I’m coming out of the closet–I love Rock Star: Supernova! There. I’ve said it. I loved last year’s INXS version, too. It’s good TV, people!

Anyway, I’m bummed that Storm got kicked off last night. Here’s her original song:

If you are in the area of Lowell, MA, on September 23rd, you might want to mark your calendar to attend ArtRoots sponsored by the one and only Middlesex Beat. You can purchase tickets here.

The narrator of Alice Hoffman’s The Ice Queen, prefers the bleaker Grimm’s to the more hopeful Anderson’s fairy tales. Perhaps this is because she paints her life bleakly and without hope. Utlimately, what she finds is that life need not be black and white and painful to have meaning; that there can be color, and butterflies, and hope.

The narrator and her brother have been locked in a struggle for survival their whole lives–since their father ran off and their mother died on her 30th birthday (the narrator believes it was her wish that killed her mother and it is this guilt which colors her entire life). The brother survives by excelling, by removing himself from desperate situations through research and hardwork. Whereas the sister survives by creeping farther and farther inward, and underground, by disappearing:

Isn’t that the center of every story? The search for the truth. The need to know. Tear off the sealskin, the donkey-skin, the feathers, the shackles. In moonlight, starlight, lanternlight, bluelight. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted: to see and hear. Take the veil from my eyes. The stones from within my ears. Turn me around twice. Tell me. No matter the consequence. No matter the price. At least until it has to be paid. At least until the price blinds you, deafens you, burns you alive.

It’s not until after her grandmother dies and she is struck by lightning that her brother comes to her aid and brings her down to Florida to live near him and be studied by lightning experts that her life begins to slowly come into focus. It is here where she begins to thaw, see color again, taste, experience love. And when her brother dies and she is there to help him through it, she is transformed, reborn. In short, it is a modern fairytale, and one in which we can see ourselves:

The story is always about searching for the truth, no matter what it might bring. Even when nothing was what it appeared to be, when everything was hidden, there was a center not even I could run from: who I truly was, what I felt, what I was deep inside.

It wasn’t until I sat down to write about this book that I realized I do not know the narrator’s name. I just searched through again and it seems she is unnamed throughout–something, apparently, I didn’t miss. But what is the symbolism in this? Is she meant to stand for that part of all of us which shuts out fear by playing dead like a mole caught by a cat?

It’s a lovely book. Thanks to my pal Ellenfor passing it on to me.

Check out Jason Hughes’s Cleanly Doors over at the always interesting Baltimore Interview.

Not only is it Kathy Fish’s birthday today but there’s also a new story live by her in Per Contra. Read it and love it here: Hypergraphia

Oh man, it took me a good five minutes to figure this out but finally I did:

petals around the rose

Make sure you check out the comment section (I LOVE how defensive some of the people are).

Watched Me Without You last night. Oh, did I love this movie! It captures perfectly what it can be to be in an intense female friendship–the love, the hate, the jealousy, the desire to absorb that person into yourself until you become the one person you believe yourselves to be.

The problem is that these relationships can be so intense that they become toxic. And so there is the inevitable breakup.

To top it all off, Michelle Williams was excellent. Watch this movie if you haven’t already.

Since spring–well, actually since the spring before last–I’ve been planning on having a yard/garage/bunch-of-crap-that-we-don’t-want-anymore sale.

The problem is that I never got past the planning stage. Why? This is what I asked myself. Why?

As in:
Why would I want my neighbors pawing over my crap and laughing at me afterwards?
Why would I want a bunch of strangers milling about my driveway?
Why would anyone want my old cassettes?

I’ve decided I’m not going to do it. Instead, anything we would have sold is going either to the take-it-or-leave-it at the dump, the book swap at the dump, the Salvation Army, or Freecycle.

I would have made what $100 or $200 tops? And that works out to probably way less than $10 an hour for all of the prep work (not to mention the supplies and advertising) and so I’m not going to do it.

I am liberated from the yoke of the yard sale.

If you’ve been missing Sue Henderson’s blog (as I have!) then you will be happy to note that she is back and has gorgeous new digs at litpark. Go on and visit her and bookmark the site.

The beloved SmokeLong Quarterly is back open for submissions–send them your best work.

Joseph Young reviews Mary Miller’s Broken:

“Broken,” then, is a shallow pool, all surfaces and light. It hasn’t the deep, probing psychology or humanistic revelation of emotion that have become de rigeur for the modern short story. Through her use of surface values–humor, quirkiness, even a bit of cruelty–Miller liberates her flash from these requirements. Meaning has been cut free from fiction.

Poor Darby got a tooth pulled yesterday. According to the vet it had a “fracture” (i.e. was cracked). He was anesthetized and catheterized and IV’d and then his teeth were cleaned and checked.

The vet did a “geriatric” blood test to check his liver and kidney function prior to putting him under–apparently he is in excellent health.

What troubles me is the label geriatric. When we got Darby 4.5 years ago, they believed he was between 2 and 4 years old. So yesterday the vet was saying he’s probably 8 or 9. No! I cannot believe he is that age. He is young and spry and will live forever.

This is what they call living in denial.

But really, what will I ever do without him?