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Sherman Alexie's War Dances has been selected as the winner of the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Excellent.

Read more from the Seattle Times.

Rest Your Soul so Quietly

I still have no words of my own to fill this space.

For now I ask that Laura Munson's Haven* meet my yearlong silence with her touching entry Stop the Clocks.


How do I know that the dead do not wonder why they ever longed for life? - Zhuangzi

*formerly These Here Hills

Go Ask Alice?

Another piece of work from the incorrigible Peggy Orenstein.

Femivore? Really?

The most I can muster about this is that The Partner's comment, "Femivore... I'm a femivore!" brought tears to my eyes. I like it so much better as a perversion than a cause.

He also provided this nicely timed piece, both to counter the femivores and to take on some of the issues plaguing our own troubled Bay Area education system. It nicely articulates the well-intentioned, if misdirected, work of Alice Waters in area schools.

More action, fewer causes, that's my new motto.

- Photo credit: Thomas Heinsner

Bonnie & the Cairo Gang, Oakland

@ The New Parish
April 9th & 10th

It Rained, It Poured, It Rained So Hard...

Thank you, Love♥

Fatal Flower Garden

Little Sir Hugh

And other variants.

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant

Tell me Bruce Dern circa 1971 doesn't bear a striking resemblance to a young Will O (sans the schnoz).

War Dances

Sherman Alexie's War Dances is a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. It's about time. The winner will be announced March 23rd.

Last year Alexie published a tremendous book of poetry entitled Face. One of those rare books, like many of Alexie's, that one should hold onto forever. Another was this 1992 book entitled...

I Would Steal Horses
For Kari

for you, if there were any left,
give a dozen of the best
to your father, the auto mechanic
in the small town where you were born

and where he will die sometime by dark.
I am afraid of his hands, which have
rebuilt more of the small parts
of this world than I ever will.

I would sign treaties for you, take
every promise as the last lie, the last
point after which we both refuse to exact.

I would wrap us both in old blankets
hold every disease tight against our skin.

Shift Work

Some of the best moments of the weekend:

Delivering a baby girl to a young mother - one of nine sisters and two brothers - with five sisters and one niece present. The youngest of the 9 sisters, aged 16, cut the cord.

A nurse, about to take a break tells her break-relief, "Don't let that Doc near my patient..." Sticking my head out of a delivery room about twenty minutes later I hear that very nurse singing sweetly and find her sitting side-by-side with that very surgeon while he strums away on his ukulele.

One nurse says to another, "You don't believe in God? Not at all?"
"No. Not at all." The first nurse hugs her tightly and then holds her by the shoulders at arms length and asks very seriously, "Then who do you think made Berkeley?"