Don’t spend time with the wife and the kid, just read. Start with bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, then graduate to Rothenberg’s White Privilege, put a bow on it all with Anzaldua’s Borderlands. Wonder about the professor who assigned the books prior to the start of the Spring semester, but don’t question her. Look forward to doing the same to your own students in four years. Take short breaths, short baths, short bites — more time to read. Don’t get dragged into your daughter’s playroom to play ‘kitchen’ because you might enjoy it and get caught up and forget about all you have to do. Show your daughter your books without pictures and she’ll leave you alone. Throw on The Princess and the Frog DVD and she won’t even know you’re there. Sigh for a nanosecond, not too long. Hit the books again.

On the other hand, you could forget all that shit. Go ahead, sit indian-style in the playroom and swallow some imaginary tea. The books’ll be there. But your daughter at this age and her smile with that gap between her teeth might not.

Oh, and one last thing: Before you begin your New Year’s rollick, here’s this week’s recommended reading.

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Impressions are a losing battle. I had a professor once who won us over by being horrible. It wasn’t his stand-up routine, which, put simply, barely kept us awake in class. Rather, his stand-up, when the prof wore shorts, showed off his purple socks, purple suede loafers, and purple veins. He also regaled us with stories of his stingray attack. But his impressions of famous diplomats are what kept us alive. Impressions haven’t sunk the Kindle: it was Amazon’s top seller this Christmas, which is a good sign for reading, but a bad sign for print. The courts are allowing the suit against Barnes & Noble over the Nook design to continue. I admit my contradiction here: I relish B&N’s struggles since they hurt so many independent bookstores, but I don’t usually gripe against retail-specific e-readers. After all, I gave a Kindle gift card this Xmas, but it isn’t quite the same as old book tokens. The Guardian has a nice article about those tokens, which I knew nothing about. I hope no one stuck in NYC transit during the blizzard planned to do any reading: the MTA  removed all poetry it had placed on the subway. Barry Hannah’s posthumous collection has arrived. As has another book on Voltaire. And, in sad news, Dennis Dutton, who founded the excellent Arts and Letters Daily, passed.  Thank you, Double D, and rest in peace.

The house was far out of town, at the top of a mountain which you had to reach by winding roads walled in by cliffs and falling rocks, and passing up a steep incline through two automatic gates before entering the property. It was like an abandoned set for Night of the Iguana—and there was no cellphone connection there so I just stood by a drained pool at the edge of the woods looking out at the lights flashing through the broad distance over the opposite mountains to where I imagined the rest of the world was, listening to a silence in my ears like the perfume of wild animals, miles and miles of predatory seduction hidden in and clinging to the dark air. I felt as if time had contracted and stopped. Sometimes we see that we’re really at the edge of things — but all the things that took place before seem to be present. It is like being in eternity. Everything seems to be taking place at once. Fragments of old movies on cable television in the middle of the night were like history repeating itself over and over again — each time with newly understood nuances which seemed to be both separated and united. Disappearing voices and gestures bouncing around — like atoms of light — off the walls of eternity. Accumulating and dissipating ceaselessly, beyond control. I read the account in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, over and over, and the print seemed to be written on the walls of time like a primitive memory, a sealed envelope, a burned letter.

Sure,
Not only the Empire State building,
Not only how that woman might have looked naked in the 1970s,
but after Christmas—
coming home at night
passing the dead end streets
the left and right
mouths of streets lit momentarily
containing a passing figure
++++++++frozen bright
in motion
dying into our dashlight
fading
into the darkness, the still surge
of types of knowing
clothed and dressed in types
of gesture, types of mustaches
then back to the smell
++++++++of an original house
the lit up facades
++++++++fading in a swift douse
like flames
++++++++life burning
or like
streets that my father
++++++++played on before I
was born, before he was married
where uncles were brothers only
tracked him down
to know what they know still
I only surmise
The grandeur of each house
its modest satisfaction
++++++++humble pride
a stigma on the doorstep
++++++++of the world
where dreams and dreams repeat
crowded streets that time evacuated
and the simple shape
+++++the door of home
where visitors call
+++++and where the unfamiliar
extend the matrix of experience
to glimpse the upstairs
++++++++windows,
++++trim and closed
their other worlds
the little worlds
++not ready to disclose
the daily yearning and the daily growth

They flash like storms
+++++like flood tides
++++++++sweeping high
over the wharves of
++++++++knowing
drowning sense
in generalities of myth and type
bathing the dark with darkness
of the soul
the simple emblem
++++++++trellised on the front
and plunge through depths
+++++of similarity

(vast mingling repetitious revelry)

Also the fragments,
++++++++spiritual shards
of the new generations
++++++++taking flight
across the coded inconsistencies
of space that’s lit by
+++++moonlight, by
++++++++streetlamp
where do they go?
+++++who counts them
++++++++apart
where their conviction
+++++is disfigurement
displacing fairy tales?
+++++They shine so bright
my heart bleeds into
+++++trees to fill the dark.

The round o’s of the
+++++face of the wood sprite.

_____________________________

Ben Mazer’s most recent poetry collections are January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010) and Poems (Pen & Anvil Press, 2010).

____________________________________

Michelle Reale is an academic librarian working in a university in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Verbsap, Dogzplot, Word Riot, elimae, JMWW, Blood Orange Review, Monkeybicyle, Apt, Pequin, Freight Train, Dogmaticka, Laura Hird and others.

Today we talk with Nicole Elizabeth about urgency, agency, and the novel she’s working on.

Tell us about the first story you remember writing?

The first story I actually remember writing was when I was eight, though I did win a local newspaper contest on metaphors when I was in first grade. The metaphor I wrote was, “The moon is a giant white marble.” My Aunt had it cut out and framed in our living room forever. Anyway so the story, I wrote it on every other line of lined paper in pencil, for editing purposes, I remember. It was a novella which took place during the 1800’s about a woman whose parents owned a hat factory and the man who worked there who she was in love with and how they weren’t allowed to get married because he wasn’t from a wealthy family. I come from this really small place in New England where we have all these old mills and old houses and I think that was part of the inspiration for the story. I was really lucky because from a very young age I explained to people that I wanted to be a writer and they listened. Once a month my Aunt would pick me up and we would go out to lunch and discuss the writing I was working on. I was in like fourth grade but she took me seriously and it meant the world to me because I was 100% serious about it. She passed away when I was 18 and not a day goes by that I don’t miss her. I think she would loathe some of my writing now.

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