Insult to Genetic Researchers

…I took the pie home with me and ate it with my mouth gaping, painfully aware I was not a moose and would never be a moose, but I had loved you in such an eerie and unnatural way. (from “Peek-a-Moose”)

I didn’t love this book the way I normally love Mary Ruefle, though (of course) I enjoyed it. It was kind of like combining Mary Ruefle with Borges and some clever contemporary poet boy (I haven’t decided which). Her (first?) book of “prose,” from Wave Books, The Most of It was published in 2008.

Poets are so coarsely bred they believe in force-feeding, arranged marriages, predestined outbursts. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)

I’m not sure what this means, but I like it. Especially the part about predestined outbursts. Yes, we do decide we’re going to explode upon the world.

My job, as far back as I can remember, was to look forward to being happy. (from “The Diary”)

I’ve always been determined to be “happy” now. To most people (and to me) this includes to a great measure not working, not having a j-o-b. Since being abandoned by my family early on, I did poverty. I decided that I could do poverty very well. By poverty maybe I mean budgeting. Regardless, for a long time I was very poor. From that time I decided never to work full time if I didn’t have to. Though just combining work-work with the work of writing, and with visual work, I almost always put in what would be considered “a lot of overtime” each week. Not working so much allows me to be something of a workaholic.

That said, I also like movies. And cocktails. Long walks with the dog and playing Scrabble.

Reading I don’t consider work or leisure. I’m not sure what I consider it. To say it’s breathing seems overused.

How many books have I read? Only one – just as anyone who is literate has read only one book, or, to be precise, is in the process of reading the one book they will complete in their lifetime. That book is the particular sum of every book they have ever read, written in the particular order in which those books were read. The book is never the same, for no two persons have ever read exactly the same books in exactly the same order. There is a great difference between The Secret of Larkspur Lane followed by Anna Karenina and Anna Karenina followed by The Secret of Larkspur Lane. And if What One Can Do With a Chafing Dish happens to fall between … as opposed to Don Quixote … well, I don’t mean to insult the genetic researchers, but I have a hunch that if no two people are alike, this is why. (from “A Half-Sketched Head”)