the year of yes-maria dahvana headley

her: “so you’re single? because i got the ‘unavailable’ vibe from you”

me: (thinking for a minute) “is it the books?”

this exchange happened at a wedding celebration at which my date(s) were a shirley temple and the book i love yous are for white people (bigups lac su).

“It was time for a new policy. I decided, in that moment, to do with men as I’d done with books. Read them all.

In seventh grade, I’d started in the A section of the library, and by the end of high school, I’d made it to N, checking out twenty books at a time. If only life were like the library! My mother had no idea the kind of guys I’d met between the stacks. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Allen Ginsberg. John Irving. Franz Kafka. D.H. Lawrence. Some hadn’t even been guys. Marguerite Duras. Anais Nin. Toni Morisson. Between A and N, there was not only a lot of great writing, there was a lot of hot literary sex. Granted, I’d allowed myself, by F, the luxury of judging books solely on their covers, and I’d been at once daunted by, and desirous of, James Joyce. My gaze had wandered to the Rs. The Satanic Verses seemed an easy read in comparison with Finnegans Wake. What could be more enticing to a rebellious teenage girl than a fatwa? Once I was in the Rs anyway, I’d taken a foray into the smutty paradise of Tom Robbins, with whom I’d fallen rather speedily out of love. He had far too many sex scenes involving things that did not sound pleasurable to me. Goat horns. Engagement rings lost in cavernous vaginas. I’d fled Robbins for Ulysses, where the proclivities of Molly Bloom had scared me even more.

Regardless of the overall quality, I had, with my reading policy, found plenty of things I’d liked. I’d found authors I would never have given a second glance, predisposed as I’d initially been toward pretty covers and Piers Anthony. Surely, I reasoned, it’d be the same with guys. If I just went out with all of them, there’d have to be some in there that I’d want to read again. See again. Either.” (16-17)

this was the passage from the book that made me think of the passage of life. i failed as an innernet dater, my new plan is to immerse myself in exercise-related activities at the gym i just joined (mostly because of the deaf bulldog that was hanging around when i filled out my paperwork). this was another impulse grab that day i was feeling sorry for myself after the confusing date, but it led me to a few laughs and the ability to tweetback @quoterobot with the answer of “dorothy parker”. speaking of tweetbacks-shouts to miz dionne farris for checking my last post.

“That hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe the reason weirdos wanted me was that even when I was trying to look normal, they recognized one of their own.” (96)

“Maybe love was like Godot. You spent the whole play talking about it, but it never actually made it onstage. You waited anyway. Of course you did.” (46)

 forever ever. RIP MCA. i’m commemorating by watching gunning for that #1 spot featuring raptor (for now) jerryd bayliss.

for truth if not love-dionne farris

r&b singer from my hometown (circa 2008): “yea, it’s really sad that she never released a second album”

me: “is that what you actually think, or did you also read that in VIBE magazine last week (they were loving ‘hopeless’ in 20 questions)?”

“fuck what ya heard, it’s how you deliver the word”

unlike shadi, i’m nothing but great-full for the tweeter this morning. first off-i learned that chris cleave has a new novel, and promptly jumped in the line to hold it from tpl. he’s coming to talk with vincent lam for luminaTO (and nomadic is also performing for the festival whose mandate i’m still understanding).  the countdown is at about 2hrs until i see vincent lam in the red chair, and two days until i see augusten borroughs at harbourfront-holy authors, batman. second, someone tweeted a song from this beauty-full second album by dionne farris that i didn’t know about. so take that to the britney beatboxer that also once played his song with the chorus and melody line “she said…stay with me tonight”. yea, it was dope and all, but he didn’t expect me to know that the pharcyde had already done it on labcab. but back to the lady that had me at wild seed-let’s time travel back to 1996 a minute-i was on a school trip to ashland, oregon and dipped into a used cd store where i purchased the first copy of VIBE that i’d ever seen (coolio, quincy, babyface and stevie on the cover) and dionne farris‘s wild seed, wild flower album. ‘i know’ got a lot of radio play, but i mostly sat on the album until my second year of university (sept 2008, so right after i met the aforementioned singer) when it became the album that i would bump when it was time to do my heavy thinking-so many of my papers (and way too many about spike lee’s bamboozled) were penned to that. so the way i see it-dionne farris deserves partial credit for the degree that i barely earned (scholastically, anyway). more importantly, she has fueled my creative process, and the fact that i named one of my most favorite pieces “thought for food” is a direct indirect homage to her. i’m a firm believer that we find the music that we do exactly when we need it, and this morning was no exception. thank you, miz farris for always being exactly on time. oh-and the david alan grier skit still makes me laugh-every single time.

how not to date-judy mcguire

“Paralyzed by fear is a crappy way to go through life and not much fun to date either.” (33)

“You know what I said earlier that stupid was contagious? That was a lie. Depression really is, though. Seriously. Just try to remain chipper hanging out with a partner who not only sees the glass as half empty, but suspects that the liquid bit is filled with a toxic concoction.

And while yes, depression is a serious condition, it is also very treatable. The people I’ve talking about here aren’t willing and/or interested in helping themselves. And these types always want to bring you along for the ride. That whole ‘misery loves company’ myth-not such a myth.” (68)

“The most insidious thing about these types is that they possess the ability to come off as normal, attractive daters, which is how they lure unsuspecting victims like you or I into going out with them in the first place. But scratch lightly at their shallow veneer, and you’ll find a ticking time bomb of misery.” (143)

this one was an impulse grab when i was scanning the shelves at annette street-they’re one of the branches that files non-fiction films in the sections that correspond to their book counterparts (gerrard is another one). i think i also grabbed dark days on this trip, but more about that in another post. it was good for a laugh as i consider my own deficiencies when it comes to personal relationships (i’m great at having acquaintances-i think this is part of the superficial draw of retail) and the changes that i’ve been experiencing in my creative process by going the route of physical arts. actually, fuck it-i picked up this book because i went on a what i thought was a great date, only to have that dismantled for the week following it, and was just completely confused by the whole process and questioning whether i’ve ever been able to read anyone at all. then chuck klosterman (again, more on that in another post) comes along with his whole argument that ralph nader has never had a relationship because he’s too literal suddenly starts to ring a little too true for me. but hey-it’s summer in toronto and i was able to trade woes last night after work over pad thai eaten on the corner with my youngest co-worker last night in leopard print shorts. i’m also listening to q‘s coverage on the south african spear controversy and not changing the channel, so i’m either developing a tolerance for gian (russell peters’ pronounciation) or i know that i can listen/not listen to him enough to actually update my blog. as a bookend, this is as good of a place as any to shoutout george for teaching me about red letter christians, when tony campolo was in his chair, and the tie-in that took a year to james frey, who employed the technique in his stunning interpretation of the rapture. as the stencil on a wall outside the 519 reads, “fear is a disease.”

les tribulations d’une cassiere-anna sam

“Qui a dit que votre metier de caissiere etait monotone? Ce serait oublier trop vite les clients. Grace a eux, les jours se suivront mais ne se ressembleront pas. Ils ne cesseront jamais de vous surprendre.” (139)

shouts to my manager for bringing the english translation into my life, but the moral of the story is that the language of origin is always better.  bigups to anna sam (1979!) but i think she could’ve hired a much better translator. my apologies for quoting sans accent, that’s the marker of my technology limit at the moment. i’m really glad that i haven’t had to see the caesar salad bitch in person for the past few weeks. may my good luck continue…

“Client(qui cherche en bout de caisse des sacs pour ranger ses tomates deja emballees, sa salade deja emballee et ses pommes deja emballees)

Z’avez pas de sac?” (17)

and, point.

the false friend-myla goldberg

“By Huck’s time, Celia had come to accept that passion was an inborn trait like perfect pitch or a photographic memory, easy to admire and impossible to cultivate.” (168)

now that i’ve read a second book (bee season was the first) by myla goldberg, i’m committing to calling her style “haunting”. melancholy is another adjective that works. i think this book explores our first relationships (with our parents, with our friends-and specifically for women, with our little girlfriends) and how we carry over what we learn (to our benefit or detriment) to our partnerships as we get older. i’m on team (john) waters that subscribes to the reality that if we’re over thirty and still blaming our parents for fucking us up, we really need to move on. but i’m glad for this meditation on how just how intense relationships between children (whether lateral or horizontal) are, and just how long feelings can linger.

 

“A voice like that had logged Celia’s late arrivals but she couldn’t tell if this was the same one. In high school she’d never bothered to discern individuals among ambient personnel over thirty.” (59)

“What struck Celia most about young children was the intensity of their passions, life too new to be modulated, perspective a possession not yet acquired. At that age friendship was a continuous present based on proximity and the shared fact of being alive. Heartbreak and betrayal were commonplace, authentic and ardent each time, forgotten within moments.” (79)

“Celia was seduced by the simplicity of her relationship to her meal. It was too much food, really, a plate filled according to a mother’s concern and not a daughter’s appetite.” (136)

“A friendship like hers and Djuna’s could only ever be a child’s possession. Only a child could withstand its stranglehold.” (142)

this metrotextual fortnight

“i’m telling you something that my mother never told me”

i remember a story from the radiolab podcast about isolation about a guy who needed some crazy surgery and his family couldn’t or wouldn’t come through, so his bowling league (of mostly strangers) chipped in and covered his costs. i am great-full to julian for keeping me company for that hour at the 519 on tuesday and reminding me that participation and engagement is always more fulfilling than hiding in my house watching movies like a fiend. i’ve encountered some hurdles in my personal circle as of late, and have 99% decided to join the gym in my neighborhood. it’s always nice to see the results of contributing to a community for the sake of being kind, not waiting for some reward beyond the priceless experience of being present-holy west coast hippie of me, batman. i also have to send a shoutout to del and shadi for holding witness with me last week at the diaspora dialogues launch of the journal of which nobody knows the acronym (if it’s even one) to. the quote came from one of the ladies at streetknit who observed me knitting myself in a circle and showed me a simple adjustment to keep my balls (of yarn) in check. the countdown is on for the musical, and rehearsals and dance class are kind of kicking my old ass in conjunction with my work schedule shift, but i think we’re coming out on top. my mission is to keep the drama for the stage and not get too invested in having friends or enemies at work. i sign off this post in complete and utter love with the supreme leader admiral-general aladeen.

wait-does this mean that he’s a five percenter?

foreskin’s lament-shalom auslander

“that sounds like a romance”

that was an actual response from a male co-worker when he saw what i was reading. i didn’t really have anything for that. but then, i didn’t really think we were a city that had paparazzi for mark ruffalo, either. especially outside of the cbc. i stand corrected. i was charmed by shalom auslander’s voice and words via podcast-namely the philly free library‘s, this american life, and the moth. much to my absolute pleasure, his voice is just as amazing when it reads from one’s own head. the delay on which this blog is operating is reminding me that i’m still waiting for beware of god-c’mon library. i laughed very hard at many times during this logical meditation on the existence of a benevolent god and how humans (specifically those in our families) fuck up their actions based on this possibility that should bring us closer together, and not drive stakes through our hearts.

“With their bright red and yellow wrappers, Slim Jims seemed more like candy than a forbidden food. Had God even seen these things? How could He get so worked up about candy? He was going to torture a kid because of candy? It wasn’t as if I’d ordered a hot dog. I wasn’t completely in this world, and hoped if I started at the shallow end, with a Slim Jim, He might just vaguely dislike me, or generally prefer the company of others.” (80-1)

“I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and shoved as much of the Slim Jim into my mouth as I could, coiling it up inside my mouth like a pig-flavored garden hose, forcing the last few reddish brown inches with the tips of my impure, trembling fingers as I tried in vain to squeeze my lips shut.” (84)

“–It’s one lousy pepperoni. You’re going to ‘loathe me in this world and torture me in the next’ over a fucking pepperoni? This is why nobody likes You.” (160)

and, point.

beyond the down low-keith boykin

“And I could never forget the time when I marched with Mrs. King as an honorary grand marshal in the annual King Day Parade. But the most profound image in my mind was the sight of a small band of KKK leaders marching through the streets of downtown Atlanta in 1989 under the protection of black police officers who kept them separated from hundreds of counter demonstrators. That was the paradox of Atlanta. Surrounded by some of the most conservative places in the south, the Atlanta metropolitan area was an oasis of culture and diversity where you could forgive but you could never forget.” (148)

“I realized that was the disconnect in my message. I was providing facts and figures and information, but some of the people affected by the down low wanted emotion instead. I was explaining why blame was a counterproductive emotion that would not change reality, but that explanation missed the point for some listeners. Their reality was that they needed someone to blame. They had been lied to and cheated on, and they needed someone to be responsible. They needed a villain.” (150)

and that’s the most important thing this book achieves-it sets folks’ minds up to be changed, or at least be complicated a little bit between black and white (the binaries, not the Absolute Categories of Race that seem to govern the united$tatesofamerica). it’s also the reason i’m not down with pride (though i would like to see asses in chairs when we debut our one-night-only drag musical during pride this year-june 27th at buddies in badtimes theatre) in principle, because it’s all fine and good to prance during one socially-sanctioned week a year, but what about the everyday? to me, keith boykin is a hero every day, getting his audrelorde on. i was listening to a recent podcast of chicago’s 89.5 the barbershop show about trayvon, and there was a caller who was trying to draw attention to the institutional racism of the police, etc. and the hosts really weren’t having it. could that be because it’s more tangible to vilify that one cop versus imagining the entire prison industrial complex dismantled? well, someone go tell angela davis that’s impossible. i dare you.

the secret life of plants-peter tompkins and christopher bird

a former roomate’s father once asked me if i was worried about becoming too smart and therefore, miserable. it’s a slippery slope, really. as i was reading this, i saw a cat in the subway rocking a full camo outfit. it could’ve been his own, first issue, but probably-not. so i was thinking about the fibre memory and the bodies that might have been on that, the blood that may have splashed it, but why stop at soldier’s clothes? why not consider the entire vintage industry-where do the clothes come from? what about the fabrics and fibres and sweatshops and machinery and dyes? (sigh). then there’s muscle memory and the similarities between humans, animals, and plants. it takes a lot to fluster me, but the descriptions of plant sex actually made me blush-for reals.

“To their mutual surprise, the plant came to life, the pen recorder oscillating wildly on the chart. This led to speculation that talking of sex could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy such as the ‘orgone’ discovered and described by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and that the ancient fertility rites in which humans had sexual intercourse in freshly seeded fields might indeed have stimulated plants to grow.” (29)

“The peanut butter which Carver went to such pains to produce is now mostly being made from rancid peanuts, says Nichols, since the food chemists have learned to clean it up, deodorize it and decolor it so that it can be sold to unsuspecting mothers. By one means or another and with hundreds of toxic additives to choose from, chemists can fix food that is very difficult for the citizen to tell that the food is going or has already gone bad.” (250)

“But there is still hope if we get back on track, says Nichols, if we begin to cleanse the poisons from every link of the food chain, so as to restore the country to proper nutrition and avoid the long decline that blighted North America and the Near East. To do so, and save the nation from metabolic disaster, says Nichols, we must change from an economy of exploitation to one of conservation. In the long run the country must give up chemical fertilizers and gradually revive the soil organically. Organic fertilizer, and at no greater cost. Deposits of raw rock phosphate and potash with marine trace minerals and other deposits are readily available.
A great advantage of organic rock fertilizers is that after a few years of application they are no longer needed. Whereas the chemical farmer is obliged to put on more and more fertilizer each year, the organic farmer can put on less and less. Eventually the organic farmer will make more money, as it will cost him less to operate.” (256)

and this brings us back to work-tomorrow.

the shark dialogues-kiana davenport

never say you’ll never steer someone wrong. but know that this is subjective-when dream hampton speaks, i usually listen. i put this on my list when she tweeted about it in the fall (i think), and it was an absolute pleasure to read this family history at a moment when i was considering my motivations around honouring tradition while questioning inheritance for my character development for the musical. during this time, i saw the whistleblower and was inspired to contact an old women studies’ prof who is involved in the fight against global trafficking of humans, and we had a great email exchange about the pros and cons of that movie. i’m on hold for the book at the library (yes, i’ve re-activated my holds list) and the very first reading i ever did for her class was one complicating the idea of welcoming tourists and outsiders (like dole) in hawaii, which brings us back to this book; a leitmotif of which is tongues in cheeks, and quite a few teeth.

“Can’t even talk to ‘feminist’ professors…the ones who see local women as ‘minority women,’ abstracts. Never ask us about our rage. How we manage to get through the day without killing. Where do we live, how do we eat? And breathe? Come on home, bitch. I will show you things. I begin to cultivate a who-can-I-knock-down-look. I begin to understand oppression….” (194)

“We shared a life, a magnificent tapestry made up of scraps. When you’re only allowed the scraps, life burns deep into your soul, every word, every curve of light you see, is a sacrament. He was my life. The father of your mothers. I broke all the laws, risked everything, health, prison, dogging submarine torpedoes going to him in the war. He was my destination. He is still my destination. Where I go each month…” (331)