Reading

This morning I (1) finished a novel, (2) read a tongue-in-cheek manual on how to be a good boyfriend, and this afternoon (3) I read another novel.  

I find, often, that words are the escape I need when I can't articulate what's happening in my own life.  It's not that I don't know what I want to say, it's that the language with which to say it is so evasive it may as well be a boy--okay, boys--I made out with at parties in high school who, come Monday, look at me like I am a visitor from another planet.  Words can be just that distant, with that same glassy 'please don't talk to me and make me admit we were close in any sort of way once' stare.  I have loved language longer than I have loved boys, but that doesn't make it any easier to adore.  

When I read something that makes me vocal--a sigh, an inward 'mmm hmm,' a catch of breath at something to beautiful to be real--I know that work is good.  Maybe not all 215 pages are well crafted, but that one sentence or phrase that gives pause, that yanks sound from deep within my chest and forces it through the thick red wall of my throat until the noise escapes, hanging in the room like yardsale curtains, lovely and thrilling for being cheap but always somehow feeling like they belong in someone else's house.

Emily Dickinson said to Thomas Wentworth Higginson--a man she saucily propositioned with the a version of the question "Tell me sir if you think my poems might be alive?"-- that she only knew if a thing were poetry if "...it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way?"  (and even she was stealing--this is apparently paraphrased from her sister-in-law with whom it is rumored Emily was quite enamored).  My point is, all of us, at one time or another, get the itch, the bug, the burn. the wild hair to express just what it is these magical expressions of others have done to us, and even we--writers by choice, word lovers by fate--don't always know how to do it without paraphrasing.

These are three things that got me today.  I hope you read something that moves you soon, and I hope you share it with me.

1. "We have a great belief, those of us who live in this income bracket and this postal district, in the power of words: we read, we write, we talk, we have therapists and counselors and even priests who are happy to listen to us and tell us what to do.  So it comes as a bit of a shock to me that my words, big words it seemed to me at the time, words that would change my life, might just as well have been bubbles: David  swatted them away and they popped, and tehre is no evidence anywhere that they ever existed. 

So now what?  What happens when words fail us?"--How to be Good--Nick Hornby

2.  "Think of the first boyfriend, Adam. You think he wasn't baffled by his girlfriend? You bet he was. Now, there's a guy who could have used this book. You may not think he needed it -- after all, he was alone in paradise, had some snacks, and Eve was already naked. But we beg to differ.

Their problems weren't over money, getting out of dinner with her parents, or his addiction to online poker. No, their issues revolved around a small piece of red fruit. God said, "Don't eat it." Eve said, "If you love me you'll bite." The poor guy had God on one side and Eve on the other; talk about a rock and a hard place. Adam tried to reason with his girl, warning her of the dangers of breaking the one rule God had made, but she wouldn't listen. From her point of view it wasn't about the apple or God (she wasn't hungry and had never even met the Big Guy in the sky), it was about whether her boyfriend took her seriously and understood her feelings. Sound familiar? In her mind, Adam was trying to control her … again. Talk about a power trip. Who died and left him in charge? There he was telling her what to eat, what not to eat, and by the way, was this "don't eat the apple" thing his way of letting her know he thought she was fat? Great."--The Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend--Felicity Huffman & Patricia Wolff (I bought this for the 50s noir book covers that corresponded to each chapter title but decided to  read the dang thing before I cut the book apart)

3. "Lying in bed, at night, my stomach growled. I rolled over and tucked my knees to my chest. I saw myself smaller and smaller, like a seed in the black night soil of the earth. Here were the stars and here was the city. Here was the net of the world and I was waiting deep down inside it.

In the morning, I took one piece of strawberry-blond hair and cut it with a razor, zigzag bangs across my forehead; I hemmed my skirt three inches above the bare knee; I blacked out my eyes with kohl, just like Astrid did. I had always been such a nice girl; I was still such a nice girl. My mother took one look at me and asked, "Why would you want to be like that?"

I ask you, why, why not?"--Whores on the HIll, Collen Curran