I'm Reading Akutagawa Prize Winner Hitomi Kanehara's Snakes and Earrings

So far, it's pretty pedestrian stuff.

I'm only around fifty pages in, but the book is only one hundred and twenty pages.

I can't believe this won the Akutagawa Prize.

She spends several pages explaining the system of gauging ear piercings and about half of the pages I have read so far have been obsessed with the body modification of the tongue into a cleft, serpent-like shape.

The author was twenty years old when she wrote this and won the prize.

She is an absolute stunner.

She looks like a living Japanese Bratz doll.

I'm hoping this gets better but it's already begun to outstay its welcome.

There are a few pedestrian S&M sex scenes, one of gash for cash in a tattoo parlor backroom, but overall this might as well be friggin Anais Nin.

It's that bland and pseudo-poetic.

The book jacket design is absolutely hideous. Somebody completely design-challenged did that.

I wouldn't even put that on toilet paper, that image.

Okay, enough negativity.

On the sunny side of the street I did all the Easter shopping all by myself and I have everything I need for the Sunday meal. Yay!

Traffic was insane for midweek. I figured it was either Jesus or the Jonas Brothers appearing at Hershey, but the one clerk told me it was a van on fire on 322.

How dramatic.

Lee has a new favorite at the Chinese restaurant so when he wakes up he will be pleasantly surprised. I made them promise to hot it up.

And I got him some white grape juice and other things he loves, so he should be a happy camper.

I'm eating grapes. That's something I should tweet I suppose on Pseudo-Twitter.

That sounds like a pseudo-tweet to me: "Eating grapes."

My mind is as bland as Ms. Steffans.

Karrine I am with you in Blandsville.

We should cook bland noodles together.

I keep wanting to steal the giant plastic vertebrae they put out in front of the chiropractor's office next to the Chinese restaurant.

I always knock on them when I walk by and love the echo.

It would be such a great decorating element.

I would turn them into a lamp...just wire some bulbs up in there and they would glow with a beautiful soft white bone color.

WAL-MART was a madhouse.

The ham I bought is humongous. There will be beaucoup leftovers.

I couldn't take my blood pressure because the children were monopolizing the machine and putting stickers on it.

I thought about growling at them like a werewolf but decided I didn't really want my name in the papers "at this juncture" as people say.

The Easter candy part of the store was too visually stimulating to enter.

I knew if I went in there I would never come back out.

I have a trompe-l-oeil chocolate duck already. It so looks like a real rubber duckie.

But it's many different colors of chock.o.lot.

What more could one ask for?

I couldn't find OxyDeep. I think they stopped making it.

I had to buy something else.

This is a literary blog.

This is all about literature.

And shopping.

For carpet cleaners.

I hear ya.

Snark this.