Snippets

thoughts and books

You can bend the paperclip
until it turns to a fishhook.

from “Question of Flight” by Katie Berger

This is what I got for an answer to a question I asked the Bibliomancy Oracle the other day. The question was trivial and the answer complex. I revel in the difficult to understand. I was going to continue that sentence with because but I realized that it would make no sense to you. Think paperclip. Think fishhook. A neighbor’s beautiful children rang my doorbell the other day and handed me a bouquet of orangey roses. They were from their mother with whom I’d been in a discussion about the nightmare situation in the Middle East. My neighbor is a devout Orthodox Jewish woman, someone who I probably have as little in common with as any other person of a fundamentalist religion, except that we both have children with disabilities, and that fact has bound us together in loving relationship. In the end, that’s what matters to most of us, isn’t it? Think paperclip. I read that the POTUS and his Treasurer chuckled together about someone’s claim that the great united states of america can’t afford a war on two fronts (i.e. Ukraine and Israel). Maybe they were boasting of course we can. Is this supposed to make us feel comfortable because it makes me feel ill. I might hate these people. Think fishhook.

I saw Cat Power last week in concert. She sang Bob Dylan, and it made me cry.

These are the novels and memoirs I’ve read or re-read in the past year, so far. I’ve starred those that I’m teaching and, therefore, am re-reading or have re-read. Reading is my only constant. If you want to know more about any of them, please leave a comment!

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan*
Medea by Euripedes
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt*
The World and All That It Holds by Aleksander Hemon
The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker
Women Holding Things by Maira Kalman
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Self Help by Lorrie Moore
Wool Gathering by Patti Smith
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Story of a Poem by Matthew Zapruder
All of This by Rebecca Woolf
August Blue by Deborah Levy
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsi*
A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney
Antigone, translated by Seamus Heaney
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
When Reasons End by Yiyun Lee
The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasm
Frankissstein by Jeannette Winterson
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley*
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury*
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut*
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne*
Maus by Artie Speigelman*
She may be lying down but she may be very happy by Jody Gelb
The Road by Cormac McCarthy*
Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf*
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf*
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf*
Monster by Walter Dean Myers
I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel
The Glow by Jessie Gaynor
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Death Valley by Melissa Broder
Dreaming by Roz Chast

I’m going to pluck one of these out and urge you to go forward and buy it, borrow it and read it. She may be lying down but she may be very happy was written by my beloved friend Jody Gelb who, along with her daughter Lueza, were Sophie’s and my first friends in the disability world. We walked the streets of New York City together in the mid-nineties and reveled in our moves to the west coast at the same time. We remain intensely connected, and while you might think that makes my opinion of the book biased, I can assure you that it’s a magnificent memoir and that I’d think that no matter who wrote it. You can buy it at all the usual places, but hopefully you’ll do so at an independent bookstore. Here’s a link to Jody’s website.

First person to leave a comment who wants a copy of the micro-memoir will get one!