Thursday, March 31, 2005

Stick It to Me


Lillet is pink.
Trey is blue.

Trey has said before that the only differences between he and I are ones of gender, and I think he's mostly right. We tend to score the same on most of those Quizilla quizzes — even "What Kind of Faggot Are You?" although in the seminal indie record quiz, I was If You're Feeling Sinister and he was Slanted and Enchanted, which is also a difference of only gender, really. This is very fortunate, as our modest incomes can only accomodate
one person's vintage cocktail dress addiction. We had our first Christmas party last year, and a mutual friend had a very hard time figuring out whose books were whose — because The Fractal Geometry of Nature turned out to be mine, and the "Que sais-je?" collection belonged to Trey.

That being said, I don't know what he will answer for the stick questionnaire — and hopefully that means we will share books on the desert island, becuase I can't imagine being on a desert island without him, and although I like saying "Read it and weep!" it's not something I can literally do.


You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

My first response was Hop on Fucking Pop, 'cause it's slender and easy, like myself in my late 20's! But, truly, I would choose To the Lighthouse, and A Wrinkle In Time.

Easy. Montaigne: Les Essais.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?


What first came to mind were characters like Valentina and Nicola Six and Trudy from Coffee, Tea or Me? But taking "crush" literally rather than euphemistically, there
is only Lisa.






After much thought, I conclude that I have never really had a crush on a fictional character except in the intense way I have cathected onto/yearned to be like female characters. I can't think of
any boys in books I have crushes on, except for Gaspard. Not crushes like the crushes I had on boys in TV and music and movies. The closest thing to a book-boy-crush has probably been David Foster Wallace, and until I met him, he was kind of a fictional character of sorts — but the crush was pretty profound. In fact, I often said that my ideal man would be a cross between Jude Law and David Foster Wallace, and guess what! Reader, I married him!


But my big narcissistic girl crushes are something else. Antoinette Cosway, Wide Sargasso Sea's narrator: I had a VERY intense Medea obsession at one point. I worshipped Nancy Drew as a young girl,
reading 4+ a day. And I had a big crush on Aleytys, the heroine of the Diadem novels that are actually an super-smart extended female Bildungsroman. (As an aside, it is funny that Trey has Valentina as a crush, because I saw a copy of Crepax's Illustrated Story of O at a young age that pretty much galvanized my erotic imagination and has affected me to this day.)


The last book you bought is:

Greene/Arroyo: The Jupiter-Saturn Conference Lectures.

Richard Klein: Cigarettes Are Sublime, which I first bought about ten years ago and read while chaining Gitanes. It was purchased this time by an ex-smoker.

The last book you read:

Scalia (ed.) Zingers from the Hollywood Squares

Greene: The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for
Redemption
; Considine: Bette and Joan — the Divine Feud.


What are you currently reading?

McWhorter: The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
Greene/Sasportas: The Development of the Personality
Keller: Bouchon
Katchor: Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District
Perec: Jeux intéressants


I started reading Cigarettes Are Sublime in bed this morning, but stopped because I get cranky using that little clip-on, non-partner-disturbing book light my parents gave Trey for Christmas. I am still reading Greene & Sasportas' Dynamics of the Unconscious and Don't Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me (merci Miss Mika!)

Five books you would take to a deserted island:

I am aiming for stringent honesty here as it is answers to this question that most often make me cringe and remind me of those "desert island discs" lists that used to (still do?) appear in Tower Pulse! (Dude! You're into The Cure and Philip Glass? Cool.) So I'm going to try to answer the question what books would you take to a deserted island? rather than what books would you like to be seen packing to take to a deserted island?

Conway et. al. Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays vols 1-4
Clapson (ed.): DK World Reference Atlas
Crystal: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language
Šahovski Informator (any number with at least 600 games)
A very, very large collection of crossword puzzles


1) OED, but the big volumes, not that crap with the magnifying glass (although the magnifying glass could be useful to start fires).

2) Krantz: Princess Daisy, because it is the ultimate in comfort books and I have read it scores of times the way three year-olds watch the same DVDs on a loop. Krantz is the non-totebaggers A.S. Byatt, and I choose
Princess Daisy
over the pale wanna-be Posession because, frankly, the sex scenes in Posession are totally icky and gay, and, no, I don't mean hot man-on-man action! Krantz is just as silly a name-dropper as Byatt, only hers are all 70s fashion labels.

3) And then, I want to print-out all of wikipedia.org and wikipedia.fr and put it in a big binder (all of which would be done on company time with company supplies before my exile).

4) The collected works of Liz Greene, and the collected works of Carl Jung, and the complete Diadem series of novels by Jo Clayton. Oh, then I would like a subscription to Harper's Bazaar, also.

5) Cambridge University Press' Sky Atlas 2000.0, so we can learn the constellations together.


Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

Lillet wanted to ask MasaMania, but I doubt we could get him to respond.

With apologies we ask these same questions of Ashlee, Kender, and Mr. Hell's Kitchen. We have no good response to the question of why we ask these three, aside from the obvious. We expect to be enlightened and entertained; we don't think that any of the three will take umbrage at being hit; and we hope that at least one Paladin Press book will appear on someone's lists.

15 Comments:

Blogger kender said...

You linked me....on your blogroll no less....THANK YOU!!!

Now, I count seven questions up there, so which three questions do you have for me?

6:39 PM  
Blogger Trey Desolay said...

Kender,

You're welcome.

There are seven questions. They are the ones that appear in bold in our post.

7:17 PM  
Blogger Mika said...

YOU GUYS ARE SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO FABULOUS!!!!!!!!!!! YOU MADE ME SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HAPPY!!!!!!!

10:03 PM  
Blogger Mika said...

Having made that clear, I just wanna touch on a couple of the choices.

L: Hop on Pop. OMG. I totally didn't even think of those!!!!!! Shit. If Fahrenheit 451 had occurred between, say, 1993 and 1995, I could've been every fucking major preschool book in existence. The X and I used to have shootouts over the dinner table. Can you do Hop on Pop? Can you do The Foot Book? Can you do Goodnight Moon? Can you do McElligot's Pool? No? Hah! Gotcha! We even had a whole thing about doing them with appropriately dramatic intonation.

And, I swear, not 10 minutes before I discovered your post this evening, I found myself (by way of helping Morpheus choose a book to read for 20 min. before bed) summarizing the plot of A Wrinkle in Time and telling him it was my favorite book when i was a kid and I'd read it like 15 times between third and sixth grade. But he chose Mr. Popper's Penguins instead. I'm still thinking about Cal's blue eyes . . . .

And I LOVED Nancy Drew!!!! Naturally, I never ever read the Hearty Boys. But I so totally remember The Secret of the Old Clock, The Clue of the Crossword Cipher, The something or other staircase . . . ! Have you ever compared the original versions of the stories with those from subsequent years? (Cappy Lynch, a nerdiloquent ND obsessive, clued me into this.) Every decade or so the language of the books was completely revised to prevent them from coming off as too dated (and, recently, as too stratospherically racist, jingoistic, and anti-feminist, which the ones from the forties were beyond belief). Reading versions side-by-side is a total hoot.

Trey: I LOVED COFFEE TEA OR ME!!!!!!! I always wanted to be Betty Big Boobs! I read it like three times. Also it's imitator, The Fly Girls. And also another one with the same curlicue font on the cover, also cashing in on the interest in supposedly sexually liberated women's careers in the sixties: Mannequin.

I hope we can play chess sometime . . . . I used to do it quite a bit (especially when stoned in high school). Now not much (except with Morpheus, sometimes, though now, like GK, he's retiring while he's ahead). It'd be fun to do it with someone who really knows how. . . . Did you ever invent problems? I spent a summer doing that back and forth with a friend who outproblemed my butt bigtime. Did you ever see that book of Raymond Smullyan's—Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes? It's kinda cool: how to deduce a past sequence of moves from a present board position.

AND I HAVE LIKE FIVE DIFFERENT SKY ATLASES!!!!! I'M TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH DEEP SPACE OBJECTS!!! (faves: the sombrero nebula and the north america nebula). One of these days I'm just gonna plop down the $700 or so to get one of those cheap 10" dobsonians you push around with your fingers . . . . . .

Glad to hear you're reading Paula, L.!

And thank you soooooo much for your wonderful, carefully selected images, and carefully constructed links to your books! You guys are total professionals!

And thank you soooooo much for asking ms. ashlee!

Could i BEEEE any happier?

11:37 PM  
Blogger Mika said...

Having made that clear, I just wanna touch on a couple of the choices.

L: Hop on Pop. OMG. I totally didn't even think of those!!!!!! Shit. If Fahrenheit 451 had occurred between, say, 1993 and 1995, I could've been every fucking major preschool book in existence. The X and I used to have shootouts over the dinner table. Can you do Hop on Pop? Can you do The Foot Book? Can you do Goodnight Moon? Can you do McElligot's Pool? No? Hah! Gotcha! We even had a whole thing about doing them with appropriately dramatic intonation.

And, I swear, not 10 minutes before I discovered your post this evening, I found myself (by way of helping Morpheus choose a book to read for 20 min. before bed) summarizing the plot of A Wrinkle in Time and telling him it was my favorite book when i was a kid and I'd read it like 15 times between third and sixth grade. But he chose Mr. Popper's Penguins instead. I'm still thinking about Cal's blue eyes . . . .

And I LOVED Nancy Drew!!!! Naturally, I never ever read the Hearty Boys. But I so totally remember The Secret of the Old Clock, The Clue of the Crossword Cipher, The something or other staircase . . . ! Have you ever compared the original versions of the stories with those from subsequent years? (Cappy Lynch, a nerdiloquent ND obsessive, clued me into this.) Every decade or so the language of the books was completely revised to prevent them from coming off as too dated (and, recently, as too stratospherically racist, jingoistic, and anti-feminist, which the ones from the forties were beyond belief). Reading versions side-by-side is a total hoot.

Trey: I LOVED COFFEE TEA OR ME!!!!!!! I always wanted to be Betty Big Boobs! I read it like three times. Also it's imitator, The Fly Girls. And also another one with the same curlicue font on the cover, also cashing in on the interest in supposedly sexually liberated women's careers in the sixties: Mannequin.

I hope we can play chess sometime . . . . I used to do it quite a bit (especially when stoned in high school). Now not much (except with Morpheus, sometimes, though now, like GK, he's retiring while he's ahead). It'd be fun to do it with someone who really knows how. . . . Did you ever invent problems? I spent a summer doing that back and forth with a friend who outproblemed my butt bigtime. Did you ever see that book of Raymond Smullyan's—Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes? It's kinda cool: how to deduce a past sequence of moves from a present board position.

AND I HAVE LIKE FIVE DIFFERENT SKY ATLASES!!!!! I'M TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH DEEP SPACE OBJECTS!!! (faves: the sombrero nebula and the north america nebula). One of these days I'm just gonna plop down the $700 or so to get one of those cheap 10" dobsonians you push around with your fingers . . . . . .

Glad to hear you're reading Paula, L.!

And thank you soooooo much for your wonderful, carefully selected images, and carefully constructed links to your books! You guys are total professionals!

And thank you soooooo much for asking ms. ashlee!

Could i BEEEE any happier?

11:49 PM  
Blogger Kim said...

I loved this! I have seen this on other blogs, but yours is the first one I read all the way through (some call it adult A.D.D.) Thanks for making me giggle.

7:04 AM  
Blogger Donkey Patrol said...

That was sweet...sweet like a totebag. But a sweet totebag, don't worry.

1:17 PM  
Blogger Trey Desolay said...

Kim, thank you. Your parking lot story was hilarious.

Mika, you are too kind. Hearty Boys. Heh. I read them all at too young an age and recall nothing but the one non-fiction guide they had to becoming a detective, which led me to fingerprint my entire family.

I still have Coffee, Tea or Me, The Fly Girls AND The Super-Jet Girls, the last two of which were written by some guy name Bernard.

(Thanks to Lillet, my last birthday was my best ever.)

I know the Smullyan book but never much got into chess problems, which is kind of weird, sort of like Perec's disinterest in poetry. Only in my dotage have I become interested in endgame studies.

4:44 PM  
Blogger Todd HellsKitchen said...

Eeegads, I've been "sticked"? Is that the right word?? I better get crackin...

7:48 PM  
Blogger kender said...

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

I haven't the faintest idea......but probably one made of asbestos.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yes, Catti Brie from R.A. Salvatores Dark Elf series.

The last book you bought is:

Liberalism is a Mental Disorder by Dr. M. Savage


The last book you read:

The Indespensable Calvin and Hobbes

What are you currently reading?

Nutritional Deficiencies in Thoroughbred Racehorses. It is actually a large compendium of several books from years back that I copied and printed up, with the main book having that title. It is now dogeared from several years of use, along with being full of scribbled margins.


Five books you would take to a deserted island:

Basic navigation for the beginning sailor

How to find water in the desert and other dry places

Netweaving and ropemaking.

Basic watercraft and rafts.

The big book of playboy centerfolds (for inspiration only)

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

George Carlin, Robin Williams and Dennis Leary because I want to hear their answers.

7:47 PM  
Blogger Todd HellsKitchen said...

Ok. OK. I'm done! Read it and weep!

Meanwhile, have a swell weekend!

8:36 PM  
Blogger Donkey Patrol said...

I know you guys ignore my posts all the time but...

But I'm going to be in NYC on Tuesday and I want some beer and snails and need two liberal wackos to accompany me. Are you guys still down?

12:42 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I googled my name and found this blog.. it's akward.. I know. But I wanted to post for the sake of it. My name is Aleytys. I was named after that same girl and because I grew up with no one else ever having my name I couldn't read it! It freaked me out to see a story about someone with my name not being me. And now that you've caught my general intention, it's that much more fun to read all you've written ~

8:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I googled my name and found your blog. Now I just have to read it for the sake of having my attention grabbed. My name is Aleytys. I was named after that same girl and because I grew up with no one else having my name, I couldn't bring myself to read the book! It was too weird seeing my name in a story that wasn't about me. It's neat though, to see someone else who knows where it came from.

8:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

and crap I did a repost and now I'm doing another *bows head in defeat* apologies

8:35 PM  

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