Emily St. John Mandel

bookstalker:

I hope everyone had an enjoyable long weekend! Mine was spent on/in various balconies, backyards and rooftops drinking various beverages. Definitely a promising summer preview.

I’m heading off to Minneapolis this week, so I won’t be doing an events post, but I did want to share a delightful book launch I went to late last week. Brooklyn-based author Emily St. John Mandel presented her newest novel, The Lola Quartet, at WORD Bookstore last Thursday. True to the book’s jazz theme, it was a classy affair.

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In his lost career at the New York Star Gavin had begun all his stories with a new page in his notebook, names and ideas and associations scrawled out into the margins. At the beginning of his second week in Sebastian he drove to an office-supply store and bought notebooks—he couldn’t find the kind he liked best, but close enough—and wrote Anna across the top of a page. But where to begin? He had already spent some time trying to find Sasha, but had gotten nowhere. She wasn’t in the telephone directory and seemed to be among the disconcerting population of people who don’t exist on the Internet. He wrote Sasha buying baby clothes at mall? beneath Anna’s name and The Lola Quartet below that. It was evening, the lights of the freeway streaming across the top of his window behind the reflection of the room.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Django Reinhardt was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

Step inside and it was just another bar, all chatter and shadows and the faint smell of stale beer, but at the back of the room was a window, a red paper umbrella attached to a wall, a doorway covered by a velvet curtain. The window was almost soundproof. From the dark of the bar he would stand and look through into a brighter world, a small dim room with a lit-up sign that read Hotel d’Orsay and a few rows of people sitting on uncomfortable chairs. Under the Hotel d’Orsay sign musicians set up their instruments, plugged in their amplifiers, milled about drinking beer while the audience stared at them, tested the mikes at their leisure, eventually got around to settling down behind their instruments, and then played some of the best music Gavin had ever heard.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

The Lola Quartet was playing “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” for the second time and a pretty girl named Taylor from Choir was singing in her best dusky lounge voice. They were all in love with the music and also a little in love with Taylor, or at least Gavin was and he imagined that everyone around him was caught up in the same dream. And then he caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye and that was the paper airplane, arcing down through the air to land at his feet. He knew only one person with aim that perfect. He looked up and saw her, Anna standing just beyond the dancers at the edge of the light, and he half-smiled around the mouthpiece at her but she didn’t smile back. There was something urgent in the way she looked at him.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

There was an afternoon spent staggering through swamps under a wide-brimmed hat, listening to a park ranger named William Chandler talk about the new monsters that had been appearing since the early ’90s. The creatures in the Florida swamps were terrifying and new, and the canals delivered the swamps to the suburbs. Experts speculated that some of the animals had been blown deep into the swamps by Hurricane Andrew—greenhouses that had held snakes had been found shattered and empty once the storm had passed—but most were abandoned pets. Small glittering lizards who’d seemed manageable enough when they were babies but then outgrew aquarium after aquarium until they’d become seven-foot-long two-hundred-pound Nile monitors with eerily intelligent eyes and extravagantly pebbled skin, perfectly capable of eating a small dog.

— Emily St. John Mandel, from The Lola Quartet

I have to admit, I’ve got a thing for literary tattoos!

skobos:

So, I got a tattoo yesterday! It says “Vers Libre” which means “Free Verse” in French. Don’t mind how awkward I might look in this photo.

It is the title (the title is in french, i didn’t change it to be cool) of a poem from a poetry book that my Great Greatsomethingoranother Uncle wrote back in the late 1800/early 1900s. It was in possession of my Nana, until she passed away and I got it. I used the same script that was used in the book. Took a photo of it, put it into illustrator, and fixed up the kerning. 

Vers Libre

I am free verse.

I express revolution.

And revolutionize expression.

I use everything that is,

From beetle to behemoth;

From milkweed to milky way;

The shallow, babbling brook,

Rivers and lakes, tumultuous seas

That rock and surge beneath all skies.

You call me new? I was not young

When Isreal’s shepherd sung,

And his great son entranced

The multitude with his high harmonies,

I have resurged!

Poesy, propriety, prudery

These p’s are dried and gone to seed;

They rattle in their pods;

I’ll none of them.

My lines and contours run untrammeled, free,

From the waist both ways.

Would you entrap my fluent feet

In cumbersome sabots?

And knead my riotous tresses

Into puffs and coils?

Would you corset me?

Try it!

Truss me in stiff vestment of convention.

Listen!

You shall hear the seams split,

And buttons plop against the chiffonier!

I am free verse.

To me, it means that I cannot be held down by anyone or anything. I am my own self and nothing will ever change that. I am free verse.