eek!

I have all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary, but I never thought to read it straight through like a novel. I’m betting on the narrative being fractured, to say the least. It took Ammon Shea a year, but he plowed through. There are side effects to learning so much in such a short time, though:

But absorbing so much made Mr Shea lose his grasp on his normal vocabulary. He recalls being fascinated when reading the definition for the word “glove” before he realised it was a word he already knew.

“That happened frequently. I guess it gave me a useless large vocabulary and in the short-term I lost my normal vocabulary. I would go to the shop and forget the word for milk. Momentarily I’m looking for the cold, white stuff.”

Shea describes some of the unusual and beautiful words he’s learned as “one-word poems.” Here’s a quick look at some of the weirdest words in the OED, along with their etymologies (my favorite part of any OED entry). Or you could just stop by my lovely new apartment and thumb through my set and find a few one-word poems of your own.

My very first piece for Louisville’s daily paper, The Courier-Journal, ran on features page 1 today. I interviewed Brock Clarke, author of An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England. He’s a funny guy who wrote a funny book, and I’m going to go hear him read from it on Thursday.

Writing for newspaper is so different from writing a profile or a review for a magazine or journal. There’s less time for reading, less time for preparation, and way less time for revision. The editor asked me over mini-golf (!) less than a week before it was due, and then we didn’t confirm until two days out. Normally I would want to do so much more research and background reading, but the most I managed was carrying around my friend Lauren’s copy of his short story collection. Sigh. Still, I think it turned out OK. I didn’t manage to show how funny he is, though, but that’s the limitation of the 600-word newspaper feature story:

Burning down the house with Brock Clarke

Some stories start with a slow burn and simmer for years before catching fire.

Brock Clarke visited the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Mass., on a class trip in 1989. He’s been working on burning it down ever since. [Keep reading!]

He was 46 years old. He was a brilliant writer with a terrifying wit. He wrote one of the most engrossing novels of our time, I don’t care what anyone says about the footnotes. His essay on cruise ships still cracks me up, and I’ve borrowed the title to explain other actions more often than I care to admit. Here are some remembrances of him and his work (thanks, Gwenda). My deepest condolences to his family and friends. American literature has lost a great mind and a great talent, but they have lost more.

The National + Obama/Biden + Community + People Uniting for Change:

My first theatre review for LEO is up. Locals, grab the print copy on stands today!

The loud Frankenstein-footed baby upstairs has moved out. Presumably with his parents. I’m sure your new neighbors will love it when your mom yells at you all the time for doing whatever it is that toddlers do that makes mothers yell and not take you outside to play on Sunday mornings because why use our perfectly good yard when you can run relay races in your stompy gait all morning long? My last month in this apartment will be blissfully quiet.

I’ve discovered Harold Bloom likes poultry more than seafood or beef. It all looks like patê to me, but he assures me there’s a difference.

Drew made French toast this morning. I am spoiled.

I finished my first theatre review for LEO tonight, 500 words on Actors Theatre’s production of Glengarry Glen Ross. I could have easily written 750 — I love Mamet and I feel pretty fortunate to have such a great play for my first assignment. Also, all of those theatre classes in college? Starting to earn their keep, one little freelance check at a time. Check Wednesday’s issue!

Because I finished my homework, I’m relaxing with a glass of wine, curled up on the couch with Harold and watching the special dvd of Tombstone, one of my favorite trashy movies. I would have finished earlier, but Bethlet and Kris took me to the baseball game, where I ate french fries and a butter pecan cone for dinner. Oh yes I did.

We have a giant basket of tomatoes and peppers from Drew’s dad’s garden. Man, I will miss them in a few weeks.

Drew’s stuff is all moved in at the new apartment, and I can’t wait to start moving my stuff, too. I really can’t wait to have our place, our home. Reader, I feel like I can do anything as long as he’s with me. Also, he makes a mean French toast.

Me: So, hey, I’m moving! Same town, different apartment.

Mom: Oh yeah?

(I can hear her left eyebrow arching)

Me: Yeah, Drew and I were looking for more space. He moved his stuff this weekend and I’ll be moving all next month.

Mom: (suspiciously) So you’re keeping house now?

Me: What?

(she made it sound like we were dorm parents for a terrorist cell)

Mom: (slowly and over-articulated) Li-ving to-ge-ther. You’ve been living together?

(I think she’s been watching too much Mad Men. My mother is not, by nature, what you would call ‘old fashioned’)

Me: Oh. No. But we will be. And we’ll have a guest room, so you should come visit! It’s a nice place, second and third floor of an old Victorian on Broadway. I’m pretty excited about the study.

(a few beats of silence)

Mom: Do you have room for Grandmother’s couch?

My mother is a champion shopper. Her venues of choice are thrift shops, discount stores, flea markets and yard sales, and she has this talent for spotting the most amazing things in the midst of piles and piles of junk. Sometimes, when we go shopping together, I will pass by a shelf of stuff and think, “nah, all crap,” and then I’ll see her jogging up the aisle behind me, five minutes later, with the Most Perfect Thing in her hand, and she will have found it on the very shelf I just passed and I tell you, the Most Perfect Thing is often invisible to the average, naked eye until my mother puts her hands on it. It’s an odd gift, but it comes in handy. When I moved into my old house, she hit all of the thrift stores in town and found a swanky bar for the dining room, a dining table that had like 99 leaves and could seat the entire Kentucky legislature if necessary, a sofa that worked OK if you squinted - all I ever wanted out of a sofa at the time - and assorted smaller pieces of furniture and flair. The house was half empty, and I needed stuff. She found stuff. Amazing stuff. It’s what she does.

When I moved out of that house and into my one-bedroom apartment, she arrived with a trunkload of stuff. Curtains, vintage dishes, assorted small bits of furniture, bath mats. My stepfather, wise and practical as he is, chided her as she packed. “She’s not moving off to college, Rocky, she’s a grown woman, she has plenty of stuff.” When I moved out, I took only what I loved or what I absolutely needed from the house, and it was still enough to fill a one-bedroom apartment. But my mom likes to shop, even for stuff nobody needs or wants. I took some of the stuff and sent her back with the rest, and we were both happy. I had bath mats, she had a reason to buy bath mats shaped like leaves. A win for all.

I have spent the last year and a half trying to convince her I neither need nor want more stuff. The best excuse has been the size of my apartment. Where would I put Grandmother’s beautiful antique sofa? It’s not as practical as the futon. You can’t put a guest on an antique hard-stuffed sofa overnight. Hell, I wasn’t even allowed to sit on it as a child, and I’m not sure I could bring myself to do so as a wine-drinking, salsa-munching adult. No thank you, I can’t take a ceramic jewelry tree shaped like an arm. I don’t have room on top of my dresser, and I already have a jewelry box, plus I just scatter my bracelets all over the top of the dresser anyway, I’ve been like that since I was a kid and I’m not about to start draping them on a fake arm now, but thanks. Really. Thank you. I just can’t take more stuff.

It’s not that I don’t love stuff. Oh, but I do. I own a 20-volume dictionary. You don’t have to tell me how awesome stuff can be. But now that I’m facing a possible move or two in the coming years, I don’t want more stuff. I might end up in a small, affordable town with plenty of room for antique sofas and creamers shaped like elks (I kept it, sue me), or I might end up in New York or California where rents and academic salaries do not conspire to keep me in squares and squares of feet for all my glorious stuff.

And what did we do? We signed a lease on a 1,500 square foot apartment that has two bedrooms (they are small! no room for stuff!), an office and a living room. Square feet which my mother will, because it’s in her blood, want to cover in stuff. And I will be forced to decline her offers of stuff, which will make us both a little sad.

Drew doesn’t come with tons of stuff, and my efforts to keep the stuff to a minimum have meant that I haven’t acquired a ton of stuff during the last year and a half. This means our large apartment will feel just right, not stuffed to the brim with stuff. And if, knock on wood, we get to move next year or the year after, we won’t have to have a huge moving sale or hock a kidney to transport tons of stuff.

We don’t want to live like students, out of milk cartons and cinderblock shelves, but we just don’t need so much stuff. Please, Mom, help me keep it down to my 20 dictionaries and two queen-sized beds. This way, I won’t have to make tough decisions about which family heirlooms to take with us when we go. I’m full up. But hey, if anyone needs a white baby grand piano that was rescued from a whorehouse in Kansas City, I can get you a deal. My mom, she knows her stuff.

Once upon a time, I was a teenager, because that’s how it works. And as a young writer, I experimented with different poetic forms, and though I found the form called “random line breaks and dramatic spacing” to be the most alluring, I managed to muddle my way through the sestina, the haiku, the pantoum, and yes, even the sonnet.

What I did to the sonnet would make Shakespeare weep. I figure this because it makes me weep, and I bet Shakespeare and I would be great buddies and like all the same movies if we had the chance, so you do the math.

I wrote a sonnet about trees.

Let me say now that I know nothing about trees. I knew even less at 16, and I didn’t care. I knew we had some trees in our yard, maybe one was an oak, but don’t hold me to it. I know some of my peers are a little aghast when they learn how ignorant I am of Kentucky plant life, to say nothing of the birds, I know the red one’s a cardinal and that’s about it. I’m sorry, that’s just how I was raised. I do have an encyclopedic knowledge of the television show Saved By the Bell!, so I’ve got that going for me.

Not only did I write a sonnet about trees, I illustrated it in my journal. Let me also say that I am not an illustrator. I am not even an accomplished doodler. But draw a tree around my poem? Oh, I did.

The poem, as you can imagine, is pretentious, overwrought, absurd and manages to fulfill the meter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet while paying no mind to the actual art of the form. I have since written actual sonnets of which I am proud, but today I’m telling you about this abomination of a poem that is so awful you might pee yourself laughing if you read it. It’s double the fun if you know me and can picture me actually putting pen to paper as a teenager and composing what I thought was quite the dramatic and beautiful poetic statement, since it sounded as if it was written by someone else entirely, like how about a girl who cared more about trees than afternoon syndicated reruns on TBS.

And read it you can! Because I love you and Sarah Brown is a kind editor, this awful sonnet is available in the Cringe anthology, which is on sale today.

Brown says of the book, “The more dramatic, embarrassing or excruciating the writing, the better. A good test to determine whether or not your material is Cringe-worthy: when you read it to yourself, do you physically cringe? Then for the love of god, it needs to be in this book. Seriously. You are going to be so glad you did this. Cheaper and better than therapy.” The book is out today, go order if you want a good laugh at me at 16 (picture inverted, burgundy bob haircut, flannel shirt and a scowl).

UPDATE: You guys, Cringe is hilarious! Definitely go pick up a copy. I love reading adolescent angst, and I adore the mini-essays that accompany each piece. So funny. So true.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that Drew and I have been apartment hunting for the last few weeks. We first started talking about moving in together over the summer when I made it quite far in the interview stages for an out-of-town job. I didn’t end up moving this year, so due to the cyclical nature of academic jobs, I’m definitely in Louisville for another year, but I’m keeping myself flexible for the long term, which means renting, not buying. Which led us to thinking about finding a place together here in town, since both of our leases are monthly now, so off to Craig’s List and the paper’s listings we went. And man, the apartment situation in Louisville this summer? SUCKS.

I used to move about every year to 18 months, mostly because there was always another, cooler apartment. I’ve lived in the Highlands, the Original Highlands, downtown, Butchertown, and now Germantown. Last spring when I found myself looking for an apartment on short notice, I found one pretty quickly, and a nice one, in my neighborhood, big enough for all of my crap but small enough for just me. It’s well taken care of, it’s affordable, it has high ceilings and nice walls and original woodwork. I love my apartment. But now Drew and I spent a lot of time here together, and it’s not big enough for two. I want a guest room that I can also use as an office so I can start being more productive, and we both want a space that’s more conducive to entertaining than my shotgun (some call it railroad) layout. When I started looking, I was optimistic. There’s always a great apartment right around the corner, right? And with our combined budget, it shouldn’t be too much trouble to find a place we like.

Think again, chickens!

Here’s my completely uneducated opinion on why there are a dearth of nice, big, suitably located apartments in Louisville right now: it’s the economy, stupid. People Like Us, and by that I mean early 30-something professionals who are looking in a handful of central city neighborhoods and want something funky and old and yet well-maintained and preserved, are not buying houses right now, leaving their nice apartments empty for us to scoop up. Even last year, there were plenty of nice places and you pretty much had your pick of many cute Victorians and nifty old buildings. This year, I think folks are staring at last year’s heat bill and aren’t really interested in pouring hundreds of dollars into an old shotgun in Germantown or Butchertown all winter long with wages kind of stagnant and folks coming out of grad school unable to consolidate their loans.

Everything we looked at up to this point was either a complete dump, suitable for 20-year-old roommates maybe but not us, or way too small for the price. We finally snapped up a cool place on Broadway near Baxter - the perfect location for Drew to walk to work, right smack between work and school for me, close to everything. It’s the second and third floor of an old Victorian, hardwood floors, with a clawfoot tub in the bathroom, a nice big office for me in addition to a living room with original woodwork, and a decent kitchen (not awesome, but you can’t have everything) on the second floor, and two bedrooms on the third. So we’ll have a dedicated guest room (come visit! comfortable queen-sized bed!) and I’ll have a Room Of My Own, which I’ve found is essential to my productivity. The apartment has zoned central heat and air, with separate thermostats and controls for each floor, which will be nice for keeping the energy bills in check. Plenty of windows and light, and the downstairs neighbor seemed really nice when we met him. I think it’s going to be good.

So Drew is going to move in this month, and I’ll be moving my stuff slowly over the next month since I’ll be giving my (darling and awesome) landlord a month’s notice. So hey, Louisvillains, if you’re looking for a one-bedroom in a Germantown duplex that’s nice and well-maintained, with a backyard and patio on a really nice street, let me know and I’ll hook you up.

Coming soon (I’ll link to the post on my other blog when it goes up) - a quick rundown of the ridiculous people and apartments I encountered on this search. Seriously, I have never been so aghast and frustrated in a Louisville apartment search. People (and their dogs) are nuts.