1. Sailor Boy and I have been playing a game of chicken about admitting to the fact that we have no food in the house. First person to break down and actually make a grocery run is the loser. This has been going on for weeks. I thought I’d emerge triumphant, as Sailor Boy finally agreed on Sunday to go to the grocery store tonight. But last night, Sailor Boy, in his secret alter-ego as Law School Boy, pulled an all-nighter. Now, some might consider this cheating, but alas, I am a soft-hearted fool, and thus… I will go and get us some food so Sailor Boy can rest his dear sweet brain.
2. I read two books this weekend. Neither of them were contest entries, which I have due at the end of the month. I read half of a book that I’m blurbing, but then my computer crashed, which sucked, because the book was hilarious! Anyway, the books I actually read: Forever, by Judy Blume, and A Bad Boy Can Be Good For A Girl, by Tanya Lee Stone. I don’t know how I never read Forever before, because it appears to be a right of passage for American schoolgirls, and I think maybe I shouldn’t be admitting it out loud, since I’m supposed to be some kind of Judy Blume expert, what with the Pocket book and all. But anyway. It’s a great book. I cried at the end, and I think it’s all tragic but very realisitc.
The Stone book was actually touted on a blurb as being a Forever for the modern generation, and considering that the plotline rests very heavily on an actual physical copy of the book Forever, I find that very meta. Anyway, I also don’t find the description particularly apt because I think Forever, more than being a book about sex, is a book about adolescent love in all of its complexity, whereas this one was more about the sexual mistakes that adolescent teen girls make. ABBCBGFAG is also written in free verse, which, considering that my main experience with poetry (which I admit, is not very in-depth) is with Latin lyric and epic poems (I know, I know, nerd alert!), I find it hard to wrap my mind around this form. Latin poetry not only conforms to an incredibly strict meter, but it also works almost like a concrete poem. In a poem about isolation, for instance, two words describing each other are kept at the absolute largest distance from one another. So part of the fun of readingthte poem is seeing the pictures the word makes and marveling at the skill of the poet who manages to create such a work of power within the strict structure he is given. Free verse, to me, reads like someone started leaning on the carriage return.
Anyway, having said that, while reading the poem/novel, my eyes began to skim over the weird constructions, much as it would if I was reading one of those forwarded email messages where the formatting is all screwed up. Because the story is SO COMPELLING. The characters are real and sympathetic and their plight is so understandable. You want to scream at them to stop doing what they are doing but not in that “idiot girl in a slasher flick going into the basement in her underwear” way. Because you know it doesn’t seem stupid, not in the moment, in their position. And you know it’s a mistake, all at the same time. You can understand why they make the choices you do, even as you know what they’ll think of them later. It’s a very powerful book, and it is one that sticks with you and make you think a lot. I don’t know if I remember a lot of the lines because they were in this “poetry” form or because they were the kind of thing that seem ripped out of the young girls’ hearts, all bleeding and pulsating.
Go out and give this book a try. There’s a link to it on Amazon over on the right, under “Books Read in 2006”.
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