Naming a product is hard. Like, mind-boggling difficult. Every time I’m challenged to write copy or even come up with a provocative title for a post — well, there’s a lot of trial and error, and it definitely is a head scratcher.

So, I’m a bit in awe of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Marianne Moore, a wordsmith if there ever was one. According to my one of my favorite blogs, Lists of Note — sister blog to Letters of Note, which is always worthy of a read — Marianne was tasked with naming a new series of cars for the Ford Motor Company in 1955. According to the letter that accompanied this request:

We should like this name to be more than a label. Specifically, we should like it to have a compelling quality in itself and by itself. To convey, through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design. A name, in short, that flashes a dramatically desirable picture in people’s minds.

That seems pretty open, right? So Marianne went nuts, coming up with names like “Mongoose Civique” and “Utopian Turtletop.” (Hey, I’d drive it.) Ford scrapped her suggestions and named the car the relatively questionable “Edsel.” (What?) No one bought it and it was one of the most spectacular flops in automobile history.

Here’s Marianne’s list in its entirety. What’s your favorite?

1. The Ford Silver Sword
2. Hirundo
3. Aerundo
4. Hurricane Hirundo (swallow)
5. Hurricane Aquila (eagle)
6. Hurricane Accipter (hawk)
7. The Impeccable
8. Symmechromatic
9. Thunderblender
10. The Resilient Bullet
11. Intelligent Bullet
12. Bullet Cloisoné
13. Bullet Lavolta
14. The Intelligent Whale
15. The Ford Fabergé (That there is also a perfume Fabergé seems to me to do no harm, for here allusion is to the original silversmith)
16. The Arc-en-Ciel (the rainbow)
17. Arcenciel
18. Mongoose Civique
19. Anticipator
20. Regna Racer (couronne a couronne) sovereign to sovereign
21. Aeroterre
22. Fée Rapide (Aerofee, Aero Faire, Fee Aiglette, Magi-faire) Comme Il Faire
23. Tonnere Alifère (winged thunder)
24. Aliforme Alifère (wing-slender a-wing)
25. Turbotorc (used as an adjective by Plymouth)
26. Thunderbird Allié (Cousin Thunderbird)
27. Thunder Crester
28. Dearborn Diamanté
29. Magigravure
30. Pastelogram
31. Regina-Rex
32. Taper Racer
33. Varsity Stroke
34. Angelastro
35. Astranaut
36. Chaparral
37. Tir á l’arc (bull’s eye)
38. Cresta Lark
39. Triskelion (three legs running)
40. Pluma Piluma (hairfine, feather-foot)
41. Adante con Moto (description of a good motor?)
42. Turcotinga (turqoise cotinga—the cotinga being a South-American finch or sparrow) solid indigo.
43. Utopian Turtletop

And if these seem experimental, think of all the aspirational car model names that have graced your television screen: Rav, Civic, Prizm, Quest, Avalon, Xterra, Yukon, Intrepid, Odyssey…

Find more history at Lists of Note.

Doris Caesar, American sculptor, 1892-1971, in her studio.

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.

From “The Imaginary Iceberg” by Elizabeth Bishop

[Via]

[Via even*cleveland]

In The Phantom Tollbooth, each new experience makes funny and concrete some familiar idea or turn of speech: Milo jumps to Conclusions, a crowded island; grows drowsy in the Doldrums; and finds that you can swim in the Sea of Knowledge for hours and not get wet. The book is made magical by Juster’s and Feiffer’s gift for transforming abstract philosophical ideas into unforgettable images. The thinnest fat man in the world turns out to be the fattest thin man; we see them both. We meet the fractional boy, divided in the middle of his smile, who is the “.58 child” in the average American family of 2.58 children. The tone of the book is at once antic and professorial, as if a very smart middle-aged academic were working his way through an absurd and elaborate parable for his kids.

I don’t know about you, but Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth was an essential, constantly re-read classic of my childhood. Initially recommended by my friend Elise — probably at the age of eight, during our regular reading sessions on the bus ride to school — I immediately fell prey to its ridiculous puns and abstract concepts, drinking them in over and over again. Finding out that the book is fifty years old this year was a bit of a shock, since it seems to exist outside time. The New Yorker interviewed Norton Juster and illustrator Jules Feiffer (his Brooklyn Heights neighbor during the 1950s) for the occasion. It’s a great read on the timeliness of the book’s birth and the merits of a liberal education.

Also, how was I not aware that Juster was also responsible for The Dot and the Line? So magical.

“And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.”

Lately, I’ve felt the need to recede from reality. I’m burned out on the mundanities of my daily routine, politics (which makes me want to scream, but that’s another story), the endless regurgitation of the same ol’ stuff in my Google Reader, and the humid nastiness that just will not die. Something had to give, so after a long absence of fiction in my life, I decided to throw myself into the collected works of Angela Carter. I’m so glad I did. Her re-workings of classic folk tales and the lives of historical figures, magical realism style — including Lizzie Borden, Edgar Allan Poe and Little Red Riding Hood — allow me to contemplate a world where life-size puppets suck the life-force out of their masters and tigers live in abandoned castles. And her writerly style? Endlessly inspiring; in fact, it makes me want to take up fiction again. Her words are like cooling aloe on the harsh sunburn of my mind. (Dramatic much? Ha!)

So, if I haven’t already convinced you, I’ll put it in other words: pick up some Angela Carter, and quick!

What are you reading?

Curious about the origin of all this teen angst? Today I recollect my Internet-addled, kind of terrible youth at Teenage. Amidst asshole boyfriends and foster care girls spitting in my lunch, I found power in the Internet. I still do. Here’s a taste of the essay:

In a dichotomy of blond athletes in Starter jackets (the ultimate status symbol) and farm boys dirt racing in the school parking lot, I was lost: a blank slate. The only thing I really knew for certain was that this “Internet” thing held a lot of power. This was in the early days of chat rooms and IM, and I was soon an addict, abusing our dial-up and lurking to my heart’s content. While held in the (relatively) safe bosom of AOL, there were no preconceived notions about being a brown noser, socially inept, fat, tall, weird or “the new girl.” I was only Zubon13. I could be anyone. I could be anything.

“But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she’d done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?” — Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

The Rumpus’s recent interview with Aimee Bender — an amazing author, weirdo and someone whose brain I would love to crawl around inside — is a must-read. I just ordered her new novel, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, which takes the concept of eating your feelings to new depths: the book follows Rose Edelstein, who at age nine bites into her mother’s homemade lemon cake, only to discover that she can taste her mother’s emotion in it. Surreal, beautiful and always interesting, I can’t recommend Aimee’s work enough. I will hit you over the head with it again and again and again.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

— Elizabeth Bishop

[Photo via]

“Time ticks by; we grow older. Before we know it, too much time has passed and we’ve missed the chance to have had other people hurt us. To a younger me this sounded like luck; to an older me this sounds like a quiet tragedy.”

“…And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can’t ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it’s already happened. “ — Douglas Coupland’s Life After God

Photos by Andrew Miksys.

[Via]

Homage to My Hips
by Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

[Via]

and isn’t it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn’t there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn’t
you like the eggs a little

different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

- Frank O’Hara

The stillness of Glen Erler‘s work moves me. Who needs fireworks when a loop of string in a patch of silent sunlight can be so utterly captivating? It reminded me of a Billy Collins poem on silence.

Now it is time to say what you have to say.
The room is quiet.
The whirring fan has been unplugged,
and the girl who was tapping
a pencil on her desktop has been removed.

So tell us what is on your mind.
We want to hear the sound of your foliage,
the unraveling of your tool kit,
your songs of loneliness,
your songs of hurt.

The trains are motionless on the tracks,
the ships are at restn the harbor.
The dogs are cocking their heads
and the gods are peering down from their balloons.
The town is hushed,

and everyone here has a copy.
So tell us about your parents—
your father behind the steering wheel,
your cruel mother at the sink.
Let’s hear about all the clouds you saw, all the trees.

Read the poem you brought with you tonight.
The ocean has stopped sloshing around,
and even Beethoven
is sitting up in his deathbed,
his cold hearing horn inserted in one ear.

[Via]

Inspired by the Guardian’s intrepid podcast series, where authors read and discuss their favorite short stories for the twelve days leading up to Christmas, I thought I’d share one of my favorite short stories.

Kelly Link not-so-recently read “The Hortlak,” from her short story collection Magic for Beginners (pretty much my favorite book of contemporary fiction), for the KQED Writers’ Block series. In this eerie tale, Eric and Batu work at the All Night Convenience store across the road from the Ausible Chasm, at the bottom of which lies a vast zombie city. While sleeping at odd hours in an endless array of themed pajamas (printed with pages from a diary, for example), Eric and Batu seem to be the subjects of a “new retail” experiment that’s yet to be defined. Zombies stop in at the All Night on their way to the chasm, accosting Eric with pocketfuls of dryer lint and inscrutable babbling. Meanwhile, the elusive Charley drives by each night with a carful of doomed dogs enjoying one last drive before they’re put to sleep. Will Eric ever get the nerve to talk to her?

I hope you enjoy Kelly’s work. She’s on of my favorite writers. Feel free to download the podcast here.

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. This is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety.

“But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.

“Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.”

— Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction.”

A woman after my own heart. Listen to Flannery’s 1959 reading of A Good Man is Hard to Find here.

Her voice is somehow totally different than I imagined.

“The old phones came to be indispensable to anyone who longed for a complex social and emotional and aesthetic life, a reliable vocal-auditory miracle, intimacy, friendship, romance, furious down-slammings, hissed interruptions and the awesomely strange sensation, via the mouth- and earpieces, of being inside someone else’s accent, intonations and sighs, ear canal and larynx and lungs.

“Your phone voice was distinctive; your phone manner was distinctive. You thought a great deal about people who rhythmically and mysteriously inhaled and exhaled cigarette smoke while they talked or left long silences or didn’t hang up immediately after saying goodbye.

“A conversation could last hours upon dazed hours, as you sat on your parents’ bed, twirling the curly cord, or hauled the house phone into the bathroom, the better to monopolize family telecommunications. Chortling, gasping, sighing, sobbing, throats catching or forming word after idle or impassioned word: you made every sound that humans make and thus joined your solitudes.”

This New York Times Magazine piece on the death of the analog phone makes me pretty nostalgic. I’d forgotten about so many of the niceties of using an “old style” phone: the pleasant weight of the receiver, mindfulness of not calling during dinner hour or after 9 p.m., and the feeling of surprised importance when your presence was requested on the line by a faux-receptionist sister (“It’s for you.”). I count myself lucky to have grown up with such a stolid and dependable mechanism. In fact, in my house we answered the phone “Feldmann’s,” like it was a grocery store or a bar. Odd, in retrospect — but even more odd that babies today create imaginary cellphones out of blocks and hold them up to their heads, murmuring hellos and goodbyes and “Can you hear me now?”, but in tiny burbling toddler words. (True story. My friend’s nephew would always play with “his phone” like this.)

What do you miss about the phone?

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

Thro’ sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver’s eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman’s restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro’ southern uplands with northern mails.

Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro’ the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

__

W.H. Auden’s poetic ending to Night Mail, the 1936 documentary about the mail trains that traveled from Scotland to London. I remember watching this in college and expecting it to be like watching paint dry, but it’s pretty cool for a documentary about the mail system. (The ending definitely helps.) I have the memory span of a fly, so I’d like to rewatch all of the documentaries I studied and make some new ones (until I forget again). Early film is first on my list!

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

——

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

——

We are rich: we have nothing to lose.
We are old: we have nowhere to rush.
We shall fluff the pillows of the past,
poke the embers of the days to come,
talk about what means the most,
as the indolent daylight fades.
We shall lay to rest our undying dead:
I shall bury you, you will bury me.

——

I love Vera Pavlova‘s poetry.

Excerpted from Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” — one of my favorite short stories.

I said, “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are.”

It was then that the blind man cleared his throat. He brought something up. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket. Then he said, “I get it, bub. It’s okay. It happens. Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Hey, listen to me. Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why don’t you find us some heavy paper? And a pen. We’ll do something. We’ll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff,” he said.

So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, I found a shopping bag with onion skins in the bottom of the bag. I emptied the bag and shook it. I brought it into the living room and sat down with it near his legs. I moved some things, smoothed the wrinkles from the bag, spread it out on the coffee table.

The blind man got down from the sofa and sat next to me on the carpet.

He ran his fingers over the paper. He went up and down the sides of the paper. The edges, even the edges. He fingered the corners.

“All right,” he said. “All right, let’s do her.”

He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand. “Go ahead, bub, draw,” he said. “Draw. You’ll see. I’ll follow along with you. It’ll be okay. Just begin now like I’m telling you. You’ll see. Draw,” the blind man said.

So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy.

“Swell,” he said. “Terrific. You’re doing fine,” he said. “Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of the fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded.

“Doing fine,” the blind man said.

I took up the pen again, and he found my hand. I kept at it. I’m no artist. But I kept drawing just the same.

My wife opened up her eyes and gazed at us. She sat up on the sofa, her robe hanging open. She said, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know.”

I didn’t answer her.

The blind man said, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it. Press hard,” he said to me. “That’s right. That’s good,” he said. “Sure. You got it, bub. I can tell. You didn’t think you could. But you can, can’t you? You’re cooking with gas now. You know what I’m saying? We’re going to really have us something here in a minute. How’s the old arm?” he said. “Put some people in there now. What’s a cathedral without people?”

My wife said, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?”

“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Close your eyes now,” the blind man said to me.

I did it. I closed them just like he said.

“Are they closed?” he said. “Don’t fudge.”

“They’re closed,” I said.

“Keep them that way,” he said. He said, “Don’t stop now. Draw.”

So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.

Then he said, “I think that’s it. I think you got it,” he said. “Take a look. What do you think?”

But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.

“Well?” he said. “Are you looking?”

My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.

“It’s really something,” I said.

If you haven’t read Esquire’s deeply moving profile of Roger Ebert: please do.