People are always saying "I don't read books." Too often, the problem is reading too many of the wrong books, thus turning a potentially great experience into something they'd rather avoid. This is where _DictionaryGirl_ and PointBlank come in and let you borrow something awesome. Let's go to town and make some recommendations, shall we?

Here we are now, fully within the throes of Spring, and all that is old is being purged in order to make way for the new. I know this because just this week alone my computer's hard drive flat-lined, effectively purging me of the past three years of my life, and yesterday my parents sold the car on which I learned to drive. At times like this, you can either accept the transience of life and press onward, or reject it completely, digging your heels in and immersing yourself in absolute nostalgia wherever you can find it. Considering that I've been listening to The Jazz June's Breakdance Suburbia (recorded circa 1999) all day, it's safe to say which path I've chosen.

Back then I was in high school, and pretty wary of any "books that should be read," mostly because so much of what we were being made to read in AP Literature was (in my sixteen-year-old ADD-riddled opinion, at least) total bunk. The only people I was really apt to trust in any artistic sense were speaking to me in four-quarter time through my headphones; luckily I was listening to some smart records, and they referenced some books that by now I have read so many times that they risk disintegration. Here are my favorites.

1. Enough Rope by Dorothy Parker

Keep me from the old distress;
Let me, for our happiness,
be the one to love the less...

Sometimes now I wonder how Dorothy Parker would have felt about about her verse being turned into a punk rock song; she didn't "dig" bop music back when she was reviewing the works of the Beat writers, and that was still a sight closer to twenties jazz than what us crazy kids are listening to now. Nevertheless, that's how it ended up, and that's how I found her -- for in lieu of words for track four, the lyrics sheet in Mr. T Experience's Love is Dead simply said "lyrics by D. Parker." Who is this D. Parker, I thought to myself, and what band is he in? A search on the intertubes revealed my mistake -- not a he, but a she! -- and a trip to the library later, I was in love.

Let's just get this out of the way -- Enough Rope, Ms. Parker’s first collective publication, is a selection of poetry. Not just any poetry, either, but metered verse, as was still the fashion at the time (1926, before the beat poets who irked her so helped to smash the idea of iambics, tetrameters, anapestics and pentameters all to bits). At this point you might be groaning and rolling your eyes because metered poetry is dry and boring, and I almost wouldn't blame you because there really is a lot of bad poetry out there, but of course there is bad poetry, and then there is good poetry. Then there is Dorothy Parker, and once you get past the apprehension of everything rhyming, you realize that she’s the absolute coolest woman you will never meet.

The most notable thing about her poetry is that it’s never erudite. Even when she exercises her impressive vocabulary, it’s never put together in a way you couldn’t ever imagine hearing out loud. In later compilations she would touch upon subjects like Greek classics and making fun of 19th Century Brit Lit (a noble venture, if you ask me); in this one, she dwells on the basics: boys gone and yet come, drinks drank and yet drunken, and half-ironically wishing you were dead. Most of the verses turn on the last line, and nothing has a happy ending, bittersweet at best. Sometimes lost loves is one’s fault, and sometime’s it’s the other, but the results are always the same.

Oh, and not to mention that she wrote the single best couplet in the world, entirely changed in meaning when one removes the title and you don’t know who first said it and in what context.

Dorothy Parker is the queen of dry sarcasm and self-effacing sardonic wit. She’s your favorite best friend, the funny half-Jewish girl with a glass of wine in one hand and snide one-liners gesticulated wildly with the other. She’s the girlfriend that blew through like a hurricane you couldn’t just quite catch, just a little bit smarter and faster and crazier. In short, she’s something to strive for.

This one's available now along with her other poetry collections, her short story collection, and a multitude of criticism and articles and letters in the brillant omnibus Portable Dorothy Parker, out now on Penguin Classics with a fantastic cover by seth.

2. Life After God by Douglas Coupland

We live our lives to expect the worst,
but once it happens, what is left?
We will never have to be surprised again...

For the life of me I cannot find my copy of The Ataris' Look Forward to Failure right now, but I'm pretty sure I read it in their liner notes there and not an interview or anything that their song "My Hotel Year" is based on Life After God. (Hey, and both of them had interviews recently on our site! Oh, synchronicity!)

This one isn’t a full traditional novel, either; here eight separate short stories are tied together as they pinwheel around the concept of a generation grown up without religion, substituting belief with pop culture and a detached sense of irony. The narrator is nameless and somewhere on the crest of thirty; it’s unclear whether he is the same voice speaking from one story to the next (I shouldn’t like to assume, but accounts vary), but he is driving, almost always driving, in a hurry to get somehow as far away from civilization as humanly possible.

The best part of a Coupland book the way its details jump out in a way that’s almost startling. He describes landscapes like oil paintings, and since half the book takes place in Canadian wilderness, there are plenty of opportunities for him to work his magic; even so, he has a way of illuminating the most mundane objects - - a coloring book, cherry yogurt containers, Count Chocula - - in just such a way that every scene is made equally important and blessed. The chapters are extremely short (rarely more than a page), and each is punctuated by simple little line drawings that define the book to such a degree that I couldn’t imagine reading it without them.



Coupland writes just as simply, but with a photographic eye. One of Life’s major themes is the seemingly arbitrary passing of time, and within his brief paragraphs, he makes time stand still. My favorite story in the book is “The Wrong Sun,” half of which describes the narrator’s apprehensions and memories concerning death through nuclear annihilation, the other half describing death through nuclear annihilation as seen through the eyes of those who might have lived it. Each scene in the second half occurs in seconds, but they pan through in the kind of cinematic slow motion that gives you chills.

It is a kind of a meditation, I guess you could say, of faith - - but not, I have to stress, religion. This is important. The book doesn’t get preachy, and no real conclusions claim to be met. The only thing that’s true to the end is the calm and desperate (yet somehow not depressing) loneliness that comes from knowing that wherever you die, you die alone.

This one's available for your consumption on Washington Square Press.

So, there are a couple of books that really take me back, whether making me think (nuclear holocaust has been an irrational fear of mine since long before I read a whole chapter about it) or reminding me of my goals in life (to be the raddest girl in the room). Do you have anything like that? I hope so. Whether it's a book, or a record: as you can see, the results are often the same (if not intertwined) either way.


Recommended Viewing: If I'm going to be talking about music and how it relates to my reading habits, the least I can do is color in the whole picture, so this is The Ataris playing an acoustic version of "My Hotel Year" live somewhere. (Well, Brownsville, I guess, because the album version of the song goes "...and now the middle of nowhere feels like my home.") The visuals certainly aren't spectacular, but it was the best sound quality I could find, and that's the important thing. I wish I could post "Somebody's Song" as well, but apparently this new hard drive doesn't come with iMovie. Go figure. Enjoy.



_DictionaryGirl_ would like to dedicate this issue to the fine folk over at the Fashion Valley Mac store, for a lightning-fast repair turnaround time that made this update possible. Also for upgrading my OS to Tiger. Rock on! Stay tuned next week for a word from PointBlank. Same time (roughly), same station.