“I did not look into the mirror, not yet, not in the morning.”
Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

“Visitors don’t arrive in Odessa so much as stumble upon it.”
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King

“The girl had received all her immunizations.”
The Sweet Relief of Missing Children: A Novel by Sarah Braunstein

“Metz is alive for now, standing in line
at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear
and buzz cut, his beautiful new
camel-colored suede boots.”
The Book of Men: Poems by Dorianne Laux

Buy One Round of Mini Golf and GET 2 ROUNDS FREE!

Roll on the turf! Let the spheres in their brilliant colors
explore the textures alive under foot. The angles and contours

are the very pleasures of existence! To see our world miniature,
without taking flight; the great challenge of humankind.

We’ll play until star fall is upon us and the smallest fracture
of wind moves the lighting bugs and serves as excuse.

“I’d heard the word before. They used it for the men they’d see at Ronnie D’s bar down in Bradford Square, the place where my father drank with students and his friends. It’s where some men from town drank, too—plumbers and electricians and millworkers, Sheetrock hangers and housepainters and off-duty copy: townies.”

—Andre Dubus III, from Townie

In an interview with NJ.com, Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya explains what inspired his new novel The Storyteller of Marrakesh:

The catalyst for the novel was going to the Jemaa, the square in Marrakesh, which is the main character in the novel. During the daytime, it is a farmer’s market and a good place to by a camel. At night, the square slides back to the Middle Ages. When I went the first time, one of the largest crowds was around this traditional storyteller, who acts like an emcee, telling stories and allowing audience members to add their own voices. I was enthralled and listened to him for two days.

Full interview here.

Laura Miller:

For Dubus, salvation lay in getting at the stories imprisoned within a reality that at first seemed merely brutal and mindless. “Townie,” in addition to probing the wounds of class and family, explains how the son became, like his father, a writer. If that narrative is the least remarkable aspect of this book, it’s nevertheless intimately entangled with Dubus’ quest to understand his father and to escape the lure of violence. Long before the end of “Townie” it becomes evident that Dubus reached a maturity his father never quite attained. His growing up may have been hard, but he grew up all the way.

milk-eyedmender:

” The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this laguage that flowed from the people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and the wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely.”

- Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

East and West Egg would be dotted with thousands of T. J. Eckleburg billboards, each ablaze with the energy of nonstop online self-disclosure.

The purview and significance of the best memoirs extend well beyond the writer — a relief, since most people’s lives aren’t nearly as interesting as they think. The focus of Johanna Adorjan’s An Exclusive Love is not herself but her paternal grandparents. Despite its schmaltzy title, her memoir is a haunting, beautifully composed book that aims to understand why this elegant couple — Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors who fled Communist Budapest in 1956 and settled successfully in Denmark — committed double-suicide on Oct. 13, 1991, when the author was 20.

What ailing AOL bought is vapor. About 35% of the HuffPo’s users come form Google. They land on cleverly optimized content: stories borrowed from other (and consenting) medias that mostly generate blogging and comments. This is the machine that drove 28m unique visitors in January, which makes the HuffPo close to the New York Times/Herald Tribune audience of 30m UV.  With one key difference: each viewer of the NYT websites yields an ARPU of $11, ten times more than the Arianna thing. Based on the HuffPo’s valuation, the NYT Digital would be worth billions. That’s a consolation.

-Monday Note

Horrorshow drink specials at the Korova Milkbar! 

What’s it going to be then, eh? Feeling bolnoy? Why not stop by the Korova Milkbar, where you can get milk plus something else?  You won’t have to cheest out all your deng, my droogies — with this Groupon, you get FIVE pitchers of milk peeted with vellocet or synthemesc for the price of FOUR!  

“Falling” is not a viable way of life, and so we tell ourselves that the transition from “falling in love” to “being in love” or a more sober “liking” represents a dispelling of fantasy, a landing on solid ground. We try to keep our footing sure by degrading idealization into mere intoxicating illusion; we are wiser and know better now. However, it is not at all clear that the solid ground we perpetually seek is any more real than the idealizations that inspire passion. It is, rather, selected for different purposes.

Stephen A. Mitchell, CAN LOVE LAST

“Love must have some grounding in reality. It isn’t some abstract idea to be gleaned from books. Love is touch, sound, taste, smell, sight—everything that makes the world what it is. Of course it may be based on an ideal, but it cannot survive solely on ideals. You can be inspired by the ocean, you can admire it, but you cannot swim in a photograph of it, however pretty it may be. For that, you must have the real thing.”

-Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, from The Storyteller of Marrakesh

And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up
For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;
A thing of soft misnomers, so divine
That silly youth doth think to make itself
Divine by loving, and so goes on
Yawning and doting a whole summer long,
Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,
And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;
Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,
And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.
Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,
If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,
It is no reason why such agonies
Should be more common than the growth of weeds.
Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl
The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say
That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.

-John Keats

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believe a person can love someone
And still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

—Marie Howe, from “After the Movie,” THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME

In an intriguing series of studies in the 1950s, investigators were interested in what features would initiate sexual behavior in male turkeys. They first found that you could get arousal with a lifelike model of a female turkey—the males would gobble, strut, puff up, and eventually mount the model. To find the minimal stimulus for sexual response, the scientists removed parts from the model, such as its tail, feet, and wings, ultimately ending up with a head on a stick. The males were fully aroused by this head, and would prefer it even to a headless body.

-Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works

…he approaches her from behind, antennates her thorax and gaster and if she runs away, follows her closely.  Eventually he succeeds in mounting and copulating with her … the Diacomma female returns into the nest, dragging the motionless male in copula along. Nest workers then attack the male, and bite off its head and thorax, while leaving the gaster attached.  There the severed body part remains for one or two days, until it is finally removed by nest workers.

Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies
-E.O Wilson and Bert Hölldobler

From ESPN:

There are several keys to the critical success of “Moneyball.” For baseball fans, it will be how well it toes the alienating line of its central thesis as well as how real the depiction of the game is. And for movie fans in general, it will be how well it transcends its subject matter and becomes a story that a wide swath of people can truly care about, the way “Social Network” did. There are indications from insiders that, despite the laborious, sometimes clumsy process of getting the film off the ground — perhaps best defined by the perplexing casting of Jonah Hill as the character formerly known as Paul DePodesta — the final shooting script will balance entertainment with an adherence to the book and the facts. But of course, we won’t know until we know.

Yes the body is lonely, especially at twilight.
Yes Baptists would rather you not have a body at all,
especially not breasts, suspended in their hooked bras
like loose prayers, like ticking bombs, like two
Hallelujahs, the choir frozen in their onyx gowns
like a row of flashy Cadillacs, their plush upholstery
hidden behind tinted windows, Jesus swinging
from the rearview mirror by a chain.

Dorianne Laux, The Book Of Men

Our experience of a poem is always greater, more diverse
Than our imperfect ability to describe it,
He wrote in his book about Stevens.
After he collapsed in class and broke his neck
A titanium halo held his head in place.
When it was taken off, he drank.

- James Logenbach, excerpted from The Iron Key