’m a fan of Vogel’s moms in Seven)
“The Glass Menagerie” (made even more delightful if played as a double header with Chris Durang’s “For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls”)
“The Iceman Cometh”
“Macbeth”
“Awake and Sing!” (Odets, why have we forsaken thee?)
“The Crucible”
“The Importance of Being Earnest”

I’m open to musicals but not “West Side Story.” (Also, not a fan of adaptations though you can beg to differ…put Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird over in my best and worst books posts) (and here and here). Bring your best and worst to the comments…

Living with a newborn

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Okay, I haven’t done the newborn care thing for several years, but I’m gearing up and asked several parents of new creatures (plus looked at my old notes and favorite books) to come up with this list for you, dear reader, and new owner/potential owner of one of these new additions to our planet.

The best tips thus far:

To practice living with a newborn: set your alarm to go off every 15 minutes all day. Every day. Forever. Every time it goes off, completely change what you’re doing. If you’re eating, stop and go do jumping jacks. If you’re showering, jump out (shampoo and all) to make a sandwich. If you’re sleeping, pop up and recite concrete poetry. The inability to do anything for more than 15 minutes (and that’s generous) is your new life.

Set a different alarm for every two days. When it rings, change careers. Not just jobs within an industry. Totally change careers. Because whatever you find to soothe or entertain your baby will change every two days. And then you have to start all over again with your proverbial bag of tricks.

Some days, nothing will work. Just keep trying. You can’t solve every problem but you can prove you care just by being there.

Mark your calendar for 3 weeks, 6 weeks, and 3 months. All of them are growth spurts, and they’ll sneak up on you with an exhausting 2-3 day of every-hour-on-the-hour nursing. If you’re expecting your babe to feed nonstop for two days at each of these three milestones, it seems less daunting. Because you know that they’re always crying because they really are hungry.

That 3 month marker is even bigger than the other two because it also means your newborn becomes a totally different baby. Completely different. For some reason, all their pain (digestive, reflux, general distaste at being in a cold, air-based environment) dissolve. Even babies with real colic (you poor, poor parents) are different children after the 3 month mark. Schedule a deep sigh of relief at week 14. Because you’ve just won Survivor.

Every single piece of advice you get is optional. You are the boss. Follow your gut. Because there are hundreds of ways to do this. And your mother and pediatrician and friends may all be wrong. You are right because it’s your child. But if something sounds good, try it. All other advice can get “oh, our pediatrician told us to do it this way.” It’s much more polite than what I told people.

If you go back to work, breastfeed. If you have trouble, get professional help. I have seen lactation consultants solve problems nobody thought would resolve, including a friend who wasn’t making enough milk, a friend with terrible plugged ducts, and my own 4 month painful escapade with thrush and Reynaud’s syndrome (nerve damage) from the treatment of the thrush. Forget all the hype about IQ and bonding and stuff—breastfed babies get sick a lot less. And get better much faster. Since day care is the germiest place on the planet, if you don’t nurse you will miss more work days than you can count for a sick child. So though pumping at work is tough, do it. And the good news/bad news is that you don’t need to pump as much as you’d think (usually 3 pumping sessions for every 2 feeding sessions that you’re replacing) because most babies reverse cycle (choose to nurse all night to be near you when you’re home) and don’t eat as often during the day.

Keep snack and water by your bedside because when a small, helpless person cries to eat at 2am, you’ll find yourself ravenous, too (but unwilling to turn on a light).

Get a sling or a wrap of some sort. Otherwise you will never eat. Sure, you can sit down with a newborn to eat. But you need two hands to prepare most foods. And some newborns don’t want to be put down for the whole first 3 months. Three months is a long time to not eat. Or pee. Get a sling or a wrap. (There are tons of reviews online. I’ll tell you my preference if you ask. But this isn’t an advertisement. Just get one. Ideally not the one that puts all the baby’s weight on its tailbone, because those are kind of spinally misguided.)

Any decision benefits from the light of day. Never, ever make an important decision in the middle of the night.

In the middle of the night, when you think you’re the only one out there, the Internet is your friend. There are lists on things to try and videos of how to fix a poor latch and anything else you can think of. Try kellymom.com or babyzone.com or babycenter.com or your own favorite site so you can find to hear that other people have been through the same thing and made it through.

Now, really—mark 3 weeks, 6 weeks, and 3 months from the birth date on your calendar. Seriously.

Anyone have more universal tips on having a newborn?

Infinite summer

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Discombobulated again by how I managed to stay ahead of Infinite Summer’s schedule and yet behind its emotional and intellectual curve.

So though I have more quotes of the day for you from the novel itself, today I give you a pastiche of the Guides’ synergy at the end of this fascinating, compelling, and comforting summer of reading…

“By giving us the ‘shave and a haircut’ and foregoing the ‘two bits’, Wallace leaves us feeling like we’re perpetually in the middle of the novel, even after we’ve ostensibly finished” –Matthew Baldwin

“You know what the ending made me think of? That E-chord at the end of the Beatles’ ‘A Day In the Life’ — that long sustained chord that just slowly fades out until you hear the piano bench creak under John’s butt. That’s what reading Gately on the Beach felt like.” –Eden Kennedy

“I think the fact that he pulls that ending off (at least to my mind) shows he is about as attuned to the reader as any writer I know.” –Kevin Guilfoile

“I think that he was attuned, or that in writing this novel he was trying to attune himself, to the human heart, almost desperately sometimes.” –Eden Kennedy

Thanks, ladies and gentlemen.

Marketing 101

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Dear Mr. Axelrod,
When you have an important message on a key policy issue from the leader of your political party, the email should not be titled “Got a few minutes?”

Aside from being grammatically incorrect (it should be “Have a few minutes?”) you almost guarantee having your email deleted before it’s been read. The answer to “got a few minutes” is always “no.” The answer to “To Whom It May Concern” is a universal, “not me; check for someone else while you’re in the trash can.”

If you’re sending out a short, compelling video about health care reform, maybe use the subject lines:
Four Minutes to Health Care Reform
Health Care Reform in Just Four Minutes
Health Care Reform in a Few Minutes
A Few Minutes to Health Care Reform.

This is just Advertising 101, people. Your only chance to be read is the headline. You have one second. “Got a minute?” doesn’t cut it. (Have vs. Got is Grammar 1A.)

(You can see the video on the White House site, but I’m not linking because I don’t reward poor grammar.)

Update: least favorite books and better choices

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I’m thinking today about books I just could not abide being dropped from the literary canon, the master list of top contributions to literature. Join along if you’d like with the famous pieces of writing you cannot live without. (Tomorrow is the pieces nobody else knows that you can’t live without.)

My original post on the ten books I loathe that other people think are just humanity’s gift to literature is here.

It’s a decent list of canonical books I avoid like the plague. Catcher in the Rye, Heart of Darkness, Wuthering Heights, you name it by Hemingway, Billy Budd, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
On the Road, The Great Gatsby. This time I’d add Pilgrim’s Progress (I’m sorry. I know it’s important. But puhleeze with the terrible writing.) And the Crying of Lot 49.
And here comes the bombshell. I’ve never been a big fan of the Brontes. Austen’s fine. I certainly wouldn’t say I dislike them. But they give me the minor league fantods, generally. Which makes me like a person who avoids chocolate or wears high tops at the beach, I know.

But howsabout some books I hope forever remain in the Western canon?
Awesome books no matter how you slice them:
Don Quixote. Seriously, if anything lives on to the twenty-seventh century, it’s this bad boy.
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Only poem you’re find up in this list. You heard me, J. Alfred.
An American Tragedy. Pride, greed, lust, entitlement, stupidity, fear. American indeed.
Portrait of a Lady. I would vote for Sister Carrie, too, but one can only be so Dreiser-centric these days…and James does understated better.
The Scarlet Letter. Don’t care how old fashioned it seems. There is never a time when a woman holding her head high about her decisions and passions whilst protecting her child isn’t a timely read. I aspire to Hester Prynne.
The Yellow Wallpaper. There would be no Bell Jar without Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Hell, there would be no women writing without CPG. We’d all be making the rounds, if you know what I mean.
The Turn of the Screw. Yeah you did, James. Went there. And how.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Defy worthless authority and keep an ear open for humanity. And the colloquial.
As I Lay Dying. They don’t get more tortured, f—ed up, and evocative than Faulkner. Dang.
Light in August. Just when you thought the above couldn’t be more true, he did it again.
Metamorphosis. Holy howling fantods, Bugman.
Ulysses. Gotta read the Odyssey, though. So it’s a two-fer.
Native Son. I don’t think there is a more powerful, viscerally terrifying novel about humanity in a society that deems you animalistic.
Invisible Man. It’s been too long since I reread this one, but several scenes remain fully intact, like paintings in my mind.
1984. Terrifying current world. Need I say more?
The Color Purple. Turns everything on its ear. Everything.
Nightwood. And this did it first.

So which books do you hope never die (sorry, Sister Carrie, I fear you’re almost already gone…) out of our classrooms and libraries? Which in this list would you toss for another that Western culture should not be without? (Poetry people, stand up for yourselves. Cuz I sure as heck ain’t gonna push poetry, but you should. And maybe someone to vouch for something from Shakespeare and Ethan Frome and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas because I can’t quite but someone should…)

Tomorrow I’ll go for books I want added to everyone’s bookshelf, canon or no. But for now, what is the best from the list of the best?

This week in Peanut

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Upon request for more Peanutisms this week, let me introduce you to this week in my child’s brain:

“Mommy, will you come play with me and my dollhouse? Yes? Okay. You have to pay me two nickels and two dimes. And if you can’t pay me two nickels and two dimes today, you can pay six dimes and two dimes and then tomorrow you can pay six nickels.”

Sitting in front of my typewriter, the ribbon to which is long since dried up: [for the sake of your eyes, I’m deleting the “And then what happened?” after every line.]
“I’m thinking of a story about ladybugs. A ladybug was hitting people. Then the people didn’t want a sorry. Then the ladybug went home to get something big to hit the people with. Then the ladybug hit the people and they still didn’t want a sorry. Then the ladybug ate the people.” Was this aphids? “No, people.” And then what happened? “Nothing. Nothing happens after you eat. Except poop.”

“Mommy, if I’m whining, I will just ignore you because my ears don’t understand whining.”

“Daddy, if you don’t say it nicely, I just won’t do it. If you say please, I still won’t do it.”

[I don’t make these up, people. I write them down and type them verbatim.]

“Once upon a time there was a girl who liked E. She just liked E. And she became E and just sat there. Because she was a E.”

“When we go to H’s house, I won’t share any toys, and I will just bring my toys and not share and if she asks me to share I will yell ‘NOOOOOO. Get your own!'” It’s her house and she’ll have her own toys. “Oh. Well then, I’m not going.”

“Once upon a time there was a coyote. And the coyote looked and looked for some meat that had already died but it couldn’t find any. So it pushed down another coyote and stomped on it and then ate it.”

[Good thing I just read and saw Raising Cain, so I know pretend violence is not real violence and not something to fear and something inherent, it seems, despite my previous belief that boys and girls are really the same, that crops up in boys’ stories over and over. Because the same story repeated with wolves and lions. Thanks to the relatives who gave him the visual dictionary of the animal kingdom which led to questions about what they were eating that was red and why the deer fell down and why its bleeding and can it feel when it dies and I don’t want to do die and when I die don’t let anything eat me. And why do some people believe the feeling part of you goes to the sky to be happy and other people believe the feeling part of you floats like a ghost and other people think the feeling part of you dies, too?…No, really, thanks for that gift that keeps on giving this month.]

Things we learned today

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I’m working on those other requests, but today I have the following highlights for you:

The rookie human in our family learned that if you fill your pockets with rocks at the beginning of a hike for the mid-point lake rock throwing, you will spend much of the hike yanking up your drawers.
Caveat: true if you’re built like Spouse; no guarantees made if you’re built like post-weaning me.

The rookie mom of our family learned that if your small human fills his pockets with rocks, the action of walking 3 miles (no joke…I bribed him with two lollipops and a fistful of licorice, but he walked—without whining—3 miles. Did I mention that after the pockets were empty he walked another half mile? Uphill? A steep one? Kid is built like Spouse on the outside and like me on the inside.)
Anyway, if a pocket full of rocks is emptied of said rocks after 3 miles, two things are true: 1)rocks will have shed approximately 1/4 cup of dirt, all of which will go into the bed at naptime (you vets know to take them off first; I am a rookie); and 2) a standard cotton pocket will act as a fine sieve and a good portion of the dirt will filter through onto underdrawers and thighs, the result of which is impossible to shake out before nap. Believe me. After I found my mistake I shook that kid like…just kidding shaking is not funny. Except that it is.

I also learned that if you’re really crave making a whole pot of cream of potato ssoup just so you can pour it all over a casserole dish of your home-baked mac-n-cheese and eat it all with a soup spoon, maybe, just maybe, you need some sodium. But probably not that much.

And to cap it off, I swear, this is exactly the sixth step in a recipe for cream of potato soup.
“Add flour and create a rue.”
How would I create a rue? Burn the meal six steps in? Or get to the sixth step and realize I’m still eighteen steps from some damned soup?