Untitled, from DELACRUZ STEPHANE:

to angry are flame regret must living. or wire are comparison feeble the key.
must way as front poor the pencil.
as flag as scissors net or common. if tin is simple jewel or owner! as elastic
must tongue gun but father.
are sex must strange prison is fat.

Because I’m at the library, with a 30-minute internet limit and waiting for Les Schwab to fix my brakes, I can only offer you the world’s wordiest man — Dr. Bill Long: professor, speller, wordsmith. Maybe start with his little ditty on the prefix “SPH”. Or browse through “Current Work” — Evolution of Crayola colors, Tango and Urban Women, The Words “Shawm” and “Shend” — there’s something here for everyone.

• I stole this post headline from Powells’ guest blogger Eddie Campbell, author of The Fate of the Artist. The post line refers to a stint Parker put in at a state mental hospital where he was allowed, after a time, to work in the gardens. I assume the lovely drawing with the post — of Parker tending the cabbages (I’m crazy about it!) — is Campbell’s, hopefully from the new book.

•   I have to get a new right contact (gas-permeable) because the protein buildup has gone beyond anything I can see through, or anything my serious and patient optometrist can sand off.  Crap.

• Some pet peeves, for fun.  Mine, right now, is that Word Press (at least for me, this week) totally sucks and deletes all my stupid code so that I can’t even have a damn list that doesn’t bunch up or have weird indents or whatever …

Wheee!  Have a delightful day everyone. 

  Backstory, here.

Eric Slater‘s Summer Reading List
Eric Slater is the author of a soon-to-be-brilliant and as yet unnamed novel. He is at present drinking up all the ginger ale in New York with a guy named Bingo.

CURRENT READING: Rereading Portnoy’s Complaint. By Phillip Roth. (I was sitting on the subway, next to a nice older woman recently when I came to the chapter, printed in big bold letters, “C*** CRAZY.”) And Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. By P.W. Singer.

NUDIST/NATURIST READING: Because I am narcissistic and also enjoy wearing no pants, I would read a story I wrote in 1995 for the Los Angeles Times, headlined: “Nudist Colony Founder Voted Citizen of the Year.” The story begins thusly:

TOPANGA–There are certain unspoken requirements for public figures in small communities. Don’t trounce the mayor on the golf course. Don’t flash the sheriff a fake driver’s license. When greeting visitors, wear clothes.

For the Topanga Chamber of Commerce’s new Citizen of the Year, the first two rules will almost certainly present no problems. But the third is a hurdle.”If you’ll excuse me just a minute,” Ed Lange told visitors Wednesday, “I’ll get dressed.”

SEASHELL-COLLECTION READING: Deafness in Disguise (Author Unknown). This book includes helpful diagrams explaining how to employ seashells as ear trumpets.

PRISON READING: If I lived in prison I would not read, but rather write, a book. I would call it: Being in Prison is not as Great as I Thought it Would be When I Smoked all that Crystal Meth then Kidnapped That Busload of Agoraphobes and Took Them to Disneyland.

SPIDER HOLE READING: If I lived in a spider hole I would read Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Young British Soldier.” My favorite stanza:

When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.

First, I’ve been getting an interesting new flavor of Spam recently … a sort of weird psycho-literary, psuedo-poetic spam. I kind of like it. This, for instance, from ALISA WAKEFIELD:

to fire is way beautiful is past. to dear but clean question else seat. As organization if false early must breath.

to rail must condition power is talk. must chest are process crime but grip! the berry must voice moon or lift.

are motion is reading bird if warm.

I’m sure I’ve infected you with some ghastly virus just from reprinting it … sorry about that. Um, oh, my brakes are dead or brake pads or something, so I really must be off to fix that. In the meantime, another Summer Reading list. This one high-browed and pretentious from (mostly) pretentious literary sorts, offered up by The Guardian. Simon Callow‘s summer must-reads, as a teaser (links mine):

Dedalus have been steadily printing the novels of the astonishing 19th-century French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (notorious for the masterpiece of decadence, Against the Grain) and as a bonus have reissued Robert Baldick’s classic biography, one of the most elegant, stimulating and moving of all literary biographies, right up there with Leon Edel’s James and George Painter’s Proust, revised and annotated by Brendan King. The life and the work are equally compelling. Earlier this year, I read, with deep emotion, a deliciously subversive children’s book, The Book of Everything (Macmillan), by the Dutch author Guus Kuijer, which, within its short span, very nearly lives up to its title.

Finally, this funny bit from Maud Newton, “How would Edith Wharton grow buzz?”

And this gramatically corrected Spam from SPOGG.

Be well, and check your brake pads!

 The teresadifalco Summer Reading List (aka, “A Heartbreaking List of Summer Genius”) is here! Reading selections from truly exceptional readers will roll in all summer, and then be sprinkled through the site in tasty crumbs oe’r the next couple months, as a more useful alternative to this, (yawn), this and this (yawn, snore).

So you don’t think these readers odd, their assignment was this:

Send me a note about one or more of the following:

1.  
   1. What you’re reading now (if anything),
   2. What you wish you were reading,
   3. What you would read if you lived in a nudist colony (ahem, I mean “naturist” colony),
   4. What you would read if you had the whole summer off to pick seashells,
   5. What you would read if you lived in prison, and/or
   6. What you would read if you were trapped in a spider hole

They can be anything, these “reads”: Proust, the newspaper, bathroom walls, Bazooka Joe comics, the safety cards on airplanes, fortune cookies … anything with words.

As a bonus, I asked my readers to “include one book or reading material that they loathe and would never ever read, even if someone threatened to make them watch Ocean’s 12 and the 20th Anniversary Oprah Winfrey DVD for three days straight without potty breaks.”

Send me your own inspirational selections, here.

• Charles Bukowski — he of such works as “the history of one tough motherfucker” — will soon be killing time with the likes of Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer at the Hungtington Library in San Marino, California. Thanks to his wife Linda Lee, who thumbed her nose at $1m for her husband’s literary collection and instead handed it over to her favorite library. [From Yahoo News.]

• Anderson Cooper and Carole Radziwill, eat lunch and talk shop.

• The Village Voice and The Atlantic offer summer reading lists from notable readers. teresadifalco‘s own very notable readers will volunteer their summer picks, soon!

• Tom Stoppard — he of my all-time favorite line from The Invention of Love: “I was said to have walked down Picadilly with a lily in my hand. There was no need. To do it is nothing, to be said to have done it is everything.” — has a new play out (Rock ‘n’ Roll), and even more important is the little item I picked up in this profile (italics mine).

“In a famous 1977 New Yorker essay, Kenneth Tynan argued that the key to understanding Stoppard was never to forget that he was an emigre. By virtue of having no native land or mother tongue, reasoned Tynan, Stoppard had been freed from the cultural constraints that afflict other writers.”

Now excuse me while I lug out my box of The Complete New Yorker DVDs, pop one (Disk #3) into the drive and pull up this essay. Wheeee!

“Mishmash” … A gradational compound (like “gewgaw“) meaning “a collection or mixture of unrelated things.”

“When we played softball, I’d steal second base, feel guilty and go back.”
- Woody Allen

“Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.
– Roger Angell

“Baseball is dull only to dull minds.”
– Red Barber, announcer

“For five years in the minor leagues, I wore the same underwear and still hit .250, so no, I don’t believe in that stuff.”
– Dusty Baker, on superstitions

“Hello again everybody. It’s a bee-yooo-tiful day for baseball.”
– Harry Caray

Damn, I lost steam. I had planned another serial installment, some good links, a bit on Google Book Search, maybe some titallating glimpses into my NIP (novel-in-progress), featuring those two crazy kids Howard and Ellen … but am tired and need coffee and reading The Portable Dorothy Parker which is more exciting right now than writing anything at all. My own rough estimate of clear cold martinis downed in the 600-odd pages is 7,412.

I’m froggy, I’ve jumped the frog. Frogs on the brain. Frogs, frogs, froggy frog. Why? Well, one, it’s a great word, “frog.” It’s fun to say. (“Frog, frog, frog”, I don’t get tired of it!) Two, they are boinking like hell in my backyard at night — at least I assume that’s part of the clatter. I know they croak just to croak sometimes, but it’s been, as they say, at fever pitch.

Also, the ghosts of Rocky and Sally Ann (RIP: 4-10-06 / 5-1-06) are rattling long sticky dead frog tongues in the attic and those three tall, cool swingers of Belleville are eating their ice pop frogs-on-a-stick. Slurp, slurp. (Just watched it again last night.)

So there’s that and then this morning M. horrified me with this:

“If you cross a particular form of the female eastern grey treefrog with a male spring peeper (another frog), they will produce offspring, and everything is fine while the animals are tadpoles. But when it comes time to turn into a frog, the animals explode.”

Thanks. That won’t disturb me all day long. [From Mark, via Olivia Judson's blog "The Wild Side" (Times Select)]

These are for A. and and the Rockland County Sunday Morning League, and everyone else who lives for baseball in ways the rest of us envy a little.

[both by Paul Bussan from A Rage of Intelligence; via Writer's Almanac]

“Fast-Pitch”

The secret to catching,
Aside from worrying

About the pop-ups
over your head

Or squibs directly
In front of home plate,

Is to make a fist
Of your free hand

To protect your fingers
From foul tips,

And then look the ball
Right into the mitt

As if the batter
Didn’t exist.

“Between the Lines”

Those old time pros
Drank all night
But still they got their hits.
Before the game
They ran their laps
Around the field
To sweat the poisons out
Then showered, changed,
And made it to the batter’s box
In time for their first pitch.