No talking like a grizzled 1890s prospector, consarn it!

My New Year's resolution is to talk like a pickpocket. Good thing there's a lot of reciprocal borrowing agreements in my new neck of the woods.*
One of my nerdier interests is slang and slang dictionaries. Especially old-timey slang--and this is another Simpsons chicken-or-the-egg: do I find old-timey stuff funny and that's why I love those jokes, or do I love those jokes because I've been watching a show written by fans of old-timey jokes since I was 10?
The current obsession with Deadwood isn't hurting either. I've been sorely tempted to keep a notebook next to me while I watch, so I can jot down all the great outdated euphemisms and slang.
I was looking through the reference section at the new library and found Casell's Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green, who also has a LibraryThing, which is pretty cool.
I kind of feel like working my way through all of his books tagged with "reference" or "slang" at some point. Teenlit and etymology, that's what I read!

As a middle-of-Chanukkah present, here's some fun outdated slang, from the aforementioned Cassell's:
back-row hopper someone who goes to bars, hoping they'll find someone who will buy them a drink
bacon hole mouth [I think I may have found a replacement in my heart for pie- and/or cake-hole.]
baste someone's coat beat 'em up severely
cross-cove and mollisher a man and woman who work together as thieves
crusty-beau an aging dandy who takes lots of care with his complexion by using cosmetics
dandysette a female dandy
get a spark up strengthen one's spirits with a drink
coffin varnish Prohibition era liquor
pick up a nail get vd
sweetheart and bag-pudding baby momma
snaffle to steal; to arrest; to seduce
Liverpool kiss blow to the mouth or face

I've determined that what I really need isn't a slang dictionary, but a reverse slang dictionary. That way it would be easier to skip past all the hundreds and hundreds of words for penis, vagina, and sex, and concentrate on what I really want, which is archaic euphemisms for getting drunk, thievery, and general debauchery.
What's interesting though, is that I'm not really as much a fan of Cockney rhyming slang. Like, it's interesting, but not nearly as much as slang with more of a history.

*As opposed to the last town, where it was every system for themselves unless you wanted to pay like $50 a year.

Replace the flesh (which is weak) with steel (which is strong).

Why do I always wind up forgetting and putting my 3 heaviest books in the same box?
As I was slogging stuff up into my new apartment yesterday, I did that thing you always do when you move: fantasize about throwing it all away.
It's especially an attractive option if, like me, all of your most prized posessions and favorite things were cheap and are a pain to move.
Take those 3 heavy books, for instance. One of them was a gift, so it's price isn't of my concern. It's the nice big Yoko Ono retrospective catalog from a few years ago. Fucker weighs like 4 times the weight of your average big fancy art book.
Book #2 is a yearbook from a big famous military school (whose name is escaping me now--Naval Academy? something...) I found in the trash outside a giant Squirrel Hill house one day. It's from the early 70s and is pretty damn sweet.
And the third book is a world atlas/encyclopedia from the early 1960s. I love this book. I think it was a dollar.
So, what I need all of you to do is remind me. Everytime I gripe about how much junk I have, and how heavy it all is, remind me of how much I love all my stupid books and records and Jimmy's Robot World coffee mug and plush things that shouldn't be plush.
***
Then, this afternoon, Mom and I went to Kawaii and I bought more stuff I'll have to move (plus a present for Tiff). In my defense, though, I did need a 2007 planner and weird Japanese school/office supplies for my new job.

Standing in a queue of a school canteen.

Yes folks, the wait is finally over.
Introducing...The PoBaL Literary Crush List!
(oooo, aaaaah.)

• The first crush I can remember having on a character in a book was Peter Pevensie in the Narnia books. He's all responsible and noble and shit, plus, if I ever had a giant evil talking wolf that needed killed, he could totally do it for me. And really, isn't that what we're all looking for in a man?
• Zooey Glass. Sure, he's snarky to his mom, mean to his sister (kind of) during her big crisis of faith or whatever, and was quoted in Ally Sheedy's book of poetry, but how could you resist a guy that looks like "the blue-eyed Jewish-Irish Mohican scout who died in your arms at the roulette table at Monte Carlo"?* And you'd be snarky to your mom, too, if she wouldn't leave the bathroom when you wanted to get dressed.
• Carrying on with my trend of wounded, arrogant, asshole-ish boys who are also loyal, noble, etc., I've got quite the crush on Sirius Black (unlike my Oliver Wood or Weasley twin crushes, it has everything to do with J.K. Rowling and nothing to do with casting directors).
• ...and Bran from Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Totally arrogant, but, as his absent father is King Arthur, kind of understandable. And hot, if I'm allowed to say that about a fictional 13yrold. Which I'm probably totally not. But that's the thing about literary crushes, especially when most of what you read is teenlit. You have a lot of age-inappropriateness.
• Also, sometimes you get the species inappropriateness. I know Foaly, the smartass tech geek in the Artemis Fowl books, is a centaur, but I still crush on him. Insert your own awful "hung like a horse" joke here.
• I also like Ravus the Troll from Holly Black's Valiant, but he's at least human-shaped. Sort of. And there's this great scene where Val thinks he's about to make a magic potion and it's actually hot cocoa. If a boy made me hot cocoa, I think I could overlook the whole green skin and fangs thing.
• After I read Heavy Metal and You, I got a really big crush on Chris Krovatin, the author. That counts for this list because the book kind of smacks of thinly veiled autobiography.
• I can't tell if I have a crush on Nick from Nick and Norah or if I'm crushing on the whole crazy infatuated night the two characters have.
• Jacklyn Moriarty writes some pretty crushable boys. She's very good at the smirky charmers who are actually quite nice boys once you get to know them.
• If you're the sort of girl who can have a crush on a drawing, which I completely and unabashedly am, there are whole genres of manga dedicated just to you. Right now I'm all about Saiyuki. There's a lot of pretty, and a lot of jackassery.
• Speaking of crushes on drawings, Drake from Scooter Girl is totally my boyfriend.
• Because it's just not a crush list without a straightgirlcrush, Dess from the Midnighters series is awesome. She fights monsters with math! And snarks around a lot!

*Yeah, I had to grab the library copy of Franny and Zooey for an exact quote, but I had a good deal of it memorized. I always forget where the roulette wheel is.

Hey, I like all that black shit.

More weeding excitement:

Nat wonders why we're getting rid of it. I wonder why we bought it in the first place.
Here are some more Breakfast Club quotes, if you're interested. I know I am.

Amongst the other people she thanks are Rebecca DeMornay and Eric Stoltz. (I wonder if he dressed up like a chicken at the book release party?) She also quotes the bit from Franny & Zooey where Zooey-as-Buddy reveals to Franny that Seymour's Fat Lady is Christ.
Which, if you know the book at all, is a hell of a pretentious thing for a teen actress to quote at the beginning of her second volume of poetry. Yes, second: the first was called She Was Nice To Mice. I am not making this up. It was published when she was twelve.

Hanging from inebriated ropes
he choked away my pride and hope
not woman enough
no angel, too rough
I failed
to save him

By breathing I have let him down
a garish painted circus clown
not goddess enough
too human to love
this whore

a portrait in a magazine
so pretty on a movie screen
I'm not tempting enough
clothed in flesh and blood
I failed
to transform it

Now falling
coming back to earth
do I even merit human birth?
Prove that you should be his wife
You are unfit for this life
I fall
undid my bodice and let out my breath
one wrong moment

Superheroes
I have known a few
but watched them fly away on cue
shortsighted
I didn't know
their envy I would come to owe
to him.

I've sinned

too close too much
won't admit human touch
again

I'll never be woman enough.
Women aren't enough.
Enough.

Yeesh--and I though High Art was hackneyed, melodramatic tripe.

Also, if someone could tell me how this picture looks, that'd be great. Guess who's filter decided to block flickr and blogger pictures today?

Don't care if this archive's destroyed.

I spent the other night getting some old nonfiction on its merry way along the weeding track. So, yeah, I typed the barcodes from a truck of books into the computer. And then pushed them into the back. Ever pushed a truck stuffed to the gills of heavy, heavy books over carpeting? It's not fun. I kept having ILL flashbacks, hating the microform and Asian language departments at Hillman because I visited them after the bound journals and that floor was carpeted.
I love old nonfiction, though. There's a certain time period, post-WWII to about 1970 I think, that manufactured books that now, with age, have a great smell. The best used bookstores smell this way.
The design of the covers from this time period is good, too.

At my old clerk job, one of my duties was taking the deselected (nice use of librarian-speak, eh?) children's nonfiction out of our catalog. I also got first dibs on any discarded books I wanted. This is why my copies of the first 4 Harry Potters have broken spines, multiple repairs, and look like library property.
Mostly, though, I like out of date nonfiction. I have a book about Communism from the 1960s, written for children. I published a zine at one point of pictures of scientists from 1950s science books for kids.*
One of the sections adult services was weeding was all the old space exploration books. I wanted to adopt them all, even though I suspect I already own at least one of the titles we were getting rid of. Artist's renderings of space travel, the future, and the surface of other planets are something I never get tired of.
Plus, sometimes old books are just fun to mock.

I don't know if you can tell, but every single one of those pictures is identical. A more accurate title would be, 24 Table Saw Projects, All of Which Look Exactly Alike.

I like to think this entire book is dedicated to making sure you don't buy a ring this ugly.

Killer bison!!! I know you can't tell, but it's eyes are totally red, too. And it may or may not be foaming at the mouth. I also like this one because it looks like the awesome caveman hunting/TRex double-sided mural they used to have at the Carnegie Museum (behind the TRex). Its historical inaccuracies always irritated my dad, but I miss it.
It's a short jump from mocking books to mocking authors. For example, if you had written this book:

Wouldn't you choose a bigger horn-thing to hold in your picture?

And here, finally, is the best one. I giggled like a schoolgirl for about twenty minutes over this, plus showed my coworkers and made them giggle. I am, after all, so good at my job because of my stunted maturity.


*I still have copies, if anyone wants one. Darren, I'll trade you one for a nudie pen.

When the 2 for 1’s undone the writers block.

The Bookslut Blog, which I read pretty religiously and is linked over there --->, was talking about the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, which I guess is a book but is also accessible here.
Here's my annotated list of the ones I've read. I had to contain myself to not include ones where I've just seen the movie, or saw the trailer of the movie in some art house theater. I've also come to the conclusion that my memory sucks ass. I also want to know how come there's no Willa Cather on the list. I love Willa Cather; I read her because Andrea Linnett used quotes from her books in a Sassy fashion story with prairie-ish clothes and petticoats at some point in the early 1990s.

1. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
2. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
3. Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi
4. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh
5. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
6. The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
7. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
8. The Buddha of Suburbia – Hanif Kureishi
9. The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker
10. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
11. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
12. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
13. Beloved – Toni Morrison
14. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
15. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
16. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
17. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
18. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
19. Willard and His Bowling Trophies – Richard Brautigan (maybe--I've read some Brautigan, liked it, but don't remember titles)
20. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
21. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs (I think--see Brautigan note)
22. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
23. Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke (Did I read this? I don't remember. It's on the list as a reminder to investigate. Handke worked with Wim Wenders a lot.)
24. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
25. 
    One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (half)
26. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
27. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut
28. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
30. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
31. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
32. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
33. Naked Lunch – William Burroughs
34. The Tin Drum – Günter Grass
35. Absolute Beginners – Colin MacInnes (I haven't read, but I should. We watched the movie in my teenpics class. David Bowie dances on a giant typewriter!)
36. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
37. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
38. Blue Noon – Georges Bataille (Um, does it count if I've read Scott Westerfeld's Blue Noon?)
39. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
40. Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
41. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin (half)
42. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (the first one--then I decided to sit back and let Peter Jackson do all the dirty work)
43. The Last Temptation of Christ – Nikos Kazantzákis (Tiff? Did we read an excerpt from this in Women and Religion?)
44. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
45. Native Son – Richard Wright
46. Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham (Does seeing the MST3K version of the movie count? Is there an MST3K version, or did we just watch it and snark ourselves?)
47. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
48. Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake (OK, it looks like there are several of Peake's Gormenghast books on the list. I checked the collected paperback out of the library, read 2 1/2, but don't remember the individual titles. I also can't say enough good things about them, or the BBC miniseries.)
49. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck (Delta 88!)
50. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
51. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (I don't care what anyone says. I really like Steinbeck.)
52. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
53. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston (I don't remember if I read this, or just thought about reading this. A lot of this list is like that--I remember thinking at some point in the last 10-15 years that I should read a certain title, but I can't tell if I followed through, or got distracted by, like, the social history of birth control or something. [also a good book])
54. The Postman Always Rings Twice – James M. Cain (I haven't read this yet, but the movie version is in my Film Noir Top 5. The scene where the 2 main characters meet for the first time kicks so much ass I can't handle it.)
55. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
56. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
57. Steppenwolf – Herman Hesse (only part, I think. Maybe. I think I've read all of Siddhartha, though.)
58. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
59. The Trial – Franz Kafka (Does reading the discussion of it in Jamie Rich's Cut My Hair count?)
60. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse (See?)
61. Ulysses – James Joyce (I have tried. Oh my lord, how I have tried. The last time, I got a librarian to recommend a good readers guide, and I sat there and tried to slog through with both, and then a squirrel grifted me out of half a peanut butter sandwich and I gave up and read The Tin Drum instead. That, incidentally, is completely a true story.)
62. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton (I read one Edith Wharton book. I don't remember the title; it was for a summer class I skipped too much of. We also read Beloved, a slave narrative, the first novel written in the new world [Charlotte Temple, aka crap, aka the only book I've actually physically thrown across a room] and the ubiquitous The Yellow Wallpaper. Damn women's studies minor.)
63. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton (That's the one! It felt like reading Little Women, if it was only about Meg and the shallow friends she's got at the beginning of the book.)
64. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James (less than half)
65. Dracula – Bram Stoker (You guys should see the sweet-ass illustrated version I bought for the library.)
66. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman (You can't see it, but I'm shaking my fist right now.)
67. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (My hatred of this book is a blog post unto itself.)
68. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll (Has anyone read The Looking Glass Wars yet? I was so into the concept, but the book kind of fell flat to me.)
69. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott (I was a HUGE Alcott fan at one point. Maybe around 10 yrs old or so? I've read a lot of her books.)
70. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
71. The Water-Babies – Charles Kingsley (My grandmother loved this book. She had a beautiful illustrated version. I remember sitting with her and looking through it. I wonder where that book is now...someone remind me to ask my mom.)
72. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo (I haven't read this, but I could swear this movie was also a novel, and I read that. Maybe I did read Les Mis...)
73. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (I really can't stand Dickens. Hate.)
74. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
75. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
76. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
77. Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne (Not yet! My local library has the movie; I think I may watch it this weekend. I'm terribly excited.)
78. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift (maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe?)
79. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

Shut up, Dave Eggers

I've officially given up on this year's best Nonrequired Reading. The kids who select have come way too much under Eggers' thrall (which is the Norse word for slave, or so it would seem from Sea of Trolls, which is the book I've cast Nonrequired over for). Also, it's more fiction than last year, and the fiction is annoying, in that Shut up, Dave Eggers kind of way.

Also, like no one saw this coming:

You are Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling
Sinister.


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