everything asian-sung j. woo

“You do this with every guy you meet. You give them what they don’t deserve, and that’s why they hurt you.” (272)

today’s count: 48 checked out 1 available for pickup 9 outstanding holds

40 renewed, and i’m pretty sure i can put a hurtin’ on this remainder by feb 17th, which is my next big due date. this one was tricky-i thought it was a young adult novel, but now that i’ve read it, i’m not so sure.

“What Mrs. Kim didn’t realize yet was how little she actually needed to know to survive in this country. Jhee remembered when she first arrived, the fear and hopelessness that tugged her at every sign she couldn’t read, every conversation she failed to understand. But then it turned out that words on signs were often accompanied by descriptive pictures (an x through a lit cigarette) or revealing colors (green for yes, red for no), and there weren’t many phrases you needed to know to sell handbags to customers.” (123)

that was for a particular child that i’ve struggled with for the past couple of weeks, the one that keeps developing mysterious illnesses that arise when she has to read-headache, seasickness (!), and a sore throat respectively. this morning it dawned on me that she frustrates me so because she reminds me of having to be around my father-go figure.

real sofistikashun-tony hoagland

“i studied at her feet without even meeting her.” -john forte on angela davis

“sometimes i feel like there’s a lot of rebuilding in order and in order and a lot of that is going to come from just the old fashioned principle of reading books. and more importantly, we have to write and document our history right now.” -badu

by the end of the night, i’ll be two books closer to reading through my spring collection. bigups to the folks who showed up to dance this week-it was really empowering to be part of living in your tall spaces as we sashayed during the runway segment. poets-i see you.

“All young poets are, to some extent, victims of fashion because young artists are by necessity imitators. To imitate is how one learns craft, and for young poets especially, art of the present moment exerts the greatest magnetism. Some are lucky to be born into an era whose style is coincidentally well suited to their talent and nature. Others are born into the wrong era, an artistic environment that clashes with their natural instincts.” (189)

“Passion is the greatest gift a poet can have, and nobody is mildly obsessed.” (82)

“Self-consciousness often provokes an over exertion of cleverness. But intelligence, when used well in a poem, never makes the reader feel less smart than the writer, or left behind. Rather, it gives the reader the exhilarating pleasure of being smart in concert with the speaker.
The goal of the healthy artist is not to be crippled by the weight of literacy, nor intimidated into a kind of aesthetic conservatism, nor to be engorged with fancy self-protective mannerisms, but to be selectively informed and empowered by knowledge. This development of sensibility could be called the acquisition and use of taste.” (67)

exactly. i should never require a legend to decipher your poetry if i’ve spent every day for 8 months. just sayin’.

last words-george carlin with tony hendra

stand-up comedians are a special breed of storyteller. i appreciate that this one goes deeper than the other books that read like scripts to the man’s act, and i don’t think that it’s an accident that he waited until the very end to reveal what happened in the gutters (thanks, comic book guy). the co-writer was instrumental in creating the moth. coincidence? never.

here’s what he said best about “the craft”:

“They had a common bond that didn’t include or interest me. A competitiveness that I was very uncomfortable with. I wasn’t a compulsive entertainer. I could always think on my feet, but I never was quick around the kind of people who dominate a table. I was a product of ideas, not ad-libs. Later I came to realize the curiousness of choosing to be, and feeling, apart from people at the same time dying to be accepted. Longing to be accepted, to be asked in. But on my terms.” (108)

this is exactly why i don’t “slam”.

“But when you’re in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you’re guiding their whole being for the moment. No one is ever more herself or himself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow. So for that moment, that tiny moment, it has a chance to grow. So for that moment, that tiny moment, I own them. That’s one of the things-maybe the most important-I seek by following this path: to have that power. To be able to say: stop in your tracks and consider this!
At the same time, I’ve had to surrender myself to that moment, and it’s a communion. A genuine, momentary communion. Which they wouldn’t have experienced without me. And I wouldn’t have experienced without them.” (250)

this is exactly why i work. point final.

the wealth cure-hill harper

rich dad, poor dad-this is not. obama‘s law school homie frames his holistic health/wealth book in an all-encompassing (personal and political history, experiential wisdom, and cold hard money facts) way without being preachy. the book reads well and i managed to just finish it just in time to pick up my remaining hold (i could’ve done it this morning, but i’m keeping the black power mixtape because vincia needs to see it). the library staff are starting to taunt me now, which is kind of amazing, like when the old ladies trash talk me whilst we knit for the homeless. the fact that the quotes come from vastly diverse sources-i’m not gonna lie, he had me from jump as he opened with a quote from salt-a global history, a book that i obviously enjoyed immensely. here’s a line that simultaneously sums it up and gives away nothing:

“She would much rather send money on organic kale than a bracelet.” (109)

the corner-david simon and edward burns

i am currently watching the black power mixtape 1967-1975, which is worth it just for the footage of stokley carmichael interviewing his mom, and our nation’s mama’s boy strombo’s haiti special. i have to shout out spike lee‘s works on katrina, and as i set up this book that eventually brought us to the wire, i have to pause for minute for the parallels. toronto and its library are the reason that i’m here (current stats: checked out-50, available for pickup-3, outstanding holds-10) and i crumble under the pressure a bit today and have made the decision not to beat a dead horse. unlike the (few) books that i’ve had to fire in the first 30 pages (i read 50 pages in half an hour, i’m pretty sure how i feel after the first 30), i only read up to p368-i guess i ended up lying to that dood at the tranzac on NYE that asked me, “are you going to read it all?” sorry, homie.

“Thirty years after its inception, the drug war in cities such as Baltimore has become an absurdist nightmare, a statistical charade with no other purpose than to placate a public that wants drug trafficking attacked and vanquished-but not, of course, at the price it would actually cost to accomplish such an incredible feat. In Maryland such cognitive dissonance translates to a state prison system that can manage a total of just over 20,000 prison beds for prisoners convicted of every act against the criminal code in Baltimore and twenty-three other counties. Yet in Baltimore alone there are between 15,000 and 20,000 arrests each year for drug violations, and in all of Maryland’s jurisdictions, more than 35,000 are charged every year with drug sales or possession.
Build more prisons, you say? How many more? Five? Ten? Keep in mind that Maryland is no slacker when it comes to locking people up; the state ranks tenth nationally in its rate of incarceration. You could bankrupt the state government by doubling the existing prison space and still there wouldn’t be enough space to house the estimated 50,000 heroin and cocaine users in Baltimore, not to mention the rest of Maryland. And that leaves no room for those priority cases who just happen to be convicted of murder or rape or armed robbery. Moreover, the construction of a prison is only the preamble; what inevitably follows is the financial drain of staffing the place, of feeding and clothing the prisoners, of maintaining security standards, of running a medical program that the U.S. Supreme Court says must correspond to outside community standards for health care. Soon enough, you’re spending more to lock a man down that it would cost to enroll him at Harvard.” (161)

the child that books built-francis spufford

“Reading catatonically wasn’t something I chose to do, it just happened, and if it could be my funny characteristic in the family, a trademark oddity my parents were affectionate toward, that was great. Though I never framed the thought on the surface of my mind, stopping my ears with fiction was non-negotiable. There were things to block out.” (2)

“I need fiction. I’m an addict. This is not a figure of speech. I don’t quite read a novel a day, but I certainly read some of a novel every day, and usually some of several. There is always a heap of opened paperbacks facedown near the bed, always something current on the kitchen table to reach for over coffee when I wake up. Colonies of prose have formed in the bathroom and in the dimness of the upstairs landing, so that I don’t go without texts even in the leftover spaces of the house where I spend least time. When I’m tired and therefore indecisive, last thing at night, it can take half an hour to choose the book I am going to have with me while I brush my teeth. It always matters which book I pick up. I can be happy with an essay or a history if it interlaces like a narrative, if its author uses fact or impression to make a storylike sense, but fiction is king, fiction is the true stuff, compared to which nonfiction is a shadow, sometimes appealing for its shadiness and halfway status; only the endless multiplicity of fiction is a problem, in a life where reading time is still limited no matter how many commitments of work or friendship I am willing to ditch in favor of the pages.” (5)

(sigh). yes. speak, reader.

“…the reward is more than an inert item of knowledge. The book becomes part of the history of our self-understanding. The stories that mean most to us join the process by which we come to be securely our own. Literacy allows access to a huge force for development. When an adult in a remote village rejoices that ABC is mastered, it isn’t just because books bring the world to them; books bring them, in new ways, to themselves.” (9)

“I’d like words to be magic; or magnetic, attracting the events they name. Perhaps I saw the chance of that when we found Piglet in the snow.” (62)

sometimes, the medium is the massage.

unincorporated poems in the last honda dynasty-tony hoagland

suffering from a light amnesia
in the way that skim milk can barely
remember the cow

(47) a snippet of the story of white people

flight-sherman alexie

sherman alexie‘s work is like nature’s candy (persimmons, pomelos, honeycrisp apples)-so quick and tasty. this one is all about revenge and betrayal-and who provokes whom? because i’ve been chewed out by a senior for dog-earring “the public books” and have since changed my ways, i feel that i can make the public announcement that underlining (even in pencil) in library books is extremely poor form. bigups to pam mountain at my home branch for not only making a request to order the classroom and the cell by mumia and marc lamont hill, but also to put it on my holds list so that i will probably be the first person in the city to read that copy, and follow up with a phone call. talk about going the extra mile.

“Jesus, I’m pathetic. I make it sound like I’m just a television addict. But I’m also addicted to books. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.
But there are no books in this bathroom or in my bedroom, and I’ve already read the books in my backpack a hundred times each. So I’m living a new life without new books.
I bet you a million dollars there are less than five books in this whole house. What kind of life can you have in a house without books?” (12-13)

werd. if you don’t know john waters’ thoughts about loving non-book lovers, you should look it up.

home is where the books are, in my case-45 checked out, 8 available for pickup, and now, 11 outstanding holds. lucky=this girl.

brain droppings-george carlin

i’m noticing some repeating bits here, but that’s to be expected from a comedian. i’ve also noticed all the things that adam corolla, and for that matter, jerry seinfeld “borrowed” from the man. on that note-jiminy glick is the shit. so is martin short in damages. the more i read carlin, the more crochety i get, i’m just sayin’. this one’s for all the middle-aged ladies that come whining to my unsympathetic face about how nobody has the good larabars. ken muthafuckin’ lee:

“Then we have the eating disorders. Is it really a surprise that with all our pathological feeding habits Americans have eating disorders? Who makes worse dietary decisions? Who wastes more food?….And all of this conspicuous, deliberate waste takes place in the midst of global malnutrition and starvation. No wonder fucked-up teenage girls don’t want to eat.
Here’s another wonderful irony: with all our supposed superiority in food production, we provide our people with far higher rates of stroke, heart attack, colon cancer, and other diet diseases than most ‘inferior’ Third-World food economies do. But don’t you worry, those folks are catching up; social pathologies are our biggest export. And so, in a curious way, cancer turns out to be catching, after all.” (255)

this metrotextual week

in a stat line: checkouts=48, items available for pickup=5, outstanding holds=10, times in as many days different librarians at my branch have asked me, “are you sure about this?”=2, placing in the first bill brown’s poetry slam this evening in toronto=bronze, mark anthony neal retweet=1, vessels of public transit that smelled like popeye’s chicken on my last commute home=3 (one of each!), hours spent out of my comfort zone in modern ballet/street dance class=3, best sound=the crisp sounds of the guy next to me enjoying his apple so thoroughly ties a co/poet’s utterance of my very thought-”also, that angry white man voice is just kind of tired, no?”. my gratitude=infinite. (shouts to nehal for ever the heads up-pause). and my pops’ 65th.