A Title Like a Book

HAPPY NAILS, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Happy Halloween Nails
It was just a fluke of timing that my orange tips
coincided with the Illinois Game (colors orange & navy).

I seem to remember this same thing happening once before.
Ben & Sam said, "Mom! Not orange!"
Well, no harm, no foul -- we won both times!

2011

Pumpkin Spice

Purdue Snazzy

For a literary blogger, a large part of the fun of having your nails done is the poetic quality of the polish names. Puns abound, and the word - play provides endless entertainment. Kind of like strolling through the library, reading title after title of a hundred books that I will never have time to read, I can easily stand at the polish display for an hour, turning over each bottle to read the clever names.

There are the food names: Beets Me!, Bitter Chocolate, Chocolate Shake Speare, Malaga Wine, Mimosas for Mr and Mrs (suggested for weddings), and Suzi Sells Sushi by the Seashore. There are those which immediately conjure a specific color: Teal the Cows Come Home, Turquoise and Caicos, Down to My Last Penny, Hollywood Blonde, My Chihuahua Bites (ouch!). My favorites are the concept names, where you must use your imagination to figure out what connection might exist between the name and the color: Amster-Damsel in Distress, Can’t Find My Czechbook, I'm not Really a Waitress, Nomad's Dream, Not Like the Movies, Optimistic, Road Trip, & Mrs. Always Right.

My friend Katy has an idea for a novel in which each chapter is named after a polish color. So imagine how delighted we were to discover a novelist -- Gabrielle Zevin -- who shares our interest in these color names and has actually used them to advance the plot of her novel The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry. Starting with the very first sentence of the book: "On the ferry from Hyannis to Alice Island, Amelia Loman paints her nails yellow and, white waiting for them to dry, skims her . . . notes." Later in the novel, Amelia explains to young Maya:

Amelia takes Maya to the drugstore and lets her choose any polish color she likes. "How do you pick?" Maya says.

"Sometimes I ask myself how I'm feeling," Amelia says. "Sometimes I ask myself how I'd like to be feeling."

Maya studies the rows of glass bottles. She selects a red then puts it back. She takes iridescent silver off the shelf.

"Ooh, pretty. Here's the best part. Each color has a name," Amelia tells her. "Turn the bottle over."

Maya does. "It's a title like a book! Pearly Riser," she reads. What's your's called?"

Amy has selected a a pale blue. "Keeping Things Light."

It is not lost on Maya's dad, A. J., despite Amelia's protestations, that perhaps her ever - changing nail colors reveal a hidden clue to the status of their tentative romance. Later in the day, he asks,

"What color are you wearing today?"

"Keeping Things Light."

"Is that significant?"

"No," she says.

On previous occasions, A. J. has asked Amelia, "What hue is that?" One day the answer was "Rose - Colored Glasses," another time "Blues Traveler." As the months pass, and Amelia and A. J. decide [spoiler alert!] to marry, Maya picks the perfect wedding day present for Amelia: " . . . a bottle of orange nail polish . . . A Good Man-darin is Hard to Find."

(132 - 133, emphsis added, 156; see also previous FN & KL)

Available on amazon

Nail polish serves as an effective metaphor in poetry as well as fiction. The color names chosen by poet Anya Krugovoy Silver symbolize not only the brief life span of the manicure itself but also a foreshortened human existence, opening with a Baby's Breath, a First Dance, and the recklessness of youth -- Russian Roulette; closing with a Curtain Call, accepting life's ultimate fate -- Bone (the skeleton takes the day):

Red Never Lasts
There’s no doubt it’s the most glamorous,
the one you reach for first — its luscious gloss.
Russian Roulette, First Dance, Apéritif, Cherry Pop.
For three days, your nails are a Ferris wheel,
a field of roses, a flashing neon Open sign.
Whatever you’re wearing feels like a tight dress
and your hair tousles like Marilyn’s on the beach.
But soon, after dishwashing, typing, mopping,
the chips begin, first at the very tips and edges
where you hardly notice, then whole shards.
Eventually, the fuss is too much to maintain.
Time to settle in to the neutral tones.
Baby’s Breath, Curtain Call, Bone.

by American Poet ~ Anya Krugovoy Silver, 1968 - 2018
in her book From Nothing

On living with cancer and the connectedness of all things in life, the poet explains:

“I have a tremendous amount of joy in my life, and my joy exists with pain. I don’t see those two things as completely separate. All of life is woven together, and separating the strands is impossible.”

Anya Krugovoy Silver
on Georgia Public Radio

One more connection comes from the futuristic novel Player Piano, a post World War II tale of Dawn or Doom written in 1952 by the visionary Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. In his imagined dystopia, the brave new machines have all but displaced meaningful human labor. Vonnegut explores the likelihood and the qualms of a society that reveres engineering above all else. However, it seems that he misguessed when he describes the "streetcorner manicure machine" that after a few minutes of buffing leaves the user "with gleaming, red - enameled nails" (239).

As it turns out, sixty - six years later, clients still value the undivided attention of a personalized, detailed manicure or pedicure. No machine has taken the place of that yet. What Vonnegut says of the haircut likewise remains true of the manicure:

"Used to be sort of high and mighty, sort of priests, those doctors and lawyers and all, but they're beginning to look more and more like mechanics. Dentists are holding up pretty good, though. They're the exception that proves the rule, I say. And barbering -- one of the oldest professions on earth, incidentally -- has held up better than all the rest. . . . It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs, where a man could be true to hisself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones, And I guess I'm just about the end of a race, standing here on my own two feet.

And I'm lucky barbering held out as long as it did -- long enough to take care of me. . . .

Anyway, I hope they keep those barber machines out of Miami Beach for another two years, and then I'll be ready to retire and the hell with them" (205 - 08).

In conclusion, I think the only thing left to say is long live the hands - on manicure and the colorful polishes with titles like books:

Back to Reality,
Envy the Adventure,
Adam Said “It’s New Year’s, Eve,”
Hello Kitty: Let's Be Friends!

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, November 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ RED: Dress, Lipstick, Fingernails & Ersatz
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Advancing & Receding

VIBRANT HORIZON, ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Red Sky ~ or ~ Red Sea?
Advancing ~ or ~ Receding?
Painting by Leonard Orr

An literary exploration of the intriguing concept
of a perpetual redistribution of human emotion:

"We seem to have learned of the horizon
the art of perpetual retreating and reference."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~
from "Experience" ~ 1844

"It was the tragic part of happiness;
one's right was always made of
the wrong of some one else."
~ Henry James ~
Portrait of a Lady (Chapter 35, 357) ~ 1888


"The tears of the world are a constant quantity.
For each one who begins to weep
somewhere else another stops.
The same is true of the laugh."
~ Samuel Beckett ~
from Waiting for Godot ~ 1953
See also:
Seen Through Tears & To Cry Or Not To Cry

"Every moment of one's existence
one is growing into more or retreating into less.
One is always living a little more or dying a little bit."
~ Norman Mailer ~
from Advertisements for Myself ~ 1959

"As in the fusion with Mercer, everyone ascended together or, when the cycle had come to an end, fell together into the trough of the tomb world. Oddly, it resembled a sort of biological insurance, but double-edged. As long as some creature experienced joy, then the condition for all other creatures included a fragment of joy. However, if any living being suffered, then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off. A herd animal such as man would acquire a higher survival factor through this..."

~ Philip K. Dick ~
from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ~ 1968

"So how do we seize the past? As it recedes, does it come into focus? Some think so. We know more, we discover extra documents, we use infra - red light to pierce erasures in the correspondence, and we are free of contemporary prejudice; so we understand better. Is that it? I wonder. . . .

“The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.

"Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry?" (100, 101, 105)

~ Julian Barnes ~
Flaubert's Parrot ~ 1984


"Their happiness is not her unhappiness. Unless it is.
What if there is only an equal ratio of happiness to
unhappiness in the world at any given time?"
~ Gabrielle Zevin ~
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry ~ 2014


"But life is not a zero - sum game.
There isn't a limited quantity of success or happiness,
meaning that if one person achieves something,
the rest of us take an automatic step backward."
~ Natalie Hanes ~ "Introduction" ~ 2015
to Extracts from The Second Sex
by Simone de Beauvoir ~ 1949

“It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.” (48 - 49)

~ Mitch Albom ~
from The Five People You Meet in Heaven ~ 2003


"It's the universe showing us that we're all connected
and feel the love, happiness, and pain oif one another
-- we just have to be ready to listen."
~ Peggy Carriker Rosenbluth ~ 2014


"One fire burns out another's burning.
One pain is lessened by another's anguish.
Tut man, one fire burns out another’s burning.
One pain is lessened by another’s anguish.
Turn giddy, and be helped by backward turning.
One desperate grief cures with another’s languish.
Take thou some new infection to thy eye,
And the rank poison of the old will die."
~ Shakespeare ~
Romeo & Juliet ~ 1597
Quoted by Peter Abernathy in Westworld ~ 2016

Green Bird ~ and / or ~ Green Fish?
Sky ~ and / or ~ Sea?
Painting by Leonard Orr

*******************

Thanks Len for multiple appearances on my blogs!
Previously Posted Paintings & Poetry:

Fortnightly
Capturing the Ginkgo Light
Like An Ant
I Will Show You Modernism In A Handful of Dust
The Ides of Whatever
Advancing & Receding
2020 ~ The Essential Sincerity of Falsehood

Quotidian
End of Summer Sounds
Golden Paintings by Leonard Orr
Excellent Images
Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas
The same war continues . . .
The Magpie Waiting for his Beautiful Partner
An Ant and a Grain of Sand
Bursting Into Light
Sun ~ Flower ~ Moon
Days of Optimism
Life Without Poetry
What To Do
Star - Spanlged But Unsingable
That Lost Time & Place

Book List
Lovely As A Tree
Evening ~ Timing ~ Floating: Poetry by Leonard Orr

Poems: "Past Tense, Future Tense" ~ "Yiddish for Travellers"
"The Loop" ~ "Desperate Times" ~ "Optimist" ~
"Sun and Wheatfields" & "Russian Olives" ~ "Monet's The Magpie"
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, August 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ Pie Safe
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com