The boyfriend’s cooking skills are good, but he’s not yet the family’s master chef - it’s the dad! This is one of the family’s most well-loved and cherished recipes, perfected over three decades of experimentation. Aglio e olio is a deceivingly simple dish whose process requires more thought...
On my to-cook list!
I read Dune, watched the movie, and reviewed the book: http://bit.ly/189ItLp
I read HTML Giant in spells, preferring to binge every couple of weeks rather than checking in every day (honestly, I skip more than I read). But "climactic hot pot binge" is such a lovely, delicious, knee-buckling phrase:
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/presumptive-yet-likely-books/#more-105008
Vol. 10, No. 1
by Ramona Ausubel
Recommended by
Electric Literature
THE GIRLS ARE WORMED OUT ACROSS THE FLOOR under down comforters even though daytime is hardly over, getting a jump-start on the slumber party. “My parents both have perfect love-arms,” Genevieve tells her friends. “Both of them can write. They write love letters to each other. It’s almost sick.” No one thinks this is sick. Everyone wants this. Pheenie, Marybeth, Sara P., and Sara T. all want the proof.
Though the girls know many two-armers, even some that seem happy and in love, what they talk about are those with love-grown arms. “My mom doesn’t have anything and my dad just has fingers growing out of his chest. He can’t control them and they grab at anything that is close enough,” says Pheenie.
“My grandmother has seven, but she has always been married to my grandfather. She says she fell in love with him over and over,” Sarah T. adds. Seven is an unusual number. Two sometimes, maybe three, but past that something important must have gone wrong. And still, the girls are greeted every morning by the television news anchors, their teeth white, their hair unyielding and their single, perfect love-grown arms, offering no hint of uncertainty.
Sarah P. lowers her head. “My dad’s arm keeps growing. It drags on the floor. It is soft and he can wrap it up and tie it in a knot.”
Genevieve, putting her hand on Sarah P.’s sleepingbag-burrowed body, says, “I wonder what mine will be like. I want to have two. I think it’s better to fall in love twice, once to try it out and twice to know for sure. I want the first arm to be a stump and the second to be full grown.”
Pheenie shakes her head. “I only want one. I only want one perfect one.”
The girls go quiet and all the arms of all the loves they do not yet have beat silent beneath their skin. They thump and prepare.
After all the students have left the building for the weekend, Principal Kevin again tells the story of his love. His wife’s beauty surpasses the Louvre, the Sistine. Both his secretaries chirp. They wide-eye his love-grown arm and tilt their heads and wish for what he has.
“You might not know what it feels like, but I do,” he tells them, “and it’s terrific.”
In fact, Principal Kevin stuffs his third sleeve. He stuffs it, but no one at school knows he does. The sleeve is filled with a prosthetic, a good fake arm commissioned from the lab at the hospital. It screws onto a threaded metal disc implanted on his chest. At the writing end: a stump. The stump is sewn up to look like the hand has been amputated. Principal Kevin is smart enough to know that a fake hand looks fake and, instead of giving up the whole beautiful vision, he tells a story about a kitchen fire in which he saved his wife and daughter but his third hand, his lovely third hand, was burned to a crisp.
But Principal Kevin knows himself. He is sure that if he did have a love arm, and if he had lost the hand to it, he would have wanted a replacement. It’s the kind of man he is—everything in its place. So, attached to the very real-looking stump with big, obvious screws, is a wooden hand. It is the fakest he could find, an art class model. Against this, the arm looks especially lifelike.
When he comes to the end of the story, one he has told more than once to everyone he has ever met, he manually straightens the jointed wooden fingers and brushes them against each of his secretary’s right cheeks. “The hand burned,” he muses, “but the arm resisted. The arm did not even singe.”
Few of Principal Kevin’s students, his daughter Genevieve among them, have any love-arm development. The girls check constantly in the bathroom between classes, inviting each other to inspect the soft skin of their side-bodies for bumps. They say they are falling in love, not with the specifics of one boy, but with the idea that such a thing is possible—that they belong to a species built to snap together in everlasting pairs. They feel themselves falling in love with the entirety of the opposite gender, with their own blooming selves, but their bodies do nothing to corroborate. Their skeletons are stubborn and unchanged.
For the boys, any new protrusions would be bad for their social standing. Certain other anatomical parts have made some very favorable changes, but love can’t break the seal. After high school this changes. Older brothers are proud of their arms. They sit on thrift store couches while girlfriends rub lotion onto the new branches and kiss them and want to make love so often because there is proof that what they have is real, that something has changed because of it. They lie close in a twin bed afterward and put their extra arms side by side. They let the unfinished appendages warm each other up just by pressing.
How strange and unsettling to think of love manifesting as appendages, as hundreds of wiggling fingers, as physical evidence. Yet how comforting it must also be.
- Revived this tumblr with a new layout
- Started a blog for my dog
Yes, a blog for my dog. Here.
Got this tacked on my mental bulletin board:
from stilleatingoranges:
In the West, plot is commonly thought to revolve around conflict: a confrontation between two or more elements, in which one ultimately dominates the other. The standard three- and five-act plot structures—which permeate Western media—have conflict written into their very foundations. A “problem” appears near the end of the first act; and, in the second act, the conflict generated by this problem takes center stage. Conflict is used to create reader involvement even by many post-modern writers, whose work otherwise defies traditional structure.
The necessity of conflict is preached as a kind of dogma by contemporary writers’ workshops and Internet “guides” to writing. A plot without conflict is considered dull; some even go so far as to call it impossible. This has influenced not only fiction, but writing in general—arguably even philosophy. Yet, is there any truth to this belief? Does plot necessarily hinge on conflict? No. Such claims are a product of the West’s insularity. For countless centuries, Chinese and Japanese writers have used a plot structure that does not have conflict “built in”, so to speak. Rather, it relies on exposition and contrast to generate interest. This structure is known as kishōtenketsu.
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in describing a particularly wounding (and piercing) comment we can alternatively—with a small variation—use the words "sharp" and "blunt."
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension...Storymaking aside, in real life people are always funny. Or, people are always funny eventually. It would be dishonest to pretend not to notice.
That voice
Feels like: All my resolutions are silent because they were already dead before they were born.
Yeah, Dude. Guess who just dropped some money for tickets to go tandem jump for the first time?
I'm about to graduate. One would think that the final crossing to the riverbank of my shiny diploma would and should uncontestedly be this dissertation (that is kicking my ass, I might add), but no. It's this PE class (racquetball) starting tomorrow that I must.not.fail (attendance-wise). It is my last chance at completing the darn PE requirements. They have threatened to withhold my diploma if I don't sweat it out twice a week from now until graduation. Rats.
(1) Never approach short stories one at a time. If one approaches short stories one at a time, one can quite honestly be writing the same short story until the day one dies. (2) It is best to write short stories three or five at a time. If one has the energy, write them nine or fifteen at a time. (3) Be careful: the temptation to write short stories two at a time is just as dangerous as attempting to write them one at a time, and, what’s more, it’s essentially like the interplay of lovers’ mirrors, creating a double image that produces melancholy. (4) One must read Horacio Quiroga, Felisberto Hernández, and Jorge Luis Borges. One must read Juan Rulfo and Augusto Monterroso.
i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh… And eyes big love-crumbs, and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new
TRAM - jazz, metal, guitar fusion - super high energy!
