The Elephant Vanishes

I've been reading this awesome book of short stories called The Elephant Vanishes. I think short stories might be my favorite thing to read. Short stories can't do all the things novels can do (because they're short) but their lightness makes them wonderfully easy to pick up and digest at a moments notice. They're also easy to read three times in a row really quickly. The first time I read "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by JD Salinger I did that. I read it, and then I immediately went back to the beginning and read it again. And there was another one I remember doing this with... maybe it was by Flannery O'Conner, it was about a family in a car, then they're on the side of the road and some criminals are going to kill them. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" - that's it. Bananafish might be my all time favorite though. It's just so... good. It's not that long, but the universe created in just that one short story fills my mind and keeps expanding.
The first creative writing course I took was at TCC a few years ago. Our prof, Lu Vickers, had just finalized her novel, Breathing Underwater. She was a great teacher. I talked with her after class about reading "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and how much I loved it. She offered to assign it to our reading and let me lead the discussion that day in class. I was thrilled! It was exactly what I (thought I) wanted to do for a living - teach! But leading a class of students just there for an easy A through one of my favorite short stories was less fun than I thought it would be. I realize now, it's just much more fun to talk about such things with people who also enjoy them.
Why is it that so many fail to appreciate a sad story? They think if it is sad, it can't be good, because who would want to read about sadness? I'll tell you who: people who have been through it and come out the other side. After that, there is always a taste of nostalgia in tragedy.

Anyway, we've been so slow at work that I have been able to read a lot lately (I got Moby Dick AND The Brothers Karamazov on my Kindle for FREE yesterday!). Maybe while Aaron is out of town this weekend I'll dive into some novels.

The Perks!

One of my absolute favorite books in high school was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Along with all my other emo friends, I would tote this book around with me and I read it so many times that the pages are literally falling out. I'll admit I'm a book snob, and that makes me a little weary about one of my favs becoming a movie... But with Hermione Granger cast as Sam my outlook is much more optimistic! Can't wait to see it!

Life

Today I sit at my desk totally at a loss as to what to do with my life. Post-graduation the only concrete option seems to be to go back to school, but that's not happening so soon after regaining intellectual freedom. To be able to read any book I want is just to delicious to give up. I can savor authors for hours upon hours now, reread passages until they echo between my ears and never give a though to writing a, dare I say the word... paper. It must be good to take a break from producing work to let ideas saturate the mind. I just want to devour book after book. If only I could get paid to read.

I'm reminded of this passage from one of my favs:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 7

I can see so many lives I want to live, so many adventures to have. How do we ever decide what to become? Nietzsche is said to have liked the motto "Become what you are." I take this to mean that you should follow your intuition. My intuitions take me in twenty different directions every day. Become what you are. Become a cupcake maker, become a ukulele player, become a philosophy professor. Become what you are...