The Day I Posted a Joke No One Would Get But Me Day

Fact: The Downfall meme continues to be some of the funniest shit on the internet. Making fun of Nazis never gets old to me.

Fact: DC announced this week they are rebooting all of their titles in September and renumbering back to issue #1. This has some comics readers up in arms but you may be surprised to hear they are prone to that. I don't get worked up about trivial goings-on like this-as long as I see the conclusion of the War of the Lanterns story arc in the Green Lantern-verse or there will be BIG TROUBLE, DC.

How are these two items related? Here's how. (Geoff Johns is DC's Chief Creative Officer. Fear Itself is a Marvel series.)  My only complaint? Hitler bitching about how his collection is worthless now threatens to make him likable.

Poem of the day-Rabindranath Tagore

From the Poetry Found, here is a sweet selection. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was from Calcutta and was an embarrassing overachiever. He wrote poetry in his native Bengali which he frequently translated into English himself, he was the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in 1913 and he decided to become a painter late in life and painted around 2500 paintings.

Being read indeed around 100 years later, I like the way he bridges the gap between us in one sentence.

The Gardener 85 by Rabindranath Tagore

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?

I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.

The title passage for Little Altars

I was surprised by how much I loved The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood when I read it several years ago. I'm finally getting around to reading the prequel, Little Altars Everywhere. The humid Louisiana setting and-I don't know what to call it-Gothic optimism make it a perfect early summer book. I noticed on Goodreads today I am reading two different books with pink covers. Jeez, my reading list is turning into some southern belle's wedding shower.

Here is the sequence from the book that gives it its title, taken from a dream Siddha had about an outcast girl she picked on at girl scout camp to fit in:

We are swinging high, flying way up, higher than in real life. And when I look down, I see all the ordinary stuff-our brick house, the porch, the toolshed, the back windows, the oil-drum barbecue pit, the clothesline, the chinaberry tree. But they are all lit up from inside so their everyday selves have holy sparks in them, and if people could only see those sparks, they'd go and kneel in front of them and pray and just feel good. Somehow the whole world looks like little altars everywhere. And every time Edythe and me fly up into the air and then dive down to earth, it's like we're bowing our heads at those altars and we are praying and playing all at the same time.

First and last for Speak

First:

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache.

Last: (I really lived* the last chapter and this final exchange with her awesome art teacher Mr. Freeman):

He sits on the stool next to me and hands back my tree. "You get an A+. You worked hard at this." He hands me the box of tissues. "You've been through a lot, haven't you?"

The tears dissolve the last block of ice in my throat. I feel the frozen stillness melt down through the inside of me, dripping shards of ice that vanish in a puddle of sunlight on the stained floor. Words float up.

Me: "Let me tell you about it."

*Edit: Good grief, I meant "loved." I didn't live the last chapter of this book, although I would have enjoyed having a cool art teacher.

Final thoughts on Speak

Well, that's the good thing about YA. Not a lot of exposition, you can just whip right through it.

I ended up quite liking this book but if I try to explain why, I sound like an Afterschool Special and then Helen Hunt will come crashing through a 2 story window hopped up on PCP that her boyfriend made in the school lab (what the hell am I talking about? Here.)

So, the main character gets raped at a Senior Party over the summer and she can't get over it (the fact that she has less than stellar friends and parents didn't help.) As you can guess from the title, she clams up the moment she calls the police shortly after the attack (which causes them to bust the party, some of her schoolmates to get arrested and thus making Melinda the most unpopular incoming Freshman) and spends the rest of the book fighting for reasons not to talk. I think it's important that the novel shows her recovering. I didn't even mind the big showdown with her rapist at the end. Since this is YA literature and literature has the power to change minds and especially young minds, it was important to see Melinda finding her voice and her rapist experiencing consequences even if they aren't elaborated upon.

A few more scenes I liked:

Melinda takes a sick day at home and imagines this daytime TV exchange:

Was I raped?

Oprah: "Let's explore that. You said no. He covered your mouth with his hand....Honey, you were raped. What a horrible, horrible thing for you to live through. Didn't you ever think of telling anyone? You can't keep this inside forever. Can someone get her a tissue?"

Sally: "I want this boy held responsible...I want you to listen to me, listen to me, listen to me. It was not your fault. This boy was an animal."

Jerry: "Was it love? No. Was it lust? No. Was it tenderness, sweetness, the First Time they talk about in magazines? No, no, no, no! Speak up Meatilda, ah, Melinda, I can't hear you!"

And this conversation with David Petrakis who is consoling her after Mr. Neck gives her a D on her extra credit report on the Suffragettes because she engineered it so she wouldn't have to deliver it orally:

David: "But you got it wrong. The suffragettes were all about speaking up, screaming for their rights. You can't speak up for your right to be silent. That's letting the bad guys win. If the suffragettes did that, women wouldn't be able to vote yet."

Poem of the day-Matthew Rohrer

Here's another NPF poem of the day, from Matthew Rohrer.He teaches writing at NYU and was a finalist for the Griffin in 2005. The judges said his poems "“present us the sideways view of the world of a young American not able to assume the mantle of hero.” Maybe this is why I like this poem so much.

What I like: as usual, vivid imagery that sets my cortex ping-ponging. And the humor.

You can hear him read the poem if you follow the link to the website.

The Amaranth

By Matthew Rohrer

is an imaginary flower that never fades.

The amaranth is blue with black petals,

it’s yellow with red petals,

it’s enormous and grows into the shape

of a girl’s house,

the seeds nestle high in the closet

where she hid a boy.

The boy and his bike flee

the girl’s parents from the tip

of the leaves, green summer light

behind the veins.

The amaranth is an imaginary flower

in the shape of a girl’s house

dispensing gin and tonics

from its thorns, a succulent.

This makes the boy’s bike steer

off-course all summer, following

the girl in her marvelous car,

the drunken bike.

 

He was a small part of summer,

he was summer’s tongue.

First thoughts on Speak

So, it's a YA novel which means you have to approach it with a different mentality. Not a lot of dense prose or weighty philosophy to ponder. But at best, it should really make the reader feel like they felt at that age, no matter how ephemerally.

The main reason I read this book, other than the fact that so many people I know on Goodreads have read it and I'm always curious about current novels that make their way onto school reading lists, is that I read an editorial written by some upstanding goose-stepping citizen for a Missouri newspaper explaining that it should be banned because the book is pornography.

It's just tedious to rant about this fool who finds rape so titillating so instead, here are a few lines I liked. They are, as you can see, distinctly unporny:

(I just have to childishly add the dude's name was Wesley Scroggins. Is that a To Catch a Predator-ready name or what? Also, I hope his testicles fall off after being crushed by the paw of the demi-urge of free thought. Ok, I am childish. But seriously, I also hope it hurts a lot.)

I sneak into my closet after school because I can't face the idea of riding home on a busful of sweaty, smiling teeth sucking up my oxygen.

[Melinda reflects on a meeting in the Principal's office with her tragically clueless parents to discuss her falling grades]
Do they chose to be so dense? Were they born that way? I have no friends. I have nothing. I say nothing. I am nothing. I wonder how long it takes to ride a bus to Arizona.


When we get off the bus on Valentine's Day, a girl with white-blond hair bursts into tears. "I love you, Anjela!" is spray-painted into the snowbank along the parking lot. I don't know if Angela is crying because she is happy or because her heart's desire can't spell.

[On the same day, she finds a Valentine's Day card on her locker and dreads opening it but finally does thinking it might have come from her lab partner. Instead, it's from Heather her only sort of friend who has dumped her because Melinda is killing her social standing]

My locker. The card is still there, a white patch of hope with my name on it. I tear it off and open it. Something falls to my feet. The card has a picture of two cutesy teddy bears sharing a pot of honey. I open it. "Thanks for understanding. You're the sweetest!" It is signed with a purple pen. "Good Luck!!! Heather." I bend down to find what dropped from the card. It was the friendship necklace I had given Heather in a fit of insanity around Christmas.

[her rapist goes to the same school as her which makes things worse. Here she runs into him on the way to school in a parking lot and he taunts her.]
BunnyRabbit bolts, leaving fast tracks in the snow. Getaway getaway getaway. Why didn't I run like this before when I was a one-piece talking girl?


[she also passes out in biology class dissecting a frog]:
The nurse calls my mom because I need stitches. The doctor stares into the back of my eyes with a bright light. Can she read the thoughts hidden there? If she can, what will she do? call the cops? Send me to the nuthouse? Do I want her to? I just want to sleep. The whole point of not talking about it, of silencing the memory, is to make it go away. It won't. I'll need brain surgery to cut it out of my head. Maybe I should wait until David Petrakis is a doctor, let him do it.