Mlle Hazelwood

Vegetarian life: I repurposed my mother and father’s old (deer)...

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:08:42 -0400

Vegetarian life: I repurposed my mother and father’s old (deer) meat grinder and used it to make A Cozy Kitchen’s potato gnocchi with a simple homemade alfredo sauce.

Oh, hey! My grandmother will be here in a week and a half and I am already mentally counting how...

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:57:03 -0400

Oh, hey! My grandmother will be here in a week and a half and I am already mentally counting how many dresses I want her to alter (three, so far) and how much of her time I want to steal in order to learn how to sew (better). This is part of my world domination plan: sewing, cooking, going to the gym. Reading, writing. Being sane.

Mail call

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:46:42 -0400

Mail call

"When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 14:33:02 -0400

“When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet.

You walk differently. In store windows you don’t recognize yourself; you are another woman, some crazy interior display lady in glasses stumbling frantic and preoccupied through the mannequins. In public restrooms you sit dangerously flat against the toilet seat, a strange flesh sundae of despair and exhilaration, murmuring into your bluing thighs: ‘Hello, I’m Charlene. I’m a mistress.’

It is like having a book out from the library.

It is like constantly having a book out from the library.”

- Lorrie Moore, “How to Be an Other Woman” (from Self-Help)

"All of life seems like one degradation after another to me."

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:58:46 -0400

“All of life seems like one degradation after another to me.”

- Alex Dimitrov, interview with Anis Shivani for The Huffington Post

Darling

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:33:42 -0400

structureandstyle:

The days fall out of your pockets one after the other.
Soon you’ll need a new jacket with tougher leather

and seams no one has felt. Soon you’ll bring
the old books into your bed and sleep easy

and alone. It must be December again.
This must be the part of the story where you

refuse to say how the bodies you’ve walked toward
continue walking in you. With heavy black boots

in a calm procession of darling and honey—
they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart.

—Alex Dimitrov

This poem is the last one in Alex Dimitrov’s collection Begging For It. I have a particularly bad habit of reading the last poems in collections first, which is part of why I’m so drawn to this one.

This is a fairly simple poem in the sense that it’s not very long and it’s not too abstract. It’s obviously a love poem, but when you really look at it, it’s much more complex than it seems.

Dimitrov’s entire collection is about sex, love, identity, and the combination of the any or all of those. This poem strikes me because I can sense the intimacy of the knowledge the speaker has. This speaker knows how darling feels. The speaker not only implies that darling has loved quite a few people, but near the end there’s the hint of one night stands or picking up lovers off the street: “With heavy black boots / in a calm procession of darling and honey— / they walk up and down the narrow streets of your heart.” This also implies a sense of loss almost, along with the line “Soon you’ll bring / the old books into your bed and sleep easy / and alone.” This is a melancholy love.

One other thing that sticks out to me is the subtle rhyme in the lines with other, tougher, and leather; seams, bring, and sleep; you and boots; darling, honey, and streets. These aren’t exact rhymes or end rhymes, but they work to keep the reader engaged and moving deeper into the poem.

There are other poems in this collection that are much more complicated, and I hope to tackle one of them eventually, but for now, I really like this brief poem. I get to the end and go back to the beginning because I feel like it takes multiple reads to really get the feel of darling and the speaker’s feelings toward him. It’s a good thing when a poem draws you back to it time and again.

If you want to know a bit more about the collection, check out this interview with Alex Dimitrov in The Huffington Post.

-S

"Pisces: This week you’re going to find yourself wanting to do nothing but talk and tell stories and..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:30:28 -0400

“Pisces: This week you’re going to find yourself wanting to do nothing but talk and tell stories and share everything with everyone, every thought you’ve ever had, everything you’ve ever felt. This week, talking’s going to make you feel lighter, talking will make you feel free. It’s a good week to write weird emails to everyone you’ve ever loved, or to write strange small poems about joy and madness, or to stay up late out on the porch, talking to your friends or your dog or yourself. Sing in the shower. Sing in the car. Listen to Rihanna.”

- the Rumblr

This week. Every week. Talking will make you feel free.

Don’t Swallow the Cap - The National “Everything I...

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:22:37 -0400

Don’t Swallow the Cap - The National

“Everything I love is on the table. Everything I love is out to sea.”

I don’t know. Maybe I just want to think of this as “England,” Part II. But I dig this song and I’m digging this album and this might get me through the summer with more levity than any other album by any other band.

"I definitely think some people are a little bit lost. But when I was abroad in my 20s and all my..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:20:42 -0400

“I definitely think some people are a little bit lost. But when I was abroad in my 20s and all my friends were in the United States — the truth is that we were all exploring and lost in different ways. A large part of that is just being in your 20s. I’m so glad I’m not in my 20s anymore.

(Really?)

Yeah, it gets so much better. Your 30s are so much better. Most people in their 20s are trying to figure out what sort of career they should have, what sort of romantic relationship they should be in, what sort of city or town they belong in. In that sense, living abroad is just a more extreme version of that same search for identity that everyone is going through at that age. Part of the reason I like these expatriate stories is because they become a metaphor for the psychological journeys that all humans take — trying to figure out where you belong.”

- Elliott Holt, interview with NPR

Spot on re: your twenties, the search for your identity, living abroad. No wonder she’s so good when she writes about it in You Are One of Them.

(h/t morerobots)

GPOY

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:46:35 -0400

GPOY

"Somehow, we blew it. We never quite got poetry inside the American school system, and thus, never..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:37:43 -0400

“Somehow, we blew it. We never quite got poetry inside the American school system, and thus, never quite inside the culture. Many brave people have tried, tried for decades, are surely still trying. The most recent watermark of their success was the introduction of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and some e.e. cummings, of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘In a Station of the Metro’ — this last poem ponderously explained, but at least clean and classical, as quick as an inoculation. It isn’t really fair to blame contemporary indifference to poetry on ‘Emperor of Ice-Cream.’ Nor is it fair to blame Wallace Stevens himself, who also left us, after all, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,’ a poem that will continue to electrify and intrigue far more curious young minds than are anesthetized by a bad day of pedagogy on the Ice Cream Poem. Let us blame instead the stuffed shirts who took an hour to explain that poem in their classrooms, who chose it because it would need an explainer; pretentious ponderous ponderosas of professional professors will always be drawn to poems that require a priest.”

- Tony Hoagland, “Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America” (from Harper’s)

I vow never ever to be a pretentious ponderous ponderosa of professional professor who teaches boring poetry. Never again.

N.B. I would argue that this piece argues for exactly what we’re trying—and sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing—to do with Structure and Style.

We at MoJo welcome our new Yumblr overlords.

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:05:22 -0400

motherjones:

A+ gif.

And this is all I currently have to say about the tumblr/yahoo deal: Leave the porn alone. (Though, my god, we are not all porn blogs. Promise.) Leave the staff alone. Fix the dashboard (what is this? JavaScript? it seems like a step backwards! and the green links are ugly!). And hey! Can you lend us a hand with our search feature?

"Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:34:47 -0400

“Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived…she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.”

- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Summer buns are the best buns.

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:17:00 -0400

Summer buns are the best buns.

incidentalcomics: Day Jobs of the Poets

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:39:41 -0400

incidentalcomics:

Day Jobs of the Poets

"There are days when my debt seems to be at the center of my being, a cancer that must be treated..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:33:18 -0400

“There are days when my debt seems to be at the center of my being, a cancer that must be treated with the morphine of excuses and rationales and promises to myself that I’m going to come up with the big score—book advance, screenplay deal, Publisher’s Clearing House prize—and save myself. There are other days when the debt feels like someone else’s cancer, a tragedy outside of myself, a condemned building next door that I try to avoid walking past. I suppose that’s why I’m even able to publicly disclose this information. For me, money has always, truly, been ‘only money,’ a petty concern of the shallower classes, a fatuous substitute for more important things like fresh flowers and ‘meaningful conversations’ in the living room. But the days when I can ignore the whole matter are growing further and further apart…I have other friends who are almost as bad off as I am and who compulsively volunteer for relief work in Third World countries as a way of forgetting that they can’t quite afford to live in the first world.”

- Meghan Daum, “My Misspent Youth”

Epic hair #latergram

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:13:01 -0400

Epic hair #latergram

Hello, my name is #Eliot and I’m an incredibly cute...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:42:18 -0400

Hello, my name is #Eliot and I’m an incredibly cute suburban housecat.

Brave - Sara Bareilles “Say what you wanna say and let the...

Sun, 19 May 2013 02:41:00 -0400

Brave - Sara Bareilles

“Say what you wanna say and let the words fall out.”

Summer Reading

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:58:00 -0400

Maybe I participated in too many summer reading programs, but summer says reading to me. Suggestions? Why yes, I have them.

Classics. Nothing says summer like a Penguin classic, right? Well, this summer I hope to tackle Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Vladmir Nabokov’s Lolita, Don DeLillo’s White Noise (are we calling this a “classic” yet?), James Joyce’s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and maybe reread F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. If I’m really ambitious, I might also hit up Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and Henry James’s The Americans. Past favorites include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Henry James’s novella Washington Square, and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. Oh, and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

Shakespeare. The Bard and I have a date. I’d like to finally read King Lear, because it seems to be referenced in literature almost as much as Hamlet and Othello (maybe more?). Also on my list: As You Like It, which Harold Bloom says is his favorite, for whatever that’s worth, as well as All’s Well That Ends Well. Maybe even Henry IV Part 1, because a very smart University of Cambridge professor told me it was hilarious. And I might finally tackle Stephen Greenblatt’s biography/love letter to Shakespeare, Will in the World. If you haven’t read Twelfth Night, you should read it. It’s probably my favorite for the way Shakespeare handles gender roles. Other favorites include The Comedy of Errors because it is so absurd and The Tempest. And if you haven’t read Bill Bryson’s book Shakespeare: The World as Stage, go read it now.

Big Novels. Summer says free time, right? Free time is the best time to tackle big novels. In the past, I read Charles Dickens novels (might I suggest Our Mutual Friend and Bleak House?—both are excellent and worth the effort), but this summer I might try to finish Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace again. Maybe the thought of cool Russian winters will help me beat the Kentucky heat and sweltering, swelling humidity. If you’re feeling really ambitious, you might read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, the first in the A Song of Fire and Ice series.

Contemporary Fiction/Novels. So many good things are happening right now in fiction! I’d love to read Meg Wollitzer’s The Interestings, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (which just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Jill McCorkle’s Life After Life, and Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook, which is supposedly very much like the movie but with a different ending. I also need to finally read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. Past favorites include Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons, and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (which I cherish more than anything else). Recently, I finished Elliott Holt’s You Are One of Them, which you should pick up when it comes out on May 30, Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane, Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, and Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles. All are excellent and I give them my recommendation without qualification.

Short Story Collections. Right now I’m reading Lorrie Moore’s Self-Help, but if I have time I might read some of her other collections, too, such as Like Life and Birds of America. I read something once that said no one else had quite influenced contemporary short story writers as much as Lorrie Moore. That’s big. I also plan on reading Alice Munro’s Selected Stories, because she’s a master of short stories and I don’t know where else to start. I also have big plans for Aubrey Hirsch’s Why We Never Talk About Sugar after reading an essay of hers at The Rumpus, as well as Junot Diaz’s This is How You Lose Her. If I’m feeling ambitious, I might tackle Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories or Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. My recommendations for excellent short story collections are Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, George Saunders’s new collection, Tenth of December (especially “The Semplica-Girl Diaries”), as well as Pastoralia (especially “Sea Oak”), and Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt.

Young Adult Novels. Remember what it’s like to be a teen…or, well, an adult? Young Adult lit is exploding right now and there are so many good things you should check out at any age. I’m particularly excited about keeping up with I Eat Words’s Sarah Dessen Challenge, and this month the book is The Truth About Forever. I can’t wait to read Rick Yancey’s very hyped The 5th Wave, Sarah Ockler’s Bittersweet, Brenda Yovanoff’s Paper Valentine, Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park (which everyone is talking about), and Gayle Forman’s If I Stay and Just One Day. I can’t say enough about Stephanie Perkins’s Anna and the French Kiss, Lauren Oliver’s Before I Fall, and especially Jandy Nelson’s The Sky is Everywhere. Oh, and don’t forget to read Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts.

Poetry. Summer is the time to break the mold. Read poems. Read Structure and Style. Read a collection or two. I’m planning on finally reading all of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and these collections: Josh Bell’s No Planets Strike, Michael Dickman’s The End of the West, Adrienne Rich’s Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Dorianne Laux’s The Book of Men, Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me, Jan Beatty’s The Switching/Yard, Denise Duhamel’s Blowout, Lucille Clifton’s Blessing the Boats, and Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split. Also Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River, which is this month’s The Rumpus Poetry Book Club pick. And if I’m feeling particularly ambitious, Diane Wakoski’s The Butcher’s Apron, Charles Bukowski’s Love is a Dog from Hell, John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, and Langston Hughes’s Collected Poems. I can’t tell you how much I love Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual, Matthew Dickman’s All-American Poem, Nate Slawson’s Panic Attack, U.S.A., Aaron Smith’s Appetite, Sharon Olds’s Stag’s Leap (which just won the Pulitzer Prize!), Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars (last year’s Pulitzer Prize winner), and—and if the end is as good as the beginning—Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s At the Drive-In Volcano. Oh, and! Adrienne Rich’s The Dream of a Common Language is the most beautiful collection of poems and so very feminist and so very worth it. Just read it.

Plays. Plays are short and dynamic and what better time to read a few than in the summer? I’ve been meaning to read Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for a while. I might also tackle Christopher Durang’s 27 Short Plays, which features the excellent “‘dentity Crisis.” And maybe, finally, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead—but I might have to reread Hamlet first. Might I also recommend Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Marsha Norman’s heartbreaking ‘Night, Mother, and Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary for its play on words? Don’t overlook Sam Shepard and Neil Simon, either.

Essay Collections. Where do I even start? If you haven’t been reading essays, you’re missing out on some of the most beautiful, lyrical prose you can imagine—and a lot of the time essayists are doing the most experimental stuff out there. I’d like to finally read Adam Gopnik’s essays on New York, Through the Children’s Gate, Brian Doyle’s The Wet Engine (which contains the best, most beautiful essay I’ve ever read, “Joyas Volardores”), Nora Ephron’s Crazy Salad & Scribble Scribble, Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, David Sedaris’s new collection of travel essays, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, as well as Naked, Harry Crews’s Florida Frenzy, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous collection, Both Flesh and Not, and Julie Marie Wade’s Small Fires. I also need to finish Nick Hornby’s Songbook, Phillip Lopate’s Getting Personal, Brenda Miller’s Blessing of the Animals, and George Orwell’s Shooting the Elephant and Other Essays. And I don’t know how to categorize this, but David Shields’s Reality Hunger is a must read. If you haven’t read Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album, you should start them and hold on tight. Nobody talks about California or the 1960s and 1970s or youth, or, well, life better. Also think about reading Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, a collection of essays he wrote while living in Paris and working for the New Yorker. I highly recommend David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Myself (in particular the title essay), John Jeremiah Sullivan’s wildly uneven but sometimes excellent Pulphead, Atul Gawande’s Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, George Saunders’s The Braindead Megaphone, and Vivian Gornick’s Approaching Eye Level, which first taught me how to be a feminist. Oh, and don’t forget to read Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of essays/advice columns she wrote anonymously as Sugar on The Rumpus. Also read Brian Oliu’s So You Know It’s Me, a collection of Missed Connection lyric essays he actually posted on Craigslist.

Memoirs. I’ll just say it: sometimes I hate them and sometimes I love them so much more than anything on earth. When they’re well written, memoirs are amazing. I want to reread Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which is the most beautiful thing I’ve read in a long, long time. I also want to read Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. I also need to finish Karen McElmurray’s Surrendered Child, which breaks my heart a little. And for fun, I might read Jen Lancaster’s Jeneration X. Other titles for the ambitious: Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Sue William Silverman’s Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia. If you’re looking for recommendations, can I point you back to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild? Also, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is a memoir about her life in Iran during the revolution, but it’s also an education in books. I love Henry James more fiercely because of Azar Nafisi. Also check out Lauren Slater’s Lying (which is a trip and a half; it’s called a “metaphorical memoir”), Elizabeth Gilberts Eat Pray Love (which is not nearly as bad as the movie—and actually, dare I say it, good), Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (which I love, love, love), and George Orwell’s excellent memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London.

Other Nonfiction. Believe it or not, it’s not boring! Some of it is so well-written and informative that you’ll think you’re reading a very gripping novel. I’m dying to read Mary Roach’s Gulp, maybe just because of its cover art alone (and I need to read her other books, too). I also want to read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of Maladies (which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2011), John McPhee’s La Place de la Concorde Suisse (did you know Switzerland’s citizens were so well armed?), Neil Steinberg’s You Were Never in Chicago, Nick Reding’s Methland (which might go nicely with all the episodes of Breaking Bad I plan on watching), Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (which I expected to win the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction this year, but oh well), Roy Peter Clark’s The Glamour of Grammar, Sam Kean’s The Disappearing Spoon (period table of elements fun!), and more of Bill Bryson’s oeuvre: A Short History of Nearly Everything, The Lost Continent, and Neither Here Nor There. (Did you know that Bill Bryson is a meticulous researcher and wittier than you could possibly imagine? It’s a terrific combination in a writer.) If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I plan on reading Peter Gay’s Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (because Modernism is my jam), Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Swerve, and Hooman Majd’s The Ayatollah Begs to Differ. I highly recommend Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue to understand the English language better (and with more wit!), as well as Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods for excellent travel writing that will make you want to hike the Appalachian Trail. Kate Fox’s Watching the English is excellent for the anglophiles out there. Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, and Barbara Kingsolver, et al’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (which is admittedly a tad preachy) will all make you rethink food. John McPhee’s Oranges is the most in-depth thing I’ve ever read about one subject, and worth its 168 pages. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed is a bit old by now, but it’s worth holding onto because it’ll make you rethink class in this country. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is a classic. Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics will make you rethink economics and the relationship between causation and correlation. And last, check out Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Oh, wait! and if reading books about books is your thing, read Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree (and the other three editions that follow it), as well as Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story and Hallie Ephron’s The Bibliophile’s Devotional.

Oops. I didn’t mean for this list to get so long, and obviously I won’t read all of these books this summer, but I’m going to try my damnest.

What about you? What are you reading this summer?