Sula- Excerpt

Every now and then she looked around for tangible evidence of his having ever been there. Where were the butterflies? the blueberries? the whistling reed? She could find nothing, for he had left nothing but his stunning absence. An absence so decorative, so ornate, it was difficult for her to understand how she had ever endured, without falling dead or being consumed, his magnificent presence. The mirror by the door was not a mirror by the door, it was an altar where he stood for only a moment to put on his cap before going out. The red rocking chair was a rocking of his own hips as he sat in the kitchen. Still, there was nothing of his — his own — that she could find. It was as if she were afraid she had hallucinated him and needed proof to the contrary. His absence was everywhere, stinging everything, giving the furnishings primary colors, sharp outlines to the corners of rooms and gold light to the dust collecting on table tops. When he was there he pulled everything toward himself. Not only her eyes and all her senses but also inanimate things seemed to exist because of him, backdrops to his presence. Now that he had gone, these things, so long subdued by his presence, were glamorized in his wake. Then one day, burrowing in a dresser drawer, she found what she had been looking for: proof that he had been there, his driver's license. It contained just what she needed for verification — his vital statistics: Born 1901, height 5'11", weight 152 lbs., eyes brown, hair black, color black. Oh yes, skin black. Very black. So black that only a steady careful rubbing with steel wool would remove it, and as it was removed there was the glint of gold leaf and under the gold leaf the cold alabaster and deep, deep down under the cold alabaster more black only this time the black of warm loam.

Big Bad Book Love

It's so hard to devote time to reading when you can tivo anything and sit in the "living room". but you're not really living if you're watching tv are you?! I'd like to thank the Greenville Public Library for supporting my obsessive interior design habit- by allowing me to check out magazines! and supporting my jazz music crush by having lots of cds i can listen to while driving around in my gross fuel burning suv. oh, that reminds me. .

Book Nerd

y'all know i love a good book.

Goodnight Moon

Gift From The Sea

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh- highly recommended

Gonzo

photo by Hunter S Thompson
just got the documentary from the lib.
f excite

Pledge

Well, you can't even see this really but its a dumb pledge going around the blogosphere for people who read everything on the internet to try and get back to book basics or somesuch.

Night before last I read a book called Paper Kisses about these 2 people that were in love during WW2 and kept writing love letters to each other for 4 years, even though they only got to see each other for like 13 days total. Part of the problem was he was a jew, and he cheated on her with an aryan women, who had a veneral disease, and then when he went to the dr he got arrested for having sex with her, and then went to jail for 3 years. Then he escaped Germany to Lithuania, and when things were getting worse he finally said okay ima just marry this otha bitch cuz shes closer, and then like a few months later he got killed by Nazis while riding his bicycle. I can assume he was going to look at this trilobite fossil cave because he was in love with them. The girl lived in the same apartment he had been writing to her whole life, and never got married. Not the most uplifting story, but it was true, and compiled by someone who bought the letters at an auction in 1995.

So yeah. I read. Yay for me.

Look at the birdie

I just saw an ad for a new Kurt Vonnegut collection of short stories- only available in e book format! I am a big fan of pages, but you can read the same thing for $1.99 instead of $14 if you leave them out. I am also (obviously) a big fan of Mr.V- who mingles social/political commentary, humor, and creativity seamlessly. and now pagelessly. The e book Look at the Birdie was published August, 25.

I got the image of Slaughterhouse 5 covers from here. And I'll throw in a really old cover of player piano, along with the current cover for Sirens of Titan available on Amazon. I really like the purple and yellow combination. (Apparently the eyes are a recurring theme.)

The Burrow- Franz Kafka

Also I am not permanently doomed to this free life, for I know that my term is measured, that I do not have to hunt here forever, and that, whenever I am weary of this life and wish to leave it, Someone, whose invitation I shall not be able to withstand, will, so to speak, summon me to him. And so I can pass my time here quite without care and with complete enjoyment, or rather I could, but I cannot.