Hands

It's been a slow few days for reading. I'm in the middle of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (9), and am struck by the hands in the book. There are hands everywhere. Heads held in hands (3 or 4 times). Hands thrust in pockets (4 or 5 times). Trembling hands. (So much trembling. So many hands.) And descriptions of hands.

From "Hands,":

"Wing Biddlebaum talked much with his hands. The slender expressive fingers, forever active, forever striving to conceal themselves in his pockets or behind his back, came forth and became the piston rods of his machinery of expression."

From "Paper Pills,":

"The knuckles of the doctor’s hands were extraordinarily large. When the hands were closed they looked like clusters of unpainted wooden balls as large as walnuts fastened together by steel rods."

From "Mother,":

"Her long hands, white and bloodless, could be seen drooping over the ends of the arms of the chair."

From "The Philosopher,":

"The saloon keeper was a short, broad-shouldered man with peculiarly marked hands. That flaming kind of birthmark that sometimes paints with red the faces of men and women had touched with red Tom Willy’s fingers and the backs of his hands."

From "Respectability,":

"He took care of his hands. His fingers were fat, but there was something sensitive and shapely in the hand that lay on the table by the instrument in the telegraph office."

From "Loneliness,"

"'...I wanted to touch her with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands were so strong and her face was so good and she looked at me all the time.'"

From "The Untold Lie,":

"Ray, who was the more sensitive and always minded things more, had chapped hands and they hurt. He put them into his coat pockets and looked away across the fields."

From "Drink,":

"For five years she scrubbed the floors in an office building and then got a place as dish washer in a restaurant. Her hands were all twisted out of shape. When she took hold of a mop or a broom handle the hands looked like the dried stems of an old creeping vine clinging to a tree."

From "Death,":

"'There was always paint on his hands and face during those days and he smelled of paint."'

We spend an awful lot of time on faces. We spend our time staring at, glancing quickly at, studying, reading emotion from, searching for duplicity within, making up our minds about someone based upon the details of, etc., etc., the face.

But faces, and voices (their partners in crime) spend a lot of time lying. Or convincing. Or seducing.

Watch the hands. Hands over to help you up, and hands hold knives that are about to get stuck in your belly, and hands steal your wallet while a face gives you gentle, innocent eyes.

I think that's why Anderson spends so much time on hands. You can, as a writer, fill faces and words with lies, and then pack all this truth in hands.

Also probably worth mentioning: when one is a certain kind of person (and this is often true of writers) one spends a lot of time trying to look into the faces of people who aren't looking at them, and one spends a lot of time avoiding the direct gaze of people and instead doing a very thorough investigation of their hands.

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10) Andrew Sullivan on Obama

"And the only way out of that deadlock is an electoral rout of the GOP, since the language of victory and defeat seems to be the only thing it understands."

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11) Jay Caspian Kantor on Kobe Bryant & 12) Greg Monroe, possibly the only thing about the Pistons worth being hopeful about

My girlfriend and I moved into a place together a couple of months back. The hardest part has been trying to find a way to blend the book collections of two professional book sellers. Her solution has been to accept every bookshelf we've been offered. Mine has been to slash and burn my way through my collection, selling and giving away the last decade of contemporary "literary" fiction. (I have, if you are interested, lots of books I'd be happy to give you/trade with you for something other than books (film for my cameras? baked goods? something else? whatcha got to offer? Lots of story collections. Drop me a line. Read slash love the books, and I'll be happy.)

One thing about the place is that it is incredibly dry. Because it is dry, we both spend our evenings snoring at each other.

It's been a long time since I had a roommate. Of course, this is a bit different. But not entirely. One of the last roommates I had would—from another room—spend the night quietly (and sometimes loudly) snoring at me as I quietly (and sometimes loudly) snored back. That was also in a fairly dry apartment. So dry, I spent the first month waking up with a nosebleed. There have been blood spots on the pillows, but nor serious, early-morning nosebleeds.

So, anyway, a lot of the time I spent hanging out with the snoring-from-the-other-bedroom roommate was spent watching professional basketball.

Which I had never really done prior to that living situation.

Now I sometimes just wish I was watching basketball when I'm not.

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12) Rachel Aviv reviews The Church of Scientology

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13) Tom Bissell on the making of "Madden NFL"

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UPDATE:

14) Blog Post 2012 by Adam Robinson

Can't believe I forgot to include this in my journal of Favorite Reads over the last few days.

I did a reading with Edward Mullany last night, and we talked a little about our friend (and publisher) Adam Robinson. And this HTML Giant post about disc golf. And books. And H0bart's upcoming Luck issue.

—Speaking of Hobart, Elizabeth Ellen has a book called Fast Machine coming out soon. There are many reasons why I'm excited about this. Here's one: I'm really glad she's finally calling a book Fast Machine. When Before You She Was A Pitbull was in process, and she was coming up with a title, and Fast Machine was one of the options, I thought it was the one to go with. I like Before You She Was A Pitbull just fine. I really love the title Fast Machine. I'm not sure why.—

Mullany is quite nice and his book (15) in the next couple of days; not finished yet) is pretty damn good. The lines are concise. The language is direct. But it's all deceptively simple. He has a wonderful prose poem called "Important," which describes hearing about a famous painter who "would've been 100 today." Dead and yet still, on certain news reports, still worthy of having his birthday marked.

I asked Mullany about the poem. Specifically, what was it that weighted that moment—the moment where you hear someone mark a dead man's birthday—to the point that it became worthy of poetic consideration. His answer: the ambiguity of it. The fact that it is sort of funny and also somber. The way it shuttles back and forth between meanings in one's mind. And in that way, begins to transcend its two possible interpretations. The way it lives as both things at once.



Here's a song for you:



Later.