2008.12.13
Reading of the Moment
A long time ago I...well, kind of stole, but technically it's back in her brownstone... a book from my Aunt, Word of Mouth: 150 Short-Short Stories by 90 Women Writers. In trying to locate the source and phrasing of a quote (for this musing on Mario's "Princess 'Peach' Toadstool's hair and her role as object of sexual pursuit) I reread the collection once again.
The quote I was thinking of comes from the opening paragraph of "Animal Instinct" by Camille Norton:
She's more or less the blonde version of the French cousin, sparrow small, bronzed, all muscle and heart. There are, you say, two versions of the French cousin. You are the dark, lean kind, the sort that is mistaken for a boy, the sort that wears striped pullovers and sunglasses while running along wharves in Truffaunt films. You're the type who's always stealing something, she's the type who's always stolen or stolen upon. This is because she bleaches the crown of her hair, the animal sign for femininity.Another great quote from the same work:
In graduate school, I learned that it is a simple thing to take coffee with people one neither likes nor trusts.
Another phrase forever stuck in my head is from "Soaring" by Marilyn Krysl, where a kind of post-hippy mom is defending her kids' education in both Non-Violent Protest and Karate:
"The human being is a very complex organism. They can handle contradiction."(Also the kids are named "Sky" and "Ocean", and "Sky" is still near the top of my names-I-like-for-kids list.)
In "File 13" Jocelyn Riley plots her revenge on a office jerk who has been sexually harassing her:
Less than a year from now, a message will come up on Oscar's screen first, and then on everyone else's screens, that will say "Leslie was here." The dates of my employment will be right there before my name, like the dates on a tombstone.I, you know, try to take it easy on the sexual harassment, but some days when the whole programming or PC configuration thing isn't going well, I feel just like the guy in that cartoon.
Inside the box will be a drawing of a man, his arms draped around a computer monitor, his head resting on its top. He'll look down at the computer, not as though it were alive but as though he were afraid of it, "Duh," he will say in a little cartoon balloon, "I wonder why I can't make her do what I want." The computer blows off smoke.
Finally Amber Coverdale Sumrall's "Siesta" has a lovely reminder from the young narrator's grandmother:
"That's why we're born, honeygirl. To learn how to love each other. And it takes all the time we've got. Some folks never get the hang of it."In retrospect, I'm amazed to recognize how influential this book was on me, how much of my writing it influenced, how many concepts I (consciously or not) lift and massaged into my own short writing. Now I'm wondering if it doesn't strongly color my editorship of the Blender of Love, that I'm ok with poetry but what I'm really after is prose in this taut and emotionally loaded style.
"The Fall".... Princess Bride meets The English Patient, or maybe Pan's Labyrinth meets Wizard of Oz... visually lush, though, like The Cell
Is there a word for "writing-only dyslexia"? I need to chill and stop scouring my typos for signs of incipient mental degradation.
I can even debug the typos of my brain:"I amazed" I wrote. Of course, because with "amazed" you already have the m-sound, so why type it?
realized why I stopped at a combo long john silvers/ taco bell; faintest hope that someday USA can do fish fastfood like Nordsea in Germany