Summer Reading is the Best Kind of Reading

"We make elaborate diagrams for one another using pink phone-message sheets. You write these words: Kissing you would be like this, and draw a picture of two butterflies being struck by lightning. I stare at it and wonder if you may be right. I do my own drawing and write, Kissing you would be like this, and draw a picture of a man made of ice kissing a woman who is actually a stove. We have made hundreds of these drawings."

"People are becoming clouds nowadays. Each time John goes to kiss his wife, Eleanor simply laughs politely into the palm of her hand and immediately turns into a puff of soft white vapor. The vapor is quite odorless and can assume various shapes. It can still understand when it is being spoken to, the vapor. It can understand whenever John begins wordlessly crying. One time, while holding hands at the airport, john, without thinking, kissed Eleanor's soft cheek and she immediately turned into a puff of charming whiteness that resembled a young pony leaping over a fence post."

"After he is acquitted, Clark Olofsson will begin a lifelong friendship with Kristin Ehnemark. On holidays and birthdays, when he is not in prison, they will exchange presents with one another. One year, for Christmas, Olofsson will give Ehnemark a white rabbit in a perforated box. It will have a blue bow around its neck. It will smell of violet perfume and will be stolen from a local pet store. It will be the best present Kristin ever receives. In her dreams, Kristin sees Clark as a hand made of ice."


(from Demons In the Spring)

five minute poems

I have poems up at New Wave Vomit today.

If you were in the sweatshoppe they are nothing new.

Apparently being 30 equals being healthy. Whether it's the influence of some strange biological impulse or spending the last month in Madison with my culinarily gifted & semi-vegetarian girlfriend, lately I'm seeking out, cooking, and eating all kinds of things I either used to hate, thought I hated, or just never bothered to try. some of my new favorites include couscous, fruit (especially in salad form), broccoli, & bell peppers. Some old favorites getting more playing time include black beans, lentils, bread (the real kind, from a bakery), and salads.

I know you're proud.

Recent Reading List

Simone Muench - Orange Crush, knife. notebook. mentholatum.

Nick Lantz - We Don't Know We Don't Know

Julia Story - Post Moxie

Rusty Morrison - the true keeps calm biding its story

Jake Halpern & Peter Kujawinski - Dormia

Madeleine L'engle - A Wrinkle In Time

Lois Lowry - The Giver

overheard

"I Wish Donuts Had Bones"

I want a bunch of glazed donuts with bones in them set out in the middle of the conference room table so I can watch people try to navigate "serious business conversation" while stacking their pastry bones on a communal paper plate. Donut bones.

The Rule

"Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B."


from Margaret Atwood (who of course I have never read, since I have never read anything, especially if it's fiction, which I suspect is what she writes)

also from c.t's blog , which includes 9 other, less important, but still entertaining rules.

Bears are 100%
illiterate but love
to curl up with
a good book and
just roar
at the pages for hours.






from Parallel Universe (Mark Leidner)