So successful was my baking/eating/drinking extravaganza that I’ve managed to gain 20 pounds. Now, I’m not saying that people who weigh what I do are fat. I’m also not saying that I don’t look good or that you, whomever you may be, don’t look good at your weight which may or may not be more than mine. I’m just saying, personally, for many reasons, I’d like to get rid of this extra twenty pounds. So, I’ve concocted a devious (not so devious) plan.

Eat healthier and fewer calories and exercise. Isn’t that crazy? In the gym I plan to work on the elliptical machine for about 30-40 minutes and then switch to the stairmaster for about 20-30 minutes. This should put me at about an hour of cardio, which I feel (who cares about you fitness experts) should give me the boost I need! I hope to do this Monday through Friday, though I won’t feel so bad if I skip one day.  (Maybe the skipping will count as exercise.) Eating is another can of worms, as they say. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that a huge appetite is cultivated, and I’ve cultivated one. So, it’s going to be hard to stop stuffing my face at all hours of the day. I didn’t count, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was throwing back a good 3,000 calories a day. That’s just ridiculous! I’m not planning on “going on a diet” but rather making small changes, eating less junk, and trying to eat healthy foods! I’m hoping that in a few weeks, the appetite will die down, and it’ll be easy. Honestly, after a workout all I want to do is eat, eat, eat. 

I know this must be boring. Luckily, I don’t have readers. I just want to put this goal down in writing. I’d like to lose 20 lbs by July the 4th, 2010. That would put my weight right around 120-125. Gosh, I feel like Bridget Jones. I remember reading that book (Bridget Jones’ Diary) and just being disgusted with her for her internal dialogue concerning her weight. She weighed about as much as I did, and she was constantly calling herself fat, cataloguing all her eating mistakes, etc. I kept thinking, “The woman is 140 pounds!” I was offended on behalf of women who weighed 140+. Now here I am, Bridget Jonesing it up.

In reading news I’ve finished The Painted Bird. Have I posted that? I’ve begun reading We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver. The novel is epistolary, which is one of my favorite types of novel (aside from Clarissa). I’m not really enjoying the novel, and after skipping ahead to the section where the author tells us about herself, I’m even less a fan of the book. The author is a whiny snob of a woman who takes for granted (even diminishes) the opportunities she’s earned/been given and experiences she’s had. I hate it. Her statement basically reads like this: “So, I’ve traveled everywhere and now I’ve decided that I don’t like traveling because it’s so passe. And your English is incorrect. You’re supposed to say “As I” and “Like you”…duh, but I wouldn’t say duh because it’s beneath me and my hideous wrinkles.” Well, she does have hideous wrinkles. Oddly enough, the protagonist, the letter writer, is a woman who has traveled a ton and has now found some boredom in life and decides to have a baby with her partner. Eventually, this little bundle of joy grows up to massacre several people in a school shooting. She’s belaboring the fact that this has ruined HER life. Ugh. I hope it gets better soon.

Anyway, LIKE I was saying, (hehe) it’s the next novel I’ll scratch off the list. The list I should probably take another look at…

I feel like I’m the animal in a zoo. I know no one, and since I don’t know these people, I assume that they know everyone but me, so I become the one to observe. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve passed women at the bus stop who don’t acknowledge my presence. I always get myself into trouble when I do this sort of thing… imagine that I know what other people are thinking… or even worse, imagine that I know what other people are thinking about what I’m thinking. The cycle of thinking: a dangerous supposition.

I’m outgoing, or at least I used to be. I hope that what mad eme outgoing wasn’t the fact that I knew everyone. I understand that knowing everyone in a small town can contribute to being outgoing, but I’d like to think that wasn’t entirely the case. For instance, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked up to groups of people that I didn’t know…and introduced myself. That was the circumstance under which I met my husband.

…I’m going to feel like the world’s biggest loser if I don’t get off my ass and go.

The quest is twofold.

1) I’m going to dive into the world of disturbing literature and figure out if I can find a book of relatively equal literary merit that is more disturbing than American Psycho.

2) I plan to read every bit of criticism on Ellis and American Psycho. Then, I’ll reread the book, formulate my final theory on it, and publish a paper! Yeah! Now, I want to do that before next Christmas.

So, on Saturday night, after both the Christmas Party and my team won the SEC Championship, I decided to do a few Google searches for “disturbing” books. I wanted to do a search for the most f**ked up books, but I doubted that would yield what I wanted. I had to weed through quite a bit of silly recommendations, many of which were Stephen King novels. (I understand that he’s not a horrible writer, I just want to find books that may be of similar literary merit, and I don’t think there is much literary criticism about Pet Sematary.) In any case, I’ve compiled a short list of possible contenders. As follows:

Possible Contenders for Books More F*&^%ed Up Than American Psycho

1. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski

2.  Bighead by Edward Lee (not sure at all that this is a good choice for the list, but wrote it down in a hurry)

3. Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. (He is the author of the famous Requiem for a Dream)

4. Johnny Got His Gun by Johnny Trumbo (Immortalized in the music video for “One” by Metallica)

5. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn (a finalist for the National Book Award)

6. The Room by Hubert Selby, Jr. (Perhaps one is more disturbing than the other? After watching the film, I have faith that his novels adhere to my criteria.)

7. Blindess by Jose Saramago (He won the Nobel Prize for Literature; how’s that for literary merit?)

8. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver (Not sure this is exactly up to par as far as literary merit, but it appeared on several lists. I’ll make up my own mind.)

9. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (It was recommended in O Magazine. Not sure this is even worth it.)

10. The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum (This appeared on several lists and is based on a true story…)

11. The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade (I figure that I should read some old-school disturbing literature, too.)

12. Das Parfum by Patrick Suskind (I’ll read the English translation, thank you.)

13. Hogg  by Samuel R. Delany (My bet’s on this one.)

Well, there you have it. I suppose that I should formally formulate my criteria. I know that I’d like the novel to have some literary merit. I’m not sure whether I should exclude novels based on real events, which would eliminate We Need to Talk About Kevin and The Girl Next Door. I’m also not sure whether I ought to allow a book to go up against American Psycho if it lacks the ostensible violence that Ellis provides. For instance, can psychological horror produce the same effect, or worse, than the type seen in American Psycho? 

I’ve already embarked on this quest, and I’ve chosen to start at the beginning (a very fine place to start). Yesterday we had a family outing to Barnes & Noble. Sophie picked up Fantastic Mr. Fox by Dahl. We loved the movie, so it’s Sophie’s nightly bedtimre story for the next few nights. (Maybe not too many since Montanna read at least SIX chapters last night!) Montanna picked up Everlost by Neal Shusterman. I picked up The Painted Bird. Forgive me, graduate school, but I’m not a big fan of Forewards. I’ll read the book and I may come back to it later; yet, last night, I found myself absorbed by the Foreward (called “Afterward”) by the author. There are a few things I found intriguing. First, the author never mentions his birth country, just that it was in Eastern Europe. Second, in his discussion of why his book is fictional and not autobiographical (despite accusations to the contrary), he says this: “A fictional life, on the other hand, forces the reader to contribute: he does not simply compare; he actually enters a fictional role, expanding it in terms of his own experience, his own creative and imaginative powers” (xiv). I like that.  (Sorry, no awesome “I’m a literary scholar” comments from me.) Furthermore, I loved reading that, while in America critics found his work to be too disturbing, too violent to be true (in the case of those who claimed he was autobiographical), those in his own country disliked the book for opposite reasons: “They blamed me for watering down historical truth and accused me ofpandering to an Anglo-Saxon sensibility whose only confrontation with national cataclysm had been the Civil War a century earlier, when bands of abandoned children roamed through the devastated South” (xxii).  He also discusses how the people in his country hated him for “vilifying” them as a nation, as a people. He relates being beaten up by old women with umbrellas and nearly beaten by two men who assail him in his apartment. He manages to outwit these two with a camera and a revolver. He says, “They seemed to have stepped out of the pages of The Painted Bird, and for a moment I felt very possessive about the pair” (xviii). I find that moment incredible. To think, he was fearful for his life and the artist’s sensibility took over nonetheless. I love it. After reading a bit of the novel, I can see why he was afraid of these two.

I’m about 70 pages in, and I must say, that the novel is disturbing. The main character is a seven year old boy, separated from his parents at the beginning of WWII in the hopes that he will be safe hidden amongs peasants rather than with his anti-Nazi, ethnic, educated parents. Things do not work out as planned, naturally. Each chapter begins with the boy’s current living arrangement. In the first chapter, there’s Marta. The second, Olga, a peasant witch doctor. The third chapter is a sort of interclanary chapter, in which he wanders from Olga to his next destination. The third (person), a miller. The fourth, Lekh, a bird catcher. The fifth, a carpenter. The sixth, a blacksmith. So far what has amazed me is the absolute superstitious and folkloric religious ideas thrust upon the boy… maybe thrust isn’t the right word. He’s subjected to these ideas and tortured by them. Needless to say, in my own bizarre way, I’m looking forward to more.

I’m going to digress here. Let me discuss for a moment “Thee Most Horrifying Book Ever Written.” This book is <i>American Psycho</i> by Bret Easton Ellis. I had only experienced his work in film via <i>Less Than Zero</i> and <i>American Psycho</i>. Both films are good, both are disturbing. So, when my sister expressed interest in reading <i>American Pyscho</i>, I decided to pick up the book first and read it before she did. I knew that I’d be exquisitely frustrated if I waited on her to read the book before reading it myself, though she’s not at all a slow reader, unless she goes days in between readings.  First, I was alarmed to find a copy of the book in Books-A-Million, considering that we were in such a conservative, small town in Mississippi. The first day, if I recall, I read about 80 pages. This was not so bad. There were a few alarming scenes, but not much that I did not recall in the movie. Also, there was infinitely more detail, as there often is in books as opposed to film, and I found that the book allowed the reader to come to conclusions rather than spell these conclusions out as the movie did. I liked that. I did notice, however, after finishing it that the book did indeed spell certain things out and these were the explicit statements used in the movie… lines such as: “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.” I did not expect to find such statements in the book after reading the first half of it; yet, they came, eventually. The first two nights I read the book, I had horrifying nightmares. Ones in which I’d wake up, physiological manifestations of my dream fear still coursing through my legs, my heart still beating fast. I am a vivd dreamer, and I anticipated this; however, I had to quit reading for a week or so. The book wouldn’t leave me alone, though. It haunted me until I picked it up again. There were two things that kept me reading: 1) As I read the unimaginable descriptions of Patrick’s murders, I kept thinking, he (Ellis) can’t keep going (on with his very detailed descriptions of these torturous murder scenes), can he? 2) What is the literary value of these descriptions?

I have the answer to the first question. Yes, he can, and he did. The book is so graphic that recommending a friend to read it is a lot like setting up a friend with a date rapist. “Have fun on your date with Bob. Just don’t let yourself be alone with him!” you’d say. No one would do that. So, I only recommend this book with that analogy. I have yet to answer the second question. The book is an awesome commentary on the decadent life of the rich in the 1980s. Why the need for SUCH gore? If you have read this book, please share your thoughts. If you haven’t, and you intend to, you might want to think twice before reading any chapter containing the word ‘rat.’ I’m still not convinced I don’t want to read <i>Less Than Zero</i>. As my friend Angie said, “I read that book in high school and it was <i>fucked</i> up.”

Now, back to Yeats. As I was saying, I’m typically a fast reader. I seldom read slowly and for that reason, among others, I seldom read poetry. Yet, sometimes, I find myself drawn to William Butler Yeats. There is a sadness in the man’s work. It isn’t a sadness that has overwhelmed him with self-pity, and it didn’t embitter him (at least not entirely). Consider “No Second Troy,” a poem he composed, when I imagine, that he was pissed off and feeling bitter at Maud Gonne, a woman who was both antagonistic in personality and his erstwhile lover. I believe she tormented him to no end.

“No Second Troy”

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
***

I love that he tries to avoid the pitfall common to those hurt by lovers. “Why should I blame her?” And I love the strength of the line “Had they but courage equal to desire.” I have looked at many a man and thought that line. Man’s most self-indulgent and disgusting of faults… having such great desire, yet lacking the courage to pursue it, or lacking the courage to meet the obstacles to it. (Look, I’m a poet and didn’t know it!) I once assigned my students an essay about Yeats’ poems. He said of two poems that one was “the way to win a woman” and the other, the way to lose her. I asked them to decide which one was which and explain why they thought so. They all got it wrong, but I don’t think that that matters. The poems were “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” and “The Cap and Bells.”

“Aedh Wishes…”

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

and… “The Cap and Bells”

THE jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.
It rose in a straight blue garment,
When owls began to call:
It had grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;
But the young queen would not listen;
She rose in her pale night-gown;
She drew in the heavy casement
And pushed the latches down.
He bade his heart go to her,
When the owls called out no more;
In a red and quivering garment
It sang to her through the door.
It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming
Of a flutter of flower-like hair;
But she took up her fan from the table
And waved it off on the air.
‘I have cap and bells,’ he pondered,
‘I will send them to her and die’;
And when the morning whitened
He left them where she went by.
She laid them upon her bosom,
Under a cloud of her hair,
And her red lips sang them a love-song
Till stars grew out of the air.
She opened her door and her window,
And the heart and the soul came through,
To her right hand came the red one,
To her left hand came the blue.
They set up a noise like crickets,
A chattering wise and sweet,
And her hair was a folded flower
And the quiet of love in her feet.

***

I wonder did he try the “way to lose” with Maud Gonne and the “way to win” with his wife? My research on Yeats isn’t great. It should be better. I do, after all, have a Master’s degree. (Don’t judge me by my punctuation!) I love meandering through Yeats’ poetry. And “Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is at least in my Top 5 Poems of All Time. So, questions. Your favorite poet? Which is the way, do you think, to win or lose a woman’s heart? And what are you reading now?

Currently, I’m rereading Christopher Moore’s (Don’t think Michael Moore, people.) <i>Lamb</i>, which is a delightful telling of Jesus’s life, the missing years, through the eyes of his childhood pal, Biff. I’m also rereading <i>Fair and Tender Ladies</i>, an epistolary novel by Lee Smith. The main character, Ivy Rowe, is one of the most endearing characters I’ve ever read. Thirdly, I’m trying to make it through the latest installment of The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon, <i>An Echo in the Bone</i>. I also read poems here and there by my two favorite poets, the one mentioned in this blog and Khalil Gibran.

I hope I have bored you to death. I’m gonna go eat wings and fries with my husband now.

Word.

On the subject of blood, I discovered last night just how much fun trying to get blood out of sheets and off matresses is. Sophie has nosebleeds. At night. Awesome. Hot water works wonders. So does, interestingly enough, shea butter hand soap. Additionally, when the stain reappears in the mattress, applying full strength hydrogen peroxide with a Q-Tip works wonders. Just thought I shared should any of you have occasion to remove large amounts of blood from something you can’t throw in the washer. Gosh, that makes me flashback to the scene in American Psycho where Patrick Bateman yells at the dry cleaner to get out the stains on his sheets, which are in fact blood that he tries to pass off as wine stains. Who spills that much wine in bed? And that makes me think back to Jim Carrey’s character, Carl, in Yes Man, who buys one of those Tempurpedic mattresses in order to put a glass of wine on one side and jump on the other side and see if it doesn’t spill. I’ve never actually recreated that ACTUAL experiment, but I can tell you that from other experiences, it probably does work. (By other experiences, I mean that I’ve actually poured a bucket of mud on a RainX treated windshield and saw it magically whisked away.)

Furthermore on the subject of blood, and probably since I’ve lost all men since I began that hideously long discussion about The Twilight Saga and stain removal, I don’t feel abashed in continuing on what seems to be a female-themed post. Periods. First, there were pads or pad-like things. Strips of animal hide attached to a belt. Absorbent fibers attached some sort of belt or underwear. Then, according to Wikipedia (yeah, why not?), tampons or tampon-like things emerged around 5th Century B.C. Great. Mass tampons were produced in the 1940s and the “digital tampon” (i.e. the tampon inserted with ones digits, erm, digit?) came about in the 1970s. So, the buck stopped there, it seemed. That’s a bunch of crap if you ask me. Tampons suck. I mean, they’re infinitely better than pads which are useful only if you’ve had a baby and are forbidden from using tampons. Still, tampons suck. Then, in 2007, a friend turned me on to InSTEAD (brand name). Oh, yeah. It’s not a pad. It’s not a tampon. It’s fabulous, if not a bit tricky to figure out at first. Women, investigate and liberate, eh? Godspeed.