O, Bounteous Holiday

Among many lesser forms of nevertheless well-thought-out gifts I acquired this holiday season, including a rather twisted Build-A-Bear courtesy of my hilarious brother, the following list was partially delivered:

by Kurt Vonnegut:
*Cat’s Cradle
*Slaughterhouse-Five
Breakfast of Champions
Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage
*God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian
A Man Without a Country

by H.L. Mencken:
Newspaper Days, 1899-1906

by Hunter S. Thompson:
The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman 1955-1967
*Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist
The Mutineer: Rants, Ravings, and Missives from the Mountaintop 1977-2005
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The Rum Diary
Screw-jack and Other Stories
Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century

by Tim O’Brien:
*The Things They Carried

by Sylvia Plath:
The Bell Jar
* The Collected Poems

Note the stunning correlation between starred items (received) and bolded items (the short list of what I politely requested). Not bad at all, Mom. Thank you, and I extend that thanks to all the parents who play Santa for their spoiled-brat demanding children.

The Sensual Nerd

Nerds are often undersexed but are quick learners. Teach them well, ladies, and they are eager to please, and often.

Wink, wink. :p

Dead Man Walking

New Jersey abolished the death penalty. I applaud my state’s thriftiness. Now, Corzine is the “dead man walking” because of political activists in favor of the death penalty.

A few years ago I wrote a rather lengthy paper about the death penalty and how it’s not cost-effective. A few semesters later I used it in a writing exercise called “Playing in Traffic,” the object of which is to take a previous piece of writing and turn it inside-out, taking the form and content and blowing it all to hell and in the process, creating something totally different. I took my strongly anti-death penalty paper and turned it into a newsletter for an organization called Hangin’ Justice, which sought to bring back the death penalty. In honor of New Jersey’s first step at penny-pinching (whether or not that was actually the reason for the abolition), please read my work.

H.L. Mencken Week

All quotes are gleaned from the collection The Gist of Mencken: Quotations from America’s Critic, edited by Mayo Dubasky.
Why are the Fundamentalists so hot against the hypothesis of organic evolution? Is it because the thing is in contempt of Holy Writ? Then why are they not equally hot against the doctrine that the earth is a sphere and circles round the sun? Isn’t that in contempt of Holy Writ also? I can discern no difference between hypothesis and doctrine save that the former is less positive and uncompromising and hence less heretical than the latter. (Jan. 3, 1926)

Religion, though it is seldom discussed honestly, is a very important matter in the United States. Most of the crazy laws that now afflict us originated in the theological hallucinations of this or that preposterous sect. (Feb. 1922)

When a fat woman shows me her legs, I am not filled with the designs for stealing her from her husband; I am filled with thanks to God that she has a husband, and that he is watchful. (Feb. 1921)

A year or two ago I displaced Trotsky, for a brief space, as the chief bugaboo of the literate minority of the populace. (Nov. 1922)

The American people have got so used to quacks in high office that they have come to feel uneasy in the presence of honest men. (April 1929)

With a Rebel Yell

All hail the man who made punching a dance move!

Acquisitions

I fell in love all over again with Rowan’s library last week, despite the shortage of Hunter S. Thompson. But I did find a stunning array of H.L. Mencken, surprising, really – and old volumes too; stuff from the thirties. I kept wandering through the literature part of the fourth floor, which houses the second half of the library’s Library of Congress-organized collection, and saw plenty of familiar names. Hemingway. Nabokov. Orwell and Tolkien are in there somewhere too. I picked up a volume by Katherine Anne Porter (the name sounded familiar; she’s the author of the short story “Noon Wine,” one of the stories listed as choices to critique in my Evaluating Writing class last year. I chose instead “The Death of Ivan Ilych”). One of the sections in Porter’s book was akin to “notes on writing” and a quick glance looked interesting, however, another attempt to read it at home yielded only annoyance. Really literatury stuff gets under my skin. It reminds me of the beginning of William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well where he’s comparing his bare-bones writing self to a beaming beginner who “Looooooooves symbols!” The really successful, really literatury writers sure aren’t beginners but I just don’t care enough to think too much about the deeper meanings of literatury stories and how they reflect some terrible thing about life. Lots of times (going back to literature class in high school) we come up with some bullshit that the writer could never have intended. Did Shakespeare ever say, Okay, Jane Smiley, here’s King Lear. Invent some crap and translate it into A Thousand Acres. Nope!

The Epiphany

“Suddenly I realized.” The amateur storyteller likes to use this as the turning point for almost any tale. What it really means in real life is that the solution or right thing to do about the situation was right there all along, but either denial or dramatic irony kept the main character from deciding. Things suddenly realized for real are things like finding out the actual temperature of a tasty-looking drink. Your tongue had no inkling that your morning latte, though it had been sitting on your desk for ten minutes, was still in excess of 120 degrees Fahrenheit. You don’t, however, suddenly realize that your boyfriend must be cheating on you – you’ve gotten the hang-up phone calls, the late-night-at-the-office schtick. You don’t realize when you already know. Unless you’re writing for TV, dramatic irony will make an editor cringe.