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The Last Book I Loved: House of Leaves

The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.

I grew up on ”Give Yourself Goosebumps” (the “Choose Your Own Adventure”–style spinoff of “Goosebumps”) in primary school. Though it wasn’t very often that I had money to buy a book, I still amassed a considerable stack of them (until some calamity exposed them water damage). I would read them over and over in the dark by flashlight, finishing one path toward fright only to start back at the beginning until I had explored every available option. Those books are the first step to what Espen J. Aarseth calls “ergodic literature.” I hadn’t noticed until I discovered House of Leaves how much I loved reading stories where, as Aarseth says, “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.” Even more, I want to write those kinds of stories—stories where you can’t simply turn pages and slide your eyes across the black line of text, but where the act of reading is just as dynamic as the act of processing what you’ve read.

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Our latest pick for the Rumpus / Tumblr “Last Book I Loved” project. Only two more left!

The Rumblr’s in-house astrologer, Madame Clairevoyant, presents her latest dispatch from the stars:

Aries: Unexpectedly, this week will be full of reminders of things from the past, things you used to love and things that never caused you anything but misery. It’ll be a strange kind of nostalgia that haunts you, a little warm, a little bright, a little bitter, where even the unhappiest memories are going to glow and the best times will torture you with their sweetness. Go for a walk, think about where you came from. Go to the movies alone and sit in the dark, quiet and free. Go home, do your laundry, sleep on clean sheets, and dream about ghosts.

Taurus: This is a good week for doing whatever you want to do, a good week for not listening to the cruel parts of yourself and the cruel people in your life. This is a good week for trusting the small and quiet bits of your soul that live in your eyes, in your muscles, in your clothes. It’s a good week for moving, a good week for applying to new jobs or quitting old one, a good week for listening to fast songs, a good week for standing tall and getting a little loud.

Gemini: This week you might have to fight against being scared of your own voice, scared of the shape of the space you occupy in this world, scared of the lines and patterns that you leave behind in your wake. It’s not the worst thing to let these feelings make themselves known to you, but don’t let this fear spread, don’t let it take over your body. Read poems by Bernadette Meyer. Look at bright, weird, wild art until it almost hurts. Pretend you’re not even scared of anything.

Cancer: It’ll be so easy, this week, for your thoughts to get tangled around each other, easy to feel like the inside of your head is a cluttered waste, easy to feel stuck, to feel like there’s no space to live. It’ll help to live inside every single moment, to be focused on the way your body works. Pay attention to the way your feet fall on the sidewalk. Pay attention to how your hands move when you’re turning the key in your door, when you’re typing out emails, when chopping garlic. Pay attention to the colors in your dreams. 

Leo: This week might fill you with so much jealousy, when you start noticing the trees or the bookstores in cities other than your own, when you notice the trees on the other side of town, when you notice the astonishing art that your friends are making. This week, you’re going to want every single thing, every feeling, every kind of life, every kind of happiness. These are the desires that can consume you; they’re the desires that can hollow you out. Hold on to the little happinesses that are yours. Call your mom, take a bath, eat a donut.  

Virgo: This week might feel a little slow, a little wobbly, a little wavy, a little strange. Time might feel like it’s passing more slowly than usual, like it’s a little dried out, a little tired. Nothing’s going to go bad, nothing’s going to be wrong, this week, it’s just a time for waiting for the last frost of the season, for conditions to be right, for buds to show up on the tree outside your window. Draw weird pictures of your house, your hands, your face. Listen to Nina Simone until you almost pass out. 

Libra: This week will feel like an open field, like a rooftop, like a blue flame, like a clear night. The world will speak to you in beautiful ways, this week. Now is a good time for dealing with the things that have been bothering you because the world’s going to give you signs, it’s going to give you answers. This week you’ll hear Beyoncé songs thudding out of car stereos and tiny children telling each other secrets on the bus. You’ll be able to do anything.

Scorpio: Even more this usual, this week’s going to be about friendship, about warm feelings, about the sweet and complicated rituals you have with the people you love. Be very good to your friends this week. Tell them how you need them to be good to you and they’ll do it, because that’s what this week is about. Spend your time on the phone, spend your time running errands for each other, spend your time gossiping over beer, giggling over dumplings, driving each other home late at night, and sitting in silence watching the road and the dark sky. 

Sagittarius: This is the sort of week where you’ll feel like you’re on a tightrope, like you’re on a balance beam, like you’re a spinning top and you can’t stop or you’ll topple over. This is going to be a week for trying to find balance, even when the whole world is asymmetrical, even when the floors in your house are crooked. Try not to worry about balance, just focus on waking up on time, on eating fruit, on taking care of the young people in your life, on watering the tiny green plants on your windowsill. 

Capricorn: When things bother you this week, when things go wrong, you might feel like the whole world is burning up, like your body and your life are disintegrating, like everything’s falling apart. It’s going to drive you crazy, the little things that don’t go right this week, but try to ride out your frustration—watch it until it starts to move. The anger you’ll feel this week is the kind of force that can make the whole world open up. It can show you colors you’ve never seen before. It can show you how to fly. 

Aquarius: This is going to be a week where you’ll want to take all the problems of the whole world onto your shoulders, into your skull, inside your body. You can do this if you want—you’re strong enough—but try walking away a couple times this week, try taking care of your sweet stressed out self. Take a jog, take a bath, let some of this worry seep out your pores. Listen to X-ray Spex alone in your room and listen to X-ray Spex out at party. Get tough and weird and wild. 

Pisces: This week is a good week to watch the different colors of the sky, to see the way clouds pull apart and stick together, to notice what time the sun rises and sets. It’s a good week to step back and let the rhythms of your brain follow the rhythms of the light, to notice the ways you feel alive in the morning, the ways you feel alive in the evening, the way the sky outside your window goes pink and orange and blue and dark as you make dinner. Think about Kate Bush. Think about Yoko Ono. Think about the stars.

Today’s image was made specially for Madame Clairevoyant by Jen May.

By now she’s climbing. And singing—or maybe, more accurately, scatting, since she doesn’t actually know any words yet besides Dada, Ha-Mmm, and something that sounds suspiciously like ‘dork,’ which she only busts out when she’s staring at me and pointing. (How could she know?) What she doesn’t do is crawl. At least, not forward. Mysteriously, she can—when flat on her back, and possessed of the urge—do a kind of dry-land backstroke, kicking her little sausage-rockets and launching herself in the opposite direction of where she actually wants to go. It shows on her face—the alternate consternation at going the wrong the way, and the sheer delight of going anywhere.

OG DAD #18: When Good Babies Go Bad by Jerry Stahl

The Rumblr’s in-house astrologer, Madame Clairevoyant, presents her latest dispatch from the stars:

Aries: This week it will be important to do new things, important to feel small, important to scare yourself, a little, by remembering how little you actually know about the world, by remembering how many things there are underground, in the woods, in the house across the street. Think of how many of these things you won’t ever see, won’t ever know you’re missing. Go on a trip, go to the other side of town, go to the opposite face of the world. Read the local pages of the newspaper. Read about the bottom of the ocean. 

Taurus: This week you may worry about the future, but try not to: this is a time for beautiful details. This week choose your words and your clothes with care; this week listen to every quiet change in the sky. This is a time to hold onto each tiny victories and tiny misstep. Keep all these things in a diary, keep them in your desk drawer, keep them in a box in the basement that you can pull out to look at, years from now, when you want to remember the things that made you. 

Gemini: This week you’re going to see signs of spring, even if it’s only a few buds on a single tree, even if it’s only a few extra minutes of sunlight, even if it’s only that you’re a little less sad than you were a week ago. This reemergence of springtime, these extra minutes of sun, are going to illuminate changes and growth that have been happening all winter long but that you haven’t been able to see. This week, if you look, you’re going to start noticing small and wonderful ways you’ve gotten older. This is a really wonderful thing. 

Cancer: This week the air around you is going to get hazy and blue and bright and you’ll feel so restless, so dreamy, so absorbed by the strange rolling landscapes inside your head. It’s a good week for making things, a good week for ideas, a good week for rearranging your furniture and painting your walls, though it might drive everyone around you crazy. Remind them that you love them; remind them that you’re okay. Listen to their stories and ask them about their days. Spend your time inside your head but don’t get lost in there. 

Leo: Take a lot of walks this week—let your feet wander, allow your mind to roam. This is a good week for doing the kind of thinking that can only happen in a certain small and strange part of your brain, the kind of thinking that needs you to be in motion, the kind of thinking that only works after you’ve walked two miles without talking to anyone, when you’re very tired, when you’re most fully yourself. Listen to rambling sounds, listen to the airplanes over your head, listen to thunder, listen to rain. Read cookbooks. Write letters. 

Virgo: This week is a time for you to spend so much time with other people: it’s a week for talking and listening and storytelling and gossiping. This week will get lonely inside your head, if you let it. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but this week it’ll be much better to pay attention to other people than to yourself. Go to school, go grocery shopping, go out with your friends after work. Call your parents. Call your oldest friend and tell each other secrets until you both fall asleep. 

Libra: This week is a good week for being little quiet, a little bit contained. Try not to worry that you’re lazy, that you should be doing more. This is a good week for sitting outside, for looking out your window, for paying attention to the different kinds of light around you and the different ways that people walk and the different ways your world makes you feel. It’s a good week for slowing down and letting the world move around you, a good week for giving your brain some space to breathe. Read poems about loneliness; read poems about love. 

Scorpio: This is going to be a good news week for you, a week of strange surprises, a week of finding unexpected treasures and thrills. Work on being generous, work on sharing the good things all around you this week, work on listening to your friends’ stories and laughing at their jokes—even if you’re distracted by this aura of good fortune. Be generous with your thoughts and generous with your love and it’ll make your house warm, it will make your eyes bright, it will make you feel happy and strange. Go to the museum. Go to the used bookstore. 

Sagittarius: This will be the kind of week where you’ll want to shrug off everything that’s been annoying you, slough off your old skin. It’ll be kind of week where you can’t stop looking at the apartments you could live in if you lived in Maine or New Orleans or Omaha or Paris. Get a haircut, find a new pair of shoes, go away for a day or two. None of these things can shift your life the way you want, but it’ll help for a little bit. Sometimes it helps to change the colors in your room. Sometimes it helps to listen to Nikki Minaj. 

Capricorn: This week’s going to feel a little tangled, a little wild, a little green; this week you’re going to feel your snarly roots speaking to you in ways you don’t fully understand. This week is about remembering where you come from—sometimes in ways that are lovely and warm, sometimes in ways that are scary and bleak. Both are important, both are going to follow you until you look them in the eye, until you invite them in for dinner. This is a good week to prune your plants, a good week to start some seeds on your windowsill, a week for feeling very tender. 

Aquarius: You might catch yourself feeling a little childish this week, a little mopey. You might catch yourself feeling like your emotions are the most important things in the world, and of course they are, and of course they aren’t. You might catch yourself feeling, this week, like all you want is to be taken care of, like all you want is for every love to be true and strong and easy, like you never ever want to grow up. Indulge this sentiment as far as you need to make it through the week, but not any farther than that. Take a long bath. Listen to Taylor Swift. 

Pisces: This week you might feel torn, you might feel conflicted, you might feel caught up in the middle of things you don’t understand, caught between happiness and love, caught between loneliness and desire, caught between the trees and the sky. This is a good week to work on balance. It is also a good week to work on tipping the scales inside yourself one way, then the other, then the other. If that gets to mean too much, it’s also a good week to practice ignoring all this tugging and pulling inside your heart, a good week to focus on work, focus on kindness.

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The Last Book I Loved: The History of the Peloponnesian War

The Last Book I Loved is an ongoing series with The Rumpus to highlight emerging Tumblr writers (and the books they love). Want to have your essay considered? Submit it here.

This is not an easy book to love. As an object, it is one of those books all of an age: squat, with yellowing, pulpy pages, the kind whose corners you can’t turn down because the paper creases so hard it that it might as well be perforated. Dog-ear it in the opposite direction and the corner comes off entirely. The print is small and dense; and it is a 2,400 year old account of a war that gets no press. It’s not sexy like the Fall of Troy, not Homerically epic. The gods don’t factor in. The content is almost as hard to love as the way I remember myself when the book first came to me.

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Look at those abs. Click through to read Holly Wendt’s ode to Thucydides, who she reveals has equal measures of sass and self-confidence.

Another week of the inimitable Madame Clairevoyant:

Aries: You might get a weird feeling that things aren’t quite right with you, this week, and you may feel a little restless, a little itchy, as you try to remember what could be making you feel this way. Even if things are mostly right, even if your life is golden and wonderful, now is a good time to pay attention to details, to be as thoughtful and deliberate as you can, to listen very closely when people tell you things. Make a lot of lists and listen to old radio hits as you check things off, one by one. 

Taurus: This week is for being honest, for getting a little angry, for letting the fire inside you flare up, just a bit, so it can warm you. This week is for clearing the dust out of your head, for cleaning your house, for scrubbing your bathroom until it shines. It might be a pain to do all this but afterwards you’re going to feel lighter. You’re going to feel new. Try to be extra gentle with yourself this week; be gentle with everyone in your life. Call your sister. Eat sweets in bed. Watch comedies. Watch movies about outer space. 

Gemini: This week’s going to feel soft and foggy; this week’s going to feel calm and easy and slow. This week might have you a little distracted from your job and your friends and your electric bill and everything else you think you should be focused on, but it’s not the worst thing to spend time inside your hazy brain. It is a good and necessary thing, sometimes, to let your head fill up with pictures of moss and snow and sand and salty air. It is a good and necessary thing to pay attention to the textures of your dreams. 

Cancer: This week is all about spirals and loops and cycles; this week is about strange patterns of repetition and memory in your life. You might feel like everything that’s happening this week has happened before, you might feel an intense recognition every time you accidentally make eye contact with a stranger, every time you hear a voice on the bus or a laugh from across the street. It can be strange or confusing or comforting or just another layer of noise, it’s up to you. Just try not to ignore it: there are messages in these patterns. Listen to yourself. Listen to Kate Bush. 

Leo: This week will be busy for you—busy getting things done, busy with people who need your attention and your love, busy inside your head. Your brain’s going to be full of motion, full of noise, full of sounds and thoughts that you need to sift through. Your world is very large and very dense and very full right now. This means a lot of good things for you. It also means that you need to give yourself time to sit on the porch, to sit on the couch, to sit in the bath and let yourself feel warm.

Virgo: This week is going to be full of very small moments, like pebbles in your pocket, like raindrops on the window, like beads on a string. This week, all the happy and good and important moments will be so small and round and shining that they could roll away, before you even notice them, if you aren’t careful. Keep your eyes open for the little gestures, the tiny signs, the small gentle smiles, the quiet jokes. Drink a lot of tea and read a long book. Call your friends and listen to their funny voices. Stay warm.

Libra: You’re going to feel really charming this week: you’re going to be so bright, so glittering, so funny. Honor this. Recognize this power in yourself. Let yourself to brighten and warm the spaces that you move in. This is a good week for living in public, a good week for going out after work, a good week for telling stories and talking to strangers. Just don’t ignore your cat or your friends or the world when they want to talk to you in quieter ways. Try to pay attention to the silent ways that feelings can move around a room. Listen to The Mountain Goats. 

Scorpio: This might be a wandering kind of a week, a week for strange solitary motion. Now is a good time for exploration, for curiosity, for reading while you eat lunch. It’s not the best week, though, for trying to make changes, not a good time for getting things done. If you can, try to put your energy towards wandering around the woods or an open field or the mall, towards listening to the sounds your house makes at night, towards mapping the cracks in the sidewalk outside of your house. Cut pictures out of magazines and carry them through the world with you. 

Sagittarius: This week might feel dull and flat and mundane to you. This sounds like a bad thing but it’s not at all. Its when your life is regular, when your life is boring, that the world cracks open to show you new things. In weeks like this you can watch the sky, you can get lost in the colors of the dirty rivers in your town, you can spend your afternoons slowly reading poems in the library, you can occupy your evenings mending the rips in your clothes. Slow down your heart rate, keep your eyes open, listen to quiet songs, get enough sleep. 

Capricorn: This week’s going to be about action, about motion, about energy. This week you will feel wild and strong and whole. The world is even wilder than you are, so be a little careful with yourself, but not so much that you can’t move through your life like a fox, like a river, like a gust of wind. Stand up straight and wake up early and feel all the electricity that’s rushing through your body. Be as brave as you can. Stand up for yourself. Eat big breakfasts. 

Aquarius: This week is going to be about small changes, about fine tuning, about making the little adjustments to the way you walk, the way you listen, the way your eyes see the world. This week’s nothing special, but the things you do now are going to have a bigger resonance than you can imagine, they’re going to make next week and next month and next winter get better, get lighter, get weirder. Paint your room. Dig up your mom’s old records and listen to them while you clean, while you draw, while you cook. Let them make you strong. 

Pisces: Things are probably not going to happen the way you wanted, this week. Though this might drive you crazy, pieces will fall into place in unexpected ways, things will run smoothly, and the world will show you strange and real kindnesses that you weren’t planning on at all. Try not to relax too hard into this good luck; try to keep working on taking care of yourself, on being the way you want to be. Try to read a lot. Try to be generous. Eat meals with other people. Eat a lot of fruit.