The Quirrell Test

When I die, let it be said about me, "She knew the importance of cover art."

CASE IN POINT: these two books I just bought. The first one...



You're peeing yourself right now, aren't you? Gorgeous color, simple yet haunting image, and the title. The title. My God. I stood in the bookstore and blew through two chapters of this baby before I couldn't resist anymore and paid my $22.

BY WAY OF CONTRAST...I also bought this book.



Where to begin?? Let's address the most egregious atrocity first: IS THAT A TAGLINE I SEE? And is the tagline..."Schoolgirl by day, owl by night"?? REALLY? And does the child model on the cover have badly-aligned lipstick photoshopped on her face? And is that a even-more-badly-aligned owl superimposed in the corner?? And....TITLE.

The thing is, the writing in this book is bomb, to the point that it didn't even bother me that it was premised on a schoolgirl who turns into an owl at night. It makes it all kind of creepy and original. The first page:

"I am in love with Mr. Lindstrom, my science teacher. I found out where he lives and every night I perch on a tree branch outside his bedroom window and watch him sleep. He sleeps in his underwear: Fruit of the Loom, size 34.

"I am not stupid, you know. I read teen magazines like Seventeen and Sassy, just like other girls. I know what Psychology Today has to say about young girls (I turned fourteen last June) who fall in love with their science teachers. Mr. Lindstrom is not a substitute for my father. He is nothing like my father. My father is pale as a potato sprouting in a root cellar; Mr. Lindstrom is red and brown and furry like the flanks of a deer mouse."

Patrice Kindl, you deserve better.

I leave you with some of the greatest cover art of all time:



I would shave my hair off and get this tattooed on the back of my head like Professor Quirrell. And shouldn't that truly be the litmus test for cover art?

Tralfamadore. And Firewhiskey.

I am the Mayor of Slackertown when it comes to this blog. Mostly because I lack direction, such that I find myself thinking "should I blog about the hilarious number of times Harry gets tipsy in the course of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? Or race in the Americas? or the superiority of Barry's Tea?"

But I have been inspired by Lau's blog which remains boldly topicless and full of wit n' grit...so I shall trek on. Here's some thoughts on my....artistic vision.

Mostly I have been thinking it would be a good idea to make a cut-out-paper animation of Slaughterhouse Five. In something like this style:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.
When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is "So it goes."

I had a dream about the whole thing that was just superrrb.

In other news, I did not get into the Brown MFA. [Cue WOMP.] I am hoping that this failure will give me a certain ennui that will contribute to my writing, much like Harry Potter's parent's deaths allowed him to bellow "YOU KILLED MY PARENTS" at climactic moments and thus lend a real dramatic edge to his adventures.

Speaking of artists, here are some pictures of my mother's hippie commune. Apparently they put on these fantastic plays featuring costumes like:



My mother played Titania (she's far away, in the greenish dress):



and apparently also dressed like Rosie the Riveter:





One of my TFs introduced herself by first saying the name of her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother. I think for me too that would be one of the realest ways to talk about who I am.

Love love,
me