Halloween + Shoes

I haven't posted in a long time. But I am putting up:

1) My Halloween headgear

2) A picture of someone's old shoes that are going to be my new shoes (from The Selby).

Lines & Shapes

The new volume of this is out:



I just ordered it. I love port2port, and have some of Mav's photographs in my house:

It's not just because I secretly want to live in Maine, either. Though I do spend time at work using the googlemaps satellite function to look at various towns in Maine. I pretend I am a gull on my way from Nova Scotia....

You Can Never Be Too Young or Too Dead

When I started this blog (such an ugly word, that. Can I call it something else? When I started this ripple? this elderberry? this donnybrook? I don’t know, those are just some words I like...) I imagined that it would be a place for me to explore my more enlightened, high-minded interests. This is not only because I am a little bit of a snob, but also because it seemed like it would be more interesting to read and write about the geological history of Eastern Parkway, or the great tradition of pet biographies (POST TO COME) than, say, "Magazines I Like to Read". I notice that I just called pet biographies high-minded. So be it.

But life is not all glaciers and marmosets. Life is also diet Dr. Pepper and lawn ornaments. And I embrace it all! Yes, life is about so very many things, but above all, perhaps, it is about this simple fact: We are all going to die someday.

A little morbid, yes, but true nonetheless. And if there is one woman who has made it her mission to constantly remind us of this fact, and who yet gives us the same kind of pleasure provided by the aforementioned diet Dr. Pepper, that woman is Lurlene McDaniel.

Either you were just drowned by a warm, wonderful flood of childhood memories, or you have no idea what I am talking about.

Ms. McDaniel is the author of many young-adult fiction books, almost all of which feature a terminally ill teenager (usually a girl). Sometimes they have cancer (they in fact often have cancer, for cancer, as we know, bespeaks innocence, pathos and wasted beauty), sometimes they need a heart transplant, sometimes they have cystic fibrosis. Occasionally it is the boyfriend of the female protagonist who is tragically ill. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The point is they are young, they are very, very sick and they are not getting better.

I loved these books when I was a kid. Particular favorites included Don’t Die, My Love; Sixteen and Dying and Baby Alicia is Dying. I could write an entire post about that last one, the cover image and jacket copy of which can, I think, speak for themselves:

"Desi thinks it's totally unfair that innocent baby Alicia was born HIV positive. Now the eight-month-old Alicia lives at Childcare because she was given away by her sick teenage mother. Desi can relate to feeling unloved. Her parents give her all the material things she needs, but there seems to be a wall between her mother and herself."

Something to chew on, hm?

BAID aside, I mostly enjoyed stories about young, white, relatively privileged kids-- kids like myself-- slowly dying. I hoped feverishly that the characters would recover, while in my heart of hearts I felt a deep, sick satisfaction in knowing that they would not. McDaniel doesn’t really write books with happy endings. In response to a question in the "Ask Lurlene" section of her website, she writes,

‘I know sad stories aren't for every reader, but it's the kind of story that most of my readers like from me. When I write "happy" books, many readers complain. So I focus on what I do best---stories that might bring a tear, but that focus on real life (where happily ever after rarely occurs). And while the books may not have "happy" endings, I try to give readers a satisfying ending---life is full of trouble and matters out of our control. How we deal with troubles determines our own character.’

So true. I think the key here, aside from the universal human fascination with death, is that all the characters in McDaniel's books are just a little older than I was when I read them. They are TEENAGERS, which is all I dreamt of being before I became one. And not only are they teenagers, they are teenagers who are made old before their time. And there is a certain type of child, of which I was one, who really wants to be old before her time. She wants death thrust upon her, if only imaginatively, because it seems a small price to pay to gain the wisdom, glamor and prestige of the dying.

I also have a chronic illness myself, but let's not discuss that here! (I will only say, in relation to that, that McDaniel started writing about dying children when her own son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which seems to be just a little bit twisted and melodramatic. But who am I to judge?)

I had completely forgotten about these books until recently. I remembered individual titles, but not that they were all written by the same person. I think this is really a testament to the fact that these books loomed large in my youthful mind, each one its own distinct world of graceful misery. Lord, I just can't wait to have kids, so Lurlene can teach them what this life is all about.

I leave you with a sampling of Lurlene McDaniel titles:

She Died Too Young

Mother, Help Me Live

Please Don't Die

Mourning Song

The Girl Death Left Behind

Someone Dies, Someone Lives

When Happily Ever After Ends

The first of many re-starts to come

I didn't really want to make this a blog about writing, or about me, or about--heaven forbid--blogging. But it was been about six weeks since I last posted, so I will write:

Why This Is Difficult


This is difficult because it is immediate.
This is difficult because it is short.
This is difficult because I've already asked people to look at it.
This is difficult because it is new.
This is difficult because I am careful.
This is difficult because it is, improbably, local. By which I mean that it exists primarily for an already-established community, that is, my friends and loved-ones.

To put something small and decent onto the earth, and to do it frequently, is a good kind of work. It is a plodding, modest kind of work that can eventually make something bigger. Or not. It need not add up to anything to have a value.

So I suppose: A small thing, of its own modest value, can be decently placed in the world, frequently.

mail art

I haven't seen this yet:



but I'm betting it's good....

A House Possibly Not Meant to Stand

A friend of mine sent out an email to a bunch of people, possibly for further use in a project:

"what does the phrase "feminist haunted house" mean to you? what do you want it to mean? what are you afraid it might mean? etc."

I said: "everything? everywhere? you know how it seems, both in movies and sometimes in reality, like everything is built on a slave/indian/colonial burial ground or potter's yard? like if you could just dig under any building, you'd find all this ignored/forgotten-about death it was built on? and possibly in digging would release, for good or ill, a lot of rage/sadness about that death? well, i suppose most theoretical digging eventually leads you to the body of some feminist idea or person. i'm not sure if that's the point at which the haunting starts or stops. but i'm pretty sure Susan B. Anthony is lurking in your house, scaring your cats.*"

Anyone else?

*Because, as everyone knows, animals are highly sensitive to paranormal activities of all kinds. Especially feminist ones.

Eastern Parkway Tour, part 1

A few days ago I was walking along Eastern Parkway at a time when I would usually be at work, and everything seemed especially vivid. Maybe I was just happy to be out roaming the streets when I'm usually behind a desk, or maybe I'm just more used to seeing everything at 7:00 am/pm, when there's less light. In any case, everything seemed brighter, more detailed, and worthier of examination. Emerson (yes that's right, Emerson. What?) said a change in perspective "gives the whole world a pictorial air." I suppose that goes for time-based perspective too.

Gratitude doesn't always find the same object twice, but I am perpetually grateful for Eastern Parkway. Most of the places I have to be each day are not necessarily the places I want to be—that is, they are not physical spaces to which I would be drawn if they didn’t contain something else of interest. But I walk along Eastern Parkway almost daily, and I’m happy to do it. I think it deserves an ode, or at least an introduction. Eastern Parkway is one of the greenest places in Brooklyn outside of parks and gardens; it preserves public space for unspecified uses (i.e. it is not a concert venue, playground, memorial, etc., but just a place with benches and plants) and in a city that seems to grow only in one direction—up—it has a wonderful and rare horizontal expansiveness.

One of my favorite things about Eastern Parkway is that it follows a glacial path. It was built along the Jamaica Pass, a valley resting between two moraines that the Wisconsin Glacier left behind as it moved across the Northern United States 2 million years ago.

Many of the trees on Eastern Parkway are surrounded by a network of bare roots that have pushed up through the shallow dirt and become hard and knotted. I think they look sort of like an aerial view of a huge, glacially-formed mountain range.

The Jamaica Pass is also the route British troops took during the Battle of Brooklyn, the first major conflict in the Revolutionary War. They marched towards Grand Army Plaza, demolishing an American outpost at Bedford Avenue, and eventually killing thousands of American soldiers. Now it's the route of the West Indian Day Parade, which I think is a tidy little piece of poetic justice. Eastern Parkway lends itself to marching of all kinds.

There isn’t all that much to visibly connect Eastern Parkway to the Revolutionary War at this point, although one of the apartment buildings near Franklin Ave. is called “Nathan Hale Court”:


There is lots of Nathan Hale to be seen in New York. A spy for the Continental Army, Hale is probably most famous for the line he spoke before he was hanged by the British in 1776: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." He was 21 at the time. It seems 21 year-olds have a tendency to proclaim. Several different sites are claimed to be the site of the hanging-- both City Hall Park and the Yale Club are in the running. Everybody wants a piece of Nathan these days.

This seems a little long to be read on a computer screen, so I'm going to stop there for now. I suppose we're moving West on Eastern Parkway, along the path of British troops and also me, on my way to work. To be continued....