If he gets up, we'll all get up.

It'll be anarchy!
--from Flickr user rubykhan's "Things I've Made" photo set

Found The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes in the stacks today and took it to lunch. The below made me laugh out loud in the break room, which I (naturally) never do:

*From Following My Creative Writing Teacher's Advice to Write "Like My Parents Are Dead", by Ellie Kemper:

FROM
Autumn Days Are Fleeting

There was a slight nip in the air, and I pulled my anorak closer. The leaves were beginning to turn. Orange, brown, bright yellow. Autumn, I thought. I inhaled deeply, imagining the crisp air filling my lungs. Oh, God. I miss Mom. Why did you take her from me, God? Why did she have to die? She is gone.


FROM
Seven Days, Five of Them Working

I agreed with Cynthia. I did. Four hours would never be enough time to prepare the presentation. There was too much data. There were too many bar graphs. It wasn't our fault. We were told the meeting would be on Thursday; it got bumped back to Wednesday. Oh, God. Wednesday. My dad's favorite day. What was it that he used to call it again? Oh, yeah: Hump Day. I miss Dad so much.

[read whole piece]


*From Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa's Disability Claim by Alex St. Andrews:

Important Notice
GREGOR SAMSA Is Not Eligible for SSI

We are writing about GREGOR SAMSA's claim for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments. Based on a review of his/her medical condition, he/she does not qualify for SSI payments on this claim. This is because he/she is not disabled or blind under our rules.


The Decision on GREGOR SAMSA's Case

You listed the following impairment(s) on your SSI application:

I AM A GIGANTIC COCKROACH

DEPRESSION

BACK PAIN


You said the above impairment(s) affected you in the following way(s):

I CANNOT STAND OR WALK UPRIGHT OR SPEAK ANY HUMAN LANGUAGE

I CANNOT HANDLE OR MANIPULATE OBJECTS WITH MY MANY LEGS OR ANTENNAE

WHEN I AM ON MY BACK I HAVE DIFFICULTY RIGHTING MYSELF

MY FAMILY HAS IMPRISONED ME IN MY ROOM AND IS FEEDING ME SCRAPS

[read whole piece]

Tom Giesler's "my anatomy"

Very fond of Tom Giesler's "my anatomy"--click to view more, larger.

an extra set of memories

From Why Time Seems to Slow Down in Emergencies, a 2007 article by Charles Q. Choi:

When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain.

"In this way, frightening events are associated with richer and denser memories," [researcher and neuroscientist David] Eagleman explained. "And the more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."

Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by...

You can get yourself dirty...

Robert Archambeau does a great job of articulating the significance of Adam Lambert's "Ring of Fire" performance on last week's American Idol. I know I jumped around when I saw it, hardly believing I was seeing it. Here was this large, fairly mainstream American Idol audience, expecting an evening like a Hilary Duff film, and getting Velvet Goldmine, or a Gregg Araki film, or Robert Mapplethorpe's Self Portrait with Whip.

Archambeau writes, "[Lambert] wasn't (like Aiken) a singer who happened to be gay. He was a gay man singing as a gay man." He was a gay man singing as a gay man, and NOT singing a show tune or an Erasure song, I'd add. Thanks to years of swishy comic relief characters and Oh SNAP! and "gay attitude," America was equipped to fairly comfortably accept last year's Danny "Ish" Noriega. America's Next Top Model's Miss J made us slightly less comfortable (he's so committed), but we're used to her by now.

Adam Lambert is "a gay man performing as a gay man"--and performing the sort of performance often reserved for a gay audience. He's not Nathan Lane, and he's not Rupert Everett, "a straight woman's gay best friend." He took the audience into (what I'm slightly embarrassed to call, but want to call) the catacombs of gay experience. I'm sure he made at least one spectator think "I want my mommy!" (or "I want 'YMCA'!")

Here's the performance (or click to view). I've always liked the Cash original, and how the trumpets and clippity-clop pace sort of wink at the heavy lyrics. Lambert's version emphasizes the heavy lyrics--making it a different song entirely.

Dan Meth's Charts

I'm enjoying Dan Meth's series of "Pop-Cultural Charts" (click to enlarge):

I'd forgotten my home state could boast A Different World.

I loved re-encountering this image at Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves. It's from The Golden Book of 365 Stories, and for a long time represented my ideal home or social life: everything feels intimate, "social," and cozy, but (chicken pals excepted) everyone's reading alone in her own little space.

Aimee Mullins & Her 12 Pairs of Legs

This blog still gets a lot of hits from searches on fibular hemimelia, mainly from parents with young kids who have been diagnosed with fh seeking answers about whether to amputate. This recent 10-minute talk by athlete/model/activist Aimee Mullins--diagnosed with fibular hemimelia in both legs as a child--should add some perspective. It's a spectacular piece about, among other things, seeing prostheses not as replacements and imitations but as mindblowing design opportunities. I'm not sure anyone could watch it without coveting at least one pair of Aimee's legs. I've never been excited about shoe shopping, but I could get really excited about leg shopping.

Aimee Mullins:

"With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves--the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public--has stopped being a problem."

--Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Sam Spenser's "Bloom"

"Bloom," a 2007 art installation by Sam Spenser (via Urban Prankster)

" a sort of woolly rice..."

One more tenth for the 10 Lines Meme, a line that came into my head today and does sometimes when I consider the usefulness of what I make and do: "a sort of woolly rice..."

It's from

Counting Sheep
by Russell Edson:


A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture for them.

They are like grains of rice.

He wonders if it is possible to shrink something out of existence.

He wonders if the sheep are aware of their tininess, if they have any sense of scale. Perhaps they think the test tube is a glass barn...

He wonders what he should do with them; they certainly have less meat and wool than ordinary sheep. Has he reduced their commercial value?

He wonders if they could be used as a substitute for rice, a sort of woolly rice...

He wonders if he shouldn't rub them into a red paste between his fingers.

He wonders if they are breeding, or if any of them have died.

He puts them under a microscope, and falls asleep counting them...

One Sentence

One Sentence describes itself as featuring "True stories, told in one sentence." At its base, it's like PostSecret without all that distracting imagery; at its best, it's a place to find well-crafted sentences, sentences that suggest more sentences, "the truest sentence you know." Here are some posts (all are anonymous) I liked enough to save in my Bloglines account:

I was copy editor of my yearbook and purposely spelled our class president's name wrong, just to make my depressed friend smile.

When I opened the door I noticed 2 things: one, someone had made cookies, and two, all the furniture was missing, in that order.

Every time I think of September 11th, I remember how he tried to convince me to lose my virginity "on a day I would never forget."

I met an anaesthesiologist last year who confessed after several drinks that she sometimes pops the pimples of her patients while they are asleep so that they will look better when they wake up.

I told my eight-year-old daughter she could choose lemonade, lemonade or lemonade and she asked "What was the second one again?"

When I finally downloaded the contents of my 3-year-old's birthday digital camera, I found pictures of another woman kissing my husband.

When they left me alone with your body, my fist came down so hard I heard your ribs crack.

If my writing career doesn't work out, I'll invent a cereal which is composed of only marshmallows.

On Wednesday I'm driving my husband to the airport to be deported.

As a child, I used to eat all my cereal in case I hurt the feelings of any pieces of left-behind cereal.

I still wish I had taken the F instead of the A on the online test I hurried to finish while I could hear my dog dying on the kitchen floor.

60 seconds on Twitter

elloyd74: New immigrant requesting *Atlas Shrugged* bcuz her boss said she needed 2 assimilate & the book was a "great representation of USA culture."

esseffen: @elloyd74 save her! go library go!

madsimian: @elloyd74 I assume you actually gave the immigrant Gravity's Rainbow, right?

eeyorelibrarian: @elloyd74 Shrug it off and hand her an atlas. You can't know where you're going until you know where you are.

heathra: @elloyd74 Oh dear god.

gatewaygroupie: @elloyd74 _Atlas Shrugged_ was so 6 months ago. Give her _Grapes of Wrath_.

7/10 of the 10 Lines Meme

I like this one, spotted on Facebook: (originated by Michael Dumanis and Gary McDowell? Eduardo Corral? Not sure)

"What are ten lines from poems that stick in your head when you are walking around your day? Or, if you stop a minute and think of some lines of poetry, what comes up? It’s fine if you distort the line as you remember it, if you misremember it..."

I've linked to the poems the lines come from, where possible.

1. Generations have trod, have trod, have trod. (G.M. Hopkins)

2. Morale is down in the boneless, lactic fist of my genitals. (Jeffrey McDaniel)
[I've blogged about this one before; it's a frequent repeater. Someday someone will ask me "How are you?" and I'll slip and answer with this.]

3. Catbird, catbird./ O lady hear me. I have no// other/ voice left. (Robert Creeley)

4. Jason--sham--too. (Emily Dickinson)
[I like this one so much, I've thought of naming a son "Jason Sham Too"]

5. Sometimes the last line, sometimes the whole stanza (I love lips/depths):

Is it because he’s angry at me
for my face with its moping lips?
It was so often ready to be
light and clear in its depths;
but nothing came so close to it
as big dogs did.
And dogs don’t have what I need.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

6. And say why it never worked for me. (Philip Larkin. And almost any line from this poem)

7. "Look!"//Look. This is the morning. (WS Merwin)

There are seven. When I "stop a minute and think of some lines," I could choose many more, but the above are lines that come to me frequently--honestly, probably all of them hit me at some point every week, and many daily.

I'd like to read anyone's responses to this, but I'll tag Teresa, Anne, Amanda, Laurel, and Peter. And, if you're reading and care to comment here, non-bloggers MAC and Polly.

Austrian artist Erwin Wurm's "Fat Cars"

"Fat Cars" by Erwin Wurm

I'm not sure how to describe my response to these. Something between wanting to cry, wanting to never eat anything creamy again...smart work.

Pi Kappa Alpha at Anchorsplash 2009 (Virginia Tech)

Via Neatorama--a performance from a talent show at Virginia Tech.



UPDATE: How about that--according to Wikipedia, both Jon Stewart & Karl Rove are "Prominent Pikes."

"It's in the click of my eternal return..."

Nada Gordon's ~~ululations~~ is probably my favorite blog to read these days. She posts excellent poems, among other things, seemingly daily, and they're full of great phrases like "I won't be adulthoodedness anymore," "I’ll weep here until my tag clouds run dry," and "Baby please don't lurch at me."

She posted this take-off on Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman" a few days back. Empowering as many have found "Phenomenal Woman," I'm glad to have other options.

From Nada Gordon's ~~ululations~~:


Phenomenal Philosopher
(after Maya Angelou)

Petty philosophers wonder where my thesis lies.
I'm not smart or built to theorize
But when I start to tell them,
They think I'm telling lies.
I say,
It's in the reach of my propositions
The span of my logic,
The stride of my argument,
The curl of my rhetoric.
I'm a philosopher
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That's me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a disciple,
The acolytes stand or
Fall down on their syllogisms.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of minor premises.
I say,
It's the fire in my cogito,
And the flash of my materialism,
The swing in my noumena,
And the joy in my ontology.
I'm a philosopher
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That's me.

Disciples themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can't touch
My inner monadology.
When I try to show them
They say they still can't see.
I say,
It's in the arch of my mind-body problem,
The sun of my hermeneutics,
The ride of my fallacies,
The grace of my axioms.
I'm a philosopher

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That's me.

Now you understand
Just why my head's not contingent.
I don't appeal to emotion or authority
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me ratiocinating
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It's in the click of my eternal return,
The bend of my dialectic,
the Weltanshauung of my Wirklichkeit,
The need of my petitio principii,
'Cause I'm a philosopher
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That's me.

Legacy Libraries at LibraryThing

LibraryThing has a neat thing going with "Legacy Libraries": records of famous dead people's libraries--what they owned--and their comments/reviews, gleaned from marginalia in their books, from their letters, or from remarks they made elsewhere. Here's Benjamin Franklin's library. Here's a sample "review" from Franklin, on William Cowper's Poems: "The relish for reading poetry had long since left me; but there is something so new in the manner, so easy, and yet so correct in the language, so clear in the expression, yet concise, and so just in the sentiments, that I have read the whole with great pleasure, and some of the pieces more than once." - BF to John Thornton, 8 May 1782.

Legacy Libraries are voluntarily compiled by a user group on Library Thing, I See Dead People's Books. One can join a Legacy project already underway or start a new one. "Completed" libraries (in quotes because LibraryThing acknowledges that completed is a relative term here) include those of Ezra Pound, Tupac Shakur, Marilyn Monroe, George S. Patton Jr., Susan B. Anthony., and others. Libraries-in-progress include those of Susan Sontag, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Harry Truman, and others. All are linked to the "I See Dead People" page.

In addition to the whole "labor of love" thing, creating a Legacy Library might be a good side project/assignment for grad students doing in-depth independent studies of certain writers--

I Remember

I got Teresa Joe Brainard's I Remember for Valentine's Day, and now that she's read it, I am. Reading it for the first time in 2009 (first published in 1970), it strikes me how much it resembles a response to a Facebook meme, or a blog project like The Chatelaine Shops or Spends. The genius of the idea being that it came 30+ years before those kinds of things--and not in response to the anyone!-instant!-publishing of the internet, which makes it seem obvious.

I've been in at least four writing classes in which we were asked to freewrite on the phrase I remember "in the manner of Joe Brainard's I Remember." I'm lousy at freewriting and the exercise has always left me cold. But after reading Brainard for ten minutes or so, I found myself writing "I remember" sentences in my head--and remembering things I'd never remembered when "freewriting" (forcedwriting) on that exercise. I got up to type some out, and here they are, in place of a response to the recent "25 Random Things About Me" meme:

I remember the Rodriguez girls who took piano lessons from our same piano teacher and performed at the same recitals my sister and I did. They wore "Add-a-Bead" necklaces and their parents gave them a new gold bead at every recital.

I remember envying teenagers for getting to walk through doors marked "Employees Only."

I remember living with my girlfriend the winter we were 18 and had little money. I got annoyed that she insisted on buying Jewish rye bread, which cost 30 cents more than plain rye bread.

I remember walking with her from the grocery store to the basement apartment we were living in, a mile away. It began to rain and the paper bags holding the groceries started to dissolve. She took off her coat, even though it was freezing, and used it to carry the groceries.

I remember walking in downtown DC with her later that week and giving a dollar to a panhandler sitting on the pavement (to impress her). It did, and she kissed me, and the panhandler leapt to his feet and yelled "Freaks! Freaks!" after us until we ducked down into a subway station.

I remember cassingles, and owning one of Wilson Phillips's "Hold On."

I remember Popcorn Circus, the store that sold nothing but flavored popcorn (bubble gum, green apple, blue raspberry, cinnamon...) that was the (overpriced) must-have snack for birthday parties when I was in 4th grade.

I remember finding it impossibly sophisticated in 8th grade when a friend ate an apple by cutting off an individual slice with a knife, eating it, cutting off another individual slice, etc. It hadn't occurred to me that it was possible to eat an apple like that. I doubted I could ever "pull it off."

I remember for a long time thinking that "Sumer is icumen in" referred to Sumer/Sumerians, and perhaps icemen (was it a typo?).

I remember being 15 and purchasing Leaves of Grass and a cassette tape of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto from the same store, going home and listening to the concerto while reading the book, feeling intellectual.

I remember listening to 10,000 Maniacs "Verdi Cries" over and over the same year, full of longing for the beach, the bath, the pastries, the jackal-headed woman drawn in the sand, Natalie Merchant, and a classmate I felt sure would "get it" all.

I remember James Swearingen.

I remember going to Hechinger's hardware store with my dad and getting to pick out a paint chip or a washer. I still think washers make great tokens of affection.

I remember Speak n' Spell, and how strange the recorded male voice sounded saying "W"--it sounded slurred and slightly drunk: vuhhvullyou.

I remember liking the theme songs and credits of Saturday morning cartoons more than the shows themselves.

I remember highlighting passages I found "poetic" in my first bible. I was eight, and still have the book.

I remember the first time I saw k.d. lang (in the "Trail of Broken Hearts" video on VH1) and the first time I saw Ya Kid K of Technotronic (in a Saturday Night Live performance). I couldn't tell for certain what their genders were, and was instantly attracted to them.

I remember lots of talk about an alcoholic beverage called "Cisco," that came in flavors like grape and orange and was said to contain liquid crack, but never seeing a bottle of it.

I remember being taken aback when I met my first college roommate, who was overweight, black, a mother of a toddler, and ironed her (light blue) sweatpants. All Sweet Valley visions of "sharing clothes with my roomie" evaporated.

I remember realizing, at around age 23 as a graduate TA, that all of those "What I Did This Summer" essays one wrote at the beginning of a school year were assigned for writing diagnostic purposes as opposed to true interest about one's life on the part of one's teachers. At the same time I realized that "Who Can Be the Quietest?" played in the back seat of the car as a child was not a true competition but a way to get one's children to shut up. [Shock!]

I remember painting the blue veins and red arteries of a Visible Woman.

I remember, in the books of my youth, people (especially mothers) often becoming "cross."

I remember, when the song came out in 8th grade, none of us buying that "You Don't Have to Take Your Clothes Off (To Have a Good Time)."

I remember reading, at 15, that 15 was the average age at which girls in the U.S. lost their virginity, and thinking I really needed to get on it, because the thought of being "average" at anything was repellent enough, let alone the thought of being less or slower than average.

I remember being the first one awake at slumber parties in another kid's house, and how, when you had a glass of milk at home, it tasted like milk, but when you had a glass of milk at someone else's house, it tasted like milk + the glass.

I remember finding marbles (clearies or marbleds, not cat's eyes, which were not aesthetically pleasing) sublimely, almost wisely, beautiful (heaven in a wildflower) and keeping mine in a purple velvet Crown Royal bag. I remember, years later, meeting a woman who kept her sex toys in a purple velvet Crown Royal bag.

Poetic Cross-Dressing Contest at WhimsyLand

Jeffery Bahr is holding a "Poetic Cross-Dressing Contest" (details here) which requires one to rewrite one well-known poet's well-known poem in the style of a second well-known poet. It looks like he's run a similar contest three times in the past, and he links to examples and past winners here, here, and here.

I love the premise and wish my brain felt fresh enough these days to do it serious justice. If yours does, the deadline is 3/6/09 and the prize is fantastic: "The winner will receive 4 one-year subscriptions to literary journals of his or her choice. The runner-up will receive 2 one-year subscriptions to literary journals of his or her choice."

Here's an entry from a previous year, by David Wright. Many are longer and deeper, but this one made me smile:

We Real Prufrock

We real depressed. We
get dressed. We
don’t talk. We
just walk. We
don’t giggle. We
pin and wriggle. We
measure spoons. We
drown soon.