I'm too sexy for books on tape

Way back in November the über-chic, über-fashionable, and soon to be über-famous film maker and writer, director and producer of my life story "My Life as a Wart", Make Do Style awarded me with the Proud Bookworm award. The rules for this sexy literate award is to pass it on to five other bloggers, and tell them to open the nearest book to page 46. Write out the fifth sentence on that page, and also the next two to five sentences.

As soon as I saw this award on other bloggers blogs I coveted it. I love everything about the Proud Bookworm Award. I love the message that reading can be sexy; it is not mutually exclusive to be bookish and saucy---and love that the gal on the award is a gorgeous redhead (very Joan Halloway like, don't you think? Yet, I imagine Joan was not a big reader. She did read passages from "Sons and Lovers" by Lawrence in one episode and I feel sure she owns "The Joy of Sex" and perhaps "Sex and the Single Girl").

So when Make Do Style nominated me with this award I was thrilled to receive it, if very slow to respond. I am extremely delinquent in responding to my tags, memes and awards. Please do not take it personally if I have not responded to your thoughtfulness it is nothing personal it just that 200-hate(8) was so stressful that my short term memory has been fried. "What?Are you saying that I didn't make the car payment? How could that be?" or "Oh, I bought groceries and brought them in the house and I did not put them away?" Yeah, I should have been on a Ginko Bibloa IV drip but as I haven't a few things, nay, lots of things have slipped my mind.




















I hope that once in office President Obama will spearhead an offshoot program of Reading is Fundamental(R.I.F.), which was a public funded program that worked to inspire literacy in children. The program I am proposing is "Reading is Sexy"(R.I.S.) which will work to get adolescents and young adults to read literature other than US Weekly and Perez Hilton. Really, I think that if the marketers who made dumb seem sexy ( Jessica Simpson's PR team) would put the same brain power into a R.I.S. campaign we would have a different America with more Tina Fey and less Paris Hilton. A few of my slogans are "Big brains cannot be implanted", "High I.Q.'s are hot", "Check it out: All the action is at the library" and "If the library van is rocking don't disturb me as I just got to a really good point in the book."

I appoint the following deputies in my campaign to "Bring reading back"( Justin would you sing that song as the theme song for RIS?) and award these six sexy readers this prestigious award( I know the rules said five but I think six is a far sexier number, after all it is just one vowel away from being sex). I challenge all of you to show how reading is not only fundamental but also better for one's ooh-la-la appeal than lingerie, implants of any variety, or playing dumb.

• Three Little Chickies
• Word Lovers Unite
• Miss Janey's Place
• That's Why
• Utah Savage
• L'ennui Melodieux
  

The book I have closest at hand is a book very generously given to me friend, the profoundly talented poet, incredible artist and all around renaissance women, Kirie of Three Little Chickies, "Maps of Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer."

"We can imagine countless frames; what we have is not a path from here to there, not a beginning, middle and ending but a single point from someplace along the route. So we imagine each fragment as a beginning and then an ending, and as some part of the middle; we look for hints of emotion, we consider voice, we create narratives. While a poetic fragment does not carry its complete genetic code, these bits of Sappho's work engage us on their own and at the same time inspire us to consider; if not fill in, the blanks."

If you write, want to write, or intrigued by better understanding your inner geography I would highly recommend this very beautiful book. I am particularly excited about this book as I am attempting to make maps of meaning in my new home town. I play a game of noticing each place around me and check to see if a location has a story or a lack of story. I notice what it feels like to not have a story and then I notice where I have story and what that feels like. I have several stories about going to Target and to the Post Office across the street from it but if I make a right turn down that street there is a whole section of no story and then I stop to see what it feels like to be in a place without a story. How do I hold together and make meaning of the fragments of place when there are only bits and pieces of stories that exist for me as I am learning the streets where I live. Each road I go down I ask myself if there is not a story here am I making one now and how are the blank places that are story brought together to make a cohesive narrative. Sexy, huh?

Update: The very sexy and well read Kaili at A-line skirt, the official deputy of fashion and uniform for the Reading is Sexy program, has posted the official shirt of the RIS campaign on her post "Reading IS Sexy". Click on over and see how well read and well dressed can go hand in hand.