Book nerd.

Sometimes even the most passionate book lover needs a break from reading or writing. I’ve gathered a few interesting ideas for book-related activities. Fun tangents to explore on the literary path. Meaty bits, dreamy bits, nerdy bits.

10. Open a clandestine used book shop. (Thanks to Elizabeth for introducing me to this heartthrob).

9. Read about a day in the life of a well-known author. (Thanks to Noan for this one).

8. Make a dress.

7. Build yourself a writing desk.

6. Become a surgeon.

5. Buy flowers and put them in a vase.

4. Get a tattoo.

3. Donate a few books to a highly selective used book store and lending library.

2. Take a trip.

1. Learn something new.

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Allow me one more delightful tidbit: today’s poem.

Anagrammer by Peter Pereira

If you believe in the magic of language…

All lit up.

Thank you to those in my reading/writing community who recommended Mary Karr’s Lit. I gobbled it. I’m putting down a few of the lines that drenched me awake because I want to share them with you and also because I want to hold on to them long after the book is returned to the library.

Some lines from Lit by Mary Karr…

On youth

What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.

On love of language

Words warranted my devotion–not drugs, not boys. That’s why I clung to the myth that poetry could somehow magically still my scrambled innards.

On writing

But humming through me like a third rail was poetry, the myth that if I could shuffle the right words into the right order, I could get my story straight, I could write myself into an existence that included the company of sacred misfit poets whose pages had kept me company as a kid.

On learning

I befriended a stately Holocaust survivor who showed me you could live like an intellectual whether you were in school or not. He loaned me a translation of Dante’s Inferno, which I left on a bus one drunken night, badly lying that it was stolen–what mugger says, Hand over the Dante!

On learning to write

[Etheridge Knight] wanted me to picture a woman climbing five flights in a Harlem apartment building in summer heat, then having to go back down with armloads of garbage. He said, If you’re standing on the corner of 116th Street poeticizing, what could you possibly say to help her climb back up?

On courtship

Warren counters with “Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness…”  Watching his unkissed mouth shaping those plush syllables is the libidinal equivalent of a studly crooner mouthing a love song.

On attraction

Occasionally, deliciously, my foot brushes his muscled calf, which makes me go all creamy in my center like a stuffed chocolate.

On survival

Build a wall around the day and don’t look over it.

On procrastination

What happened to the poems I was going to set the world weeping with? Tomorrow!

On drinking

I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle.

On drinking in a hotel room

And why a mini-bar when a maxi-bar is clearly what’s called for?

On accepting help from someone

You’re not gonna pay me back, he said. It’s not that linear.

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So many lines, sharp as arrows,  to choose from. These are just a measly handful to whet your appetite for this galloping book, this galloping life. Even though she and I share more differences than similarities, reading Lit made me feel (as Karr herself writes in the memoir about work she adores) somebody out there knew who I was even if we’d never met–or would never meet. Reading this book also made me feel, for a thimbleful of a second, that I might want to believe in prayer again. The feeling didn’t last long, but still, it counts for something.

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Today’s Poem: (click on link to read entire poem)

Morning Poem by Mary Oliver

Every morning

the world

is created…

10 ways to a woo a word lover.

10. Do not give her diamonds; give her books.

9. Date night? Scrabble. Bananagrams if you want to shake things up a bit.

8. Court via letters. Your hand-writing on paper does something that no email, no matter how romantic and well-written, can ever achieve.

7. When she cries about feeling lonely and misunderstood, tell her she is avant-garde. What a word! She’ll perk up. Immediately.

6. Do crossword puzzles together. Gives new meaning to the phrase you complete me.

5. Tell her that her glasses make her look like a sexy librarian.

4. When she mentions that she’s never read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, give her the copy you read in college so that she can devour the book with the sprinkling of your adolescent marginalia adding to the flavor.

3. Understand that she might never pay attention to you with the same intensity that she lavishes on the book she’s reading.

2. Use the word “covenant” as a verb in a poem you’ve written. Yes, this means you must write her a poem.

Almost 1. Edit her work and point out typos. Especially glaring mistakes in the title.

1. Take her to hear Billy Collins read his poetry.

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I love people that make me laugh. I love poets. Billy Collins is a poet that makes me laugh. Here is just a little taste.

Today’s Poem: (click link to read entirely) by Billy Collins

I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of ‘Three Blind Mice‘

And I start wondering how they came to be blind.

If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sisters…

Noan

Bibliomancy. Oh, how I love this word. Before last week I didn’t even know it existed. I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember, but thanks to Noan I now know that what I’ve been doing has a name.

I’ve written about Noan here before. She is my Robin Hood; she regularly leaves treasures for me to find at the entrance of my lonely cottage. In the short time I’ve known her, I’ve already learned so much. Most importantly, I’ve learned that you can feel friendship with someone whose face you’ve never seen and whose voice you’ve never heard. In reply to one of my posts last week,  Noan sent me a piece she’d written for a writing class. I loved it and I asked her if she’d be willing to let me share it–share her–with all of you. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce my first official guest post writer: Noan Cleary.

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Bibliomancy: the use of books in divination

It was spring of 1999, and I was on the search for a surgeon.  My younger daughter, Elizabeth, was seven years old at the time.  Elizabeth has cystic fibrosis and that year she needed sinus surgery, and she needed it as soon as possible.   I had an appointment that afternoon with one of the surgeons recommended by Elizabeth’s doctors, but unfortunately the appointment did not go well.   This surgeon, I learned, was not the type of doctor that answered questions.  When my husband called to see how it went all I could think to say was: What is the difference between God and a surgeon?  God doesn’t think he is a surgeon.

I drove home from the appointment feeling rather beaten down and slightly weepy.  Fortunately – because this type of physician-induced miasma was becoming familiar to me- I knew just what I needed.  I needed a good book.  More specifically, I needed that focused relaxation I feel only when my head is buried deep in a book.  It came to mind that Anne Lamott had a new book out, and since I pass a bookstore on the way home I decided I would stop and treat myself to the guilty pleasure of a full-price, hardcover, chain-store book purchase.  You can imagine my profound disappointment when the bored young clerk at the bookstore informed me, Oh, we don’t have that book in stock.   I searched the store for an alternative purchase, but no other book felt right, and I left empty-handed.

Arriving home, I immersed myself in the nightly tasks of dinner preparation and homework tutoring.  I was up to my elbows in long division and marinara sauce when I heard a voice say, Anne Lamott, and looked up to find Rosie O’Donnell on our TV screen.  Anne Lamott, Rosie announced, is going to be with us tomorrow to talk about her new book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts On Faith.   How funny, I thought; I never remember seeing an author on the Rosie O’Donnell show before.  I’m going to have to keep looking for that book, I thought to myself.

The following day I succeeded in tracking down a copy of Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, and that evening I settled in bed and began to read.  It had been over an hour, and I was just beginning to feel sleepy when I read something that caused me to sit up and take notice:

 On an otherwise ordinary night at the end of September, some friends came over to watch the lunar eclipse, friends whose two-year-old daughter Olivia had been diagnosed nine months earlier with cystic fibrosis.  I know that sometimes these friends feel that they have been expelled from the ordinary world they lived in before and that they are now citizens of the Land of the Fucked.  They must live with the fact that their younger daughter has this disease that fills its victim’s lungs with thick sludge that harbors infections.  Two-week hospital stays for nonstop IV antibiotics are common.  Adulthood is rare.

 What surprised me most about this passage was just seeing the words cystic fibrosis on the page.  I had never come across any mention of a child with CF in any book I’d ever read.  I thought to myself: pay attention.  And I kept reading.

 We stood outside for a while longer, talking about this last flare-up, how frightened she’d felt, how tired.  And I didn’t know what to say at first, watching Olivia go chasing the big kids, coughing.  Except that we, their friends, all know the rains and the wind will come and they will be cold – oh, god, will they be cold.  But then we will come too, I said; we will have been building this barn all along, and so there will always be shelter.

I read that ending two or three times, slightly puzzled.  I would love to say that I found it illuminating, or at the very least satisfying.  But I did not.   I did not at the time want to hear about shelter from the damn storm.  I just wanted the storm to end.  I wanted a sign that better weather was on its way.  But I paid attention because in some twinkle-twinkle-ding-dong kind of way I felt like the universe was trying to send me a message.  Since that day, I have pulled Traveling Mercies off the shelf numerous times and re-read that ending, and it is only now, twelve years later, that I realize it told me exactly what I needed to hear.   

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Thank you, Noan. You have been my source of bibliomancy quite often lately, offering little chunks you’ve gathered from books and life to help me divine my own way and find shelter from the storm.

Noan chose today’s poem: (click link to read entire poem)

Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz

Not soon, as late as the approach of my

ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered…

Love smells like paper.

I love words. I love words, a multitude of them, the way a lifelong bachelor can never decide between his cool blonde, his spicy red, his velvet brunette, or his blade edge black.  I love the friction and sizzle that an unexpected pairing of words emit. I always instinctively sensed the corporeal energy produced by language, but was unable to fully comprehend what I was sensing until I read an interview of poet Naomi Shihab Nye who explained her experience of language like this:

The older I get…the more I think energy is everything. If we have it, feel connected to it, we are rich. If we don’t have it, we are forever searching. High school students frequently say that emotion is the key to life..but the older I get the more that key, that source of all living, seems to be energy. Energy comes from many places including juxtaposition and contradictory things, elements, experiences, impulses coming together. The energy that comes from rubbing one image up against another in poems is quite surprising and majestic, and I think our brains are desperate for that energy.

Language is generous. It doesn’t ask us to be loyal or forsake the pleasure of one beautiful phrase because we’re smitten by another. Today I want the hard drinking, tin can poverty of Bukowski, and tomorrow I may need Neruda’s Latin American tumult and flame.  Today I might crave magical realism, tomorrow I’ll want Steinbeck and his dry tear-stained American earth. Within a particular book, each passage has the potential to turn my world on its head, spinning me head over heels in love, countless times (see photo above).

Language is powerful. It has the ability to create universes, real or imagined, within the dark tunnels of our mind, to set off a battlefield of firing synapses. Language is pleasure. It’s the bacchanalia we indulge in without repercussion, a smorgasbord for our hungry minds.

A few days ago I saw this:

This business concept allows clients to select a favorite passage which is then printed and applied to their wall of choice. Literary decor; throw pillows and a quote. The thought is enticing, especially for someone like me who prefers the warmth of books and language to a wool afghan. I wanted to love the idea, but I could not.

In that split second of terror at the stop light (how does one choose?!), I was schooled in the ways of the eternal bachelor. Because how could we possibly be asked to choose just one? Charles Simic’s Orphan Factory, the book I’ve been spending my time with lately, is just one example of a book full of beauties that turn my head with each turn of the page. Here are a few:

If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.

After a while, I listened only to the silence deepen, the night continue to hold its breath.

The experience of being eludes language…the advantage of the poetic image is that it preserves the wordless.

Like poetry, humor is subversive.

The night sky loves only the solitary ones. To the one sitting in a corner with his face to the wall, it offers its own secret invitation on the breath of the night wind. When he finds himself in the desert or on the mountaintop, he will want immediately to confide himself to the sky. Oh the things we would all say to the stars in the sky if we found ourselves alone in a lifeboat at sea.

Perhaps bachelors are onto something. Perhaps they are our true romantic poets who understand that the experience and appreciation of one inherently leads to and enhances the experience and appreciation of another. So I refuse to emblazon my walls and live happily ever after with just one.  My first confession: I’m an eternal lingual bachelorette. My second confession: I dogear my library books…please don’t tell.

Do you have a word, a phrase, a poem, or passage that you love more than any other? That guides you or comforts you or drums your heart with pleasure every time you read it? A passage that you could wake up to every morning and share a sink with?

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Another juicy plum of a find in Simic’s Orphan Factory is a poem he discovered during his earliest years in New York. I imagine Simic holding onto it like a carefully wrapped piece of secret chocolate stashed in a cupboard, taking a satisfying nibble every once in a while.

For pleasure, in every incarnation.

The Peasant Declares his Love by Emile Roumer

High-yellow of my heart, with breasts like tangerines

you taste better to me than eggplant stuffed with crab…