Bibliophile Style: Library Lust

Check out these stylish personal libraries...

I am absolutely the type to put a library in a dining room...

I love classic white floor to ceiling bookshelves.  So crisp and so clean!  And the chandelier!!  LOVE.

GAH!  This reading nook would be AMAZING!

Bibliophile Style

Bibliophile Style by agirlcalledjack featuring clutch handbags

1.  Adore these vintage dictionary covered letters!
2.  Huge plastic glasses and fedora don't scream "hipster" enough?  Add an Ayn Rand tee...
3.  Loving Evan Robertson's aesthetic!  Check out his Etsy shop here.
4.  Got $1,540 lying around?  Too bad this Olympia Le-Tan Gatsby clutch is sold out...
5.  This bumper sticker made me giggle...because it's true... 
6.  LOVE this custom rubber stamp from FUTURE PRIMITIVE RUBBER STAMP CO.

The Literary Link List

Links to pieces, old and new, on literature:

• The Most Cryptic Titles in Literature (And What They Mean) over at Flavorwire
• Nine Writers and Publicists Tell All About Readings and Book Tours over at The Awl 
• The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do over at McSweeney's Internet Tendency
• "Suicide is Preferable":  Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen over at Book Riot
• Even David Foster Wallace Nods over at The Millions ( I LOVE the back and forth in the comments over whether or not my beloved DFW did or did not use a not-right-enough word).

Review: Zipper Mouth by Laurie Weeks

title:  Zipper Mouth [purchase here]

author:  Laurie Weeks

pages: 167

genre: fiction

publication: 2011

source:  New York Public Library

"Outside my window it was cold, bare trees shaved in a bitter wind.  Or maybe it was summer, who can know.  The TV's dismal flow leaked across my sheets. Jesus, close eyes. What did the day used to be like. I drifted to a memory of a happy time when I brought home a poem in second grade about clouds. "Clouds" was misspelled:  The fluffy clods are floating in the sky.  My mother's loving laughter, my beautiful young mother, at the time she would've been thirty-one, her laugh a fizzy feeling, both of us dissolving into giggles, sadly ignorant of the bloody five-car pileup of life I was hurtling blissfully toward." (page 159).  

I came to Zipper Mouth in a roundabout way:  I was reading an awesome piece over at The Awl on the merits (and inherent problems) with author readings and book tours, and I really enjoyed reading the thoughts contributed by Laurie Weeks and Tao Lin.  When I researched Weeks, I quickly found out that parts of Zipper Mouth had appeared in Dave Eggers' The Best American Nonrequired Reading, I immediately put a hold on it at the library.  (Those of you who are fluent in my particular brand of literary snobbery know that I take the recommendations from "The Daves" very seriously, "The Daves" being David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and David Sedaris.  They walk among the gods who reign supreme in my personal pantheon of prolific prose-makers).  Per usual, Eggers' recommendation was spot on.  

The narrator of Laurie Week's Zipper Mouth has a problem  several problems:

1)  She has a substance abuse problem.  Her drug of choice:  ALL OF THEM.  Heroin, speed, coke, booze, weed, nicotine...if you can crush it, snort it, or smoke it, apparently it either has been or will be in her at some point over the course of the narrative.

2)  Due to said substance abuse problem, she has an employment problem (she seems to gain and lose various temp jobs throughout the text) which, combined with the substance abuse problem, results in a financial problem that leaves her unable/almost unable to pay her rent/bills or, at one point, buy a bagel for breakfast.  Her ability to stretch even the smallest amount of money while ensuring the purchase of some sort of illegal substances boggles the mind.  

3) And to top if off, she has an unrequited love problem, as she's hopelessly infatuated with her best friend, Jane, a straight girl who gets high on the attention and free drugs that come with said infatuation. 

Set mostly in NYC's Lower East Side, the novel itself is a nonlinear collage of images, scenes, lists, memories, amends and letters (to dead celebrities like Sylvia Plath, Vivien Leigh, and Judy Davis, and to her very much alive addict friends) that work together to create a rich, vivid picture of the narrator's life.  The protagonist, though presented in a reflective yet unselfconscious and nonjudgmental manner by the author, at times seems to embody the verb "waste":  she wastes her potential, her intelligence, her passions and talent; she wastes her heart on a woman who isn't going to love her in a healthy way; she is literally wasted for most of the book.  As the reader (and as an overly empathetic being),  I couldn't help but feel for her, to want more for her. Though flawed (and aren't we all!!), the protagonist is so warm, so genuine and funny (!!!) and unpretentious, so realistic and raw and reflective and aware that I rooted for her every step of the way.  And THANK GOD that Weeks has created a piece of work that pushes the reader out of a passive comfort zone, to really feel something, even if that something is, at times,  discomfort and anxiety.  (sidebar:  FACT: after reading the scene in which the protagonist wakes up, hungover, only to realize that she vaguely recalls she may or may not have a test that day ("What fucking test?  In what banal way with nonetheless enormous consequences was I about to fuck up today?" (page64)), I woke up at 2:24am in a cold sweat and could not for the life of me fall back asleep before I had reviewed and re-reviewed my "to do" list no less that 13 times and I was reasonably sure that I hadn't dropped the ball on anything. THAT'S how much I empathized with the protagonist...I actually adopted some of her anxiety as my own. You know you have an empathy problem when you start taking on the stress of the fictitious...).  

I loved Week's utilization of multiple and alternative forms for her narrative (lists, flashbacks, letters, etc).  It reminded me of Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad in terms of how successfully utilized and how incredibly contemporary those choices felt (n.b. for those of you who haven't read A Visit From the Goon Squad yet, DO!  It's phenomenal!  There's an entire chapter done a as series of power-point slides that illustrates my point and, stylistically, works wonderfully!).  My favorite list came on page 46:

"10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today

1. Battled Satan

2. Didn't smoke pot(so far)

3. Swept floor, tied newspapers

4. Organized four files

5. Went to work in spite of spirit being broken on Rack of Menstrual Pain

6. Ate broccoli, 'the colon's broom'

7. Endured lengthy conversation with X; faked waves of empathy

8. Didn't smoke for three hours after getting up

9. Walked to the gym instead of taking a cab

10.  Celebrated diversity"  

I actually do the same thing when I'm feeling especially unproductive and/or am feeling the desire to be self-congratulatory.  Here's mine from today:

Jack's 10 Bonus Accomplishments of Today

1.  Wrote email from bed to Marketing at 5:33am (to make up for email I forgot to send before I left work yesterday...ooops)

2.  Only had 1 1/2 cans of Coke despite running on less than 5 hours sleep

3.  Wrote Zipper Mouth review, which has been at the top of my "to review" pile for at least a week and a half

4.  Remembered to take all 6 supplements

5. Called Mom; experienced genuine empathy

6.  Remembered to ask Mom for Grandma's new email address

7.  Cleaned off couch (i.e. the world's largest, most comfortable junk drawer)

8.  Requested Pinterest invite

9.  Made a dent in the dirty dishes

10.  Celebrated diversity

This one was mostly self-congratulatory ;)

I would also be remiss if I didn't talk about how damn beautiful the language was!  Weeks is so skilled at putting together some infuriatingly gorgeous sentences.  Comme ci: 

"I couldn't focus.  Nicotine deprivation revealed to me what a vacuum I was, what a suction machine of need and desire.  God I love everything, I thought, gazing out my window at passersby several stories below.  Blossoms dripping from the trees, robins in love warbling among the peeping spring budlets, trash spilling festively from an orange dumpster...That emaciated visionary walking his mangy dogs beneath the ginko trees  like he did every day in a paradigm-shattering costume of sandals and socks beneath an overstretched Speedo and bare rib cage--I worshipped him.  The periwinke sky and its cloud scallops arched up from behind the jumbled gothic architecture of rooftops across the street.  I loved that shade of blue, what a sharp sensation it produced in my lungs!  What chemical floodgate does a color open in your mind?  Love leaked from my pituitary and converted on contact with my bloodstream into panic and I was swelling up, threatening to leave the ground and float off fast.  I needed a cigarette, the tap-dancing kind, three feet long."  (page 48)

C'est magnifique!  

Rubric rating: 8.5.  Can't wait to read more from her!!!  

FYI:  There's a great interview with Weeks here at The Rumpus on Zipper Mouth.  

Review: The Mystery Guest: An Account by Gregoire Bouillier

title:  The Mystery Guest: An Account [purchase here]

by: Gregoire Bouillier

translated by: Lorin Stein

pages: 120

genre: memoir

source:  New York Public Library

I have needed this book several times over the past six years without knowing it.

The Mystery Guest is Bouillier's true account of what happened when the love of his life, who, without any warning, literally walked out on him five years prior, calls him out of the blue and invites him to be the "mystery guest" at a birthday party for an artist he's never met, where he ends up (unknowingly) participating in an uncomfortably personal piece of performance art.

The first half of the book is dedicated to Bouillier processing what happens when someone he cared for deeply inserts herself back into his life as abruptly as she withdrew years before.  Reading his processing was incredibly cathartic for me, as I've been the person abruptly dropped several times in my romantic past:

• Six years ago, months into what I considered to be developing into a pretty strong connection, K called on a gorgeous Friday afternoon to end things with me as he ran his errands. I had been napping (I was in my first year of teaching first grade at the time, and by Friday afternoons, I had given all of the energy I had to my little kiddies and desperately needed to recharge) and through the fog of newly abandoned sleep, all I caught was something about dry cleaning, that he felt he could only pursue something serious with me, that he wasn't in a place to be pursuing anything serious right now, and that he was about to lose the connection as he was getting on the subway.  It was an elevated, delicate variation on the "it's not you, it's me" theme, and seemed an inaccurate, incomplete picture.  The blow took three minutes to deliver and weeks to recover from.
• Five-ish years ago, I had been dating S for several months and had met his friends and his father (which is a story in and of itself! His father makes for epic storytelling, and I mean that in the best possible way...), when he disappeared.  Poof!  Gone.  Two or three weeks went by when I finally got word that he was very busy at work but could spare half an hour to meet me for a drink, during which I basically broke up with myself because he was too exhausted/burnt out/wasn't present enough/didn't care to say what needed to be said.  I left him in the bar with 25 min left in his 30 minute break.  It's surprisingly easy to end things with yourself when you're the only one doing any of the talking.

Bouiller and I share many parallel experiences.

Like Bouillier, I like clarity.  I'm not good with ambiguity.  My mind wanders into a zone of over-analysis that can, at its worst, be crippling and excessively annoying to those I'm closest to.  Almost against my conscious will, I replay conversations, moments, interactions over and over again trying to pinpoint the exact moment when something shifted, so I can figure out what exactly I did wrong (so I never do it again!).   I vacillate between giving the other person a benefit of the doubt far more generous than any reasonable person would allow, to inditing them as the coldest, most unfeeling man to have ever encountered, and pause everywhere in between, searching for WHY?????.  But the gods of circumstance shined on Bouillier, and he receives his answers in the most perfect manner for a writer.  On page 93, he writes "And just when you think you've thought of everything...you forget the book sitting right there on the bedside table."  Without giving too much away, I envy Bouillier in that he finds some sort of explanation in the pages of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. He gains some (wonderfully artistic and perfectly literary) insight into the ever elusive WHY?????, can take it in and move on.  If all human behavior were that simple, and if all answers could be found in the book on the bedside table...

Like Bouillier, I have also been woken from a dead sleep by an unanticipated voice at the other end of the line.  His offered a hello, mine a goodbye.  Of this moment, he writes: "I could hear how soft and gummy my voice was, how drowsy-sounding, and without even giving it any thought I realized that she must under no circumstances be allowed to know she'd woken me up.  That was crucial, even if it meant sounding cold and detached--and why on earth did she have to call...when I was fast asleep and at my most vulnerable, my least up to answering the phone...In real life, it goes without saying, the ideal situation eludes us, and no doubt that's a good thing for humanity in general, but just then I'd have done anything to keep her from guessing that she'd caught me sound asleep in the middle of the afternoon." (page 6).  In my situation with K, the last thing I wanted, when I was about to be cast aside, was to appear at any more of a disadvantage than I already was, and Bouillier's fear of being perceived as weak completely resonated with me.

Like Bouillier, I've had long lost lovers reappear out of nowhere.  S asked me to lunch last summer, for no other discernible reason other than that he was in town.  K found me on Facebook a few weeks ago and messaged me to find out if I were still teaching.  Personally, I prefer the past to stay there, unless there's a compelling reason that benefits us both for their reappearance. It's as if they only considered how they would feel talking to me, and gave no thought to the fact that I would experience some sort of emotion having to, in turn, talk to them.  They certainly felt some urgency years ago to put distance and silence between us, so why reach out now? And the WHY?????? reappears...WHY???????  I hate the WHY?????

And like Bouillier, I've felt compelled to change something about myself when finding myself suddenly by myself.  Bouillier goes through a lengthy turtleneck phase post-breakup.  Of it, he writes:  "Since I'd always hated turtlenecks worn as undershirts and despised the men who wore them as the lowest kind of pseudo-sportsmen with, as they say, the lamest kind of collar, I started wearing turtlenecks as undershirts the moment she left.  Basically, I never took them off.  No doubt this was magical thinking on my part (if I never took them off, nothing would ever take off on me); at any rate, these turtleneck undershirts erupted in my life without my noticing until it was too late and I was under their curse.  You could even say they'd inflicted themselves on me, so that now I hardly remembered the wind on my neck, which is the very feeling of freedom itself." (page 18).  I thought a lot about this idea of the "freedom" he was trying to gird himself against, and upon reflection I realized that several of my tattoos have come about post-heartbreak, but for the opposite reason.  My method of self-protection seems to be to race toward that "freedom," to get back on the horse as soon as possible, to show myself and the world that I'M FINE, so then maybe I will be.  The idea for the tattoo has usually been percolating for months and has nothing to do with the relationship at hand, but there's something about finding myself alone that lights a fire in me to get it NOW.  My first tattoo came on the heels of K, and my most recent came after H  (about a month ago, H, the Chekhov enthusiast I mentioned previously, made his hasty unanticipated exit).  It's almost as if I'm subconsciously (as Bouillier was no doubt conversely doing with his turtlenecks) trying to reassure myself that life is continuing and I'm actively participating in it.  I'm evolving.  I'm changing.  And the person who walked away doesn't know the person I am now, at this moment, anymore.  That they'll never know that I've changed is irrelevant. It's the act of moving forward where I find comfort.

I'm absolutely going to purchase a copy of this book.  It was (and is) reassuring to know that there's someone, somewhere, as neurotic and overly-analytical as I am when it comes to affairs of the heart, who has been dropped and has lived to tell the tale.  I'm sure this is a book I'll come back to again and again, as my romantic history unfortunately tends to repeat itself, but next time at least I'll know to look to the book on the bedside table. 

Rubric rating:  9.  

Shameless (non-book-related) plug: Sarah Kendall Trio LIVE @ The Bitter End tomorrow night @ 8:30pm

I went to high school with some insanely talented people:

• Michael Phelps  (I'm convinced he's more fish than human being)

• Carrie Murphy (whose book Pretty Tilt is on Amazon!)

 

(Carrie is on the right)

• Derek Waters (doing awesome work in LA as an actor/writer/comedian)

And, last but certainly not least, there's Sarah Kendall...

...whose band the Sarah Kendall Trio I have the privilege of shooting (with my camera) tomorrow night at the Bitter End here in NYC.  Show starts at 8:30 and cover is $7.  Feel free to come by, grab a drink, hear Sarah Kendall's angelic voice and watch me try to unobtrusively take some pictures.  Their EP Oh Really?  is available now on iTunes.  

Review: Darling Beastlettes by Gina Abelkop

title:  Darling Beastlettes [purchase here]

author:  Gina Abelkop

genre:  poetry

published: 2011

source:  I purchased a copy at her reading at the Mustard Beak.

"Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words."

~Paul Engle, New York Times ( 17 Feb. 1957)

Have you ever read something and come across a phrase or a line that made you stop and think "DAMN I *wish* I had written that!"?  That happened more than a few times as I read Darling Beastlettes over the weekend.  Gina's stunning collection made the 2 1/2 hour Greyhound bus ride to Hartford, CT surprisingly enjoyable (despite the dude sitting next to me who took  "Greyhound bus" to mean "moving booze-free karaoke bar" and rapped aloud to himself for all 2 1/2 hours...with choreography...).

Poet Gina Abelkop, founder and editor of feminist press Birds of Lace, is supremely gifted at creating haunting, otherworldly images and turning out gorgeous verse.  At the heart of her poems are women, real and imagined, recognizable and authentic.  Adroitly observant, the themes Gina tackles aren't new (gender roles, sexuality, femininity, love, lust, etc) but they feel that way due to the welcome freshness and honesty of her perspective.  

My favorite stanza from "Heather in Curls":

"Ask for a hideaway bedroom, one with a secret fireplace, a stack 

of fabric that leads in well-tread steps to another country, one with mountains. 

You can cry over them as much as you'd like, they'll be there forever."  (p. 39)

A snippet from "Greta" (my FAVORITE piece in the collection):

"...At night

opened her breast like a gushing fruit

and fed reveries of love.

Nightingale wanted some

she could crawl inside.

Others looked upon her snidely,

ripped at her raw chest, 

wouldn't fit,

closed their own in return.

All this gore and nothing." (p. 61)

GAH!  Just...wow.  Brutally observant, her delivery is at times as fanciful as it is raw...which isn't easy to pull off without coming across a tad manic (which she does not).  As I said in a previous post, I don't know much about what experts say makes a poem "good," BUT I know what speaks to me, and Gina does.

Rubric rating:  8. I am absolutely keeping an eye out for her future work :)

You can read poems by Gina Abelkop at:  La Fovea, Two Serious Ladies, and Everyday Genius, among other places (check out her blog for a far more comprehensive list).  And if you happen to be in LA, check her out at The Empty Globe at Pieter Projects w/ Kate Durbin @ 8pm, or at the Saturday Night Special Reading Series @ Nick's Lounge, both on May 25th.