#334

Well, that's out of the way. Preceding post, that is. Damn. Who knows if that was the right thing to do? But as always, that's not really the correct question. The correct question is always "who cares?". Spoken like a teenager, slouch implied, sitting in a chair in a fashion contrary to the design of the chair. Sitting against the principle of sitting correctly. 

That's usually enough to soothe me, but in this particular instance, the answer to that question actually comprises of people I don't want to put out in even the slightest fashion, so I have to get over it some other way. 

Ah, and so, it is at this point that "who cares" regains its tremendous, laconic power.

*

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out, and I have it, and indeed, when I said I wanted to do a bunch of writing this month, I didn't calculate the presence of this videos game into the balance. I have done very little with my free time other than play this game, which is more Breath of the Wild in greater quantities and, shall we say, gently remixed? It's a perfect sequel. It lacks the sublime, gentle pathos that made BotW one of the greatest works of art of the last decade, one which has brought many different kinds of tears to my eyes many times over, but it has its own signature and despite a profusion of mechanical dovetails, its own learning curves and playfeel. 

S'good. Oh, it's good. An accomplishment the magnitude of which is almost never seen in the game industry. 

*

It's common for me to feel more prepared for death when an anticipated cultural landmark hits and I can experience it. My level of general physical tension dropped so precipitously when I read the final page of Bleach for the first time that I think I've never been the same. It relaxed me on a cellular level to live to bear witness to that finale. Serious completion anxiety; it's never been so intense since, but it's there. 

Anyway, I am once again here to tell you that one ought to be well-prepared for death. Psychically, spiritually, physically, legally; just, y'know, get ready. It's coming, like a great rushing wind, to sweep you elsewhere. 

*

Death! Professor Emeritus at Factually Pointless University. This caricature of the most merciful and swiftest of all angels works on multiple levels. I like to picture them always carrying a cup of coffe, clad in a thorn-proof tweed with serious elbow patches; delightfully ironic on a personage with neither flesh nor need to assimilate liquids. I suppose the protection and support provided by the patches could prevent the olecranon wear any skellington who works at a desk on occasion would be prone to. I mean that's got to be the originating logic behind their presence in overwear.

--JL

#333

Today's album--

for it is, fuck yes and hell hard--

ALBUM WEEK 2022

concluding at last...in May, twenny twenny FREE! Wow. Time.

The album is Sink / Swim, by Cutting Room Floor. This is a heavy decision for me, but there are things one has to lift precisely because of their weight.

*

At one point in this blog it was very briefly and obliquely mentioned that Sink / Swim, by the band Cutting Room Floor, would be released, and that this event would be emotionally significant to me, though I did not mention the album or the band by name. This is because I was hiding. Am always hiding; in order to protect privacy in general and especially the privacy of the people and places I must needs write about in order to be honest about myself, disclosing as little as possible in order to disclose as completely as possible. In this case, though, hiding more completely, the difference between standing up straight and looking you in the eye while smiling knowingly and occasionally winking, and crouching in the shadows of the undergrowth like a hunted animal. 

So, the standing up straight is this, such as it can be: I am a fly, and as a fly, I was on the wall for nontrivial and especially privileged portions of Sink / Swim's genesis.

Years of memories; journeys, live shows, conversations, berths, meals. The color palette of Sink / Swim's cover art, the songs themselves, the artifact in its own time--just the sheen on the roof of the house seen from the outside. It might be said that it is professionally improper of me to even write about this record, given the privilege of insight.

Yes, it might be said, but what might be said sometimes has to be risked and endured for the sake of what must be said. For example: God, how I miss them. God, how the gulfs have widened indeed.

So. Sink / Swim. By Cutting Room Floor.

* 

Unclear whether it will be possible to even talk about a single song; there is so much to say about just the first thing to discuss, which is the first of many before we can even begin our interpretations. Perhaps it is indeed this inordinate closeness of mine to the material that fosters this thinking, but come with me for but a mile or two, and see if you can agree with me concerning the nature of this odyssey. 

*

We begin with water. When it comes to this record, we must be as Thales, and regard water as the prime element from which all else arises. It all ends there, too. 

Water. If you're lucky enough to be able to do so, maybe draw yourself a clear glass, drink part of it, and continue reading with the remainder at your side. Glance at it occasionally. Don't know if it'll help anything, but it cannot hurt. 

*

Water.

Three atoms arranged in a tetrahedral structure; a triangular pyramidal shape. Quaternary phase diagrams of mixtures of chemical substances are represented graphically as tetrahedra. A tetrahedron's dual is another tetrahedron. The net of a tetrahedron  can be drawn as three upward-pointing triangles surrounding downward-pointing triangle, or three downwards-pointing triangles surrounding an upwards-pointing triangle--the Triforce, or the kamon of the Hōjō clan.

One of four possible archai in Greek Presocratic philosophies; the roots of creation: basal components from which all else arises. I mentioned Thales. In Plato's Timaeus, water's corresponding solid is the icosahedron, twenty equilateral triangles. Water is the identifying element in the phlegmatic humors, embodying the feminine. Its alchemical symbol, mercury, is a downward-pointing triangle. Its elemental weapon is the cup. 

Mercury is also, of course, an element, a planet, a god. The aspects of Mercury/Hermes/Thoth that interest us here are the connections to divination, reconciliation, magic, communication, sacrifices, music, healing, the tortoise's shell, and--especially--boundaries and boundary markers, and the link between this world and the underworld. Mercury, being mercurial, fluidly crosses boundaries and in doing so makes the boundaries themselves fluid, and makes the identity of the formerly bounded no longer so in any case. 

The Black Tortoise in the tenth mansion, the house of Aquarius, the house of the Girl. Yin Water, the Ruinous Star. Cetus, the Whale, who guides spirits to the underworld--between dimensions.

Tiamat, Goddess of the Sea and Salt Water, the chaos of primordial creation, whose body makes up the heavens and the earth. 

Incidentally, just by the way, water has a high heat capacity and high latent heat of vaporization, as well as the ability to moderate neutron decay in radiation. That tetrahedral structure I mentioned involves the two hydrogen atoms separated by an angle of about 105 degrees, both located to one side of the oxygen atom. This atomic arrangement gives the molecule polarity, and that molecular architecture in tandem with that property grants water the properties of adhesion and cohesion--she sticks to everything, and also to herself--and the ability to form weak hydrogen bonds, which, in tandem with polarity, is what makes her a famously universal solvent. Give her enough time, and she'll dissolve any rock or mineral you care to name.

*

Water.

Drawn from multiple raging oceans, brought forth from deep within the earth, gathered from the sky, attracted and repulsed by the moon, pouring into a hollow downwards-pointing triangular pyramid containing three solid icosahedrons, this water thus structured pouring from the tip of the pyramid into three cups, overflowing into the shell of a black tortoise where a serpent swims. 

*

It's important for me to talk about all this big shit because I can't really tell you about anything specific or important about this album itself. This has made itself clear to me over the long span of time between the genesis of this post and its completion, which may not even be the same day I'm typing these particular words, though they are definitely closer to it that the preceding sections. 

My confidence that thinking about all this information I've provided would enrich one's listening experience and multilevel analysis of Sink / Swim is fairly high, but I think a child whose head is as beautifully empty as only a child's can be could bang along very happily to most of the record without a tangible thought in their head--certainly, happier than I can be, burdened in the extreme as I am with waves and waves of viscous, heavy memory every time I listen to this album. This I have done so many times that I can see through my copy of the disc, and a few of the tracks skip so bad they've become unplayable. Thank the lord they've put it on iTunes, since I'm too much of a coward to buy a new one from them, revealing my address and continued existence in way too general and, simultaneously, personally baring of a way. Guess I could just have Ezra do it for me. That verges on a trick, though, and it feels like cowardice. As cowardly as needing and wanting a CD and not getting it? More? Less?

These are the murky waters one might find oneself in when it comes to some albums. Conflicting currents abound, the closer one gets to the deep end of things.

*

This is the part where I really wish Alyssa would put Contingency on iTunes too. I run into much trouble getting my digital copy to play on anything reasonable, and this saddens me. Contingency is one of the greatest albums ever recorded, and I will someday write a post about it. I've been working on it in my mind since I first listened to it, and it's a cross between the Divine Comedy and guided mediation.

*

But anyway, I don't have the emotional tools to write about the meals I cooked, the teas I brewed, the lunatic strength instant coffee for the three creators of this album while they were banging out tracks like holy harpies armed and blessed by God and Gabriel, standing on the neck of the devil himself and pulling tarot out his guts. It is not within my reach to go as high as the mountaintop we lived on, the cigs I smoked with Alyssa on her side house porch, the bald eagles flying at head level in the mornings, the snow, the pines and boulders and ravines. The main house, half-dilapidated even after months of work, the painting of the crowned pig's head on a background of blazing stars and nebular gases, the old piano, the creaky stairs. The texture of my thoughts as I ruefully tried to wash greasy dishes with dish soap made of little more than water and plant saponins, a manufacturing decision which did little to offset the simple fact that it was sold in a plastic container. The warm uncomplicated comforts of the classic-ass little diner in the classic-ass, old little town at the foot of the mountain, the incredible, astronomical sales tax on cigs--I believe that location holds the all-time record on what I have paid for a pack of American Spirits even to this inflated day, and imagine one could currently pay over twenty dollars for one. How could I tell you what it meant to recieve the news of a new Mountain Goats album--Goths--with Alyssa, the feeling of grasping each other's forearms and dancing together in a circle, chanting "GOTHS! GOTHS! GOTHS! GOTHS! GOTHS!" loud and gleeful? The profundity of playing a Super Mario World emulator on her PC with actual Super Nintendo controllers hooked into the machine when everybody else was asleep, smashing through the early levels and ripping through the shortcuts to Star World and the Bonus Levels (maybe you know this, but Alyssa Kai knows a thing or two about videos game). The nightmare I had, a fucking bad one, and waking up in a frigid sweat to the warm and immediate comfort of Fiona and Ana Mei Li. My hemorrhoids getting so bad I finally had to be like "Guys, I gotta get something for these hemorrhoids." Walking around in the national park that comprised much of the rest of the mountain on which the house rested. Sharing long talks, intricate and simple, about trauma, about the past, about the future, about magic and art and cartoons and sonic power and ghosts and paintings and desserts and God and queerness and significance. That trip was the last time I saw my passport, which I didn't even need to bring. Hours and hours of tinkering with poems and drawing pictures, reading my books and making them laugh or helping them with whatever as the three of them rewrote lyrics and reframed purposes, sketched out drum patterns which sometimes required fairly complex equations, laid out and practiced chord structures, drew new sounds out of amplifiers, planned many and varied time changes, and just generally worked their asses off. I went home after just over a week of labor and love and the gift of sitting in on that and they stayed to take what they'd made to the studio. Three years later, everything was different, and the album came out. When the release tour brought them near enough to me to see them again, I lacked the courage to do so. It's taken four more years to write about it, another sterling demonstration of my brand of cowardice. 

*

This fucking post needs to get published already. There comes a time. It's not finished. Not suitable. A failure, really, when it comes down to it. I suppose there's one last thing to add, if I wanted to be useful to you, dear reader, and it is a version of something I told the band themselves when they wondered about the point of it all, as all creators do. 

This album is important. It is not important simply because a lot of fans anxiously anticipated the band's second album, nor because the subject matter is vital. It isn't important because of the success it might or might not have. The music and lyrics are important, because they are amazing and spectacular and represent a power that transcends space, time, physics, and earthly limitations, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's important in the way that years from now, people who have no clue will pretend they've known about it for a long time even though they haven't listened to it yet, and that tickles me, but it's not what I mean either.

This work is important because it needed to happen. The universe needed this record so bad it brought together this triad, a sacred union of three, whose six hands were the only hands, whose voices were the only voices, whose minds and hearts were the only minds and hearts that could have produced this medicine. And that last concept is what's important. Some albums are very very good, some albums can even keep us alive, but it is a very rare record, a very rare work of art that is true medicine. 

*

Hail, High Furies.

--JL

#332

Because of my grimy, checkered past, I find myself in the interesting position of being simultaneously denied the use of my financial aid by my institution, and called to be honored by them for outstanding academic performace. Guess the bodies in charge of these separate processes don't communicate that much, or at a very granular level, or something. An appeal has been filed, and I have been assured that it should be granted, but who knows. Haven't RSVP'd to the honors thing because even if all goes well I have a natural aversion to being honored and even if I got over that it would be too bitter, I think, for the opposite to take place and be honored and denied at the same time. I don't fuckin know. It's so much easier not to think about this stuff. When I got that email, about being denied financial aid despite all my A's and pulling my GPA up more than a full point, an old familiar part of me rose up in my chest cavity and told me to say fuck it, quit everything, go back to just reading whatever the fuck you want all the time and forget this noise. I won't--but can't pretend it wasn't a struggle for a minute. And I do miss being my own teacher and the only one, but this new situation is nice too, and I do like it. Perseverance! How annoyingly necessary, how perversely vital.

*

Went to the Toledo Zoo yesterday with Ezra and my mother-in-law. It was pretty great. It's so good to look at creatures. Organisms are fucking incredible. The whole enterprise was lent a special interest because I've been reading the work of Eugene M. Marais, specifically The Soul of the White Ant, and it's amazing work, and has me thinking a great deal about the nature of what life truly is, what constitutes it, e.g. the body and the possible interpretations of what a body is; where it begins and ends, and what life leaves behind when it departs what has been its vessel, or the billions of vessels which make up the vessels which make up the vessel. And in the end, is it all white light? The light of God, as the Sefirot says? That seems to be the secret that lies in quantum mechanics, in the oneness of the universe, in the illusory nature of the separateness of being. That we are vessels made of light, filled with light, and life and death only changes in refraction. A crystal universe, with infinite light radiating throughout. Concretions of imagination, metaphors and stories as atoms and molecules.

Also been reading that book I got about Giordano Bruno. Fucking good as FUCK.

*

Dunno. Maybe I'll write a letter to the Pope about it. He's supposed to know. Don't wanna bug the guy, really, but I'm curious about what he might say to me, if anything. I mean, the chances that the Pontifex of Rome would ever respond to any letter my apostasical ass would write him are so slim it is comical, but sometimes you write and mail a letter because it's a thing, not because you seriously expect anything out of it. There's a letter to Disney I'd also like to write, for all the difference that would make in the universe. 


--JL

#331

Oh no! I've been putting off the last post of Album Week 2022 until post #333, and it fast approaches! This is terrible! Not ready! But I must be ready. It is essential that the post be dropped on #333 and no other, and I can't just take a hiatus right now--feeling extremely productive lately and wanting very much to put a lot of posts into the blog this spring and summer as well as finish and start some books, so I will simply have to screw my courage to the sticking-point and plunge headfirst into the deep end. Literally and metaphorically and literally within the metaphor! You'll see what I mean when we get there, dear reader. Water, and plunging--will we sink, or will we swim? 

That is what is known as a teaser.

What is the sticking-point of courage, I wonder? Is it the nipple on the left side? Your right hip? Up your own ass far enough to plant it in your guts? This bears long consideration. Courage a threaded thing, made to fit a threaded hole in the body, or the spirit, and hold fast. Does its mere presence do the job thereafter, or does its function as an affordance require further manipulations? You know, like a strap-on. Or, I dunno, a crank.

Perhaps we all have our own unique sticking-points. Perhaps many sticking-points, for many varieties of courage. I get my artisanal, shade-grown courage at the stupid fucking farmer's market, and it makes me feel super good about myself. I put it in a reusable cloth bag before I take it out and casually but conspicuously screw it to my extremely obvious sticking-point.

That's an example that occurred to me just now. Suppose we don't have to respect every kind of courage, even if we're obliged to acknowledge them when we see them in our effort to appraise the world with honesty.

*

Thinking about openly carrying a pistol or other high-velocity projectile weapon, as is so prized by certain types of individuals in this vast, strange land of ours, these nominally united States. More like federally linked conditions, but those aren't the hairs I'm here to split.

One reason I would never carry a gun is I just don't like them, but even if I did like them I don't think I would carry one openly because of the very simple reason that to me, carrying a gun is a clear signal that I want to get shot at. I dunno. It feels like, fucking airtight to me. 

"Why did you kill that man? There was no provocation."

"Well, he had a gun."

"So?"

"I don't understand the question."

"Explain to me why you killed that man, as though I were a five-year old, son."

"Ok. I'll try. Listen, kid, that dude had a gun, and he made sure I knew it, so what I heard him saying was that he walks around looking for an excuse to use it. I killed him to make sure he didn't kill me first for a real or imaginary reason. This is a function of my paranoia and the fact that I also had a gun, which I carry because I know a lot of people carry them, and so I knew it was only a matter of time."

So like, I dunno. That's exactly how I feel, so if I had a gun, I would have killed a man by now. You know what's fucking crazy? I think it's a miracle that there isn't more gun violence in this blood-drenched, gunpowder-reeking nation. It's fucking pathological the way shit is about them and it is absolutely incredible that the very gutters don't reek with clotted gore.

No solution! I'm just saying, you know? Well, I have my solution, which is to accept that man with a suppurating infection for a brain might shoot me for a faggot or a wetback or a heretic or some other scapegoat for his own massive personal problems or as a form of revenge against our embattled society with its broken institutions or even just as performance for the pageviews and and that's just how life is, and death is, and fuck him, he's not gonna run my life, make me have things I don't want to have, or do things I don't want to do. I live how I want to live, which is with my hands empty.

Wage peace or fuck off. Or don't. All anyone can do is walk their own path.

--JL

#330

No time for talk! I think this list is more than fifty books, so we must get down to business. I will say that, to make it more of a post, this list features some fairly robust annotations. OK GO NOW

*

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, translated and introduced Gregory Hays

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard

Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Concise Oxford American Dictionary,  Oxford Corpus, and a  Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the Merriam's people I guess, I dunno. [I may not in every instance be as extremely exhaustive as I sometimes like to be. Also I just realized I never indicate who translates the Murakami I get. It's usually Jay Rubin or Alfred Birnbaum, but Murakami desperately needs new, uncut editions, possibly from new translators, and I await them eagerly.]

Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, Virginia Hamilton, illus. Leo and Diane Dillon

Fractured, Karin Slaughter

Exposed, Alex Kava

The Last of the Breed, Louis L'Amour

The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, Karen Armstrong

Bones of the Lost, Kathy Reichs

Where the Past Begins, Amy Tan

Selected Tales, Edgar Allan Poe

Rhetoric & Poetics, Aristotle, R translated W. Rhys Roberts, P translated Anthony Kenny 

Meditations of First Philosophy With Selections from the Objections and Replies, René Descartes, translated and edited John Cottingham

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding with A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh and Hume's Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature & An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume 

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, translated A.V. Miller with analysis, foreword by J.N. Findlay

The Discourses: The Handbook Fragments, Epictetus, translated and edited Christopher Gioll, revised Robin Hard

Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, edited Peter Hunt

Children's Books and Their Creators, edited Anita Silvey

American Picturebooks: From Noah's Ark to The Beast Within, Barbara Bader

Piper at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature & There's a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak, Jonathan Cott

The Pleasures of Children's Literature, Perry Nodelman, Second Edition

Children & Books, many editors, Sixth Edition

Origins of Story: On Writing For Children, edited Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire

Facundo, Domingo F. Sarmiento, translated Mary Peabody Mann, introduction Ilan Stavans [don't usually bother to grab any kind of translation from the Spanish, but this was just...there. I just grabbed it. Often, I cannot help this reflex.]

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, translated Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany Chevalier, introduced Judith Thurman

Chronicles of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez, translated Gregory Rabassa [Ordinarily I do not bother with translations from the Spanish (see above) but I have a soft spot for this one. So small, and acquits itself well.]

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant, translated/edited Mary Gregor and Jens Timmerman, revised by latter, introduced Christine M. Korsgaard 

Clouds, Aristophanes, translated N.G. Wilson, edited John Claughton and Judith Affleck, introduced generally P.E. Easterling

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick

Rudyard Kipling Illustrated, Rudyard Kipling [it's a bunch of his stories and writings, probably not including The White Man's Burden but like who knows with this type of thing]

The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley

"...And Ladies of the Club", Helen Hoover Santmyer

The Martian, Andy Weir

The Reluctant Dragon, Kenneth Grahame, illustrated Ernest H. Shepard; also by Grahame, The Penguin & Dream Days

Randolph Caldecott: 'Lord of the Nursery', Rodney K. Engen

Quiet: The Power of Introverts In a World That Can't Stop Talking, Susan Cain

The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettelheim

Gorillas in the Mist, Dian Fossey

Fascism: A Warning, Madeline Albright 

The Bookstore Mouse, Peggy Christian

The Owl Service, Alan Garner

Breadcrumbs, Anne Ursu

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, Philip Pullman

A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, E.L. Konigsburg

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated N.C. Wyeth [hardcover illustrated upgrade from my current paperback, which is an upgrade from my super old paperback]

Mourt's Relation: A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Some dude named Mourt I guess

Spell of the Tiger: The Man-Eaters of Sundarbans & The Octopus Scientists: Exploring the Mind of a Mollusk, Sy Montgomery, photographs for OS by Keith Ellenbogen

Krakatoa: The Day World Exploded: August 27, 1883, Simon Winchester

The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women, Geraldine Brooks

Letters from the Hive: An Intimate History of Bees, Honey, and Humankind, Stephen Buchmann

When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy

The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

The Gift of Fear: And Other Signals That Protect Us From Violence, Gavin De Becker

Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas, Jim Ottavian and Maris Wicks

Slumps, Grunts, and Snickerdoodles: What Colonial America Ate and Why, Lila Perl

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara W. Tuchman

Fraser's Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica, Fen Montaigne

Nothing Is Impossible: The Story of Beatrix Potter, Dorothy Aldis

Eco Amazons: 20 Women Who Are Transforming the World, Dorka Keehn

Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Uncovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--And Formed a Deep Bond in the Process, Irene M. Pepperburg [I feel like I have a good chunk of the gist here, but, y'know, still gonna read it]

The Story of English, Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, William Cran [This kind of shit gets me off. There is something primevally sexual about the formation of language. There's this section on the effect of symbols on the development of meaning in language in The Art of Looking Sideways, which is a life-changing visual and informational masterpiece that I should probably write a post about, which gets me hard enough to cut glass.] 

In the Company of Crows and Ravens, John M. Marzluff, illus. Tony Angell, foreword Paul Ehrlich [very excited to read this. I absolutely love corvids]

The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, Maria Tatar

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

The Read-Aloud Handbook, Jim Trelease

The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in "Healthy" Food That Cause Disease and Weight Gain, Steven R. Gundry, MD [A big part of me is like "ok buddy keep it movin" but I dunno, eating "fresh" food off-season is pretty inflammatory to the system and we should probably stop it. I'll read it and see what I think. Pickling and preserving and otherwise fermenting is, of course, the bomb]

The Classic Fairy Tales, Iona and Peter Opie

New Coasts and Strange Harbors: Discovering Poems, & Dusk to Dawn: Poems of Night, compiled Helen Hill and Agnes Perkins, also Alethea Helbig for DtD

Poetry for Cats, Henry Beard

The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets, compiled Bill Moyers

More Spice than Sugar, poems compiled Lillian Morrison, illustrated Ann Boyajian

Complete Poems of Robert Frost, Robert Frost

Dreams of Glory: Poems Starring Girls, compiled Isabel Joshlin Glaser, illustrated Pat Lowery Collins

Republic, Plato, translated G.M.A. Grube, revised C.D.C. Reeve [I feel like you have to purposefully endeavor to achieve these name shenanigans. Like "Yeah, Larry, this is pretty good translation. Yeah. But you just have the one name, huh? Listen. Get this and your no-name ass-hole the fuck out of my office."]

The Millenium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson, separate volumes [you know, that girl with her dragon tattoo. That stuff. I found out the title in the original Swedish is Men Who Hate Women, which is perhaps too advanced as a public-facing concept]

Children's Literature: An Issues Approach, Masha Jabakow Rudman

A Critical History of Children's Literature: A Survey of Children's Books in English, Prepared in Four Parts, Revised Edition, Cornelia Meigs, Anne Thaxter Eaton, Elizabeth Nesbitt, Ruth Hill Viguers

A Critical Handbook of Children's Literature, Rebecca J. Lukens

The Journey to the East, Hermann Hesse

Pilates Anatomy: Your Illustrated Guide to Mat Work for Core Stability and Balance, Rael Isacowitz, Karen Clippinger

El Diablo De Los Números: Un Libro Para Todo Aquellos Que Temen a las Matemáticas, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, illustrated Rotraut Susanne Berner [this is a translation into Spanish from the German by Carlos Fortea. The title in English would be The Numbers Devil: A Book For Those Who Fear Math. I stole this back, along with a few other items on this list, from my little brothers. A bunch of them were stuffed into the closet of my old room, which I see as an unmistakable signal that they are up for grabs again. It's a good book, filled with delicious concepts and metaphors; it did not, however, improve my scholastic mathematics performance, as my parents had hoped. I never feared numbers. I love math. I just hate rote performance in the service of the obvious to prove something to a third party. Guess I'm trying to get over that these days.]

The Green and Burning Tree: On the Writing and Enjoyment of Children's Books, Eleanor Cameron

*

God damn, people. Was it good for you too?

This list does not even include the dozens of actual children's books I've acquired in recent months. Another time. I mean, we all got places to be.

I would like to befriend a dinosaur. Where's that videogame? I'm tired of running from or killing dinosaurs. The Dinotopia game they made was almost unplayable, and lacked sufficient dinosaur interactions. My dreams often come true when it comes to video games, so hopefully it's on its way. I got this game Dying Light where one can finally, properly, jump around on an interactive environment and do a bunch of parkour in order to navigate a zombie infestation. I was very tired of "running in a single direction and maybe I get to turn around or perform a context-sensitive jump" movement formulas, and I finally got a game where one can approximate human movement in an urban environment. It's pretty awesome, and good to play. Could be better, but, y'know, so could the average piss.  

*

On a separate and final note, it's a Joseph Got Extremely Laid Tuesday! Tell your friends, family, neighbors, call up your old teachers--anyone who might be helped by this information. I know I was!

--JL