#314

Got a bunch of books. Also have been reading a bunch of books, though, not as many as I would like. Finished rereading all my Tolkien, then reread Laurence Yep's excellent Dragon of the Lost Sea cycle, which I had not done since I was a wee sprat--used to check 'em out of my local library branch over and over. Think I've mentioned that. Then I read Prince Ombra, another book I had not read since in a long time. I read this one once, when I was eleven, maybe twelve, at my best friend's insistence. Didn't remember all of it with my customary clarity, but a few scenes have stuck with me through the many years, and the work as a whole was more formative and influential than I would ever have guessed. An amazing book. I mean seriously, that book is truly something. Read After the Quake and Kafka on the Shore, and am currently almost done with James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, borrowed from my mom at her insistence. Apparently Mr. Stephen Dedalus reminded her of her own firstborn (yours truly). I cannot deny certain affinities--even echoes. After that, the plan is to read a bunch more Murakami, reread Ulysses and perhaps more Joyce--probably just Dubliners, dunno if I want to get into Finnegan's Wake till next year, and at least a bit of Le Guin before I hit the nonfiction again.

There's really a lot of nonfiction I've been meaning to get to: a book about diamonds, a book about the Wars of the Roses, a book about metahistory, a book about Jerusalem, a book about math; books about a whole bunch of fuckin shit. Too many books, not enough time or money. Why, why won't the government pay to me to read like a madman every day? Can they not grasp my potential value as an intelligence asset? Fools! Squanderers!!! Just fucking make me a spot, feds!

Uh, speaking of books, I've grabbed too many this month and should have tabulated them, but didn't. Because of these factors, the following list may not be exhaustive, and I shouldn't--damn it, won't!--get more new books at the very least till well into next year. 

We'll see how that goes.

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The Very Eric Carle Treasury, Eric Carle

Tono Monogatari, Shigeru Mizuki

The Cricket in Times Square, George Seldon

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

Black Zodiac, Charles Wright

What Have I Ever Lost by Dying?, Robert Bly

Memoirs, Dreams, Reflections, C.G. Jung

Love That Dog, Sophie Creech

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Kafka on the Shore, First Person Singular, Haruki Murakami

The Trumpet of the Swan, E.B. White

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (not strictly necessary, since I own a complete collected works of his, but whatever. Maybe a gift someday after read it, or before, who cares)

Early Christian Lives, a bunch of people (Penguin Classics, publishers)

The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body, Neil Shubin

Life in Ancient Egypt, Adolf Erman, transl. H.M. Tirad, introduction by Jon Manchip White

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

The Templars and the Grail: Knights of the Quest, Karen Ralls

The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar: Solving the Oak Island Mystery, Steven Sora

Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, Ingrid D. Rowland (Really extremely excited to read this)

The Long Valley, John Steinbeck

Squire, Sarah Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas

DEAS...and Other Imaginings: Ten Spiritual Folktales for Children, Valerie Tarico

The World According to Garp, John Irving

Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, Elvis Costello

The Abolitionist's Handbook, Patrice Cullors

Birds, Tim Flach (this was a wedding anniversary present from Ezra and it is supremely magnificent)

Fairy Tale, Stephen King

Principles of Isotope Geology, second edition, Gunter Faure 

The Complete Practical Guide to Pet and Aviary Birds, David Alderton

Nobody Knows My Name, James Baldwin

The House at Pooh Corner, A.A. Milne

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Cool ok that's all I got time for MAY NOVEMBER BE A VERITABLE BLITZ OF PRODUCTION PRASE GOD

--JL

#313

Among my very early memories is running around the little vacation home complex my mother's side of the family used to have on the coastal city of Puerto La Cruz. There was the swimming pool where I learned to swim, in which I cracked my chin so hard once on one of the submerged hubcap lights that I thought my little face had started to split in two. Stung like a hornet got me, silver bubbles rose with my screams shivering inside them, blood billowed into the water, and to this day, my beard won't grow on that little line where the gash was, though it's smooth and unmarked when shaved. On a separate occasion, I scraped most of the skin off my knee, enough that there was a little eyelet of white beaded with crimson glaring out of the oozing, flowing pink when my mom wiped it before disinfecting it. I yelled and fought and begged her to leave it, to no avail. My father, too, shed blood there; once went for a run and returned dripping sweat all over and with blood running down his shin from his own injured knee. Sitting by him on the front steps, I asked why come it didn't hurt him; in my own experience, bleeding that much meant you were having an experience that demanded unwilling tears and venting the sensation by dint of screaming. He told me that when you get older, you get used to pain, that it doesn't mean as much as when you're little. 

I have grown more like my father, as one does. For example, I was never the most powerful or technically adept wrestler; though strong and skilled enough to matter, my true advantages were my quickness and the fact that no one could ever hurt me badly enough to easily turn me into meat. Whatever they did to me, I kept fighting, shoving pain aside. Once I took a spill from a moving motor scooter (well, three separate times) and smashed the living hell out of my right knee, losing a bunch of skin there and on my arms and elbows. My knee and various connected muscles and tendons were quite damaged and forever changed by this incident, but I did not go to hospital--I walked it off that day and for weeks and months afterwards. Cleaned and took care of my own wounds, and took care of my own leg my own way. 

Guess this tangent is just to say that to age in a body is, in a sense, to grow numb; to become ever more inured. 

What I was actually getting at when I started writing is that the complex concierge's daughter, a lithe dark girl with jet-black eyes, was about my age, and we used to run around together sometimes. Early on, when we were about three or getting near four, she told me she had to go poop. I said I'd wait for her right where we were standing, on the grass on the side of one of the buildings, and she said she didn't want to go home. She skinned her underwear down and off under her skirt, squatted where she stood, and took the biggest shit, proportionally, that I have ever seen anyone take in my entire life. It was bigger around than her arm and almost as long. 

Though I had no problem, intellectually, understanding what had happened, and her reasoning, though quite alien to mine own (in my mind, shitting outside of a toilet was something done only while camping, and only when your parent was with you to help you bury it), was sound enough--"when you gotta go, you gotta go" is a tautology every human understands--I found myself astonished, abandoned by my faculties. I told her that her poop was the biggest one I'd ever seen, and she ran away, underwear clutched in her fist. Later, I went out to look at it again and found it crawling with flies. The grass was so incredibly green, the scat such a dark and vivid brown, the flies as black and gleaming as madness itself. Don't know if anyone found it before we left for home. Don't remember hanging out with her again.

Only three years later, the neighborhood bully in my section of the university housing complex we lived in when we first moved to the United States, a huge-boned hefty red-haired girl a few years older than I was, urinated in front of me in a secluded little grove of pines behind and in between a couple of the buildings, fenced off from the street and obscured from the view of passersby in the courtyard in front of the buildings. She made me stay in the grove, and by all accounts didn't let me watch, telling me to be her lookout; though she suggested that a boy who saw a girl pee was destined to marry her, implying that if I looked over my shoulder I would be sealing a form of accord with her.

"Did you peek?" She asked, after zipping up.

"No. Can we get out of here."

"Yeah, stupid. Get away from me, ok? You're such a stupid little kid."

*

No idea whatsoever what it is about me that brought these incidents on. I was but a lad, and still don't fully grasp what was happening, to be honest. I've never remembered this kind of thing during talk therapy; they did me no harm and did not foster in me any kinks or deep-seated dissatisfactions or dissonant confusions. I believe they merely make up a part of the tapestry of my memory that displays a profound mystification with what other people want and how they express their desire for it. Also that shit just happens, and nobody can stop it.

--JL