Quid pro quo.

When I was little my babysitter, Donna, lived right next door. Most days after she got home from school I would pull together a hefty stack of books and march across the lawn to her back door. Donna invariably answered my call and would spend seemingly endless amounts of her precious teenager free time reading to me. Blessed with book-obsessed offspring, my mom calls it payback.

With the almost-six-year-old well into his own stack of reading, (except for nightly bed time stories read to him by my husband because "he can do all the voices") I was just waiting for the almost-two-year-old to make that story connection. This weekend he did. In spades.

There is now a stack of about 14 board books, all with conveniently-shortened-to-one-word titles; like "Uh oh" for We're Going on a Bear Hunt (Michael Rosen) and "Fly" for The Very Lonely Firely (Eric Carle) next to the comfy chair in my living room. Rest assured (or actually, not), I know when I walk in the door this evening I will be greeted with "Mama! Hand. Walk. Sit. Read!"

Drunken, frisky pagans.

Is that a beautiful phrase, or what? I totally stole it from Chuck Terhark's (hi, Chuck!) intro to the feature story in the April issue of METRO magazine. He's a clever lad who manages to reference both Pump Up the Volume and Fight Club coherently in the span of two paragraphs. If you think you know everything about the Twin Cities, think again. And go buy a copy of METRO! (You can't miss it. Just look for the gigantic, fuschia, snakeskin shoe on the cover. Yikes!)

This month's feature is a collection of bits about everything from lunatics who surf Lake Superior to Minneapolis' up and coming graffiti (outdoor?) artists. Most notably, John Grider, who is incredibly talented and very, very brave. Though mention of the jump from the street into galleries just made me think immediately of Jean-Michel Basquiat (a/k/a Samo) who accomplished this feat and far more before he died of a heroin overdose in 1988.

Quick story tangent: I worked at a certain Beverly Hills hotel in the 80s and Basquiat stayed there while in town for an art show. He removed all of the "paintings" from the frames in his room and rehung them empty. He denied maids or anyone else access and when he departed, they opened the room to find that he had kept all of the windows open and welcomed in numerous pigeons. (I also have stories about Emo Philips, Michael Jackson, Vidal Sassoon, Mickey Rourke, Milton Burle, Willem Dafoe, Tone Loc, one of the Princes of Saudi Arabia, and Billy Idol. It really is in your best interest to buy me cocktails.)

There is a lovely film about Jean-Michel's life and death done by New York painter and director Julian Schnabel. Schnabel also directed the absolutely stunning Before Night Falls and the surprising Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) which was nominated for four Academy Awards this year.

We're not in Kansas anymore.

A while since the last post, I know. Spent a week in Mexico where normally I would accomplish quite a lot of reading between the plane rides and laying around in a lounge chair but my son is nearly two. Need I say more? Luckily, he naps. And pool+beach+sunshine equals tired babies so when I could keep my eyes open long enough (the above formula works on grown-ups, too) I was also able to get in a chapter or two after kiddo bedtime.

I brought along and finally finished What the Body Remembers (Shauna Singh Baldwin). It was our first book group selection this year and I just couldn't get into it. Yet there it sat, leering at me from my 2008 Reading List and I just couldn't in good conscience leave it there unread. Baldwin's lush descriptions grew on me and like any book, once I got to know and understand her style and came to appreciate it I enjoyed it immensely.

The story tracks the Punjabi peoples in India through Partition: Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. I couldn't ignore the parallels to the current war in Iraq and America's complete disregard of the history, customs, and beliefs of three very distinct cultures. The story is eerily relative and I think is a chilling look at what may be in store for a country "created" by a distant, arrogant and criminally ignorant nation. (Ooh, did I say that out loud?)

Roop's personal story is so small by comparison. And yet it's intimate nature allows the reader to really move through this foreign world with some sense of reality and understanding. Singh Baldwin leaves us touch stones along the way that give us the ability to become invested in Roop and Sardarji in a way the occupying English never could. This irony is not lost on the careful reader.

To follow this up with The Yiddish Policeman's Union (Michael Chabon) brought some interesting insights. One of the many underlying themes is the fictional reversion of the state of Alaska from a forced Jewish refugee settlement back to America. Going from India's Partition to Alaska's Reversion has an odd and unexpected synchronicity which I totally dig.

Yet Chabon's prose couldn't be more different from Singh Baldwin's. His writing is tight, clever, and when wielded via hammer blows pounding out a pseudo-historical noir thriller, it is downright heart stopping. His prose is gorgeous and to steal my best friend Sarah's line once again, makes my brain tingle. It reads like the love child of Raymond Chandler and Thomas Pynchon.

I was hoping to spend some quality time relishing Chabon's words over Easter but between a trip to Duluth and then the incensed "toto" (Calder's work for chocolate)-induced hilarity after the bunny's visit I'll have to work a little harder this week. Though I think it will be no effort at all to push through this page turner and move on to In Cold Blood (Truman Capote) before next book group on April 2nd.