May 13 - 22, 2008

embryoyo

dean young

paperback, 2007

7 cards

This book arrived as one of the titles in the McSweeney's Book Club. I was in grad school when it arrived and then I moved, but finally I picked this brilliant volume of poetry up. Dean Young twists words into amazing, vivid, fabulous phrases and ideas. From robot monkeys to the pround, this collection is truly wonderful. Don't delay in reading it like me.

Excerpts:

15- "Dachshunds!"

"What am I but the intersection of these loves?"

-"Mexican animal crackers!"

17- "my nightmares are your confetti"

20- "I want to get as close as possible to rain without actually being in it"

"I would rather spend an hour with a dying squirrel than tour a cathedral."

22- "Erik Satie's birthday comes and goes and barely a notice on public radio."

-"Hours in front of the mirror, still the mirror forgets. Hours in front of the mirror, now you're all reflection."

24- tambourines

25- "The immortals torn from the grooves like cancelled stamps from envelopes, the message carried within no longer known."

28- "primarily by zigzags like a poem, bunny moves"

29- "...the doubleness of being one place but feeling you are another is solely a human blessing/curse..."

30- "a twice-met person"

31- "Mallarme...his poems seem not so much written as evaporated."

33- "There must be a point where a broken thing can be broken no more. Probably, we need protection from each other."

34- "...and my dreams remain attached to me by silver thumbtacks..."

36- "The sea seemingly a constant to the naked eye is one long goodbye, perpetually the tide recedes, beaches dotted with debris. Unto each is given a finite number of addresses, ditties to dart the heart to its moments of sorrow and swoon."

-tuna melt and waiting

37- "Probably worthless but it is my heart so take it"

40- giraffe

-"some things can't be bought, they can only be paid for"

42- "There is a time for tinsel, and it is not now.:

43- "So much life we cannot have or find or repeat yet so much we had and found."

44- "mark permanent on the heart"

47- "One attempts to be significant on a grand scale in the knockdown battle of life but settles"

-clams

63- Basquiat

65- "Why am I so afraid of nothingness?"

66- "The second CD only the witlessly bored watch."

69- "For a while I was in danger of becoming someone who gets up in the middle of the night to make sure the flashlight in the drawer is off then I found the giraffe!"

71- babies

73- middle

75- "Yellow pencils composing odes to birdlife, mostly wrens"

76- "Every bird knows only two notes constantly rearranged"

"We make paper hats of headlines and float them away."

-"my favorite poem is cinder scratched into a sidewalk"

81- Ant Farm's Cadillac Ranch

89- "The nighttime is no time to undertake a search yet that is when we begin and sometimes must end..."

92- "Hurdy gurdy, says the world feeling a wee cranky"

-"the people who haven't found out won't a while longer"

96- "smaller and smaller the sea bashes everything until viola: sand"

"even though everyone already knows is death a secret that must be told and told?"

"Every sunset is a crease"

100- Jean Tinguely

101- "Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels. You want happy endings, read cookbooks."

"We go to art to learn the unlearnable, experience the unexperienceable."

-"Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur, Breton said that"

103- "So while in Italy, see as many Caravaggios as you can and I will look here in my bushes and grocery store."

105- shoe prints

"no cloud without tears, how it smells like iron then it rains and rains and rains"

April 17-19, 2008

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

Hardcover 2005

31 cards

It's hard to read a book while crying, but it is truly amazing to read a book that moves me to tears. When this book was lent to me the picture from 9/11 was flipped to. I admit this was a picture I did not want to see at the time, I didn't watch the news, I didn't need the images at the time. While I loved Foer's other book Everything is Illuminated it took a month or so for me to pick this book up, but once I did, I couldn't put it down. Using the picture as a sort of Readymade and wrestling with Duchamp's both and rather than either/or (the door that is both open and closed), Foer, from a child's perspective (a child anyone would live a richer life to know) offers amazing story layered upon story, driven by letters and emotions, while also revealing revelations about life not unlike Jenny Holzer's Truisms. Foer includes amazing statements about love throughout while also cracking the reader up. I thought I was one of the few who see the need for a detachable pocket and I was delighted to see that Foer through Oskar also see the need. This is likely the best use of a tambourine in a story. Ever. "Heavy boots" but boots worth putting on and wearing.

I don't even know where to begin with my stack of cards from this book. Each page offers a present. A rich experience with each page turned.

-2 birdseed shirt

-tambourining

-4 "It's that I believe that things are extremely complicated."

-7 children and parents

-8 map of Central Park

-"Was nothing a clue?"

-9 "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I be right?" "...Another way of looking at it would be, how could you ever be wrong?"

-10 not stop looking

-"The more I found the less I understood."

-11 letters

-12 laminator

-13 "Just because you're an atheist, that doesn't mean you wouldn't love for things to have reasons for why they are."

-17 yes, no

-36 coffin and closet

-40 319 post offices, 207,352 post office boxes, 41,163 million locks

-42 "someone walking on a tightrope between the Twin Towers" (Phillipe Petit, about whom I just saw the film, Man On Wire)

-Stuff That Happened to Me scrapbook

-45, 47, 48, 49

-46 "...most people write the name of the color of the pen they're writing with."

-"Would you mind not shaking the tambourine in the store?"

-53

-60-61

-59, 62, 63

-69 "It probably gets pretty lonely to be anyone."

-71 portable pocket

-Mencils

-72 and 73- ambulances

-74 "We need enormous pockets, pockets big enough for our families, and our friends, and even the people who aren't on our lists, people we've never met but still want to protect. We need pockets for boroughs and for cities, a pocket that could hold the universe."

-"In the end, everyone loses everyone." (This reminds me of Jason Collett's song We All Lose One Another)

-76 (letter) "Where had it been for those 15 years?"

-"I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love."

-ruby bracelet

-"I had a letter from everyone I knew."

-81 "Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted."

-"We had everything to say to each other, but no ways to say it."

-82 "I was more along than if I had been alone."

-84 "Together and separately."

-87 meeting people with last name Black

-88 "I shook my tambourine the whole time, because it helped me remember that even though I was going through different neighborhoods, I was still me."

-90 Edna Saint Vincent Millay

-95

-96 elephants, remembering

-99 "So in a way, the more you kiss with lips, the more human you are."

-card

-100 scarf and knitting

-101 "Don't go away."

-102 love and collection

-106 inventions: wedding rings and bracelet

-108 "songs are as sad as the listener"

-109 "...at the end of the day I fill the suitcase with old news."

-111 Something. Nothing.

-126 "Trying to be"

-130 "My life story is the story of everyone I've ever met."

-133 "I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life."

-145 gambols

-147 Coney Island, Cyclone

-149 leather

-154 "I was keeping a list in my head of things I could do to be more like him."

-"There are more places you haven't heard of than you've heard of."

-LP...Polaroid...drive-in...Frank Lloyd Wright

-156 "Is a love song a love song?" "Yes!"

"Is love love?" "No!"
-biographical index

-160- 230 years of peace

-162 library sinking

-163 being careful with people

-164 artists, arms, feeding each other, believing in the story

-166 and 167

-169 "His memory is here"...

-cells

-170-171 Feelings Book entries

-172-173

-175 taking pictures

-178 "Everything will be..."

-179 shyness, shame

-colder

-books, grandfather clock, time

-180 book crying

-189

-"Why are you so weird?"

-190 Buckminster Fuller

-191

-193 postage stamp, creme brulee

-194 "He said poverty made him nervous, not people."

-195 watching the world

-202 Cucumber, Formica

-203 juicebox

-207 Hey Jude

-208-216

-208 "You write to someone you can't be with."

-214 typewriter

-215 "Life is scarier than death."

-216 letter- "And here I am instead of there. ..."

-217 the Sixth Borough

-220 "I love you" and response

-222 "Maybe we're lost..."

-Antarctica

-230 staples and tape

-226-229

-230-232

-232 "That beautiful person is mine! Mine!"

-233 empty envelopes

-239 "In Chinese ny mean 'you' Though was 'I love you.'"

-245 Empire State Building- what it's really like

-247 "I looked at everyone and wondered where they came from, and who they missed, and what they were sorry for."

-Ruth

-249 "We'll care incredibly much."

-250- kissing, electric sparks

-251 "If I had an answer, it wouldn't really be love would it?"

-252 spotlight

-253

-255

-256 "Maybe he didn't say he loved me because he loved me."

-257 "Why Yes and No?"

-260-261

-269

-275

-278 "The room was filled with the conversation we weren't having."

-map of where he went

-280 "We didn't talk about unimportant things."

-285- Mr. Black's

-286 Oskar Schell: Son

-"...I wouldn't have let him go."

-believing

-287-288

-304-305

-"I wish I were a poet."

-307- nothing to write on

-309

-310 "It's better to lost than never to have had."

-312 "What if we stay?"

-314 "It's always necessary."

-316 book invented

-318

-319 names, keep

-321 dictionary definition

-324 extremely complicated

-325 reversed the order