It’s hard to capture the playful, skewed perspective of Miranda July’s storytelling in an excerpt—her stories are best apprehended all at once, like a photograph or painting. I’ve given this book away to dozens of people. Some even liked it.

WORK

’She didn’t think she would have bothered if she hadn’t been what people call “very beautiful except for.” This is a special group of citizens living under special laws. Nobody knows what to do with them. We mostly want to stare at them like the optical illusion of a vase made out of the silhouette of two people kissing. Now it is a vase … now it could only be two people kissing … oh, but it is so completely a vase. It is both! Can the world sustain such a contradiction? And this was even better, because as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin.

Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be. Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery. She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her. There was so much potential in the imagined removal of the birthmark; any fool on the bus could play the game of guessing how perfect she would look without it. Now there was not this game to play, there was just a spent feeling. And she was no idiot, she could sense it. In the first few months after the surgery, she received many compliments, but they were always coupled with a kind of disorientation.’

—Miranda July (from “Birthmark”)
—found in No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories

WORD

handless (or haunless). adjective. Figuratively, one who cannot do anything well with the hands. Maladroit. Similar to clumsy or butter-fingered, but conveying a deeper ineptitude and incompetence worthy of scorn, frustration or pity.

“…she could scarcely empty a scuttle of ashes, so handless was the poor creature.” (Mary H. Vorse)

Of course there is also the much more literal meaning, memorably used by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus:

Speak, Lavinia, what accursed hand
Hath made thee handless in thy father’s sight?
What fool hath added water to the sea,
Or brought a faggot to bright-burning Troy?

Incidentally: don’t buy this.

WEB

• “Breaking the Low Mood Cycle” is funny, true and relevant to anyone who even occasionally finds their mood turning for the worse (yeah, it happens to you too). Reminds me of my all-time favorite piece explaining serious depression to those who’ve never experienced it: The Oatmeal’s “Depression: Part Two”.

• Continuing my exploration of portrait photography: I don’t have the words to describe Cyril Caine’s “Portraits of Disfigurement” as an expert might, but…wow. Diane Arbus immediately came to mind. Caine works with a reconstructive surgeon, taking striking portraits of people being treated for disfigurement from accidents and suicide attempts.

• In his short life, Donald Evans painted nearly 4000 postage stamps for 42 imaginary countries from an imaginary globe. They are astonishing, in themselves little missives from a fictional world. In fact, he cataloged them all in a book called Catalogue of the World. See some of them on the clippings overflow blog. At the other end of the gallery, behind a curtain, you might find Philatelic Atrocities.

• Two things that go great together: today in the US is both National Postal Worker Day and National U.S. Postage Stamp Day.

As always, I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you: clippings@katexic.com