An Annotated Bibliography of the Inside of My Head

My friend Alex is running a blog circus now through December 15, 2019, in which we list books we find ourselves recommending over and over again: “You know those books that you can’t stop thinking about, won’t shut up about, and wish everyone around you would read? The ones that, if taken in aggregate, would tell people more about you than your resume?”

Here’s my list. If you’d like to participate, check out the details on Alex’s blog.

“Metalheads: Heavy Metal Music and Adolescent Alienation,” Jeffrey Jensen Arnett: Until I read this book, I thought I was the only person who listened to heavy metal because I found it soothing. 

“Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha,” Tara Brach: I hated this book at first, but being able to accept yourself just as you are, right now, is the most radical and important steps toward self-love. You are worthy.

“The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity,” Nadine Burke Harris: The idea that childhood adversity leads to a lifetime of stress, pain and illness is being called the germ theory of the 21st century. Harris (now California’s surgeon general) describes the remedy. 

The Road to Nowhere series, Meg Elison: After a pandemic wipes out most of the women, and new babies become vanishingly rare, a story of how women and trans folk survive across the United States. 

“Come As You Are,” Emily Nagoski, and “Burnout,” Emily and Amelia Nagoski: In “Come As You Are,” Nagoski lays out the science to reassure us that our libidos, however they are, are normal. In “Burnout,” she and her twin sister give us tools for shedding the stress that gets in the way. 

“So You Want to Talk About Race,” Ijeoma Uluo: White people: we need to talk about race. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. But here are some facts and perspectives to get you started. 

“Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” Peg Orenstein: Disney’s “princess industrial complex” is motivated by profit and greed, and is teaching generations of girls toxic lessons in femininity.

“Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice,” Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Healing doesn’t mean you go back to the way you were before. Trauma gives us superpowers. Communities of care help us thrive.

“Migraine,” Oliver Sacks: One of the world’s premier neurologists began having migraines as a young boy. He describes how they’re more than just headaches, but fascinating electrical storms in the brain and body.

“You Have the Right to Remain Fat,” Virgie Tovar: You are not required to be thin. You are not obligated to go on diets or control your eating. Fat-shaming leads to health disorders, but being fat doesn’t. Take up space and shine. 

“The Body Keeps the Score,” Bessell Van Der Kolk: Our bodies remember every terrifying thing that happened to us. Here’s how and why they do it, and how to start on the path to recovery.

Poem a Week: At 89

Photo by Jeff Turner on Flickr. Creative Commons.

She looks at her reflection in the solid glass
of a nearby skyscraper.

She sees her curves and filigree framed
by its straight black borders, doubled by its impermeable sheen.

Born in 1914, she knows her young neighbors,
who sleekly shade the sunlight from her face, silhouette progress.

She's seen the blueprints that trace it out: there is no future
in her stone flanks, her bright crown.

She wonders if it's true that buildings earn
their souls when they survive a century

of bankers and barbarians, lawyers and legislators
who bow when they enter her marble chambers.

Who, when they look to her from below, see her face twice; her image
not trapped so much as giving that steel and glass a purpose.

Poem a Week: Summer Fever

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash.

I am walking in the noon sun 
through the canyon, searching for evidence
of the fire that woke us last night. 

There are no remains – no charred
earth, no noseful of smoke or rivulets
of mud churned by the firefight.

So I go looking for blackberries
in the wood, thinking of the tart fruit
I devoured last summer, when I 

was newly pregnant. But the 
thickets have been cut back and picked 
over by birds and human hands. 

Last night you came clutching
a belated half-apology, seeking – what, 
exactly? The sun has long set

On the day for amends between us. 
the woman you seek no longer lives in this
house, this unfamiliar body. 

In the oppressive sky, a clucking raven
dives, hunting what meager morsels are
brave enough to emerge at midday

in this summer fever, 
more stunning for what it lacks: fog, 
noise, abundance, comfort, peace.

Poem a Week: Apocalypse Real Estate

"eine Treppe" by YtvwlD. Creative commons.

This is the house you want to own when shit goes down.
Its blast-proof windows will withstand bullets,
hydrogen bombs, political rhetoric,
and they come pre-sealed with duct tape.

The walls are rubberized concrete,
ready to shimmy when the big one hits,
ready to suck down the heat of climate change
or the cold of the sun's death.

These floors are melt-resistant steel,
just in case those terrorists fly a plane into them
or your ex sets fire to the place.

With the touch of a button the kitchen converts
to a bomb shelter, complete with compostable toilet,
water- and sun-free garden and tankless heated shower:
just the thing for when the Koreans nuke us
to high heaven or your stock bottoms out.

The paint and carpets will match themselves
to your clothes in case of a break-in;
those burglars will never spot you.

No, there's no bedroom.
But you don't actually sleep at night, do you?
There's much too much to worry about
for you to be able to get any shuteye, anyway.

Poem a Week: False Clover (Oxalis)

"Common Yellow Oxalis, Yellow Wood Sorrel" by milesizz. Creative commons.

Don't even think about wishing on
my green hearts. They fold
like the wings of three butterflies,
heads in a huddle. Never four,
not like the one you think I am
when you spy me under
the redwoods' emerald umbrella.

They don't call me sour grass
for nothing. In the wood I am sorrel,
a word like a mouthful of spring;
at home I choke your tender
peas and parsley for all I'm worth.
With each drift of yellow petals
I'm building up my buttercup brigade.

Go on. Pull me. I like it so much I
shower seeds so I can do it again.
Smother me with your thickest mulch;
I will dig my way into the sunlight.
Purge is another name for propagate.
When you found me, you were right
on one count: I can change your luck.

Poem a Week: Basket Stinkhorn

Several basket stinkhorn mushrooms, Clathrus ruber, at varying stages of development.

Alien egg, or bee-spun globe
the size of a toddler's head
sleeping in its bed
of sedums and mud.

At first no more than a marshmallow,
round and mute as an amnion.
Inside, a fungus fossil blooms
a basket of brains.

Come closer, whiff the perfume
of putrescence, a dead ringer
for summer-baked carrion.
You'll catch more flies

with stench than maple syrup
and this is no waffle worth eating.
Stand aside. Let the insects
scatter saprobes as they soar.

Poem a Week: Land's End

The Golden Gate Bridge as seen from the Land’s End trail. Photo by Pest15.

Land’s End

This trail has everything:
views of the Pacific so full, the horizon scythes.
Squawking ravens. Foghorn.
Wide tableau of the fog-headed bridge.
Warning signs that keep you from learning the hard way
about fragile cliffs, sleeper waves, poison oak.

The Great Beach is never
more than a stone's throw from the Great Highway.
There is no getting lost here,
only nature half-tamed
as walking cliches in track suits
check their cell phones for signal.

Even the gulls crave McDonald's.
Even the surf knows Natalie Wood.
Here, you could dismiss the sea's cold limbs,
crumbling headlands, toxic perennials,
and, beyond the water, a green land so feral
it makes you forget you are part of it.

Poem a Week: Furniture

I am sitting on the couch. The baby
is resting against my arm as though
I'm her personal BarcaLounger, and the kitty
is curled up on my knee. The baby
is taking lazy draws from her bottle while idly
clutching handfuls of the kitty's
ears and scruff, which the kitty tolerates because
it's the closest thing she may get
to petting for some hours. I think
she may even be purring. All three
of us are relaxed, in our own minds,
afternoon daze. I wonder what life is like
in their small, wordless heads,
what they wonder about my large noisiness
and long limbs. We're neither Plath's
fat gold watch nor Cassatt's beatitudes,
but somewhere in between,
furniture for one another. 

(2009)

Of Craneflies and Kitties

It’s cranefly season here in Northern California, and they seem to be everywhere. They bounce against the siding on the back of our house like they’re rappelling down a sheer rock face. They rest in the shade, hiding under windowsills. They mate for hours at a time, motionless on the doorframe or flying awkwardly across the yard.

When I come in from the backyard they dart through the opening in the door; you can almost hear the “woohoo!” as they swoop in. But then they sulk around the house, perching near the tops of walls, waiting for mates that are, generally speaking, outside. They resist efforts to shoo them back to the open air.

One made it all the way across the house into the living room, where it hung around the lamps in the evening and divebombed my head, landing on my shirt and tickling my chin before ambling off again. But it made the mistake one afternoon of flying close to the floor. Our cat, Pigeon, chased it around the room, chittering at it, and managed to trap it under her front paws. She opened her mouth and took it in, but somehow it got away. How does that even happen?

The cranefly escaped to the mantel, where it hid and caught its breath, so to speak. Pigeon had managed to injure one of its legs, which was leaking white goo. A few minutes later the cranefly braved a journey across the room, but this time it had a long trail of dusty spiderweb stuck to its gooey leg, weighing it down. Pigeon caught it again and made a few smacking sounds with her mouth. I haven’t seen the cranefly since.

Pigeon, as you may have guessed by now, is not a skilled hunter, even of bugs. (Last week I caught her bothering, but failing to catch, a fly that only had one wing.) She’s also really scared of cars -- to the extent that she won’t go near the front of our house, especially if she can see out the windows, because the sights and sounds of cars going by terrify her.

Today, though, the street was quiet, aside from a couple of workmen, and she got curious. She crouched on the ottoman by the window and carefully raised her head enough so that she could see outside. As she spied the workmen, her ears perked up and her tail twitched attentively. But a moment later, a car sped by, and Pigeon turned and bolted from the room.

She’s smart to be scared of cars, but I was impressed at her bravery. She knows she can’t tolerate the cars outside, but she tested herself anyway, going to the window and peeking out, letting her curiosity override her fear for a moment.

How to love your double chin

A Galápagos sea lion. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I was sitting at a bus stop at the corner of 40th and Telegraph in Oakland a few months ago when an older man sat down next to me. He was slender, wearing fitted black trousers and a slightly oversized sweater of the sort that Dwayne Wayne might have worn on A Different World. His dark face was etched with deep lines.

He started telling me, his voice thick with southern twang, about his latest trip to Kaiser to get the dressing changed on a wound — from what, he didn’t say. It had taken too long and he’d been given the runaround and he had to go back tomorrow to do it all over again. I nodded and smiled, and said a few encouraging words here and there. He was pleasant enough.

He paused in his story to look at me, then pointed to my double chin. “You should get that jelly roll looked at,” he said, hoisting himself up as the bus drew near. “That can mean all sorts of trouble.”

My enjoyment of the banter evaporated, replaced with shame as a hot flush spread across my face and my stomach turned to stone.

I’m plus-sized. Zaftig. Curvy. Chubby. Voluptuous. Fat. For each of us, body fat settles in different spots. Our asses. Our thighs. Our arms. In my case, it’s mostly my belly. And my chin. Even when I was at my thinnest, I still had a roundness under my jaw. When I look at other plus-sized folks, I notice that the ones I find most beautiful are the ones with sharp jawlines. No “jelly rolls” underneath.

And yet, I don’t like feeling hatred or disgust toward a part of my body. “There’s good reason we’re afraid of our double chins,” fat activist and author Virgie Tovar wrote last fall. “We live in a culture that is openly hateful toward fat people. Friends, family and social media reward us for appearing as close to the (thin) standard as possible in photographs. I understand the impetus completely.”

Tovar moved past these feelings by embracing photos of herself taken from low angles that accentuated her double chin — or at least no longer hid it. I’m nowhere near that point yet, but last year I found myself opening up a Google search window and typing “how to love your double chin.”

Google assumed I’d made a typo. “Did you mean ‘how to lose your double chin?’” Pages of search results related to cosmetic surgery, jaw exercises or weird nighttime contraptions followed.

Great. Even the search engines were fatphobic.

I showed the results to my partner, D., who works at Google, though not in the search-engine department. We tested the results again in an incognito window to make sure Google was showing this “correction” to others as well, and it was.

Google has internal forms that allow employees to report when they notice something is awry; those reports do make their way to the right teams, sooner or later. A few months later, D. checked the search query again and realized Google was no longer spell-correcting the phrase, and was offering better results in the links. The body-positive ones are still mixed in with exercise videos and other body-shamery, but it’s better than it was.

I still struggle with loving this part of myself (despite how delicious a jelly roll is). But at least I contributed to something that will make it easier for other people to love theirs.