shimmy up the black walnut tree, let the hard blue sky fall right through me

[fitz_clementine]

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

Comments

[signifiers]

That's so similar to what you said in the first place! So smart, lovely. (I need to go to bed.)

I hope your headache gets better, and I hope you can sleep.

(Also, yes, that is essentially how Tao Lin makes me feel as well. Sometimes I think he's interesting, but that's usually when I'm trying my very best not to care about anything at all.)

[fitz_clementine]

Yeah. I did get to sleep. I don't know quite what it is that inspires that reaction; it's like I can handle We Are Flawed and Tragic and Doomed but not We Are Static, Shallow, Boring, and Pointless. (& then the sense that there is absolutely no way for anyone to even briefly defy or transcend or escape from the constraints that make them that way.)

[autumnknees]

I really must order Swamplandia!, I know exactly what you mean about the prose, I think I underlined half of St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Actually, I could probably underline half of what you write, too. :-)

(Sorry, I deleted the last - almost identical - comment because I messed up the HTML & the italics were bugging me. Perfectionist? Me? Never.)

[fitz_clementine]

Oh, thanks! I'm reading your post about YA fiction now, and having a lot of thoughts about it...for example (while it isn't considered "YA," in part because that's a relatively recent way of categorizing and marketing fiction), teenage girls have been reading Jane Eyre for more than a hundred years; other types of people read it as well, but it seems to have a particular attraction to young women, and it's gothic melodrama, it's a luridly dark story that essentially consists of the heroine encountering one bad-but-seductively-described situation after another; her love interest is sinister, mysterious, powerful, and much older than she is...I mean, it's far headier stuff than Twilight , actually, and a lot better , but you can see the similarity.

(Karen Russell writes great young adult fiction, even if it's not promoted as such.)