• Sickness: Where it’s almost socially acceptable to wipe a green booger on your mother’s new couch (until your seventy-five year old father sees you and asks himself if he really raised you like that).

I’ve been unbearable over Thanksgiving break.  Coughing to feel the tremor in my skull from mucus in the sinus brain field.  Sounding like a thirteen-year-old pre-pubescent boy (even though many men have told me a deep voice is sexier and therefore I’m more interesting to talk too because of it).  Trying to sing Katy Perry, only to hear myself phase in and out of sound.  The silence my mouth holds.

Because my voice was gone, I also wasn’t up for typing a blog.  This is something about me, I mime words while I read and write.  I can feel my tongue soft like a nudge against the back of my teeth and moving through the air like something light rather than the bulbous pink muscle it is.  Without my throat working along, and my mouth tasting like honey and menthol I was unable to get through a blog, even about being Thankful.

I literally just tried to type what I was Thankful for and nothing really exquisite came out of it.  Probably because I’m thankful for the usual things: my family, my friends that I actually see, and a boy who can change my oil (one of the many tangible things I like about him, the intangible would be too long to name).  I’m also thankful that my family decided not to go around the table and list the things their thankful for because when it comes down to it, I’m just thankful that my life at the moment is relatively easy.

What I’m always thankful for, and I don’t always voice is words: any language, any size, any amount of space in the vowels.  I’m just thankful for how people use them (even when they’re angry) or how my phone changes “fucking” to “ducking” every time I’m angry and it subdues the argument.  Being thankful for that also takes a lot of responsibility, that you will protect those small curvaceous beings and keep them in your pocket in a small, but sturdy notebook and look at them when you’re sad or lonely.

Over the weekend one of my favorite poets died.  (She was also a National Book Award Winner so she’s everybody’s favorite probably).

Ruth Stone

I didn’t think that this blog would be about her, but because her use of words has made me thankful for my ability to read, and manipulate words on this blog for the past year and a half, I can’t let her go without a homage and possibly a pilgrimage to Vermont someday.

Ruth Stone is a poet who tells you that age is nothing but a number, that Poison Ivy isn’t the only super villain (hero) that can have hair burning in the stale air.  Not only that, but she’s a poet that shines through devastation with her power of words.  It’s like having a sword to fight off the tears, or a black pan to throw across the room when you get angry – these words and these poems.  Her husband committed suicide some forty odd years ago and many of her poems are about her own anger towards him, or her pain at his leaving so abruptly with their children huddling around her legs and her need to make herself more than a woman who idles.

(Side note:  I think a lot of times in this country, and beyond I’m sure, society has told women that their function is to idle, to stabilize, to rest stagnant against the kitchen counter with their hips bursting buttons of their jeans and their hair frizzing.  But this is not what women are supposed to do, women are supposed to lift cars with their bare hands and sexy backs like the men do.  They’re supposed to flex words into pick-up lines and poetry.  They’re for more than a lawn ornament, or a Christmas Tree star, or a sweet meat dangle on an arm.  And this is one of my favorite things about Ruth Effing Stone).

Here is just one example of a Ruth Stone poem (as you can tell her voice is one we haven’t heard before, and it’s her very own).  Please read aloud if possible:

Putting up new curtains,
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, "No pets! No pets!"
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

When I read this poem, I can hear Dorianne Laux getting louder at “No Pets, No Pets” in the quiet space of a college classroom.  This isn’t about how I can go back to my college days (oh, so long ago, a whole two years) and remember this poem echoing against the white walls, it’s the fact that it still echos in my head anytime I ask myself, what again is a good poem?  What am I working with here? How can I even write this when Ruth Stone has already written that?

I think one of the most important things she’s ever taught me is to live beyond.  And by that I mean, live past, live fully after, keep on.  A lot of times when something devastating happens to someone (and I’m going to go out on a limb and say happens to women) we hole up in our bathtubs with our chocolate and our eyeliner puddling on our cheeks like a shadow, and we don’t keep on.  We let it keep us stagnant.  We let it keep us against that cabinet or stove like someone holding us down by our throats.

I’m very guilty of this.  In some ways, I move on completely and never look back, and in others (many others) I’m still dwelling.  I’m still letting it darken the cave of my heart, and my chest, and it spreads lower and taller and higher.  Every time I tell someone new that I hate someone from my past, or tell them another horrible-to-me story of my middle school years, I let it live and breathe inside me.  Instead of writing a poem about the pets, and the curtains and what you’ve missed by not being my friend, or continuing to sleep in a bed next to me….I’m killing a piece of myself that could take steps forward, that could run through a field – free.  Because Ruth Stone put this piece of her half-dead marriage out to the public, out to her poems, to her words and vowels – she’s let some of it go.

She has said up until the day she died that she was still very much in love with her husband, as if his death wasn’t the death of their love.  When you sign on for eternity, you hold on, but you don’t remain still, silent or calm.  You continue.  You let the words be pushed up against your thumb and pointer-finger, against the rough ridges of the pen or pencil and you keep on.

I will respect that, and love listening to her read poems, in a grandmother’s voice for the rest of my life.  And this blog, is going to let me do that, because I’ve written it and I’m making it live, and at the same time freeing it.  In honor of Ruth Stone today, let something go, and then move…even if it’s just a tap of your pinkie finger to prove to yourself that you can.

• Her obituary can be seen here.
• Always on the Train by Ruth Stone
• Ruth Stone in her Home
• Elizabeth Gilbert on Ruth Stone’s Genius

• Ruth Stone on Porch
• Poetry Foundation Biography
• The Guardian Poem of the Week

Today the weirdest members of my family went to the Raleigh Christmas Parade.

Here are the photos:

The essence of my gene pool.

Even those guys from Star Wars were there/Some ridiculous holiday cars.

Skating Rink float

That nephew I'm always talking about.

The North Carolina Beauty Queens

Animal in a drum. Yes, North Carolina has giant balloons. Maybe not four-thousand, but enough. :)

Amazed

Oh ya know, Just American Idols Last Winner Staring at Me. (eeeeeee!)

The Nutcracker

Family <3

Best Marching Band Shot

Only in North Carolina...seriously.

VOTE FOR WOMEN.

My Sweetie :)

SANTA!!!!

How this all relates to books, I haven’t figured that out, but surely the giant potty represents the bowel movements.  Hope everyone is getting into the Christmas spirit, but refraining from the music too early.

Today, if you speak to me. I will be using the voice of a fourteen-year-old fan girl who happens to look like this:

Don't play.

Or this…

Or this…

The transformation back to thirteen has begun.

Enjoy your day TWIhards.

Weekly segment of Newsday Tuesday:

1. Tin House Blogger Emily Komlos-Hrobsky gives literary merit to one of my personal favorites, Zelda Fitzgerald, here.
2. Tess Gallagher has finally gotten an anthology of poems called Midnight Lantern (great title) which can be purchased here, and find reviews here.  
1. One of my favorite Tess Gallager Poems:

BLACK MONEY

His lungs heaving all day in a sulphur mist,
then dusk, the lunch pail torn from him
before he reaches the house, his children
a cloud of swallows about him.
At the stove in the tumbled rooms, the wife,
her back the wall he fights most, and she
with no weapon but silence
and to keep him from the bed.

In their sleep the mill hums and turns
at the edge of water. Blue smoke
swells the night and they drift
from the graves they have made for each other,
float out from the open-mouthed sleep
of their children, past banks and businesses,
the used car lots, liquor store, the swings in the park.

The mill burns on, now a burst of cinders,
now whistles screaming down the bay, saws jagged
in half light. Then like a whip
the sun across the bed, windows high with mountains
and the sleepers fallen to pillows
as gulls fall, tilting
against their shadows on the log booms.
Again the trucks shudder the wood framed houses
passing the mill. My father
snorts, splashes in the bathroom,
throws open our doors to cowboy music
on the radio, hearts are cheating,
somebody is alone, there’s blood in Tulsa.
Out the back yard the night-shift men rattle
the gravel in the alley going home.
My father fits goggles to his head.

From his pocket he takes anything metal,
the pearl-handled jack knife, a ring of keys,
and for us, black money shoveled
from the sulphur pyramids heaped in the distance
like yellow gold. Coffee bottle tucked in his armpit
he swaggers past the chicken coop,
a pack of cards at his breast.
In a fan of light beyond him
the Kino Maru pulls out for Seattle,
some black star climbing
the deep globe of his eye.

3.  I’ve become more and more enthralled in this idea of the Occupy Wall Street (and other Occupied areas) have libraries.  I want a book desperately with an Occupy stamp in it, so much so that my friend Christine and I have started planning a bus trip to NYC.  So, in an effort to share in my fascination, here are some awesome links about the library (including the libraries website).

• Occupy Library Website
• The Book Bench
• Eviction of Occupy Library
• “Occupy” libraries flickr
• Occupy Wall Street Library Facebook

It Chooses You by Miranda July

Sorry for the corny title.  The quote I immediately ran too from the book was epically long for a blog title and so I decided to go the corny, bad-stand-up-comedian route instead.  It finally arrived November 7th, in my bare and tired hands after years of waiting for Miranda July to pop out another baby baring ink and recycled paper (I can only guess at it being recycled since I have to believe she’s the kind of person that throws all bottles and paper in that nice, blue bin).

I actually don’t think I’ve ever written about my love for Miranda July, my groupie-status of cuddling her book No One Belongs Here More Than You well into the night, under my winter covers.  I tweet at her, hoping one day she will see that I’m the ultimate fan and say a few words back to me about us being curly-haired twins or something witty that only she could say appropriately.  I would drool, and cry.  My face would be a mess of mush and water, like a waterfall, but ugly.

So, Miranda July is a film maker, fragile goddess, writer, actress and wife.  She’s contemplating children which I would love to nanny (wow, I am such a creeper).  I can only wish that that child would give any wisdom, or July inspiration and child dust onto my writing.  Have I mentioned I want to be Miranda July when I grow up?  I told MAU that yesterday and he said, “but then you wouldn’t be you…” and I said, “BUT I WOULD BE HER.”  Because I can’t get any creepier than I already am.

Okay, enough geeking out. (My new favorite phrase).

McSweeney’s has published her newest book, a work of non-fiction and real life advertising.  The premise is that during the writing of her newest movie, The Future, she got caught up in calling people from the PennySaver (a shorter, print version of Craigslist) and interviewing them, almost always asking, “what was the happiest time in your life?”  Some of them were rather strange, okay, okay, they were all really strange people.

Strange in the best sense of the word though – these are the people who check you out at the local grocery store and have eyebrow piercings and tattoos of men’s names like Ronald and Steven and Him on their collar bones.  In your rush of maintaining the corral of your children, you ignore them.  These are the people that save the photographs of your loved ones only to sell them at flea markets later for girls like me to pick up for 10cents and write short poems about your dead parents.  These are people who raise bullfrogs in their backyard because the education system in our country has failed them.

If you’re not interested after that, who are you?

If you only read elite novels, about people who take tea at 2pm and rest until dinner, than I don’t recommend this one for you.  If you like to read about life, and men who paint their nails, women who sell leopards from their backyard and hold naked baby birds in the palms of their hands, then this is probably for you.

This is the best way I can describe this book:

I knew this would come in handy one day….

When I was first sending out poems to literary magazines, I sent a few out to Neon Magazine (a literary magazine I think is pretty stellar located in the UK).  However, being a newcomer and being that my poems weren’t quite there yet, I got a personal rejection from their lovely editor.  Here is that rejection:

Dear Cassie,

Thanks for your submission titled Neon Mag Submission: 2 poems. On this occasion I have decided not to publish your work. By way of feedback I offer the comments below.

“Enjoyed reading these and thought they were very well constructed. Didn’t quite strike the bleak tone I was looking for–perhaps felt a little too organic and human. You shouldn’t have much trouble placing these in another magazine.”

Sincerely,

Krishan Coupland

Neon Literary Magazine

Probably the nicest rejection I’ve ever gotten, however I couldn’t figure out what “too human” meant.  And now I know.  Miranda July’s new book, It Chooses You is exactly that.  It is too human.  It is the part of a human you don’t even really want to know, like an episode of Bones where you see the maggots crawling around inside the eye and wonder “why, again, did I sit on the couch to watch something so disturbing…” This is July’s book, except the question is: “why, again, did I decide to read about an eighty-year-old-man who for the last fifty years has written his wife dirty celebration cards?”  I don’t know why.  Why do we talk and walk at once, why do some people hate the sound of gum popping, or some kids bite?  Because we’re human, and we have a deep longing to connect to our body, and the bodies of other people.

Sometimes, you meet people who think their just a soul and their body is just this vehicle of living life how they want too.  Then why when we break our body, can it break our heart?  Our bodies are instinctive parts of who we are – if I didn’t have my particular hands with their wart scars from seventh grade, and gluttonous amount of rings would I be typing this blog right now?  If the generations of women before me didn’t have curly hair, would I be so blessed to be highlighted red, and springing?  No.  My body, is a vehicle to move, yes, but it’s also a vehicle to hurt me by, or a vehicle to physically show an emotion, or a vehicle to drive my experiences.

I think July says this better than me, so here are some of my favorite quotes:

• “If I’d been Sophie, my character in the movie, I would have had an affair at this point.  Not out of passion, but simply to hand myself over to someone else, like a child.” (It Chooses You, 140)
• “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life – where do they put their body – hour by hour – and how do they cope inside of it?” (It Chooses You, 157)
• “Most of life is offline, and I think it always will be; eating and aching and sleeping and loving happen in the body.” (It Chooses You, 161).

For people who can’t take my own personal (and bias) opinion and go out and buy the book immediately…the New Yorker Book Bench is featuring an excerpt everyday this week.  And lucky for you I search the internet crawl spaces for things to prove the worth of books I love and you can take a sneak peek right here.  SNEAK PEEK. 

It must be the day you went for Chinese and came upon all this luck in your fortune cookie because I’ve organized EVEN MORE excerpts.

SNEAK PEEK 2.0  (Joe is easily my favorite part of the book and also very much part of the cover). 

SNEAK PEEK 3.0

SNEAK PEEK 4.0

SNEAK PEEK 5.0  

Here’s The Future trailer:

*

Other fun Miranda July – esque things:

• No One Belongs Here More Than You website.
• Miranda July website.
• Learning to Love You More website. 
• Story of How Miranda July Lost Her Virginity (alert on the creep factor).