Blogorrhea Junior

Form & Substance (Oh, and New Poems)

Prompted by a request from Jen over at Cocktail Party Physics, I've updated the poetry page over at my site. She asked to use an old poem, "On the Fringes, Falling Up" (from 1985! Yikes!) in one of her posts. I've put a copy of the poem up, and added a couple of new ones. It's instructive and sometimes cringe-making to go back to old work, but I'm not too horribly ashamed of this one. And its images of Tibet dovetail nicely with the new one from this year called "Wooden Buddha, Stone Buddha, Buddha Nature." Hmm, maybe there's a theme . . . *wink*

As I think I've mentioned earlier, I haven't been writing a lot of original stuff lately (aside from mad blogging), being involved in learning a new art form, kicking my freelance business into higher gear, and trying to take a breather from the Protestant Work Ethic of wage slavery. But for the last several years, I have been writing a lot of fanfic, which I can almost do in my sleep. I enjoy it because I know the characters so well that I can concentrate mostly on the plot structure and the language. I'm very slowly teaching myself to write short stories, which is a really hard format for me. I like big, sprawly books with big, sprawly ideas, and I've always been more of a Big Picture Person than a Detailer, at least as far as reading and scholarship go. So I find long fiction much easier to write than I do short fiction. Even my fanfic has become a big picture: it's a huge set of interconnected stories along one story arc. Some of them are brief moments, some of them are longer action-adventure stories or drama. As I write more of them, I'm trying to keep them all to 20 pages or under, which should tell you something about how long-winded I am.

But my poems tend to be little tiny moments or single images, extrapolated outward, or, lately, extrapolated inward (er, the opposite of extrapolate is not interpolate; what is it?), and are seldom longer than a page. I've been reading a lot of haiku recently, especially a really lovely little book called The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu (that I picked up in my foray to Kinokunya) and writing very compact 3-line poems under the collective title "In This Moment." They're not haiku or any other formal verse form, but I've confined myself to three short lines, with as many in a set as necessary to catch the moments in a given period of time. For instance, I wrote a set of 12 3-liners in the three hours between tutoring students one afternoon and on the bus to and from it, another set of 17 while I was proctoring a 4-hour exam, and another set of 4 (far less successful) one afternoon from 3-4 at home.

It's an interesting exercise, especially for someone like me, who has a tendency to go on and on. (I'm sure you've noticed that.) It makes me pare everything down to the absolute essentials of what I want to say, and work harder to craft the image I'm reaching for. I can't be sloppy or vague; I have to find exactly the right word, and right way of saying it. And really, that's what writing's all about.

"45 Lessons" Copyright Update

Well, that turned out to be ridiculously easy, and a great example of why it's not so hard to find authors or copyright holders as you think it might be. Five days after I posted about looking for the author of the 45 Lessons of Life, my old (in every sense of the word *wink*) pal Leslie from my undergrad days sent me the name of Regina Brett, a columnist with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Brett turned 50 last year and updated the original list of 45 to reflect that, then posted it on her blog at the paper, where it was no doubt found by some enterprising soul, copied into an email and sent around to friends with the tag, "Hey, isn't this great?" Somewhere along the way, as so often happens in the ether of perpetual forwarding, the chain email lost the name of the author, and it arrived in my in-box, via MG, anonymously. To be fair, I'm sure MG got it without the author's name, too, since, as an artist herself, she's scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due.

From this particular column of hers, you might get the idea that Brett's a fluffy, "women's page" columnist, but she's is anything but. She was a finalist this year for the Pulitzer because of her columns on teen violence and she's written on teenage pregnancy, racism, the death penalty, Sudan, and reforming the justice system. Which makes her 50 Lessons of Life,even more valuable, since they come from experience.

And, BTW, she has a great column on how not to be a writer, the title of which says it all: "Words are Free. Write. No Excuses." My favorite lines from it are: "Get your doctorate in creative writing first. Start therapy. Find the right writers group." More on this in another post.

Now, the next step is to decide what kind of book I'd like to make with this text, and to contact Ms. Brett about using her text.  Keep you posted.

White Rabbit Syndrome

As you've no doubt noticed, the book arts posts have been pretty slim around here of late. I promise to change that, soon. I wrote most of April's posts a month ahead of time, but have been doing May's very piece-meal, which means I've been writing what I know for the last month, the result of which is you get a lot of posts about writing, not so many about book arts.

The truth is, the book arts posts, though short, take a lot of time to research, if I want to make them interesting and substantive and not just repeat what everyone else is posting. So it involves combing through both numerous Google alerts, and my ever-growing list of blogs, something that can easily take most of the day, then writing the artist for permission to use an image, and learning more about them. This weekend (Memorial Day here in the States) I plan to spend some time in the evenings catching up on my reading and flagging stuff to write about. I'm equally backed up on my emails. But in addition, I have readings for my upcoming class to plan and syllabi to finish, and, and, and . . .

You get the idea.

This makes me feel a bit like Lewis Carroll's White Rabbit: "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!" Fortunately, most of the book arts stuff I tend to write about isn't time sensitive. I just have to sound like I know what I'm talking about. You know, it's said that the best way to know something is to have to teach it, and it's true. I'm continually getting a good education in book arts and techniques by writing about it here.

"So remember what the Dormouse said: 'Feed your head! Feed your head!'"

Writing Prompts

Though I'm not a huge fan of McSweeneys (too self-conscious in an aren't-we-clever way, for my taste), but I love this send-up of the writing prompt technique. I'm not a big fan of writing prompts either, except as a way of jump-starting your writing to go on to something else. That old dictum about writing what you know (which is really a dictum for beginning writers) applies in this case. It's difficult, if not impossible, to write an emotionally honest, psychologically real story from someone else's ideas. It may, as you're writing it, turn into something emotionally honest and psychologically real, but chances are that if it does, you've left the original storyline somewhere in the dust. I know a lot of people use writing prompts, but I've seldom seen a good story come out of one that isn't just a collection of random words, or a single noun or verb, without the ideas.

Which is what this parody is all about. I mean, what would you do with a prompt like this:

A wasp called the tarantula hawk reproduces by paralyzing tarantulas and laying its eggs into their bodies. When the larvae hatch, they devour the still living spider from the inside out. Isn't that fucked up? Write a short story about how fucked up that is.

Do I really want to know? Probably not. Neither does anyone else. Now, using that fact as a metaphor . . . hmmm, you could go some interesting, if nasty, places with that.

This is not to say that prompts aren't useful or a good thing. Natalie Goldberg, author of my favorite and one of the most useful books ever written about writing, suggests keeping a list of things to write about. Just a list of one or two words or short phrases. But the more stripped down, the better. For example, there are a couple of writers groups on LiveJournal who post weekly prompts for flash fiction. These consist of four random words and the rule that you must write the piece within an 8-minute time frame. I keep thinking this would be an excellent exercise for me, mostly because it scares me to death. The little writer in my head runs around in freaked-out circles with her hands thrown in the air yelling, Are you crazy? I can't write a whole story in 8 minutes! I can't even write a coherent paragraph in 8 minutes! which is an exaggeration (she's such a drama queen!).

What I can't do is think of a storyline that I could resolve in a mere 8 minutes. You know that 6-word Hemingway story: "For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn."? Brilliant, huh? Concise, poignant, dramatic. Six words. To my brain, that is merely a fragment from which to start. I've got a whole story built around that about a miscarriage that completely destroys a marriage. Hemingway's six words are just the opening lines, the ad in the paper that sets the already-inevitable dissolution in motion. In eight minutes? Not bloody likely. Think of all the character development!

That's my downfall (or my strong suit, depending on how you look at it). I find people endlessly fascinating, and the ways they justify their lives and actions by turns amusing, appalling, and confusing. I love trying to get inside their heads and seeing how the world looks to them. This does not make for short fiction, as a rule.

I guess it doesn't really matter. Novels are easier to sell than short story collections, as a rule, though they've both been trumped by "memoir." It just seems funny that I work most comfortably at both ends of the spectrum: novels and poetry, and that I'm so completely inept at the middle ground. I guess this makes me a literary extremist.

Now, tarantula hawk wasp: poem or novel?

Book Arts & Copyright, Part 5: Orphans

The other day, MG sent me this really wonderful list of lessons we should remember about life. Apparently it's making the rounds of the Intertubez and I'm wondering where it came from. Anybody have any clues? Because I'd dearly love to use this text in a book, but yanno, that copyright thing again (see the sidebar, under "Copyright Posts). So if anybody wants to claim responsibility . . . speak now or this may be considered an orphan work.

What's that mean? Orphan works are pieces like this, unattributed to anybody, floating around the Internet anonymously, unclaimed and but not necessarily unwanted, the author unknown or unreachable. As attorney Joe Keeley, who has consulted on recent proposed orphan works legislation, points out on his site, Orphanworks.net, an "orphan work" is not:

• A public domain work
• A copyrighted work whose owner(s) or exclusive licensor(s) decline to license or sell their works for any price
• A copyrighted work whose owner(s) or exclusive licensor(s) offer to license or sell their work to you for a price you are unwilling to pay
• A copyrighted work whose owner(s) you are unwilling to look for
• A copyrighted work with little or no ownership information attached to it (such as a photographic negative or textile)
• A copyrighted work for which a statutory license is available (such as Section 115 of the Copyright Act, usually referred to as a compulsory mechanical license)

There's a fair amount of controversy (and a very good blog following it) right now about orphan works and the proposed legislation, especially among graphic artists, who often can't or don't sign their work and thus are hard to track down, and a lot of crazy freaking out by people who think this means they'll be unprotected (countered very nicely here). Again, though, this all boils down to placing the burden on the user of the artwork. If this orphan works legislation is enacted, it will mean that potential users of orphan works will be required to make (and document) a good faith search for the copyright holder, and only if that fails will the work be considered an orphan.

The scary bit is that it still doesn't protect the user from being sued for infringement should the copyright holder surface. The term "good faith search" is undefined and, like beauty, probably in the eye of the beholder. Hence the suggestion to document your search: Library of Congress? Check. New York Public Library? Check. Copyright Office? Check. Google? Check. And that's just scratching the surface. There are any number of sources to consult and your librarians (who rule the world) can point you in the right direction for the media you're researching. Take notes about where you've looked and whom you've consulted and the results, and keep them handy, just in case. Because if the copyright holder shows in court that he or she is actually pretty easy to find, you're in the deep weeds, my friend.

In the meanwhile, here's the first step of my search for the author of these 45 rules. By itself, it does not constitute a "good faith" search. I have a lot more work ahead of me if I really want to use this. So if anybody knows where this came from, can you leave a comment or drop me an e-mail? I don't want to poach someone else's work without attribution or compensation. Makes for bad karma and an empty bank account.

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.
2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.
3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
4. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does.
5. Pay off your credit cards every month.
6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.
7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.
8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.
9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.
10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.
11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.
12. It's OK to let your children see you cry. 
13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.
15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.
16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.
17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.
18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.
19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood but, the second one is up to you and no one else.
20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.
21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don't  save it for a special occasion. Today is special.
22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.
23. Be eccentric now. Don't wait for old age to wear purple.
24. The most important sex organ is the brain.
25. No one is in charge of your happiness except you.
26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words: "In five years, will this matter?"
27. Always choose life.
28. Forgive everyone everything.
29. What other people think of you is none of your business.
30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.
31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.
32. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends will. Stay in touch.
33. Believe in miracles.
34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.
35. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.
36. Growing old beats the alternative of dying young.
37. Your children get only one childhood. Make it memorable.
38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.
39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.
40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.
41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.
42. The best is yet to come.
43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up, and show up.
44. Yield.
45. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.

Milestone!

Sometime last night, I passed the 50,000 hits mark on my stats. Now, I've only been blogging here, in one form or another since October 2003 so it was bound to happen eventually (*rolls eyes*), but I do want to say thanks to all the regulars who've been dropping by, especially the people who've done so since this morphed into a publishing/book art blog (well, more or less, anyway). There will be more to come as Maelstrom House gets off the ground.  Thanks for dropping by.

Books that Make Us Look Smart

Sorry about two in a row of these. Why is it that I can never resist these things? Is it bragging? Is it the impulse to share in the culture of books and the cultural literacy of my particular group of people? Probably a little of both. Book people tend to talk about books a lot, and recommend stuff we've read to other people who like the same sorts of books we do. I think that's part of it. I'm not yet a user of LibraryThing because I'm afraid I'd get sucked into that and be lost forever. There's nothing I love more than talking about books, the way other people talk about movies and television shows. But they're not mutually exclusive, by any means. I've gacked this from LJ pal Gloriana, a fellow Star Wars fan; last time we met we spent a significant part of the conversation talking about Peter Greenaway films, for which I have a particular weakness.

On to the meme:

What we have here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

(I have a limited amount of shelf space, so unless otherwise indicated, the unread ones or half-started ones aren't even on my shelf. Neither are a lot of the ones I've read, if they weren't keepers.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell [Normally I love stuff like this, but I couldn't get past the first ten pages; that's my limit. Life is too short to read books one doesn't like when not reading them for school.]
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude [keeper]
Wuthering Heights [keeper]
The Silmarillion [keeper]
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose [keeper]
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice [I just can't make myself love Jane Austen they way I'm told an English major should]
Jane Eyre [The Brontes, now, they're a different matter entirely, though my favorite of the lot is still Vilette, an unsung classic.]
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace [I can only take so much of the Russians; this was too much]
Vanity Fair [and the movie, too]
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad [I'm working my way through the Robert Fagles translation right now]
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner [keeper]
Mrs. Dalloway [keeper]
Great Expectations [one of the few Dickens I haven't read, even though I can't stand him]
American Gods [keeper]
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius [Dave Eggers just really irritates me; I don't even know why]
Atlas Shrugged [drivel]
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books [this was so marvelous that I bought it as an ebook first, then wanted a hardcopy; and I bought one for my mother]
Memoirs of a Geisha [I read the book it was based on, instead]
Middlesex
Quicksilver [I still have to get to this trilogy. Truthfully, I'm a little afraid of it because I got so engrossed in Cryptonomicron.]
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales [Once for school, once for fun, now and then ever since; my excuse is that I was a medievalist ]
The Historian: A Novel [And threw across the room at the end. What a crap ending! Loved the rest of it, though.]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera [one of my top five favorites; keeper]
Brave New World [keeper]
The Fountainhead  [see above]
Foucault’s Pendulum [On the 'to try again' pile]
Middlemarch
Frankenstein [plus the Polidori short story from the same evening, sez Gloriana. Me too!]
The Count of Monte Cristo [and all the Musketeer books, with relish]
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
1984 [keeper]
Angels & Demons [wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole]
Inferno [I was reading the newish translation on the train and got into a long conversation with an NYC cop about it; he'd read it in Catholic school and loved it]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray [keeper]
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse [keeper]
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections [And not likely to ever read it either, if Franzen's essays are any indication of his style. What a whiner!]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune [keeper]
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon [could not put it down]
Neverwhere [keeper]
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being [which became the unbearable weight of boredom]
Beloved [keeper]
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon [keeper]
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita [Genius, but ew! Makes me want to take a shower afterwards. Alone. Ew!]
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values [Twice, believe it or not]
The Aeneid [as a kid, in a very condensed version]
Watership Down [Am I the only person who thought this was really stupid?]
Gravity’s Rainbow [V was so much better]
The Hobbit [keeper]
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Teaching and Writing and Teaching Writing

You wouldn't know it, but I've been elbow deep in student papers for the past month. Thankfully, I have not had to grade them, only help students with them as a tutor in the writing center. It's both soul-filling and appalling work. The students are what make it soul-filling: they're mostly adult women coming back to school at a non-traditional age, and so very driven and highly motivated to succeed. They want help, they want to learn, they want that piece of paper that's the prize, that they hope will better their lives and give them more income, make their parents proud and inspire their children. They're the best kind of student you can ask for; a teacher's dream.

What's appalling is how the educational system has failed them. Few of them come in with a good grasp of grammar, even something basic like verb tenses, and subject-verb agreement. Many don't understand what the basic units of a sentence are. The subject-verb-object construction is really complex and confusing to them. Part of that is the lack of nomenclature: we don't share a common language about the intrinsic parts of language, because somehow many of them got out of elementary school without even understanding the difference between a noun and a verb. They have never diagrammed sentences, learned to spell phonetically, or break words into syllables. They don't read aloud or do so poorly and can't hear where a comma would go, where their breath tells them it would go. I'm led to wonder what the hell they were taught, when I was learning all these things back in 2nd and 3rd grade. Whatever it was, it was neither successful nor useful, and I doubt this was entirely the students' fault. It's an all-too-typical complaint from college teachers of all stripes, but there's nothing to be done about it at this level, for these students, but help them catch up and fume privately about shortchanged public schools, underpaid teachers, crowded classrooms, lack of materials, and an indifferent public.

The other appalling part is the stories they have to tell in their papers. Far too many of them are absolutely heartbreaking: domestic violence, drug addiction, mental illness, an HIV diagnosis, chronic health problems, children lost to the streets, drive-bys, cheating men, abusive parents, gunned-down friends and family, immigration struggles, nights in jail. And yet they're here, bootstrapping themselves up out of whatever it was they went through, clawing their way out of bad relationships, low-paying jobs, single parenthood, abandonment, indifference. They abso-fucking-lutely amaze me—not that they can do what they're doing, but that they decided, themselves, to believe they could change their lives, then went and did it. And nothing, but nothing is getting in their way.

I haven't done this kind of one-on-one tutoring in a long time, and when I signed on, I wondered if it would spark my own writing the same way teaching a structured course always has in the past. The answer is yes. In part, it's because of these women fearlessly telling their stories, claiming their history, and spelling out their plans to rise above it. Not to sound trite, but it's like watching Oprah for three hours a day, three days a week. All this courage and determination uplifts me and makes me once again realize how charmed my life has been, how privileged (to use a word that was recently hurled at me like a curse), and how easy. I am lucky, lucky, lucky. Maybe this is why teaching feels so right to me. I've always believed in the "teach a man to fish" philosophy and I know how to fish: what better way to share my luck and my privilege? It also deeply appeals to the feminist in me. CNR is primarily a woman's college like the one I went to, and I deeply believe, as my mother did, that education and economic independence are the best things you can give a woman to improve her life.

I realize what I have in the writing center is a self-selecting population of students who aren't shy about asking for help, and aren't too proud to take it. I'm sure CNR, like all schools, has its share of slackers who don't really know or care what they're doing there, who prefer to coast along on the financial aid, thinking it's a good scam. I think there may be fewer of them than I'm used to because this is such a focused program (it's mostly health services students). My upcoming classes will probably have the usual bell-curve mix of ability and motivation, although that too is different when you're teaching an elective.

I'm really looking forward to teaching an entirely new class and a new genre of writing than I've taught before, especially something that I did myself for years: journaling. I see journals as a strange mix of personal and public, imaginative and factual, creative and disciplined. None of these attributes are mutually exclusive, but they don't often blend the way they do in a journal. I know that I would not be the person I am without the reams of paper I consumed in introspection, in analyzing relationships, in thinking about what to do with my life, or what was going wrong with it. It's a luxury that many people don't have, and even fewer realize they can make work for them. It's a fine way to teach writing, too, I think, because there are so many ways to make journals work. There are few rules, and much room for exploration of form and to learn how to clarify ideas and tell a story.

In short, I think it's going to be a good class. I'll keep you posted. My first class (tentatively) meets June 3rd.

Cult books (?) meme

This is from the UK's Telegraph, originally, gacked from one of my LJ friends. As the journalist points out, it's hard to define what makes a cult book, vs. a best seller, and the two are not necessarily the same. I'm a little shocked not just at how many of these I've read, but how early I was drawn to this kind of book. Some of them I read when I was a kid, or a very young adult. Here's what the Telegraph calls a cult book:

In compiling our list, we were looking for the sort of book that people wear like a leather jacket or carry around like a totem. The book that rewires your head: that turns you on to psychedelics; makes you want to move to Greece; makes you a pacifist; gives you a way of thinking about yourself as a woman, or a voice in your head that makes it feel okay to be a teenager; conjures into being a character who becomes a permanent inhabitant of your mental flophouse.

I like the "mental flophouse" line. I wish my boarders would start paying rent. There are a lot of them.

I've added a few of my own to this list, since it's sort of heavily British and weighted with boys' coming of age stories.I'm not even going to touch the fact that they've treated a number of ovarian (I refuse to use the word "seminal" in this context) feminist texts as "cult" literature, or the way their description trivializes The Female Eunuch. Because, you know, we're such a minority. Like those whack-job Arthurians and the SF nuts.

My additions are in blue. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you want to read, strikeout the ones you hated.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (1957-60) One of my friends did her Ph.D. dissertation on Durrell and I read bits of that. Does that count?
A Rebours by JK Huysmans (1884)
Baby and Child Care by Dr Benjamin Spock (1946) I've read bits and pieces of this, just to see where my parents were getting their tactics from. No such luck.
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1991)
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993)
The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart (1971)
Chariots of the Gods: Was God An Astronaut? by Erich Von Däniken (1968) See Dianetics, below. And have a tin foil hat, while you're at it.
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980) This one I keep looking at in the bookstore thinkking, hmm, that looks good.
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg (1824)
Dianetics: the Modern Science of Mental Health by L Ron Hubbard (1950) That's not a cult book. It's a cult. Period.
The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley (1954)
Dune by Frank Herbert (1965)
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (1943) Tried this one, too, but thought it was stupid.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter (1979) On the long list to be read.
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973) Well, I tried, anyway. V was better.
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln (1982)
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979) Why is repetition considered so clever? The Baron in the Trees and Invisible Cities were far better than this.
Iron John: a Book About Men by Robert Bly (1990)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Russell Munson (1970) Cut me a break; I was like, twelve, at the time.
The Magus by John Fowles (1966) Tedious and disappointing.
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954-55) Hello? How did they miss this one?
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
The Merlin Series by Mary Stewart (1970-1995) Responsible for the creation of many Arthurians and medievalists.
No Logo by Naomi Klein (2000)
On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) I liked Dharma Bums better, though.
The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (1923) I got a copy of this for my HS graduation from my favorite cool cousin.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell (1914)
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám tr by Edward FitzGerald (1859)
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922) Also on my reading list, along with Steppenwolf.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Story of O by Pauline Réage (1954)
The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (1961) How can you ignore a book whose principal neologism, grok, has become part of the language?
The Teachings of Don Juan: a Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda (1968) Thought this wa sa dumb book, too.
Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883-85)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (1962)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig (1974)

Snail (Mail) Art

I used to be a prolific letter writer when I lived in the boondocks, in college, and before the advent of email. I still have drawers full of cards and stationery paper and, and once I discovered desktop publishing, I started to make my own stationery. If you got a letter from me, it was likely to be several pages long, handwritten in a fun color with a fountain pen (then later typed, because my handwriting is so bad and I can type faster than I can write), on funky stationery or in a cool card, and the envelope would be stamped and stickered and glittered up. Like most kids, I'd been fascinated by postage stamps too, and kept odd ones that I liked. I've always loved getting mail, and I wanted to make that a special experience for my pen pals, too. My former college roommate, who now lives in South Carolina, still sends me handmade, collaged cards with lovely line drawings and pictures on the envelopes.

I drifted a little closer to it when I bought the first three Griffin and Sabine books, by Nick Bantock. Those books opened a double door for me: one into book arts, and one into mail art. Although I'd been decorating my own envelopes and making my own stationery, I'd never thought of actually making my own cards or postage stamps. At the time, it wasn't even possible to make your own stamps, unless you did it by hand, and then they weren't valid postage. Now, of course, the Post Office allows you to design your own, and there are a couple of different services to help you, including one for Canadian postage. Little did I know decorated envelopes and cards were part of an entire art form.

Nor did I have any idea it had gone on so long. After all,  mail service as we know it is only a few hundred years old., though people have been sending each other written messages for as long as there has been writing, and ways of traveling. Wikipedia (that all-wise, all knowing source; just kidding) says, "Mail artists claim that mail art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet," although I would classify that more as "parcel post art" myself. Wired Magazine, in its Rants and Raves section, actually has a monthly mail art contest called "Return to Sender" of who can send the wackiest crap with the weirdest packaging. The latest is a shredded issue of Wired in a clear plastic bag. Those geeks—what kidders!

Mail art mostly consists of postcards and letters, everything from decorated envelopes to handmade cards, and postcards, or whatever you can send through the mail. They're a bit like artist's trading cards (ATCs), but with stamps, and bigger. As with ATCs, there are mail art groups and associations (I found a bazillion googling "mail art"), national and international.

If you like this sort of thing, the Center for Book Arts is hosting a new exhibit that I checked out on opening day:

Mapping Correspondence

Mail Art for the 21st Century
Also on View: Featured Artist Project: Karen Baldner and 2007 Artists In Residence Workspace.

The exhibit's got some great stuff in it, as always, including a chance to make your own art on a postcard with stamps, a book of thorns, a couple of great piano hinge books, and loads of fabulous postcards and other kinds of "letters."

Through June 28th
Center for Book Arts
28 W. 27th Street, 3rd Floor