#09 – Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910] Russian Author: Gave away entire fortune, froze to death in a railroad station on a cold winter night.

#08 – Virginia Woolf [1882-1941] British Author & Critic: Filled pockets with stones and drowned self in the River Ouse.

#07 – Euripides [480-406 B.C.] Greek Playwright: Mauled by a pack of wild dogs owned by Archelaus, the King of Macedonia, according to legend.

#06 – Sherwood Anderson [1876-1941] American Author: Complications of peritonitis in Colon, Panama, after ingesting a toothpick along with a hors d’oeuvre at a cocktail party.

#05 – Hart Crane [1899-1932] American Poet: While en route to New York aboard the S.S. Orizaba, leapt into the Caribbean Sea; reputedly said “Good-bye everybody.”

#04 – Edgar Allan Poe [1809-1849] American Author: Died of “acute congestion of the brain” several days after he was discovered lying unconscious in a Baltimore street, wearing someone else’s tattered clothes.

#03 – Sergei Esenin [1895-1925] Russian Poet: Cut wrists, wrote a final poem in own blood (called “Do svidania drug moi” or “Goodbye my friend”) and hanged self in a hotel room in Leningrad.

#02 – John Berryman [1914-1972] American Poet: Jumped from a bridge over the Mississippi River; reputedly waved at passersby on way down.

#01 – Yukio Mishima [1925-1970] Japanese Author: Committed seppuku (hara-kiri) and was beheaded during failed attempt to overtake a Japanese garrison.

Remember yourself, from the days when you were younger and rougher and wilder, more scrawl than straight line. Remember all of yourself, the flaws and faults as well as the many strengths. Carl Jung once said, “If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better. A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance toward oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbors, for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures.”

—Anna Quindlen: Commencement Speech at Mount Holyoke College

“P…A…N…T…S,” she intones. The chalk goes clack clack against the board. “Now.” She turns to face us. “Who can tell me what these letters mean when we put them together like this?”

No one raises their hand. My gaze flits from the teacher to the board.  The teacher looks at me. “Rachel,” she says, “Can you tell us what word those letters make?”

I stare at the letters.

“Puh…paaaa……” I pause, my mouth hanging open slightly. I can feel the sounds on the flat of my tongue. “Paannnn…”

“She wasn’t here yesterday!” one of my classmates pipes up. I realize the class must have learned this already, when I was home sick.

“Okay,” says the teacher. “Can someone else tell us what these letters say?”

…pants. The word rings full and round in my mind. Pants!

“Anyone?”

Letters together become more than themselves. Pants.

You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here’s a hint – ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn’t just the women. It’s the great male fantasy – all it takes is one dance to know that she’s the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know – this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don’t want a very long courtships. They want to know immediately.

David Levithan and Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares

I will state upfront that I had an ulterior motive for reading this book. I read it for the anal.

Yup, you read that right. Blazing anal. Blazing the Hershey highway. Firing up the backdoor action. Hot poop chute lovin’. Avast me hearties, there be anal in this novel.

[..] But this is easily one of the most boring Blazes I’ve ever read. Even with the anal. Lackluster anal, can you imagine?

Srsly, they should put a sticky at the top of their blog, like Warning: Contents may cause co-worker-startling guffaws, accidental aspiration of beverage, and sympathetic snarkiness.

I’ve learned as much about writing from the Bitches’ book reviews as I have from any instruction book. For example, in this particular post we ponder the potential pitfalls of poor characterization:

There’s a scene where Bryna eats Cocoa Puffs while reading Thoreau, and I’m not sure what that was supposed to say about her, though I hope she brushed her teeth because those things stick to your molars like whoa and damn hell.

If I hadn’t been lured by the promise of extremely questionable anal sex, I wouldn’t have read past the halfway point. This book is just so dull and wooden and the characters are such schmucks, I wouldn’t have cared about their happy ending because I didn’t like either of them. I thought he was a sexist tool wad and she was a judgmental twerp with questionable taste and limited business skills.

But then, there was whatwhat in the butt.

This is just a few lines; read the rest of the post at your own risk. Your sinuses may never forgive you.

All time is all time. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I’ve said before, bugs in amber.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

“All fiction offers us a world we can’t otherwise reach, whether because it’s in the past, or in far or imaginary places, or describes experiences we haven’t had, or leads us into the minds different from our own. To some people this change of worlds, this unfamiliarity, is an insurmountable barrier; to others, an adventure and a pleasure.”

It is only with imagination and reality that you get to know the thing a novel requires. Reality alone has never been that important to me. A teacher once said that one should write about one’s own back yard; and by this, I suppose, she meant one should write about the things that one knows most intimately. But what is more intimate than one’s own imagination?

Carson McCullers – from The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing

Been re-reading Eckhart Tolle recently and am grateful to remember that life is here, now, before I wake up to find I missed it.

Scientists say some ridiculously high percentage (like 98) of our daily thoughts are repetitive. Meaning, a lot like a broken record and just as useful. And half the time, they’re not even truly about what’s going on around us at the time. They’re about events that happened in the past (memory) or might happen in the future (worry). We are not really here; we are somewhere that doesn’t exist. Life is now.

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as WE are.” — Anais Nin

Most people are initially taken aback when it’s suggested to them that much of their suffering is self-created because they believe everything they think. I know I was. For about fifteen minutes.  Then I realized how odd it is that I should believe everything I think (the narrative, the opinions, the conclusions) when at the same time, I know that logically it’s all likely to be flawed, because I am not an omniscient being, plus like all humans I see the world through my own personal experience-engendered filter.  And then I put two and two together which equaled a great big light bulb over my head. That was ten years ago, and I haven’t been the same since.

The Meaning of Existence
Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.
– Les Murray

I got an iPad for my birthday. As a communication device, it’s OK, though even with my narrow hands, the teeny keyboard is a speed bump; my pinkie keeps inadvertently hitting the enter key mid-sentence. But my Facebook friends enjoy my comments more when they’re unintentionally truncated, so there you go.

As a reading device, however, I find the iPad to be, as the children say, da bomb. (Do they still say that?) Granted, so far I’ve really only used it to read online, since I’m trying not to buy ebooks until I finish (or at least make a sizable dent in) my stack of old schools. Even so, I love the iPad’s portability; I can haul it around all day without a visit to the chiropractor afterward. I can read Google news or NPR or email (and OK, Facebook) wherever there’s unsecured wifi nearby (thanks Starbucks!). I don’t have to fool around with a book-light at night when Kevin’s asleep.

But the biggest advantage of the iPad is that it’s WAY easier to get new books past the Accounting Department. (Did I say I wasn’t buying ebooks yet? Um.)  No more smuggling a bag up the stairs when Kevin’s not looking and stuffing it under the bed! I can download as many books as I want and he’ll never know! Mwahahaha!

Until he borrows the ‘pad for a business trip and opens the Kindle app. Oh well.

Anyway, I hereby give ebooks the Uppity Stamp of Approval and no, I do not think that they sound the death knell for paper books. At least, not for a really, really long time. Stinky paper books will not disappear until until either humankind has evolved past the need to read, our brains absorbing knowledge from the very ether, or we run out of trees.

October is National Book Month. Read however you can, whenever you can, whatever you can.