shimmy up the black walnut tree, let the hard blue sky fall right through me
My mom's brother's family sent me these excellent shoes (they're tan, what the website calls "bark"). It's my first birthday gift, apart from donations to Full Moon Farm, a sanctuary for wolf-dog hybrids where I've done volunteer work (& which is perpetually short on funds). My mom and I went to our town's annual "Trash to Treasure" sale, which is kind of like a giant garage sale where everything the university students left in their dorm rooms is offered up to the general public in a big, chaotic, unwashed heap at slightly less than thrift store prices. I managed to find...let's see...I've got this black and white dress that's only slightly big, a t-shirt with a pattern of big stylized yellow cherries that look like something you'd find on kitchen wallpaper...Mom and I got there a little late in the day, so it was already well picked over. (My brother, on the other hand, stayed up all night, got in line at four in the morning, waited for about two hours till the doors opened, and snatched up new-looking basketball shoes and a bunch of electronic equipment before anyone else could have at them. Charlie's ridiculous like that.) I'm starting to read Swamplandia! and it might be the first novel I finish this summer-- well, no, I read (and liked) Emma Donoghue's Room, finished it about two weeks ago in a laundromat, but it's not normal for me to be reading as few books and as little fiction as I have been lately. And no poetry at all! Can you believe it? I was going to read this one book by Tao Lin because my friend Charlotte likes his work, but I quickly realized that it was making me feel terrible, and not the elated, adrenaline-pumped kind of terrible where you're almost enjoying your black mood in a grim way (or at least it's inspiring you to do something or another); I mean the kind of terrible where it feels like you're filled with lead instead of blood and bags of sand instead of organs. Instead of feeling like a werewolf, you feel like a zombie. Not a George Romero zombie with its voracious appetite for braaaaains, either, but a zombie drugged and hypnotized into docile mindlessness by a magician, standing in a corner somewhere wondering vaguely who you are and when you'll rest, waiting to be given a task which will not be beautiful and which you will not comprehend or remember. I just couldn't do it. I returned that book to the library.
Anyway, I'm not far along yet, but I keep wanting to quote sentences that aren't even exceptionally showboatish or witty or profound just because I think they're communicating some simple thing or another so well, or so vividly, or in such an emotionally true-to-life way. That's always a promising sign. (He got this aura of expectancy about him that confused me. It wasn't dread, not exactly, but you could not call it hope. "What little test are you studying for?" I asked him once, and he looked up with clouds for eyes and said, "My future.")
Alicia, I like this response to that article you showed me. I do think that it's possible (and often necessary, if you want to understand its cultural importance) to analyze the symbolic connotations that get stuck to an animal & the way the animal is popularly perceived apart from the biological reality of that animal's existence, which is why it bothered me less that the writer of the original piece appeared to know sweet fuck-all about anything ornithological than it did that she was saying things about how I ought to get myself a hairy-chested boyfriend and accept my reproductive destiny if I want to be a fully actualized adult human woman. But this is such a great rebuttal!! (Speaking of symbolic meaning, in Aztec cosmology it's only the bravest, fiercest, most noble people who are reincarnated as hummingbirds. Those little, hyperactive, flimsy, jewel-bright creatures sipping sugar from flowers are filled with the ghosts of warriors.)
I guess I've had a headache for a long time now. I guess I feel all out of sorts lately, bored and lonely and sleepless and restless. I guess I'll be okay in a little while. Don't worry. I saw a dead crow on the road today. I saw two live crows pecking at a half-rabbit smeared across the black asphalt. I saw two live rabbits standing still as ice sculptures in the neighbors' yard, their oddly stubby ears not twitching, their big eyes not obviously following any one thing.
1. Red, Okkervil River
2. Mother, Tori Amos
3. Prison Girls, Neko Case
4. Maize Stalk Drinking Blood, The Mountain Goats
5. We Laugh Indoors, Death Cab for Cutie
6. Safe as Houses, The Weepies
7. Dance With Me, Nouvelle Vague
Oh yeah, and pretty much the entire recorded output of one of my favorite obscure 90's bands is available for free online; go check that out! It's good, good stuff.