The Beautiful Anthology
THE
BEAUTIFUL
ANTHOLOGY
A COLLECTION OF
ESSAYS, STORIES, & POEMS
EDITED BY ELIZABETH COLLINS
Published by The Nervous Breakdown Books
Los Angeles, California
First Digital Edition, June 29, 2012
Copyright © 2012 TNB Books
The views expressed in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized editions, and do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated.
Book Design: Charlotte Howard, CKH Design
Digital Conversion: Draco Felis
ISBN 978-0-9828598-7-2
Produced in the United States of America
Contents
The Beautiful - Victoria Patterson
Beheld, Beholden - Elizabeth Collins
See Ya Later, Big Nose - Jessica Anya Blau
The Quiet Light - Quenby Moone
21st Century Beauty in Poetry - Uche Ogbuji
Meditation in Middle Age - Catherine Tufariello
Milkweed and Metamorphosis - Ronlyn Domingue
No Animals Or Insects Were Tortured Or Killed In The Making Of This Poem - Rich Ferguson
The Form Within The Stone - Matthew Baldwin
Crazy Beautiful - Melissa Febos
Pretty Is As Pretty Does - Marni Grossman
The Politics of Beauty - Nora Burkey
Change for a Ten - Rachel Pollon
From The Venus de Milo to Porno Mags: The Evolution of Beauty, & Vice Versa - James D. Irwin
Truth and Booty - Tyler Stoddard Smith
FOREWORD
As I’ve been reading the many wonderful and refreshingly disparate pieces of writing and art that make up
The Beautiful Anthology
, the French term
belle-laide
keeps coming to mind. Literally translated as “beautiful-ugly,” it is an adjective usually given to a woman or girl whose looks are beautiful to some, ugly to others. In short, it denotes a hard-to-pin-down, hard-to-describe woman.
Many people don’t understand this term because it seems self-negating, but I think it is a very interesting and appropriate idiom, encapsulating in its way all the dichotomies and debatable areas of life: how one person’s beauty, or what one finds beautiful, is not always appreciated by others.
The Beautiful Anthology also captures those gray areas. For example, a tattoo that an adult child gets, defacing a large expanse of her lovely white arm, can ultimately be considered apt and beautiful. The design of urinal dividers can also be a thing of beauty. Seeing the beauty in a perfect tennis serve, in a malodorous, ill- dressed kid covered in dirt, in the parts of our bodies that we usually hate, in death, in all sorts of unexpected places – this is what our anthology is really about.
The very word
anthology
even means – if you don’t mind the didactic tendencies of this former English teacher – a collection (or garland) of flowers. Since flowers are the classic example of beauty,
The Beautiful Anthology
is a rather meta title.
The contributors to this anthology are mainly authors who have been featured on the popular literary Web site
The Nervous Breakdown
, founded and directed by
Los Angeles Times
best-selling author Brad Listi.
The Beautiful Anthology
is a publication of TNB Books, the publishing arm of
The Nervous Breakdown
. We have some well-known writers who have kindly shared their work for this project, including Victoria Patterson, Gina Frangello, Jessica Anya Blau, Greg Olear, and Melissa Febos. Likewise, we have many emerging authors (too many to list) and other new and exciting contributors. The artists whose work you will read in this anthology hail from around the world.
You may find some of the work in
Beautiful
to be conventionally beautiful, and some to be shocking or hard to describe in traditional, sentimental terms. That’s exactly the point. This book is, as a whole,
belle-laide
. It should start a conversation about what beauty is and why we find certain things, or people, to be beautiful. It is my hope that
The Beautiful Anthology
will also change readers’ minds about beauty and inspire them to share their own stories and to read the work of all of our amazing authors and artists.
— ELIZABETH COLLINS, EDITOR
VICTORIA PATTERSON
THE BEAUTIFUL
While visiting a relative at the hospital, I glanced out the door of her room to the hallway and saw an elderly couple walking. He wore a hospital gown and used a walker. They moved slowly.
As they passed the room, we all made slight gestures of polite acknowledgment –
hello there
– and then they were beyond the open doorway. I was out of their eyesight, though they remained in mine. The man’s hospital gown had the featured split in the back. The woman, sensing that I was still watching, moved her hand behind him and closed the gap. Her maneuver was so gentle that it seemed to pass undetected by him. Her hand stayed there, protective, and then they were out of sight.
As a witness, a flash of recognition came over me, and I had a sensation of both the universal and the personal. How many patients have had their gowns protectively covered by loved ones? And how many not? Hadn’t I performed a similar gesture for my grandmother?
Elusive and mysterious combinations of qualities that produce achingly profound sensations fascinate me. This definition of beauty has little to do with physical appearance. It is instinctual, individual, unexpected, and in synch with life (and therefore mystery) itself. I have a respect for, and delight in, beauty at its seemingly most prosaic and incidental.
In
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, James Joyce describes the mind “arrested and raised above desire and loathing,” a comprehension like a flash of sublime recognition. The mind in this mysterious instant the poet Shelley likened to a “fading coal,” and the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani called “the enchantment of the heart.” Beauty, Joyce suggests, reveals the illusory divisions between us, and the object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. To apprehend, to somehow convey and give evidence, is a profound endeavor.
What is beautiful to me defies traditional notions – Leonard Cohen’s “crack in everything” that reveals the light. Recently, I did a reading, and the organizer wore a somewhat flamboyant shirt with one side of his collar tucked under. I wanted to reach out my hand and remedy his mistake, but because I didn’t know him well enough, I didn’t. And no one else did. So his collar remained tucked under, and when I think about that night, what I remember most is his earnestness in beautiful collusion with the collar of his shirt.
A simplistic notion is that beauty is a settled fact, and that what is closest to the standard ideal is closer to beauty. Beauty isn’t a material thing, and it doesn’t reside in the subject, but in the expression.
What we find beautiful is a reflection of our personality and individuality. It’s as beautiful as we think it. We’re wrapped up in life, and because we’re inundated, because we’re human, this is our strongest connection. What is beautiful to me bears a kinship to my life. What moves me is beautiful to me.
When he was in grade school, my eldest son and I came up with a nonverbal form of communication to take the place of those unrestrained preschool and kindergarten hugs and kisses. Before I dropped him off, while still in the car, we’d do a quick “handhold,” which, we agreed, meant something akin to “I love you. Have a great day.” A last-second affectionate well-wish.
As he got older, the handhold took on different, less obvious variations, until it became a very slight – almost nonexistent – touch of the sides of our pinkies. Now that he’s in middle school, I simply imagine it.
ROBIN ANTALEK
INKED
Eighteen years ago, on the way to the delivery room, the feeling of not being able to stop what was about to happen suddenly overwhelmed me. This baby that had been making me miserable for twenty-four hours had to come out, and the passage of egress was not going to be a gentle one. When my first daughter eventually emerged from her long battle waged in the birth canal, cone-shaped head and bruises on her face the size and shape of peach pits from the last-ditch-effort emergency forceps, a smudge of pink between the delicate fuzz of her brow that one of the nurses deemed an “angel’s kiss,” I was assured that in a week, maybe less, her face would be healed and the trauma of her birth would leave no visible scars, only memories, where I would be able to chart the ghost marks on her face, badges of what she and I had endured in the moments before her birth.
