"Be Nobody's Darling"

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Watch the people succumb
To madness
With ample cheer;
Let them look askance at you
And you askance reply.

Be an outcast;
Be pleased to walk alone
(Uncool)
or line the crowded
river beds
with other impetuous
Fools.

Make a merry gathering
O the bank
Where thousands perished
For brave hurt words
They said.

Be nobody’s darling;
Be an outcast.
Qualified to live
Among your dead.

Alice Walker

"I've survived a lot of things, and I'll probably survive this."

J.D. Salinger's passing bums me out, but this article about Salinger by Lillian Ross got me thinking about his utter awesome-ness.

I've probably read Catcher in the Rye more than 20 times, and loved it more each time, but I don't think it'd be half as wonderful without J.D. Salinger being a total punk in real life. He saw the connection between being a writer and being narcissistic, and he avoided ruin by isolating himself from people who wanted to lavish him with praise--something he considered damaging.

In the New Yorker article, Lillian Ross says:

"The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them: the destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation. ...He talked about how easily writers could become vain, complaining that they got puffed up by the same 'authorities' who approved putting monosodium glutamate in baby food."

Have you read The Catcher in the Rye? Should we have a group reading of the original YA novel? I'll lead the discussion. Let me know if you're in, or if you're just a crummy phony.

From: Jesus' Son

"There were many moments in the Vine like that one--where you might think today was yesterday, and yesterday was tomorrow, and so on. Because we all believed we were tragic, and we drank. We had that helpless, destined feeling. We would die with handcuffs on. We would be put a stop to, and it wouldn't be our fault. So we imagined. And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons."

Jesus' Son
Denis Johnson

If you haven't read Jesus' Son, you're missing the best novel/collection of short stories of all time (in my humble opinion). It's dark and makes you wonder. It also illustrates a definition of "desperation." Oh yeah, and it's my favorite book. What's yours?

From: "The Final Cut"

"...If I show you my dark side,
will you still hold me tonight?
And if I open my heart to you
and show you my weak side,
what would you do?

Would you sell your story to Rolling Stone?
Would you take the children away and leave me alone?
And smile in reassurance as you whisper down the phone--

Would you send me packing?
Or would you take me home?"

"The Final Cut"
Roger Waters

(And now for a Wikipedia-napping within a Booknapping: "Q Magazine once compiled a top ten list of depressing records, and this [The Final Cut] was on it. Enough said, I think.")

From: The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl

"'Adults are idiots. They think they're in charge and they think they have some kind of authority, but you know what? They're idiots. They're just grown-up kids with more money who listen to shitty music and hate everyone younger than them because they know they've screwed up their lives and they want another shot at it. But all of us, all of us kids think that adults are in charge too. They've got us messed up, up here' She points to her head. 'So they get away with all kinds of crap.' She sniffs. 'But if you have the balls to tell them to shove it, they crumble. Easy.'"

Barry Lyga

My Late-ass Tribute to Michael Jackson

Everyone else’s accolades may have come out in a timely fashion, but I needed to collect my thoughts regarding this fiasco before I blogged about it. I mustered a respectable “WTF?” and snickered at the day-after texts, but I still hadn’t pinpointed the reason I felt an embarrassing longing in my stomach during all the deathly hullabaloo.

Thriller was one of my first cassettes and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The bass riff of “Billie Jean” still puts me in my childhood home’s dining room on a hot Philadelphia evening, watching a 60-second video clip at the end of Entertainment Tonight with my dad.

Michael Jackson = roller skating rinks, big brothers making fun, taping songs off the radio. Young Michael Jackson, the one on all your TV screens as of late, was so BAD. You think I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not. For one thing, he was black, and in the day of Usher and Kanye and Fiddy, that probably doesn’t seem like a big thing, but back then some people still called it n* music, and they didn't flinch when they said it.

But because Jackson’s popularity was so great, he wasn’t so easily labeled. So many people loved him. Did I believe what I thought or what I was told?

Michael Jackson was my first independent decision. Despite the haters, I listened to his tape until it exploded, and then I winded it all back in with my pinky and listened again.

Here is the effect Michael Jackson’s death and the world’s reaction to it has on me: a giant, heavy sadness—inordinate for a pop star I haven’t thought about in twenty years. It’s not him I miss, but that early 80s vibe that the world was changing. I was changing.

Just like it’s done to Michael, time has made those years laughable and plastic and un-get-backable.

And this idea, that from that innocence, I became part of a public that stalked one man to the point of his wearing masks to hide from us, deeply saddens me. It’s not the people we’re after, I realize—it’s feeling and meaning and time.

I’d like to say I’m going to stop reading Perez and TMZ, but I love that shiz. It’s not Iran, and that’s its appeal.

But I hate what the celebrity-public dynamic does to people. Michael was reportedly obsessed with the painting at the top of this post. When I stare at this image embossed with the TMZ logo, I can’t get over the feeling that gossip sites are wicked witches, and the people who follow them (admittedly me) are misguided souls looking to their icons with confused disillusionment.

It's no wonder our icons are merely sad humans these days, what with the 24-hour surveillance whispering, “I’ll get you, my pretty.”

From: "A Quick Trip Through My Adolescence"

"...I would rather write like a dancer shaking my ass to boogaloo inside my head, and perhaps reach only readers who like to use books to shake their asses, than to be or write for the man cloistered in a closet somewhere reading Aeschylus while this stupefying world careens crazily past his waxy windows toward its last raving sooty feedback pirouette."

Lester Bangs

From: Walden

"No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new."

Walden
Henry David Thoreau


When other kids were saying, I wish I was born in the 60s or 70s, I was all, I'd like to live in the transcendental period. Lately, I've been meaning to re-read Walden, but never got around to it until I stumbled upon DailyLit.

Go register and choose a book (you can pay for something new or choose something free from the public domain). They send you a page or two every day via email or RSS feed. I love my morning dose of transcendentalism.

What time do you dream of visiting?

From: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"In the old days when his so-called friends would hurt him or drag his trust through the mud he always crawled voluntarily back into the abuse, out of fear and loneliness, something he'd always hated himself for, but not this time. If there existed in his high school years any one moment he took pride in it was clearly this one. Even told his sister about it during her next visit. She said, Way to go, O! He'd finally showed some backbone, hence some pride, and although it hurt, it also felt motherfucking good."

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz

From: Speak

“…Heather says I was smart, ‘…so smart, Mel, to blow off this stupid group. This whole year has been horrible—I hated every single day, but I didn’t have the guts to get out like you did.’

She completely ignores the fact that I was never in, and that she dumped me, banished me from even the shadows of Martha glory. I feel like any minute a guy in a lavender suit will burst into the room with a microphone and bellow, ‘Another alternate-reality moment brought to you by adolescence!’”

Speak: 10th Anniversary Edition
Laurie Halse Anderson

From: Stargirl

"She liked you, boy."

The intensity of his voice and eyes made me blink.

"Yes," I said.

"She did it for you, you know."

"What?"

"Gave up herself for a while there. She loved you that much. What an incredibly lucky kid you were."

I could not look at him. "I know."

He shook his head with a wistful sadness. "No, you don't. You can't know yet. Maybe someday..."


Stargirl
Jerry Spinelli