Books

I went to the bookstore again today. I’m a book hoarder. Maybe it’s some leftover paranoia from my life in Nazi Germany. I’m just more comfortable having literature around in the event of the loss of internet access, which could happen just from not being able to afford the bills, I mean, it’s not overt paranoia. Anyway, I did get There is my People Sleeping by Sarain Stump, which was marked down, but maybe that was good just because 6.50 is a good deal on a book, especially if you think you wrote it yourself anyway. It has a lot of drawings which is why it’s not really reproduceable online in it’s full entirety. Anyway, that satisfied my curiousity.

Then my mom and I were driving to go eat at the bookstore and I said “Mum, I think I might be a poet.”

“Oh god! First you’re a lesbian, then you’re a man and a woman and now you’re a poet!? They make even less money than filmmakers!”

I could just see her waving goodbye to any idea of a comfortable life, I bet she thinks I’m going to live in her basement forever.

“Why do you want to be a poet?”

“Because I want to write about things that don’t make any sense otherwise.”

“They don’t make any sense after you write them down either!”

And then we had a really good discussion about Vonnegut’s alter ego, the infamously obscure Kilgore Trout.

Later on I said “What if revolutionaries are just poets in a dangerous time?”

You don’t want to be like those damn Futurists though, that was just woefully silly, an art movement that joined the army and was completely wiped out in a matter of years. And it made their machismo warmongering art work look kind of pitiful. The art movement of which there were no survivors.

Anyway, I got more books, of course. I got Sky Burial An Epic Love Story of Tibet by Xinran. It’s the memoir of a woman’s life in occupied Tibet over three decades. I got Notes from My Travels by Angelina Jolie, because I’m tired of trying to read about her through mass media, she’s got intense identity politics going on, it makes people weirded out, even though she just talks about the state of the world. Oh, she got a blurb from Jane Goodall. I remember my friend Annthea was going to some luncheon with Jane Goodall and I was trying to get her to take a picture of her ponytail. Nothing else. Just Jane Goodall’s ponytail. I also got Black Elk Speaks, which is just a classic that I never got around to reading yet. I think I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in Grade Seven and got pissed off at my white classmates. That’s when I started arguing with people about the merits of Original Sin, I turned very contrary, to them. I thought it was silly to start out life automatically minus one point. Anyway, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee freaked me out enough that I didn’t really want to touch anything from that era for a while. And then I got one huge tome that’s just going to be something that gets dipped into once in a while. It’s the Gnostic Bible, but it’s texts from various spiritual ideologies like Judaism, Islamic, Christian, Mandean, Pagan, etc etc.

My auntie is going to be a priest soon, so now I have someone to banter with. She’s fun for filling in some of the gaps because she’s read similar things over her life as me.