“There were tides in the new earth, long before there was an ocean. In response to the pull of the sun the molten liquids of the earth’s whole surface rose in tides that rolled unhindered around the globe and only gradually slackened and diminished as the earthly shell cooled, congealed, and hardened” —Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us
What are your Rumblr editors reading this week? Well…
Molly: I am still reading Alison Stewart’s First Class and it keeps getting better. It’s part DC history, part chronicle of black education systems, part tribute to Stewart’s parents, part survey of Dunbar’s (America’s first black public high school and, for decades, its best) storied graduates. I love the attention Stewart pays to class issues, too, a topic sometimes neglected in otherwise triumphal histories of black Americans. Maybe a novel next week!
Claire is probably sleeping off her jetlag.
Lucy: I am reading Herbert Gold’s Lovers & Cohorts: Twenty-Seven Stories. I’ve been in a missing-San Francisco funk and much of Gold’s work is set there, so the tales are both tonic and torture. Isolation, wandering, bohemia: all those little needles to the heart are here.
I definitely was sleeping off my jetlag. Embarrassing!
In case you were wondering! I’m reading The Sea Around Us byRachel Carson. It’s about the science of the ocean, but it reads like poetry, or the creation myth of some weird aquatic religion. It’s stunning; it is making me very emotional about the ocean, to a degree that is maybe a little comical.
Tonight the babies are listening to Destiny’s Child and being THE CUTEST EVER; one of them just told me a story about wearing a bear costume and getting crazy on 4loko, one of them told me I should stop working here and be a “covergirl” (“seriously, you could! you look like you’re eighteen!!!”, oh great thanks), one of them asked me for advice about dealing with all of his Myspace girlfriends, one of them is wearing leopard print booty shorts and literally rolling on the floor laughing.
REMEMBER WHEN I had to help my old work (…Americorps) run trainings for “commercial revitalization professionals,” remember when I said I thought it was weird that nobody ever ever ever mentioned the people who lived in the neighborhoods they were talking about, remember how my boss looked at me, so shocked, and said “but this isn’t about people, it’s about businesses.”
One time a stranger emailed me and asked if I would write “as if” in my hand writing so she & her best bud could get matching Clueless tattoos. Obviously I did it but I don’t think they ever got the tattoos. Or they never sent pix.
!!
Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before. I, I, I—he went on. It was like a vulture’s beak pecking, or a vacuum-cleaner sucking, or a telephone bell ringing. I, I, I. But he couldn’t help it, not with that nerve-drawn egotist’s face, she thought, glancing at him. He could not free himself, could not detach himself. He was bound on the wheel with tight iron hoops. He had to expose, had to exhibit. But why let him? she thought, as he went on talking. For what do I care about his “I, I, I”? Or his poetry? Let me shake him off then, she said to herself, feeling like a person whose blood has been sucked, leaving all the nerve-centres pale. She paused. He noted her lack of sympathy. He thought her stupid, she supposed.
“I’m tired,” she apologised. “I’ve been up all night,” she explained. “I’m a doctor—”
The fire went out of his face when she said “I.” That’s done it—now he’ll go, she thought. He can’t be “you”—he must be “I.” She smiled. For up he got and off he went.
Close! The screening is on Sunday!
LOOK AT THIS, too good, I want to see it so much. If I were rich I would give Amanda so much money to make movies, it’s a weird thing that I think about actually all the time, every time I pass a movie theater, every time I see movie ads in the subway.
skullsjawsteethclaws asked: 1. Your horoscopes are beautiful and perfect; 2. Your Northeast blogging/NH blogging in on point; 3. Is that Hatchetface as your icon?
Horoscopes and New Hampshire and Hatchetface, this is the best message. Thank you!!
(It is Hatchetface! She is such an angel; she’s maybe my favorite John Waters character? In my dreams I am as weird as she is and as good as she is.)
THE MANARCHIST SAYS: “
Aye Nako
“Molasses”
It is getting so warm and great in Brooklyn and that means that this song gets stuck in my head everywhere I go
ONE OF THE BABIES JUST ASKED ME TO HELP HER TAKE SELFIES, I am dying of happiness, “I want it to look like I’m like, looking up, can you do that?”
