Norm Jenson
http://mostlyanecdotal.org
The Fat Broad Lumbers into class five minutes late, dragging, along with her yard-wide butt, a beat-up vinyl briefcase stuffed with old notebooks. A contender once, it’s obvious, she’s got great hair, long and wavy and thick and white gold,
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“Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.”
― Sputnik Sweetheart
― Sputnik Sweetheart
“Outside the vintage shop, the one-footed grackle hopped along the concrete blocks. His mouth was jacked open. He eyed Thea: I’m a bird, but I could fuck you up.”
― The Souvenir Museum
― The Souvenir Museum
“The Wheatear PAUL BATCHELOR | 93 words Up for good at five, watching the small rain settle light as pollen on rosehip & nettle in my excuse for a garden, light-headed, thinking how little I had to complain of - no job, no kids, no wife; the life I chose, a life painted on glass; each girl a cure for the one before - I looked & saw a wheatear, a Saharan wheatear teetering on my excuse for a garden wall, seeing without a tear myself, an easy figure trying to recall what, if anything, he was flying from. PAUL BATCHELOR”
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“Song I try to make the step-down call of the chickadee, but do it too insistently, over and over so it loses sense, the air going equally out and back, not slower in the opening, then quickening as the tight hinge retracts, but absolutely evenly, too even, the way one breathes and regulates breath for a doctor, to present the body’s equanimity. There’s a bird in a tree with a hinge in its throat, a door opening to let the sweet air pass from a high, thin place down a notch. There’s phlox out there, opening between one black and another black, hanging branch of an apple tree—the very tree that holds the bird that bends the air so parenthetically around itself, and its song around anything listening.”
― On Looking: Essays
― On Looking: Essays
“Some grackles might possess souls and some grackles might possess intelligence but it was impossible to believe that any one grackle possessed both: not enough room in their brilliantined heads. A klatch of them walked unnervingly around the parking lot outside the vintage store like a family at a hotel wedding, looking for the right ballroom. One grackle was missing a foot, and Thea blamed him for it. If they had been magpies, she might have counted them up, wondering what they foretold, but grackles were just seagulls in widows’ weeds. They weren’t omens of anything except more grackles.”
― The Souvenir Museum
― The Souvenir Museum
Norm’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Norm’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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