Two memoirs, a novel, long and short films, and two poems

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My name is Howard Dully. . . . In 1960, when I was twelve years old, I was given a transorbital, or "ice pick," lobotomy.

My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some "tests." It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.

. . . I hadn't been a bad kid. I hadn't ever hurt anyone. Or had I? Was there something I had done, and forgotten—something so horrible that I deserved a lobotomy?

From My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming (Three Rivers Press, 2007).
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Scaredycat, 2006, a 15-minute short film (and official selection at the Sundance Film Festival) which was included on the DVD Fifteenth and Taylor: Dispatches from a small apartment and packaged with the full-length film The Adults in the Room, a thoughtful documentary/drama hybrid by Andy Blubaugh.
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Pauline said, "Once upon a time, there was a woman who had a birthday."

Michael stopped pouring his cereal and looked across the table at her.

"It was January fifth," Pauline said. "The woman was twenty-three."

"Why, that's your birthday, too!" Michael's mother told her. "That's how old you turned, only yesterday!"

"And because this woman happened to be at a low point in her life," Pauline went on, "she was feeling very sensitive about her age."

Michael said, cautiously, "A low point in her life?"

From The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

I recently reread this one, along with Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and Celestial Navigation.
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"The Lost Strudel" (originally published in The New York Times) and "On Rapture" (originally published in O, The Oprah Magazine) from I Feel Bad About My Neck: and other thoughts on being a woman by Nora Ephron (Vintage Books, 2006).
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"Your Marriage Gets Louder as You Get Older," a poem by Amorak Huey, and "Half-hearted Apology," a poem by Nicole Koroch, from Ramshackle Review, March 2011.

Just when I think I can't like Tina Fey more than I already do...

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...she writes a book. There were a lot of funny and quotable moments, but I've read two good reviews of this book, so I'll just link to them. One review is at The Buffalo News ("Tina Fey delivers the laughs in 'Bossypants'" by Emily Simon), and the other is from the Los Angeles Times ("'Bossypants' by Tina Fey is funny and heartfelt" by Mary McNamara). There are also many other reviews, op-ed pieces, and blog posts about the book with regard to humor, feminism, etc., and two excerpts in The New Yorker. (I've only read the first, re: working moms, and felt it didn't do the book justice. McNamara mentions the excerpts in her review.)

Bossypants by Tina Fey (Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2011).

The Spring 2011 issue of the Apple Valley Review

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The Spring 2011 issue of the journal features fiction by Glen Pourciau, Gregory J. Wolos, and Kevin Carey; poetry and prose poetry by Ryan Ragan, Michelle Valois, Nick Ripatrazone, Neil McCarthy, Tamara Grippi, Karen Skolfield, Danielle Hanson, Regina Faunes, Svetlana Cârstean (translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Claudia Serea), Linda Benninghoff, and Tammy Ho Lai-Ming; and artwork by Sarah Walko (photographed by Christopher Keohane).

The Apple Valley Review is a semiannual online literary journal. The current issue, previous issues, subscription information, and complete submission guidelines are available at www.applevalleyreview.com.

Happy poetry month!

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Mention poetry, and people tend to divide into two camps: the ones who have a well-worn copy of The Bell Jar on the bookshelf and an opinion about Billy Collins's place in the literary canon, and the ones who still remember Mrs. So-and-so, the English teacher from hell, and her fixation on Emily Dickinson or her impossible test questions about the meaning of some poem or other.

"A Few Painless Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month" is continued here.

Lorrie Moore's Birds of America

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What should she say? It must be the most unendurable thing to lose a child. Shouldn't he say something of this? It was his turn to say something.

But he would not. And when they finally reached her classroom, she turned to him in the doorway and, taking a package from her purse, said simply, in a reassuring way, "We always have cookies in class."

Now he beamed at her with such relief that she knew she had for once said the right thing. It filled her with affection for him. Perhaps, she thought, that was where affection began: in an unlikely phrase, in a moment of someone's having unexpectedly but at last said the right thing. We always have cookies in class.

(Excerpted from "Agnes of Iowa," which originally appeared in Elle. This quote is on page 88 of the Vintage paperback.)


From Birds of America, short stories by Lorrie Moore (1998).

What a great collection. I was going to type out more of my favorite segments, but there were just too many. Seriously.

Two stories from Guess Again by Bernard Cooper

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Guess Again, short stories by Bernard Cooper (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

"Exterior Decoration" (originally published--in slightly different form--on August 25, 1999 in The LA Weekly): "Standing at the living room window, Ray looked up from his morning coffee and saw that the garage door of the house across the street, which just yesterday had been a shade of beige, was now painted a sumptuous red. Ray froze mid-sip. He suspected that Cliff, still asleep in their bed, had sneaked out and done it in the middle of the night." (pp. 140-152 in paperback)

"A Man in the Making" (pp. 125-139 in paperback)

Three stories and an essay from The Saint Ann's Review

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These are all continued in the Summer/Fall 2008 issue of The Saint Ann's Review.

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Now, if I may be permitted another small comment on a matter so large as art, I only wish that, in casting me as the pedantic, spinsterish anti-heroine in your book, you'd given me a fuller head of hair; baldness in women is so difficult, so tragic, that I think you, as a writer, might have misstepped in failing to imagine my character's suffering sufficiently. But, no matter—the book was hilarious and at one of our Friday seminars everyone in our department concluded that your fame was indeed well deserved after we'd read and exhaustively discussed it, the book I mean, from the first sentence to the copy accompanying your author photo. Do you remember our Friday seminars?

(From the short story "Eleven, the Spelunker" by Diane Greco, pp. 12-24)

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She had been sitting at a table in the evening, having a drink. She recalled feeling very much like a vulnerable woman, sitting at that table alone—she felt it described her well—that was how someone watching her would have put it, and it didn't matter to her to have been thought of that way. Anyone could have come up to her. She looked good—she knew it, too. Tan from the first few days of the vacation and she wore most all clothes very well. She had never had a problem with weight and she thought of that as a talent which had a certain shelf-life—eventually it would give out, it would become exhausted, and she intended to use it while she could. She was having a Corona. She was a woman who could drink beer. She always felt this was a skill, too. And then this man, wide-cheeked, narrow-jawed, extremely athletic, extremely masculine, salt-and-pepper stubble on a kind face, asked her if she'd seen a billiards ball roll under her table.

(From the short story "An Overqualified Woman" by Peter Levine, pp. 131-144)

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Whether you like it or not, that's not the problem with us. It's the lint trap. Or at least, with her it's the lint trap.

It was on a Sunday. I put my clothes in the dryer and walked out of the utility room.

"Did you clean out the lint trap?" she asked.

How many times has she asked me that? She never gets tired of asking me, but I'm tired of answering. She knows the answer and she knows my position.

"Did you?" she asked again. "The lint can catch fire."

(From the short story "Trap" by Glen Pourciau, pp. 154-158)

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Earlier in the day my brother and I had asked my grandfather if it was all right to put on the casket a large photograph of my father and his motorcycle, a red and white Yamaha YZF R-1, one of the fastest superbikes in production. He agreed, and that was the first thing you saw upon entering the room: this photo of my father smiling behind the machine that killed him.

(From the essay "Of Men and Motorcycles: An Inquiry into the Death of My Father" by William Giraldi, pp. 183-195)