what beast would turn its life into words?

someday in the not-too-distant future i will make some sort of substantive contribution to this hurr livejournal. today is not that day. in the meantime, you can:

Comment on this entry, and:

❶ I'll respond by asking you five questions to satisfy my curiosity.
❷ Update your journal with the answers to your questions.
❸ Include this explanation and offer to ask other people questions.

cascades, who is an utter nutball, gave me these questions:

1. REMEMBER BLUE-SKIDOO FROM BLUE'S CLUES? when blue could transport into pictures and books? well, if you could blue-skidoo into any book, which would you choose?
NO, ACTUALLY, I DON'T, BUT I'LL FORGIVE YOU YOUR TRESPASSES AND ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION. and it's a very good question at that, i have to say. lovely variation on the usual "with which character would you most like to chill?" deal. aaaand my aaaanswer iiis...tales from outer suburbia, by shaun tan. yes, it is a picture book; it's essentially magical realism for kids. and shit-wow, i wish that description could do it justice. magical realism restores a sense of wonder, so i feel odd applying it to a children's book, because when you're a kid, magic is commonplace anyway. archy_the_roach introduced me to this book a couple of months ago, well past my childhood, and still it moved me on a very visceral level; it curled its way deep underneath my skin, successfully hijacking the place i reserve for favorite songs and uncomfortably revealing dreams.

the following tangent doesn't answer this question, but as this is my livejournal, i shall abuse my memes however i see fit. the book that most successfully translated the world i inhabit into a tangible place is palimpsest, by catherynne m. valente. it feels like my own headspace reflected back to me, in all its ugliness and desperation and incandescence. palimpsest is a part of me, located somewhere just beyond tales from outer suburbia, somewhere within my ribcage, possibly.

i also really pathetically wish i could beam myself into shoebox_project, although that's not a book at all. it feels like home to me, in only the way your very favorite stories do. yes, i know it is a fucking fan fiction, and i lose all lit cred for admitting this. i am okay with that!

2. if you could choose to live in a different century, would you? or would you rather stay in the 21st?
fuck, no. i'm not big on romanticizing the past. humans do a pretty good job of fucking up the planet, but i remain (perhaps stupidly) a firm believer in progress. i want to continue to live just where i am and do whatever i can to bring the world a little closer to the place i believe it can be. we owe the past a lot: everything we have now, in fact. it'd be an insult to want to shave off a few decades. reminds me of holden caulfield on his merry-go-round, caught in a loop and still looking perpetually backwards. to that image, i say: no, thank you. i want to go forward. because do you know what we have now? MOTHERFUCKING JETPACKS. suck on that.

3. have you ever wanted to have any kind of exotic pet? (i always wanted a wolf when i was little.)
i want a tarantula! no, seriously. i do believe that counts as exotic. and i'll be boring and confess that when i was little, i totally wanted a dragon. still do, because i am the muggle incarnation of hagrid. although the former desire is a bit likelier to be fulfilled than the latter.

4. when you retire as an old wrinkly lady, what do you want to do with your free time?
accumulate wrinkles. play bingo; use the panoply of medications i'll undoubtedly be on as markers. laugh at my hideously disfigured tattoos. have many spiders as pets. run amok. naked, preferably. be the nut in the neighborhood all the little kids are terrified of.

5. do you have any sort of ~security blanket~ that you keep around from when you were little? mine is a stuffed animal, a goat named djali. FROM THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, REMEMBER? esmeralda's pet goat. he has an earring! he's pretty bamf.
ONCE AGAIN, NO I DO NOT REMEMBER, BUT THANKS FOR TRYING. security blanket? you mean like a straitjacket? some of my friends would argue that i need one of those these days. i, um. don't have an actual remnant from childhood on hand? because i have no soul. well, okay, i did have this purple stuffed dog (creatively named "peace") that i used as a sort of talisman. i've yet to hand her over to the EVILS OF SUNNYSIDE throw or give her away, so that may say something about the state of my immortal soul (mostly that it's comprised of 100% pure unadulterated LAZINESS).

speaking of the sorry state of my soul, the latest regina spektor song manages to make me weep every. damn. time. and i've listened to it like twenty times at this point. it's slowly becoming tiresome. you should download it and join me in my blubbering! (and i do recognize the irony in my inadvertently prefacing this paean to childhood with an anti-holden caulfield rant. do i have my holden moments? yup. do i want to be holden caulfield? hell, no, bitches.)

( lyrics, for posterity. also because they're fucking gorgeous. )

i believe the kids are callin' it a rec post these days? at any rate, i commanded cool_rain_kiss to go read the things they carried and she demanded i make her a rec post. because apparently Our Modern World is too frightfully harumscarum to carry around the memory of ONE lousy book title. that's fine with me, cool_rain_kiss. i will make you a rec post. and then i will facebook message you. and then i will tweet you every ten seconds. and then i will record a youtube video of me yelling at you. and then i will youtwitface your sorry ass.

without further preamble:

dear world/f-list of two_grey_rooms/mostly cool_rain_kiss,

you should consider picking up a copy of the things they carried, by tim o'brien, if you never have (i know it's A Modern Classic* and a high-school curriculum favorite). it is about the vietnam war, but more truthfully it's a story about the brittle, strangely redemptive place where lives intersect with language; what happens to the human heart after it survives something unimaginably horrible; the obdurate fibers of memory which keep us looking back; and the mutable nature of truth. also, rat kiley is one of my absolute favorite characters in all of literature. you might want to meet him.

if you do read or have read this book, talk to me.

*OXYMORON AHOY!

I KNOW this is pretty obnoxious on account of how I just posted about two seconds ago. But. Vonnegut was such a fantastic human being whose words needs to be shared at every available interstice, I swear. Here's the full quote, because I am evidently in a sort of typing-up-other-people's-words mood tonight:

No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC

Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn't be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.

That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today's war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can't fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today--jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on--is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country--an atrocity from which we can never fully recover--the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can't drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it in the corners of any room where it's being played. So please remember that.

And--of course--here is "Blues from Down Here," and, as is my wont, ( lookee there are the lyrics: )

In my quiet moments, I totally think Vonnegut woulda been a TV on the Radio fangirl. He would've liked that they freely admit they have no idea what they're doing and that "A lot of bands have something to say...[they] have something to ask." That seemed like a pretty bitchin'-ly Vonnegutian sentiment to me anyway. Here, let me continue this post's theme, and leave you all with another profoundly inspiring quote from the mouth of Mr. David Andrew Sitek:

"Most of the music that I like was made on dope. There is no way I could play a song back to myself 3,000 times unless I was stoned. I don't ever want to repeat myself, so I try to be not too conscious of the process...Sitting in my underwear doing bong hits is how I get a mix to gel."

motherfucking \o/!