DISTRACTIONS: I Was Able To Sit Through a Movie
I haven’t been able to watch a movie without looking at my phone for like, six months because the pandemic has made me really anxious about plot lines and miscommunications. This week though, I watched Vertigo directed by Alfred Hitchcock. It was beautiful & Kim Novak is so hot.Okay, maybe this is UNHELPFUL to say but do you know that every single one of his films is based off a book? The Birds & Rebecca were both written by Daphne Du Maur and literally I had no idea until I saw that in the credits. I understand that Hitchcock is like “the master of suspense” and he was really meticulous and that Psycho (also based off a book!!) was the first time anybody had ever seen a toilet get flushed on screen but I think I am annoyed that people think of Alfred Hitchcock as somebody who came up with these ideas?? He literally didn’t, he just put them on screen in a way we will always remember. I guess!!! Anyway nobody has been reading books since forever, LMAO. Anyway I’m probably watching Psycho tonight.
description: Melissa in the middle of waxing her face.
DISTRACTIONS: I saved a plant
The plant was dying and drooping, on the verge of leaving this world. I placed her in a bowl of water for six hours and now she is fine.
DISTRACTIONS : The candles
I ripped up rose petals & put them in candles that I made but they still didn’t smell like anything. My bf has admitted that my candle-making is one of his “least favorite” pandemic hobbies of mine.
Description: Stranger by the Hudson with many birds.
DISTRACTIONS: DOES READING SUCK TO YOU OR NAH AKA INTERVIEWS WITH PEOPLE I LOVE ABOUT READING
Here’s an interview with comedian/poet/bookseller/person in possession of a nice ass, Arti Gollapudi!! Arti is a Brooklyn-based writer and comedian who helps run FREE BOOKS FOR ALL, a mutual aid project dedicated to making reading accessible to folks across Brooklyn. She is one of the most insightful and funniest people I know. I interviewed her about reading! I’m gonna try to put these in every week. I like knowing what makes people struggle with reading & what they love about it. For example, is reading, like photography, retro? And in that way, can we make it cool again? But also does that mean it will always be elitest?? I didn’t actually ask Arti that at all. I literally just thought those up and um, I’m impressed with myself and my takes. I should who ever I have on next week to answer those. I should consider those little questions for myself. Reading … is it retro?? Anyway here’s me interviewing Arti. Thanks babe!!!
MLO: How long does it take you to read a book?
AG: It depends on the book, what time of year it is, what’s going on in the world, what I ate for breakfast, etc. I pride myself on being a slow reader who reads a lot. Some short books take me forever some long books take me a day- I’m all over the place (blame my moon in Gemini)
MLO: Have you ever pretended to read a book just to impress somebody?
AG: When I was in college most definitely. I remember really trying hard to love Vonnegut and Bukowski and while I admittedly did enjoy parts of the books by them I read, I definitely never was into them as much as I told people I was. I think I just wanted to feel like I was “one of the guys” or some dumb shit like that.
MLO: What books do you want ejected from the canon, if any, & what books deserve more spotlight?
AG: I am not sure if this book is cannon or just something everyone in my school was forced to read but I remember really hating the book “Hatchet” which is a book about a young white boy surviving in the wilderness after a plane crash. This was at a time when I was VERY into the Bell Jar which felt more survivalist than Hatchet because I am and have always been dramatic af about my life. So yeah. Eject Hatchet. Immediately! Any books by BIPOC authors deserve all the spotlight if we are discussing cannon. There are so many pieces of bell hooks and Audre Lorde I wish I read before college. Also, right now there are so many YA books I only dreamed of having. The two current day YA books that 16 year old me would’ve flipped the fuck out over is Juliet Takes a Breath and Pet.
MLO: What do you think reading has done for your PERSONALITY and like ... your life?
AG: Reading has made me unbearably curious, confident, and funny. It has emboldened me to become the nightmare of a woman I am today. Seeing reflections of myself in stories and poems allows me to see myself in the world.
MLO: What’s something you’d like to share specifically as a bookseller & free-library organizer in these hell-times?
AG: I want to share that the work I do comes from a place of wanting to share a world bigger than the ones we create in our heads. I think reading and sharing books has helped me feel hopeful in an otherwise dismal time. I hope people can see that and learn to be patient and kind to fellow booksellers and also advocate for jobs like bookselling to have higher pay :)
photo description: Arti in front of a bike on a blanket in the beginning of September.
Finally, the book I read:
Okay this book was dope as fuck. Another translation (I’m addicted aka Puloma keeps buying them for me) and I loved every sentence. I first read Yoko Ogawa when I picked up The Memory Police, which is about a writer who lives on an island where the police, without reason, take away people’s memories of objects. Your memories of perfume? Gone. The idea of flowers? Gone. The main character of the book is a writer (and reading Revenge, I get the sense that Ogawa looooves meta shit) and eventually forgets how to read, then once she slowly and painfully teaches herself to read, she forgets the memories of her arms, so she, in effect, loses her arms. Eventually she becomes a floating head and then she disappears. But she writes an entire book so …. it’s okay? IT’S BLEAK BITCH and I’ve been thinking about it everyday during the pandemic, especially thinking about people’s losses of smell/taste & especially as I work on all these projects that may or may not go anywhere.
Okay REVENGE THOUGH … it’s 11 short horror stories that are all interconnected. The first one is called Afternoon at the Bakery, about a woman who, every year on her son’s birthday, goes to the bakery & gets a strawberry shortcake. The only thing is that her son is dead and has been dead for many years, ever since he crawled into a fridge to die. One story that really made me squirm and literally make noises is called “Sewing for a Heart” about an expert bag-maker who is visited by a beautiful lounge singer who is asking for a particular kind of bag; a bag that will hold her heart that is OUTSIDE OF HER CHEST. Every story is about some kind of lonely person who has some kind of perverseness/sadism born out of their loneliness. If only they knew there were other lonely people around, feeling the same way. Seriously either every character is like, the ex-lover of a B-character in one story or like, inside the writer’s mind (and the writer herself dies inside of a fridge too) or they like, all live on the same block? They’re all neighbors??? I love how good I am at close reading … The writing was also gorgeous. Beautiful weird details that elevated the story. I sound like I’m talking about coffee.
These are really spectacular poems by my good pal Sam Rush, who I like to call the most popular boy in school. Topics swirling in this collection are trans identity, living with hearing loss, sexual aversion & chaotic horniness, birds!! Many of these poems are sonnets, one of the most traditional forms of poetry with hard rules of being only 14 lines long and having 10 syllables a line. Sam uses this rule to their advantage & their language shines when they do so. The word-choices are lush & wild, sensory. A line from “Sonnet for citrus rotting & sexual aversion” goes: “I’ve fucked to find a zipper down men’s backs/and some to crawl out sideways from my own.” Like what the fuck? In the sonnets, I see Sam parsing through the complications of praising moments, like “respiration & not correcting any of your names for me,” or “burial rites & my first nights on grinder.” At the same time there’s also this elegaic quality to them, like they are putting these moments to rest, and good-bye to these moments, they really loved them but now it’s time to go. Moving away from sonnets, one of my favorite poems in the collection is “27 Explanation for the Lump,” in which Sam beautifully world-builds in 27 tercets that, as says in the title, explains a lump. Some of the best lines: “Once upon a time life made up rotting to take/back pieces it had lost & give & make new & this is also why it made up teeth,” “Once upon a time a bird ate a fish a window/ ate the bird a being of ants ate the rotting the clear/ sky ate the water from their bodies & the air felt alive,” “Once upon a time your father his sister his sister got the laughs/in the front hall of their mother’s wake like grief turns rotting/into bubbles like death likes to make life move for it on its way out.” Each tercet is something to do with shedding new skin or being reborn & the way Sam goes about it makes me think of when we are hanging out & doing bits, like one time we made up an entire story about a wifi ghost whose family was all missing heads. It’s playful & mournful, it’s a flower in some shit nestled in the snow.
And now, poems:
sry
in the future i’m reading 2/3rds of a think piece about
the evolutions of apologies from 2017-2021
at first they were “i’m sry if u felt that way”
to “I’m sry if i made you feel that way”
to: “nobody is perfect & I certainly wasn’t either”
to: “i acknowledge i benefitted from many systems & that
this apology isn’t enough & acknowledging that this isn’t enough
& saying that this isn’t enough is not enough & acknowledging
what i’ve passed acknowledged & will one day acknowledge is not enough”
whatever, shut up!! dont u kno u’ll never b enough?!!
our world is addicted to throwing away half-empty cups.
just say “i was wrong & i hurt you. now,
this is what i can give. it’s okay
if you refuse to take it.”romance poem
walking some miles to meet friends outside
in the cold is romantic but maybe
i think everything is romantic like
suing for divorce is romantic: the threatening yellow envelope,
the sexy rage!! our kids! the life we made …
it’s romantic drinking coffee on an icy bench
because it’s dangerous & in many ways we could
kill each other & anyway the opposite of romance
is getting used to it & i refuse, my darling!!!
i refuse to ever get used to this.