Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats by Eli Levén

Need to think about this for a while.

One Big Happy Family, edited by Rebecca Walker

 

After sharing my love for Rebecca Walker's work with a few internet friends - and the desperate need to get a hold of the One Big Happy Family anthology, the great Jen Disgrasian quickly came to my rescue. Within a week, this beautiful book (plus a note written on enviable personalized stationery) had reached my mailbox. For that, I am eternally grateful to this fabulous woman. 

The anthology contains 18 well-written essays about different family constellations, among them mixed marriages, polyamory, single parenthood, open adoption, househusbandry, sperm donation... Marc and Amy Vachon's story Half the Work, All the Fun on equally shared parenting and Sasha Hom's beautiful account of a home birth in Unassisted especially got to me. As did Neal Pollack's Home Alone Together: 

"Why don't you do the fucking dishes?"

"Why don't you do the fucking dishes?"

"Because I don't fucking want to, that's why. So can you tell me why the kitchen floor is such a mess?"

"I don't know. Why don't you fucking clean it?"

It's sometimes hilarious, too. 

 ***

Read Rebecca Walker's foreword here and Unassisted by Sasha Hom here. 

Les Librairies of My Life: Les Mots à la bouche

Les Mots à la bouche is my favourite bookstore in the Whole. Wide. World. It is on my favourite street corner in Paris: rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie and rue Vieille du Temple, in Le Marais, 4:ème arr.

Les Mots is packed with books, LBGT-themed and others, and they always seem to carry the top 5 books I've been looking for lately; classics as well as new stuff; everything neatly organized. They have a great wall of magazines, too. And a basement.

At the moment all I want is for that wonderfully nice staff to start selling tote bags with their logo, in the appropriate blue colour. It would be perfect in my collection, and I would carry it everywhere with me, showing it off.

By the way, on that same extraordinary corner is:

Amorino (the best ice cream in Europe),
Saveurs de pains (a boulangerie that does fantastic baguettes with gruyère & ham and a mean café crème)
L'étoile manquante (a great hangout café/bar with an otherworldly salad of fresh fruits and cheeses with mustard dressing - Salade d'Ètoile).

(All pics old and googled)

Lubiewo by Michał Witkowski

Lubiewo, my love.

The author and his webpage.

Något bara kvinnor kan. Normer, biologi och graviditet by Ulrika Lorentzi (Swedish only)

Swedish journalist Ulrika Lorentzi has written a great book about pregnancy and, to some extent, parenthood. Great intervews with queer feminist Tiina Rosenberg and feminist Ebba Witt Brattström. Read it. Get it here.

Lorentzi's blog (in Swedish).

Avant les hommes by Nina Bouraoui (Swe)

Yes, I did read it in French when it just came out. But I'm currently in Phuket International Airport waiting for my Air Asia flight to take me to K.L, and I'm bored.

I did also prefer reading this novel in French. Not that it's badly translated - but there is something about the flow that doesn't really translate too well into Swedish. Although I do remember reading it in French thinking someone will have to tell the translator not to translate the word "shit" into something stupid. Which she certainly did. "Brass" in Swedish is a word only used by peeps older than 40 (definitely not by teenagers now), it reeks of the 70's, in a bad way. Every time I read it I shiver.

Otherwise, this novel is a bit like Mes mauvaises pensées, as if written in one long sentence. Sometimes you have to catch your breath, the same way I had to do when I was a kid, reading The Fantastic Four comic books until I almost saw fire and devils coming out of the pages.

Att älska män är min allra största tystnad, och det största krig som jag måste föra. Jag vill vinna, jag vill vara bland dem som liknar mig.

No Tears for Queers by Johan Hilton

Swedish journalist Johan Hilton's report on gay men and hate crimes really got to me. Well-written and on point, oftentimes haunting, quite a page turner.

Read an excerpt (in Swedish).

Bögjävlar

I love these guys.

Mon frère féminin by Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva answers Natalie Clifford Barney's Pensées d'une Amazone after their meeting in Paris in 1932. In short, she writes about the psychology behind a lesbian woman's choice to leave her older girlfriend for a man; for her utmost desire to have a child.

[It is not the day the child was born, it is now, three years later, that she knows what it has cost her.]

More Tsvetaeva.

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

I am wondering why most of Winterson's novels come with such horrid covers. Naked women, flowers and fruits galore, it makes for an almost embarrassing read. Who are they for? I mean, she writes about love and gender in the most wonderful way, but who is supposed to yearn reading these thingies by the awful Harlequinesque look of them? Do these tacky naked bodies make more women read her? Men? Americans? The only cover that's really acceptable, even beautiful, is Weight, published by Canongate.

"As I embalm you in my memory, the first thing I shall do is to hook out your brain through your accomodating orifices."

That line does not go with that cover. Moreover, that line made me remember the first time I read about Ancient Egypt in school and how terrified I was of the mummification process. A quite repressed thought, merci beaucoup.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

"Literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing really corpulent."

Once upon a time I borrowed this book from a certain English teacher of mine. I remember it being sort of a grand thing to be let into her little library to take one or two books to read over summer, and English being my only strong subject at the time, I was a tad proud. I did begin reading it, but couldn't for some reason get through the first page. I suppose I suffered from the same illness then as I do now, usually taking for ever just to choose which book/s to read, going through a tedious amount of little actions every time and always ending up reading three or four at a time anyway.

"Haunted! ever since I was a child."

When I was a kid I sometimes dreamed I was let into a supermarket and that I could take all the candy I wanted, but only for sixty seconds or so. I always woke up totally stressed, before that minute had passed. My stepfather said the interpretation would be that I was a greedy person, which made my old therapist really mad some twenty years later. I do have similar dreams these days, but then they're usually about books. Of course.

"We can, if we have the resolution, turn the hussy, Memory, and all her ragtag and bobtail out of the house."

I love Orlando.

.

The whole book can be found online here.

Drift by Liv Strömquist and Jan Bielecki

Pretty sweet queer feminist sex comics. A short story made long, kinda, and sometimes a bit too hastily drawn, it seems. But as an alternative to the not very empowering Starlet comics I used to read as a kid, it's very good.

S.C.U.M. Manifesto by Valerie Solanas

S.C.U.M. makes me laugh out loud. And bow deeply.

The Swedish foreword by translator Sara Stridsberg is very beautiful. As was her play "Valerie Jean Solanas ska bli president i Amerika" starring my fave actress Ingela Olsson. And the novel "Drömfakulteten" (The Dream Faculty) that I have yet to finish.

Avant les hommes by Nina Bouraoui

It is a story about a young boy and his thoughts during the summer that seems to be the last 'avant les hommes'. He dreams about a boy, he is empty before his mother, he smokes to feel something else.

J'ai envie d'un homme parce que j'ai envie d'une autre vie que la mienne, j'ai envie qu'on me raconte une histoire, j'ai envie de savoir comment cela se passe ailleurs, dans les autres cerveaux, j'ai envie que l'on me change la tête.

Mishima by John Nathan

Poupée Bella by Nina Bouraoui (Again)

I finally got to read it in French.

A book so much on love and writing I can't really write too much about it.

Je ne sais pas s'il faut vivre ou écrire.
Je ne sais pas si l'amour est le sacrifice de l'écriture, ou si l'écriture efface, lentement, l'amour.

Mes mauvaises pensées by Nina Bouraoui

I had really wanted for this to be the last book on the '06 list, but I was too busy meditating over The Word for 2007 on the train.

It's funny with N.B., every new novel by her translated into Swedish seems to be very similar to the one I'm writing in my head. And after reading them, I have to reconsider my own.

Mes mauvaises pensées (in Swedish Mina onda tankar) is written in one long sentence, it seems, so very dense that it's almost hard to remember what you've read, which is a little disturbing and therefore perhaps kinda healthy for a word fascist like me. It contains all thoughts at once, intended for the female psychoanalyst: words on childhood, girlfriends, relatives, Algeria, Paris. It is not to be missed.

Eva Dahlgren

I've been a real shitty reader this year. Had a look at my reading list for 2006 and so far I've read like 4 comic books and re-read a Marguerite Duras and that Nina Bouraoui diary thingy. Have been away in Mallorca, Spain for three months just working like mad, guess that has some to do with it. However, today I finished Swedish pop/rockstar Eva Dahlgren's autobiography "Hur man närmar sig ett träd" on the train back from Arboga.

When my dear assistant / new great friend / personal trainer / hairdresser Andreas asked me recently which known Swedish man's life I'd like to live I had no answer even after thinking a long while, but his Swedish known woman's life to live would be Eva Dahlgren's. That's actually a real cool answer. He also has this worn out and wonderful t-shirt with one of her album logos on it.

Eva's this tall beautiful blonde woman with a fantastic coarse voice who was my big idol in the 80's and 90's. And now she's written an autobiography about creating and not creating; it's about her writing and recording a new album. I like it.

Poupée Bella by Nina Bouraoui

My best friend Lina gave this to me for Christmas the other day, saying Bouraoui's writing in this particular book reminded her of mine. Yeah, so I read it at Teatergrillen while having coffee and overhearing some older ladies' squeaking over Irish Coffee.

I didn't move for three hours.

And it wasn't even like I was jealous of her language the way I sometimes get when some author really has that way with words. No, this was more like meeting someone else who understands everything.

If this is what prose can be like: I'm all up for it!