Evaluation is all well and good, but if your math skills are on par with mine, a reevaluation will improve your situation. (Thusly, dear Mother, you have explained my grades in Math lo' these many years, no time to reevaluate during tests).
We're watching the Monarch Chrysalid quite closely. It's a pearlescent geometric nugget of nature.
For those unfamiliar with the process by which a milkweed caterpillar becomes a butterfly,
the body of the larva is nothing but an well-spun shawl that keeps all vital chewing gears and pooping parts safe from the elements. As the caterpillar eats and expels his way to the end of the vine, the shawl stretches to keep all the soft parts soft.
Then, after seven days or so of using all its energy to eat and expel, our little miracle might drag itself to a sturdy (albeit inverted) promontory, weave a little silken pad and make a place to hang out for the next two weeks.
Once it is well-seated, it begins to rip the shawl, and a glistening glob settles into a shape that will become a most fashionable bag that will take a prehistoric powder and sprinkle it into a goop that stews into a butterfly with scaly (sometimes membranous) wings. Then, nature rips that bag away, an alien emerges, pumps life-force into its flappable appendages and goes off in search of sex. Perhaps the use of procreational drugs is involved, sometimes called pheromones.
I sent off some mail last week, an opportunity I relished and exploited to sketch a bee on an envelope. Well, I remember getting a ton of mail in camp, and brother, those stacks of letters remind you of home in their own special way. So Chere Cousine S.C. in North Carolina, relish and exploit every moment made available to you. The friendships you weave in arts and farts and crafts, short and long; above all the sunrises.
Also, nobody wants to be the dead girl in the SLEEPAWAY CAMP MOVIE!!
Summer is past its peak and while it is hot, the days are growing shorter. We use these days to reflect the high points of the year behind.
I happened upon Mythology's old friend Thomas Bulfinch this week. He's a delight, and a choice in pure denial, because I also need to review something new that is not the New Yorker, and I have about three write-ups for September. This is of no use, the next month is clearly August.
By Golly, the store is out of good galleys.
So I have fostered the following paperbacks:
Sick City by Tony O'Neill. It struts the stage like Eddie Murphy [following clip most definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK] Delirious. And the humor is not quite as approachable, or incongruous, or even worthwhile. I think I got over the glorification of track marks and selfish junkies a few years ago. O'Neill's short stories are pretty tolerable, though.
In a similar vein of satire, Albert Cossery, The Jokers. The introduction itself incites scoffing, thank you James Buchan.
As the French are the wittiest race in Europe, so are the Egyptians in Africa. Cossery's comedy derives from contraposition of exquisite French and an exceptionally squalid setting.
Translated rather skillfully from the French by Anna Moschovakis, The Jokers does not sit well before bed. I recommend sitting upright for this bad boy.
Coming in first, Gary Shteyngart. (Not that cute in real life, I'm told)
His writing found its way into my eyeballs when the New Yorker published 20 under 40, and the excerpt from Super Sad True Love Story had me with its bashful honesty and brutal satire. Perhaps I have a thing for bespectacled writers, estranged from the Russian Jewry.
And it's not just that he has an event at the store. No, it was my LOLing on the subway that told myself how much I enjoy the book. I said to myself, "Self! You are really enjoying this novel written in nouveau epistolary fashion, you are laughing out so loud!"
And really, dear readers, what other test does a book need to pass, if it is not causing you to miss your stop on the train, or LOL?
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