Steve Earle on getting loaded to create something:

The idea that numbing yourself out and preventing yourself from feeling what you should feel and then thinking that you're going to translate that into a piece of art that's worth anything -- that is so flawed. It's cheating. You're writing about feelings and not really feeling them.

[From the book Moments of Clarity by Christopher Kennedy Lawford.]

If all girls had mouths
like yours I'd be done for.

from the poem Elegy Scale by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

How could that pair of lines not bring a sly smile to your face?

That's what happens after I read that poem -- hell, any poem -- from Calvocoressi's collection Apocalyptic Swing. I'm either smiling at a clever phrase, reveling in her choice of words, or utterly seduced by the story the lines of verse have whispered into my ear.

This is the best, most stirring collection of poems on boxing, jazz, religion, small towns, and big cities that I've read in a long time.

Check it:

Epistle From Her Daughter
           Yet to Be Consummated Back East

Love, you'll stick your finger into
anything. Sweet cream, valve oil, the mouth

of every damn baby that gargles.
You're insatiable, and that

city will screw you within an inch
of your life. Leave before the sun goes

down, before the cars start cruising
from Sunset to the canyons

and someone writes a song that goes
something like The city is burning

as the city startles and burns.
I've got no chance in the face of all

that starlight. Those boys on the beach?
All muscle and grass and nothing

but time. Come back. Pack your cheap bag
and get your ass on that bus.

Oh yeah. More, please.

Simon Rich's Free-Range Chickens is a collection of funny short takes on life and the bizarre situations many of us find ourselves in. Only rich makes them a little more bizarre. Many of these takes could be skits on Saturday Night Live, where Rich is a writer. Like current SNL skits, though, some are hilarious while others are more "ha" or not so funny.

Here's one of the really good ones from the section If adults were subjected to the same indignities as children:

GARAGE

ALBERT ROSENBLATT: Can I drive your car? I'll give it back when I'm done.
MRS. HERSON: I'm sorry....do I know you?
ALBERT ROSENBLATT: No, but we're the same age and we go to the same garage.
MRS. HERSON: No offense, sir, but I really don't feel comfortable lending you my car. I mean, it's by far my most important possession.
PARKING ATTENDANT: Mrs. Herson! I'm surprised at you. What did we learn about sharing?
MRS. HERSON: You're right...I'm sorry. Take my Mercedes.

The section on God is really good, too. Not for the easily offended, though.

Philip Roth's American Pastoral is a fascinatingly dense story of appearances and the realities that are hidden behind them.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

Then Roth delivers the kicker:

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

It took me longer than usual to read American Pastoral. It's layer after layer of dense detail that unravels with each page. The attention was worth it, though. The reward is having read one of the finest, most eloquent works of fiction ever.

Epileptic is a graphic novel by comic book artist and writer David B.

The story is autobiographical and focuses on the life of David's family as they struggle to deal with the effects of his big brother's epilepsy. It's a marvelous and insightful book.

The thing that really got me was how David B. used his gift as an illustrator to depict the trials he, his parents, and especially his brother, were going through.

For instance, throughout the novel his brother's epilepsy is depicted as a dragon-like creature that haunts the family. The dragon constantly suffocates David's brother as it envelops his mind and body, especially during a seizure.

It's intense imagery.

From Wallace Shawn's dazzling and disturbing dystopian play Grasses of a Thousand Colors (2009):

You see, the reality is -- and those of you who are younger may find this terribly hard to believe, but it happens to be true -- the reality is that in the old, old days when I was growing up, people simply didn't think very much about their genitals. And they never talked about them. So you see, for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing -- I mean, the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties, in magazines and newspapers -- I can't get over it. Ha ha ha!

Further reading on Wallace Shawn's Grasses of a Thousand Colors.

My friend and author Jami Attenberg wrote a wonderful novel called The Melting Season and asked if I would read it and create something inspired by it.

Here's what I came up with.

I love these images.

Thanks for the inspiration, Jami.

What you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

Twyla Tharp

This is the first book of 52 books I will read this year. One book a week.

I thought this passage about how Twyla Tharp began The Fugue captures my endeavor well.

There's a difference between a work's beginning and starting to work.

I learned this with one of my earliest dances, The Fugue. Being a novice choreographer I didn't know where to begin. So I stood up in the center of the room, took a deep breath, stamped my foot, and shouted "Begin!"

To this day that's how The Fugue starts out -- with a stomp that rings in my mind "Begin!"

If you're at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout "Begin!" You never know where it will take you.

My wife hand makes dresses for little girls and sells them at an Etsy shop called sweet little bird. She recently set up shop and sold her dresses at an Etsy craft fair here in Charlotte.

Our six-year-old son Nick wanted to make and sell some things at the craft fair, too. So he cut up some paper and bound them with staples, found some fabric scraps and glue, and used a few colored pencils and his imagination to create the 4×4 inch, 5-page Firetruck Counting Book.

pages from Firetruck Counting Book by Nick Bellmas

Pretty cool, huh?

I think so. So much so that I ended up buying two of the books he made from him.

I love that my boy is this creative.