Monthly Archives: March 2013

A Few of Your Favorite Things

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likeEvery single word at dictionary.com has a Facebook “Like” button next to it. I have spent the morning collecting data (ahem), and am happy to bring you this report on the state of the world of the things, courtesy of dictionary.com and Facebook.

Bondage (54 “Likes”) is more popular than yachting (9), but less popular than terrorism (1,500) and badminton (56). (Terrorism & Badminton: The Martha Stewart Story. No?) No one likes macramé these days. A giraffe (96) is more likeable than a polecat (5). 26,000 soppy bastards like love, while 558 emotional deadbeats can only bring themselves to like like. Sex (2,900) is preferred to chocolate (139), which will be troubling news for the monkeys who write the whimsical captions in women’s magazines. God (965) is more beloved than his holy sprog, Jesus (482), but both beat Satan (51) and Santa Claus (15). Cannibalism (58) is preferred to pork (28). Two people enjoy vomiting, which is two more than enjoy lawn tennis. Forty-nine people have some affection for pus, which makes pus more popular than lemonade (31). Twelve sensible people like facts. I will save you the trouble of looking up poop; 654 people endorse it. Whiskers (6) are more likeable than kittens (1); no one gives a toss for raindrops or roses. Spelunking (12) triumphs over a good spanking (8). Colorado (78) is vastly more likeable than Australia (7), but then you knew that already. Twenty-one people like rainbows. (Be nice to those people. They are just barely alive.) The doorknob is enjoyed by five raging perverts. And five people like tapioca, because that is all they serve at the asylum. One person likes polyps. I have sixty-three soul mates who share my vast affection for the word undulate. Two people enjoy having a lovely antipodean fossick. Six people like the saxophone. What is wrong with them? The word exacerbate (337) is oddly popular. The dog (574) beats the cat (516). Cunnilingus (149) beats cheese (86). No one likes towels or containers. Six people like a nice submarine, and I am one of them. One person likes fondling—presumably the same person who likes socks. Thirty-two really boring people took the time to express their love for the bicycle. WE KNOW. SHUT UP ABOUT THE BICYCLES. And eight utterly insane people enjoy asparagus; I want to punch each and every one of them in the face.

Sex, Death, and a Mince & Cheese

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Meat PieRecovered from AWP yet? Isn’t it cozy to imagine that writers all over the country spent yesterday tucked up in bed with a pile of shiny new books, a bottle of Advil, and a plate of greasy meat bits? Here at Malvern Books, we’ll offer a graceful no comment on the more sordid excesses of the past week, and simply say, golly, yes, we met heaps of lovely people and came home with a ton of books.

Of particular note: John Gallas’ Fucking Poets Vols. 1, 2, & 3, a series of chapbooks from New Zealand publisher Cold Hub Press. (Cold Hub also published a collection entitled Ballad of the Last Cold Pie, which is almost but not quite the best possible title for a collection of New Zealand poetry. The best possible title for a collection of New Zealand poetry would clearly be You Think You’re a Flowerpot Because You’ve Got a Hole in Your Bum.) As the title suggests, Gallas’ poems are about famous poets having sex. Featured rutting writers include Rupert Brooke, Christopher Marlowe and, of course, that old rogue Mr. Shelley. The poems are full of “merry obscenity,” as the blurb insists, and bloody brilliant.

But lest you think Kiwi poets only write about sex and meat pies… wait, there’s more! They do pretty well on the usual gloomy death stuff, too. Here’s one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed poets, Bill Manhire, with a sad poem that makes me very happy. (And if you’re ever in New Zealand and find yourself wanting to express your post-meat-pie-eating joy in the local vernacular, be sure to say “I’m a box of fluffies, mate.”)

“Kevin”—Bill Manhire (from Lifted, Victoria University Press, 2005)

I don’t know where the dead go, Kevin.
The one far place I know
is inside the heavy radio. If I listen late at night,
there’s that dark, celestial glow,
heaviness of the cave, the hive.

Music. Someone warms his hands at the fire,
breaking off the arms of chairs,
breaking the brute bodies of beds, burning his comfort
surely to keep alive. Soon he can hardly see,
and so, quietly, he listens: then someone lifts him
and it’s some terrible breakfast show.

There are mothers and fathers, Kevin, whom we barely know.
They lift us. Eventually we all shall go
into the dark furniture of the radio.

Library Night

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Friday afternoon. You’re home from school. No homework, or maybe only math, and who cares about math because long division is dumb. Mum makes you some crumpets and you watch All Creatures Great and Small, the one where an old dog dies peacefully and someone in a tweed jacket smokes a cigar. Then Dad gets home from work and it’s on! (In case you’re wondering, your dad spent the day designing a new lamb deboning machine; you grew up in New Zealand and this is how all New Zealand dads spend their days.)

TrikeYou gather up a week’s worth of books—a backpack full of Maeve Binchys and James Micheners and ghost stories—and head out to the trike. Ah, the trike! That’s it in the photo, the three-wheeled beast your dad built. You sit in the middle, hoping no one will see you. You drive through the streets of Hamilton and people point at you and stare. What an odd sight, a family of foolishly tall people on a clattering buggy! A dad with a crazy beard, a kid with crazy hair, a mum with a massive bag of books strapped to her back.

The library is the only nice building in all of Hamilton. It’s a massive old concrete edifice in a town where everything else is made of glass or painted brown or designed to look like a Soviet vending machine. (Naturally, they pulled it down when you were in high school and replaced it with the blue building pictured below. The new library was designed to look like a casino or the set of a German TV game show; it was hoped that stupid people would enter it by accident and then find themselves reading a book.) You have been inside every room of the old library a million times. The smell of the Young Adult reading room—socks, books, a hint of Impulse body spray—is as familiar to you as the smell of your own hand. You know all the librarians and they all know you. There’s the nice old lady librarian who keeps getting older and older and her face has so many lines on it and every week you expect her to be dead and you wonder if that will be upsetting or just, you know, a thing that happened. And there’s the young man librarian with the very high voice; you feel a little sorry for him, though he always seems cheerful. (If he was 25 when you were 10, he is now in his fifties. How can this be?) The nice old lady librarian once told you that you were the youngest person ever to be issued a library card: your parents signed you up when you were just a few weeks old. Hearing that made you feel really proud.

You all disperse, mum to the violent murder mysteries, dad to the Things With Wheels section, you to your usual spots: first, the YA room for a few novels (you like the ones about English boarding schools and ballerinas with eating disorders); then to the Paranormal section; and finally to the piles of magazines, where, if no one is looking, you’ll open the Ladies’ Home Journal and read “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”

LibraryYou meet back at the front desk to check out your books. The nice old lady librarian asks you about school and you say something polite but odd. Our class got an axolotl. It smells bad. You’re allowed to check out as many books as you want; you usually take as many as you can fit in the backpack—ten, fifteen. And then it’s time for dinner at P&M Plaza, a peculiar shopping mall in which the cafeteria—orange and green carpet; cheese and onion sandwiches; rugby on the TV—is for some reason in the middle of the wedding dress department. You eat your hard-boiled egg and soggy chips surrounded by polyester gowns. You want to get started on Mysteries of Britain, but your mum says “Not while you’re eating,” which is totally unfair because your dad is watching the rugby and how is that any less rude? And then back to the trike. Fifteen minutes of humiliation and you’re home.

Home is the best bit. You sit on the sofa with the Spaniel and sort your books into three piles: must read; might read; upon further reflection, nah. Once you’ve got your piles worked out, you crack open Mysteries of Britain and turn to the chapter on spooky animals. Some of the pages have those weird brown stains, a dirty smear that is definitely either chocolate or old blood. It doesn’t bother you. Your dad watches the end of the rugby match. Go Gary, you little beauty! Your mum passes you two squares of Milky Bar. You’re all warm and safe indoors, and somewhere out there on a Yorkshire moor an unlucky English gentleman is encountering a phantom black dog.

Spasm, Cappuccino, Polyp

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wordgameToday we have an assortment of bits and bobs that we will nattily tie together under the theme words. First up, word games: my name is Tracey and I am a SpellTower addict. Have you played SpellTower? It’s an iPad game that combines elements of Scrabble, Boggle, and Tetris—oh, blessed nerd trifecta! (There’s also an Android version, and you can play it on your iPhone, too, but if you don’t have small fingers you will find yourself constantly making words like floot and merp and drangle.) SpellTower reminds me of the word-search puzzles I loved when I was a kid, the ones you find in those Be A Nice English Lady magazines, hidden between the knitting pattern and an article on how to groom recalcitrant Spaniels. My sticky little hand would drag a biro around a diagonal giraffe and I would feel like the cleverest person alive. I felt pretty damn clever when I reached a SpellTower score of 10,000—I briefly declared myself a SpellTower savant and contemplated a life of professional SpellTowery—until I heard about Jerry:

The other day [Jerry] told me that he’s been playing the same continuous game for over a month now and has obliterated his own high score. He has passed 1,000,000 points, adding about 20,000 points a day. He’s confident he can keep playing as long as he wants.

Did you hear that? Jerry is playing a game that will never end. Don’t envy Jerry his lexical genius. SpellTower will come to rule his life. He will see those colored squares in his dreams. The plink, plink, plink of the letters will drown out all human voices. It is only a matter of time before Jerry stops bathing.

SpellTower was created by an interesting artist/programmer chap called Zach Gage, who you can read about here (no, I don’t know him, and no, this post is not sponsored).

And from the sublime to the truly disgusting: I recently came across this old Language Log post in which the author had compiled a list of the most hated words. Panties and moist are top of the heap, naturally. Other hated words included baffle, squab, cornucopia, fleshy, luggage, and hardscrabble. (I would like to have a cup of tea with the woman who was outraged by hardscrabble. I bet she’s awesome.)

A man called Neven comments:

While I’ve hated the word moist for the longest time, there’s a fouler word: ointment.

What are your most hated words? We took an office poll a while back and came up with spasm, cappuccino, forceps, and polyp. And we all hated panties, of course; I assume Terry Richardson is the only person alive who can say panties without wincing (I assume Terry Richardson says panties twelve times a day, and each time he says panties a bit of drool gets stuck at the corner of his mouth and his nubile young assistant, Cloaca, dabs delicately at the drool with an artisanal tissue and Terry says “Sorry, folks!” and they all laugh like it’s the end of a sitcom and then Terry goes back to taking oversaturated photographs of teenage girls in knee-socks). But for me, there is one clear winner in the nauseating word stakes: slacks. Slacks. Ew. Even the definition—“trousers for casual wear”—makes me want to vomit in a bowl.

Kafka Was My Boyfriend

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KafkaFor the gloomy teenage girl with literary pretensions, Franz Kafka was The One. The dim-but-cool kids went gooey for Kerouac; the jocks-with-brains thumped each other with battered copies of Hemmingway. But for the determinedly miserable lit-nerd, there was only one bloke in the game: K. It helped, of course, that he met the standard requirements of an emo Ken doll—tall, dark, handsome, and riddled with tuberculosis—but what really got this maudlin adolescent’s heart a-poundin’ was the TORMENT. Oh, the torment!

I read the short stories and The Trial and The Castle, of course—teenagers in love are such completists—and I was vaguely aware that all this nightmarish bureaucracy stuff somehow spoke deeply to adults, or at least made them say Kafkaesque every time the office photocopier jammed. But bureaucracy wasn’t much of a force for evil in my young life (the indignity of compulsory ballroom dancing lessons not withstanding), and what really moved my soppy teenage heart were his letters to Felice and Milena.

Writing letters…means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

Reason

I kept the two volumes of letters on my bedside table, along with a black and white photo of Kafka in a bowler hat and a copy of my favorite Kafka biography, The Nightmare of Reason, which I liked as much for the Scream-ish sunset on the cover as for its insightful commentary. I wrote ridiculous marginalia—Am inglorious failure! Must learn German!—and cultivated vehement opinions concerning the relative merits of my rivals-in-love. Felice was conventional and had troubling teeth; Milena was dashing and clever and her horrible father once had her locked away in an asylum for being a bit naughty. Surely every young Kafka obsessive must be Team Milena? I told my mother that if I one day had a daughter I would name her Milena. My mother, a nurse, advised me against it; with a name like that, there would be teasing.

He wasn’t the perfect boyfriend, of course. I had to overlook the visits to prostitutes and his insistence on chewing every bite of food thirty-two times before swallowing—but what romantic relationship is without vexation? I also had to ignore the not inconsiderable biographical evidence that suggested Kafka was in fact a dapper, popular fellow who spent his evenings gadding about at proto-hipster shindigs, since my Kafka spent his evenings alone in an attic, sitting at a small wooden desk, troubled by headaches, thank you very much. But all in all, he served me well. Tracing a path of logic through his labyrinthine sentences made my brain work better, and the purity of his writing wiped the ironic smirk off my adolescent face. He made me laugh (no, really; dude is funny), and his neurotic meanderings were a peculiar consolation.

What happened was that the brain could no longer endure the burden of worry and suffering heaped upon it. It said: ‘I give up; but should there be someone still interested in the maintenance of the whole, then he must relieve me of some of my burden and things will still go on for a while.’ Then the lung spoke up, though it probably hadn’t much to lose anyhow. These discussions between brain and lung which went on without my knowledge may have been terrible.

Eventually I grew up, stopped being so morose, and expanded my obsessions (step aerobics has not stood the test of time nearly so well). But I still love the letters and diaries, still read them from time to time, still think of them as some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. And I will happily force a volume or two into the hands of anyone whose cheerful adolescence robbed them of a perfectly miserable Sunday afternoon in bed with Kafka.

Note: The two quotes above are from Letters to Milena; I cut-and-pasted them from a teenage girl’s Tumblr. Plus ça change….

AWP is Nigh!

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RaptureWith The Rapture Index approaching an all-time high (“news reports claim there is a surge in demand for exorcists”), it’s time to get packing for AWP! This year’s boozy MFA reunion conference kicks off in Boston on Wednesday, and Malvern Books will be there with bells on. We’ll be looking to stuff our tote bags with all manner of splendid wares—bookstore shelves don’t stock themselves, people!—so please do keep an eye out for us (us = tall; Texan; curly of hair and black of shoe), and feel free to thrust catalogs and cookies in our general direction.

And, in entirely related news, here are our favorite collective nouns for geese (painstakingly curated from the handy Collective Nouns for Birds website):

  • A plump of geese
  • A christmas of geese
  • A skein of geese
  • A covert of geese
  • A gagelynge of geese
  • A knob of geese
  • A little knot of geese
  • A string of geese
  • A wedge of geese
  • A chevron of geese

What should a group of publishers be called, I wonder? A gossip of publishers? An intoxication of publishers? A hatchet of publishers? A palimpsest of publishers? Whatever you are, publishers en masse, we look forward to seeing you shortly.