Thursday, November 10, 2011

On Embodiment


(excerpt from an essay I'm currently writing)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about embodiment. By embodiment, I’m speaking about what’s tangible, like skin, bones, flesh, and blood. And there are also things like the trees, of course, and the paper products made from the trees, the lakes and the carp that scavenge the murky bottom for food. I’ve never been a fan of the tangibles. Taste, touch, hear, smell, sound. Mostly, I’ve seen them only as limitations or, at the very most, things that must be survived or tolerated.
            I like ideas, concepts, plans, fantasies, and expectations. I’m a big fan of love and and adventure and spirituality. Spirituality, it’s always seemed to me, is the place beyond the concrete. It’s the untouchable, inexplicable, the magic of life. In all probability, this love of the ineffability of things comes from my religious upbringing, where there was a clear distinction made between things of this world and the things of God.
            I certainly don’t want to make it sound like I’m all spiritual and serious. I’m quite the opposite, really. I’m irreverent and inappropriate, and my butt crack hangs out the back of my pants way too often. It’s a problem. The lowrise-pant cut helps my figure, since I’m high-waisted and look like a spider in pants that come up too high, but really it is disastrous when I bend over. But, that kind of makes my point: God, way up over there. Sadly, me and my butt crack, right here. To me, God and butt-cracks seem vastly incongruent. 

Monday, November 7, 2011

October Reading List a la Nick Hornby

Books bought: 

  1. Best American Short Stories 2011
  2. Best American Essays 2011
  3. Best American Spiritual Writing 2012 (which, to be honest, confuses me since how can it be possible that someone wrote the best spiritual essays in 2012 when no one has gotten the chance to actually write one since 2012 hasn't actually happened yet? it seems rigged or something. or metaphysical. like there's some tesser or something only spiritual essay writers know about.)
  4. How to read slowly
  5. Celeb cause by Helen Fielding 
  6. Friend of my youth by Alice Munro
  7. A son of the circus by John Irving
  8. The Mediator by Meg Cabot

Books read:

  1. Selected Short Stories by Flannery O'Connor (5 stars, of course)
  2. The Situation and the Story (4 stars...great resource for narrative nonfiction)
  3. Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin (so far, so good!)
  4. The first three chapters of The Hunger Games because I couldn't find Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, which was hiding under the couch.