the age of persuasion-terry o’ reilly & mike tennant

i’ve loved this podcast for a minute. the recent rebrand to under the influence has also been a good look. the format of this book is great, with notes showing up on a page in a comic dialogue bubble. you know who else did this kind of thing? rodrigo and chris in enter they babylon system-just sayin’.

i heart books that learn me new things. this one offers that in spades.

“Ads that don’t speak to you can seem tiresome or inappropriate, and this may lead some to the mistaken conclusion that those ads aren’t effective. The truth is, they simply might not work on you.” (95)

i had this very discussion yesterday morning about hip hop.

“Later successes helped create an entry of its own: the Guinness Book became the best-selling copyright book of all time, at 100 million copies and growing. The Qur’an and the Bible are two of the few books that outsold it.” (62)

yann martel talks about his book project involving the prime minister at the seattle public library and how it’s the opposite of getting a letter from obama saying that he read and liked his book. harper’s favorite book is the Guinness Book. martel offers harlequinn, a canadian publishing powerhouse, if the pm wants to read money makers.

“In thousands of places of worship across North America, the weekly bulletin might include paid ads for local merchants and professionals, some from within the congregation, and for funeral homes, counseling services, mechanics, and home renovators. At least one church, in Munster, Indiana, has a Starbucks concession in the lobby right beside the-I’m not making this up-‘Heavenly Grounds’ bookstore.” (7)

“The ‘ads on exams’ idea is getting very mixed reactions around the country, as you can imagine, with many people taking exception to the notion of businesses paying to get access to kids. Farber first asked his students if they would be offended by the idea, and the answer was no. Parents are also supporting him. As Farber says, ‘We’re expected to do more with less.’ He wants to help the kids, and advertisers are more than happy to help him.” (91)

for serious?! ads in church programs and exams?! damn…

drinking coffee elsewhere-zz packer

how many addicts walk amongst us? this is the question that holds together the jumble that is nurse jackie (where paul feig meets wendy and lisa), sexy beasts (hey, abyssinian creole), and the influence of whitney in my brain-RIP. this title came off that giant list that came out of the afternoon i spent absorbing back issues of bust magazine in the centre for women and trans people’s library-yea. btw, they have an excellent free monthly film series-complete with delicious vegan snacks.

style. that’s the only thing i’m considering whist declaring my love for this collection of stories:

“He’s so stupid, he’s brilliant; so outside the realm of any rationality that reason stammers and stutters when facing him.” (82, The Ant of the Self)

“‘Bird crap doesn’t have an odor,’ my father says. ‘That’s the paradox of birds.’
‘She loved these birds,’ I say. ‘And you just took them away.’
‘They learned best when stressed out,’ he says. ‘Why do you think they say ‘Arriba!’ all the time? They get it from the Mexicans who’re all in a rush to get them exported.’
He almost knocks me off kilter with that one, but I stick to the point.” (83-4, The Ant of the Self)

bailing your father out of jail + hearing his investment advice + being hijacked to the million man march to sell tropical birds = brilliants.

also, writing corrections in the margins of a library book is like writing on the walls of the bathroom, especially when you correct them wrong. but bigups for using pencil. i once wrote in pencil in a library book….

happy accidents-jane lynch

“The roughness of New York City’s streets seeped in everywhere. At that first sublet, my Chinese roommate had invited home some guys who were rumored to be connected to the Chinese Mafia, and they ended up ransacking the place. Another time, a friend of mine named John brought a trick home, and after I’d left for work and John had passed out, the guy rummaged through my stuff, took some cash and my boom box, and for some reason cut the sleeves off my sweatshirts.” (73-4)

this makes me laugh every time, the first time being thursday on my way to a citizenship ceremony. i learned in my travels that military service, not birth, makes you a citizen in switzerland. how’s that for a country that boasts a global reputation for neutrality. here, all you have to do is take an easy test and say the oath (in english and french). to be fair, standardized tests are always easier when you’re well-versed in the language and culture they’re written in. i’m not sure how i’ve managed to avoid this thus far, but i’m glad for the opportunity, even if it meant that i had to renew my vows to a queen that i didn’t make a conscious decision to marry (i was a newborn). it was a push and pull between getting misty and being slightly offended-”congratulations, Bridgette, you’re about to have yourself a naturally born Canadian there”, “the RCMP are here to help, not hinder, not like some countries back home”, “for those of you who are chewing gums, do not stick it under my chairs”, newly robed judge joyce being called judge judy-these are all things that were uttered. it was really something to be present for 40 people from 24 countries being sworn in as canadians, and jane lynch was there in my lap.

neverwhere-neil gaiman

from one writer who seamlessly moves between mediums to another. i’ve always been scared of neil gaiman, though the sandman is on my list because of its role in winning that contest and subsequently getting graphic novels banned from the next year out. this one arrived on it because of the book binding exhibit that i saw in october at the harold washington library. a lot of the entries had rats on them, and i’ve been on team rat since, well, you know. it feels good to actually remember how/why i put books on my list (whew), and my library synchronicity continues, as i am listening to a 2002 philly free library podcast featuring mat johnson and toure. i’ve heard mat‘s voice in a youtube video on his thoughts about book clubs, and this was a bit less angry. the brilliance that stays with me as i ate my chorizo and gouda omelette on marble sourdough with basil pesto was “i was seven, and i didn’t know crack was coming….followed by zombies” (paraphrased). there was an audible “ohhhhhhhh”, and it came from me. i’ve been thinking about my lifestyle that doesn’t include drugs/alcohol/cigarettes/money (ha!) and now coffee (10 days today), and realize that it’s a choice to experience and remember my life-however shitty it might be at any given moment. this connection between crack and zombies, as well as the current resurgence of zombie fascination (my thinking is that while drugs still play a role, the current drones are more about the effects of technology), is just simply brilliant. which connects beauty-fully back to neverwhere:

“My name is Richard Mayhew. I can prove who I am. I’ve got my library cards.” (66-7)

“…there are two Londons. There’s London Above-that’s where you lived-and then there’s London Below-the Underside-inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you’re one of them. Goodnight.” (113)

“They turned their backs on the brown water and made their way back into the tunnels. ‘With cities, as with people, Mister Vandermar,’ said Mr. Croup, fastidiously, ‘the condition of the bowels is all-important.” (232)

“He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.” (277)

pym-mat johnson

it’s supposedly winter right now in canada. pshaaaw. some people deal with the weather by reading books about the opposite climate, it’s distracting or something…i’m really talking in a circle that stops at the fact that i can’t remember reading any other frozen tale than a day in a life of ivan denisovich. i read it during a hockey game fifteen years ago, which also goes to show that i’m a bad canadian for being so unamused by hockey that i’d rather be reading about the gulag archipelego. that said, i’m going to a marlies game on saturday with all the knitters in the city-puck and purl, muthafuckas! one chapter into this book, i fell in love. three chapters into this book, i asked for its hand in marriage. its author “favorited” the tweet, so i suppose that is as modern of a way that a father can give his blessing as any. i was kind of sleepy and almost late for work, but when the connections were made between mahalia jackson, the jackson family of gary, indiana, and the late entertainment lawyer, charles mathis in my brain on the subway train, i beamed in the realization that mat johnson is the devil. i mean that in the most affectionate way possible, since all my friends are the devil, and he would fit right in at a dinner party around my way, and that is amazing. i can’t even deal with carleton damon carter and his gay lover jeffree (2-for-1 roc-a-fella fresh prince reference!) and a teeny bully named james baldwin. there are no things lost in the translation of medium here, in fact it feels like a million gained-the gutters are flushed out so effortlessly, bigups. my final comment is that a regular guy buying his own freedom at the price of his comrades with lil’ debbie cakes is a future/past reworking of the reality of comrades selling marcus garvey for rice. even the fact that a completely synthetic “food” with absolutely no culture except that of destruction is substituted for an original food that is the staple of so many civilizations just works so flawlessly. i fucking loved this book, so i put a ring on it.

“Still, even for her the broken grammar she used to tell me this message was exaggerated, and I heard another meaning within it. That I, like her, would have to overcompensate for my pale skin to be accepted. I would have to learn to talk blacker, walk blacker, than even my peers. Or be rejected as other forever.
Going to the library was excellent advice, it turned out. The library was open for another hour after school, the byproduct of an academic initiative long since forgotten. Hiding in the library immediately after dismissal allowed the tsunami of juvenile violence that occurred at the end of each day to ripple on beyond me, clearing the area for a safe retreat to my apartment once it was gone. So I went every afternoon from that day forward. The only one not pleased with my new routine was Mrs. Alexander herself, who’d grown accustomed to leaving in time to watch her stories. But after a week or so of missing General Hospital for my sake, Mrs. Alexander showed me how to turn out the lights and lock the door behind me, and then we were both happy.
Alone there, wasting the hour, I couldn’t bring myself to read the real James Baldwin. I wouldn’t read the man until college, another thing I blame on my abuser.” (136-7)

“That is not to say that at the moment I cut a stunning figure myself, but even in the real world I was known to let myself go for the sake of a good book with more than three hundred pages.” (195)

may i kiss you on the lips, miss sandra?-sandra bernhard

the distance between a performer and an audience is a tenuous space. this was a quick read, but not an easy one. the difficulty for me comes from the gutters-i’m inferring what lies beneath. i’m still thinking about this…but i did laugh out loud at the idea of the dalai lama declaring the closure of barney‘s a great tragedy.

“When anger and hatred turn into passion and sex.
When loneliness and love turn into boredom and fear.” (29)

“When blondes fall, they fall so hard.” (49)

“Germans invented Monistat.” (123)

“I wanted to feel the cold, but the weather just hung there as uncommitted as an affair with a married man.” (127)

“When Jackie was redecorating the White House, citizens were donating money right and left. When my cousin sent in her contribution, she received a handwritten thank-you note from Jackie. So of course I wanted a handwritten letter from Jackie Kennedy. I sent in my five dollars. And I never got my handwritten thank-you from the First Lady. So I sent a letter saying that I had mailed in a contribution, but had never received a letter from Mrs. Kennedy. Soon thereafter, I received not only a letter of apology from the White House but a genuine, handwritten thank-you from Jacqueline Kennedy-which I lost, along with a letter of apology from Jerry Lewis for making fun of my lips on the set of The King of Comedy. Two of the coolest things in the entire universe, and I lost them. I think this is maybe the only thing that I regret in my life.” (198)

“How this city has changed! There used to be hookers up and down this strip dressed to the nines, right across the street where I used to perform sometimes. I would go on at one in the morning in front of ten people. Paul Mooney was my mentor, and we used to scare everyone. Me in big funky heels, Paul in cowboy boots. After one night of dancing, I observed, ‘Now I know why there’s no Jewish hookers,’ and Mooney replied, ‘Now I know why there’s no nigger cowboys.’ We would eat at Ben Franks. All the pimps in those wide-brim hats would not to us and pay their dues to those funny motherfuckers.” (187)

and that’s a super-comedy team.

home and exile-chinua achebe

so you know what’s jarring? hearing casey casem announce stevie wonder‘s number one hit this week, “superstition”. i’m really not sure how sirius pulled that off for their 70s on 7 station (my compromise when the coworkers won’t let me play the groove), but it was hellaweird. this is the same aural situation i am experiencing as i listen to chinua achebe talk about home and exile via the philly free library podcast. not just because it’s like a delayed round of the words i read in my head half an hour ago being read in the author’s voice in my headphones. i’m not gonna lie-i can still hear G98.7 on the radio outside my headphones, because they’ve already played so many of my favorite tunes all evening. but the library must also have some kind of archive system, as among the facts listed in the program’s introduction was, “he has influence the philadelphia hip hop group the roots, who have named their latest album things fall apart…” and, confirming the publication date of 2001, a few choice memories of my life with that album have flashed before my eyes and i am great-full. from rolling my suitcase over the cobblestones in ha noi to the password of my second yahoo email address, the roots were the band i came of age with, and the half of my life that they’ve been in it has been infinitely richer than the first half. it’s no coincidence that we both made moves to stay still at the same time, after a decade of running at the same time.

“That does it for all those beleaguered African writers struggling at home to tell the story of their land. They should one and all emigrate to London or Paris to dilute their Africanness and become, oh, ‘so academic, so perfect.’
The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.” (71-2)

tariq-you got me. thank you. oh-on a related note-the video of badu‘s 6-minute rendition of on and on for red bull is the epitome of staying power.

life itself-roger ebert

why is it that girls will read anything and boys need to be seduced into reading at all? one of the tidbits of information that has stayed with me from the toronto public library‘s last tutor training session is that boys will not read unless they witness (that’s see with their eyes) an older male figure (that they respect) in their lives reading. this detail kept coming up as roger ebert lovingly describes his father as reader. a letter that i received from the lady reverend today (which also served as a reminder that i did send her a band-aid with jesus’ likeness on it-a reminder that i should probably try to rein it in, sometimes) asking me, “what is it, dear girl, that you do for a living?” also calls into question the things we do for living, and the things we do for life. this being the beginning of 2012′s black history month, i’d like to link everything together by shouting out alfie roberts, a man invaluable to montreal’s black community. though i never met the man in person, i began to get to know him through his books. my roommate and creator of baobab magazine, shortly before her departure from the city, decided to take on the task of attempting to archive the man’s books in hopes of one day turning his personal collection into a lending library. this was a man who made a conscious choice to stay “the people”, but he lived unabashedly in his books, scribbling in margins in many a rare edition, and this most recent turn of my life to devour books like there is no tomorrow (there might not be) is less a project and more of a lifestyle.

“What’s sad about not eating is the experience, whether at a family reunion or at midnight by yourself in a greasy spoon under the L tracks. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. Unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments, and memories I miss. I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to start reciting poetry on a moment’s notice. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it’s sad. Maybe that’s why writing has become so important to me. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now.” (382-3)

“Our friendship has endured despite the inescapable fact that I don’t care very much about horse racing and Bill doesn’t seem to go to many movies. Our bond is reading, and our subject is often not far removed from the Meaning of it All. We are puzzled that we are now nearly seventy. How did that happen? Our conversations all take place in the present tense. We are always meeting for the first time. When you’re young you don’t realize that at every age you are always in the present, and in that sense no older; when I look at Bill I see the same man I met in Illinois. He’s one of the lucky ones whose lifelong work didn’t change him but only confirmed the person he was all along.” (303)

mister ebert‘s, too. game recognize game, sir.

the trouble with being born-e.m.cioran

i’m pretty sure this came out of a list of suggested reading by the 25 under 40 list that came out in the fall. i don’t remember the original source, but i saw it on the tweeter, and junot diaz‘s pick was octavia butler’s dawn (yep-i do see it in my peripheral vision on the top of a giant pile of the library’s fiction). the author was born in rumania, and moved to france as a young adult (yes, i count that as 26) and lived there until he didn’t live any more. this of course, highlights my insecurity about reading works in translation, but i’m always slightly reassured when i find out that the translator and author have a long relationship (phew). i will say this, though-i love reading english works by non-english speakers, because of all the times i must consult a dictionary. it just goes to show how much we take for granted of the languages that we are born into. it’s probably part of the reason that i’ve gravitated towards so much “modern” literature in my adult life, because i’m interested in reading work in the original language that it was written in.

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.” (27)

“What makes bad poets worse is that they read only poets (just as bad philosophers read only philosophers), whereas they would benefit much more from a book of botany or geology. We are enriched only by frequently disciplines remote from our own. This is true, of course, only for realms where the ego is rampant.” (74)

“A book is a postponed suicide.” (99)

“He who hates himself is not humble.” (26)

yeaaaaaa.

look me in the eye-john elder robison

augusten burroughs is a lie. ok cool, sunday sensationalism aside-it’s an assumed name. this book is the story of his big brother and his life with asperger’s. i’m not quite sure how this one got onto my list, either, but it might have been the scientific american podcast, or something podcast-related, one of the libraries’ or npr books….however it happened, i’m glad. dood was kind of the devil, right? i’m not sure if it’s a teenage thing, or a social outcast thing, but some of the pranks that he came up with were really elaborate and mean. but that’s what makes for good reading. here’s what he tells his kid about santa claus:

“Because Santa skims some of the toys he’s supposed to give away, selling them on the black market in Russia and Mongolia, places where they don’t have Christmas. Toymakers donate stuff to Santa on the condition that he gives them all away, and he’s not supposed to sell toys. But he’s got a drinking problem and he can’t help himself.” (230)

i mean, damn. my recent analogy that santa is the template of deadbeat dads everywhere-daddy just comes around one night of the year to drop off a gift, and you don’t even see him because he has to jet in the night to give presents to all his other children that he doesn’t see either…is at least a little sympathetic to the man who probably has diabetes due to the fact that he just binges on cookies, not to mention the carbon footprint he leaves…but the above is on some next level shit.