Grammar Piano

Migration

2011-05-15T08:34:00.003-04:00

I have moved over from Blogger to Wordpress. I hope you'll join me there, and update your links, your RSS feeds, and whatever Internet magic you do.

I'm still settling in over there, so some things don't look the way I want them to, and some sidebar stuff isn't quote up to speed--but we'll get there.

GrammarPiano.com will take you there, as per usual. Thanks for reading. I really do mean that.

30 Day Song Challenge: Your Favorite Song

2011-05-12T12:49:00.000-04:00

The "30 Day Song Challenge" is a Facebook meme going around that all the kids are doing. Basically, you post a song a day according to these rules. I saw it and thought: Oh, what the hell?

1) Your Favorite Song

The idea that we're supposed to scour through the whole catalog of all music--all sounds for that matter? What makes a song different from a sound, or set of sounds?--and cull down to one "favorite" is, well, mind-boggling and gives me agita. I think here of Donna Tartt saying in this 2002 interview, that "My favorite color is different for different things. Depends on what it is....For flowers, it's one thing, for clothes it's another."

So, favorite, how? How about "most meaningful at a meaningful nexus in my life?" Does that make sense? That seems like a long way from "favorite," but if we're talking about the stages of aesthetic development--and why shouldn't we--I'm definitely feeling a level five on this one. (Feel free to read up and then get back to me.)

Well, in this case, it's a song that gave me--at least this is my memory, plus 20 years reflection--a first inkling of how my sexuality was more than just who you sleep with. That my queerness would encompass, or rather that it could encompass, an entire set of values different from the ones I saw the status quo culture embracing. Beauty, fashion, grandeur, elegance, camp. A refinement in which the style was the substance. At the time, I wasn't very sophisticated--but I knew, I could sense, that this was sophisticated. (I can't believe I'm waxing on how Madonna is sophisticated...but hey.) Or, if it wasn't sophisticated, it was beyond my realm of understanding in a way that made me drawn to it. It was like watching a version of myself that I had never known, revealed. I saw a version of me in black and white, too. I saw a version of me moving like that, too. I saw that me as beautiful, refined, a success.

Madonna's "Blonde Ambition Tour" was broadcast on HBO that same year, and I set the VCR to record it. It's mechanism was such that it wouldn't stop during recording unless it was completely unplugged. So, in the break between "Open Your Heart" and "Causin' A Commotion" Madonna let fly a stream of "fucks" so long and punchy that my mother, either hearing this from the other room, or getting up from the couch while watching with me, I can't remember--ripped the cord from the wall!!! "You do not need to hear that," she said, sealing the deal. I was 12. I was heartbroken.

So, for the next several months, I watched the opening three songs over and over, until the tape turned fuzzy and refused to play. Eventually, I taught myself the choreography from the below video which I periodically performed both alone in the rec room and at Roller Coaster Skate World for scores of cheering girlfriends. Wow, what a queerbait, huh? I can still do most of it.

Here's a question: How does "1990 Madonna" stealing and popularizing New York ball culture reveal the inner life of a blossoming queen from the suburbs of Chattanooga, Tennessee? And the answer: That's the power of music.

So, having said all that, I give you, my favorite song, Vogue:

Taking Care of Your Work

2011-05-05T10:38:00.004-04:00

The Newburyport Literary Festival was a wonderful occasion to sit and talk about books with friends and strangers, and my panel with Michelle Hoover and Steve Yarbrough went well. (Steve and I also got to talk about Mississippi Delta accents versus Tennessee mountain accents, and how both our families have Lena's, and that felt a bit like home.) A 9:00am talk brings out a certain kind of audience--a bright, listening audience, ready to go, and I like that. They asked good questions, mostly about process and publishing challenges. At the end, the three of us sat at a table and signed books--fielding more questions and listening to the struggles of the writers in the audience, trying had to find a place for their work, an agent, an editor, even a bit of attention.

During the talk, there was some discussion of how our (or maybe just my) work was repeatedly deemed "unpublishable" or "without an audience" or "difficult." Michelle warned against self-publishing because you are tired--tired of coming up against these walls, tired of rejection after rejection, most of them with no reason as to why you were rejected, you just were. It made me think about my own time fighting with the desire to self-publish, and subsequently getting the call from my agent that someone was interested and could I wait maybe two more weeks for them to make a decision.

This made me think of this trend toward e-self-publishing, or digital-self-publishing, or whatever they are calling it these days, as a way of twarting the difficulties of the Publishing Business, and maybe--maybe--making a quick buck. Lots of attention has been paid to this new model--sell on Kindle, Nook, iPad, etc, and charge 99 cents, and make a mint. The theory of microtransactions. But I want to say to authors considering this model: Know what your work is worth, and know that readers will follow your lead.

The other part of me--the more radical, lowlife, street rat part--feels like this is Scrooge-y and coming from a more knowledgeable place, and young writers (read: younger than me, and not that different from my limited experience) need to find audiences however they choose. Not publishing kills you inside, I know. But please don't rush to publication until you've thought a lot about what you want from it.

Publishing is difficult--it takes something very intimate and specific and blows it up into something that people will take as vague and "for their consideration." They'll say its autobiographical when it isn't, and fictitious when it's pure realness. They will write horrible things about you personally on Amazon.com and GoodReads and B&N.com, and other places where democracy is at its worst. They will write things like "I strongly recommend that you don't waste your time on this one" and "I kept thinking to myself, 'Who Cares.'" This is all if you're lucky.

Then, once you've been published and all these wonderful things start happening--and they do, really incredible, deeply fulfilling things do happen. The rewards are many, though mostly very personal and intangible. But the thing that happens after that, is that you have to figure out how to write for yourself again. Because suddenly, you're writing for the world, which, at least in my case, was never who I wanted to write for in the first place. You will have to figure out to make it back to the fearless place, to the courageous, invincible-and-vulnerable place that good art comes from.

All of this is only to say: take care with your work. Give it the right foundation, the best pathway to success, give it the most careful ushering into the world. Then you can rest and feel accomplished for about 24 days. And then immediately after that, start working on something else.

Newburyport Literary Festival

2011-04-27T11:07:00.002-04:00

I'm speaking at the Newburyport Literary Festival this coming Saturday, April 30. If you're nearabouts (and awake early) come down and sit a spell:

Write What You Know: Personal History in Fiction

It's the oldest advice in the book: Write what you know. But it isn't always so easy to translate a memory or an experience on the page. Join novelists Michelle Hoover, Lee Houck and Steve Yarborough as they discuss how they translate their memories and experiences into fiction.

More info here.

Lucy, an excerpt: Part 4 of 4

2011-04-24T14:25:00.001-04:00

From the kitchen, she eyed the lottery ticket.

The last square gnawed at her, its final, decisive shape still hidden. There was an urgency all through her body, a pressure building. She could break into a run at any moment, her muscles all pushed into a forward slant, coiled and compressed, like a spring. She could not wait any longer. She spread the ticket flat on the table, and with the coin clutched in her fingers, she scratched at the shiny surface. A palm tree appeared, curved cartoonishly to the left, with two coconuts nestled in the leaves—the whole thing looked practically perverted.

“Merde,” she said. She crushed the worthless ticket in her palm and threw it across the room.

Frustrated, she turned on the television, found the channel which showed game show reruns all day long, and settled back into a cushy leather armchair.

Match Game was her favorite. On the screen, Gene Rayburn crossed the stage wearing a disaster of a suit, and a tie that started out as red, was met halfway with a diagonal brown stripe, and ended with a diamond of pastel blue. He was a complicated, gangly mess, all legs and arms, completely devoid of the square-jawed charm that she preferred in a game show host. Rayburn was missing something—ego, perhaps, a broadness. He lacked fakeness. He never seemed in control of the game, rather he was running just behind it, trying to catch up to the celebrity panel, who never looked as if they had much at stake. “Mister Gene,” Lucy said aloud, “what sort of necktie are we wearing today?”

They spent countless Sunday afternoons, bleeding into evening and on into the night, on Helena’s frumpy sectional sofa, passing a bowl of popcorn back and forth, brushing salt and brewer’s yeast off their laps, sucking it from their fingertips—Helena’s nails thick and colorless; Lucy’s perfectly manicured in the old style, the pale half-moons left unpainted—solving puzzles and admiring (or not) the contestants’ clothing. Lucy wanted her friend home immediately.

Baroness crept into view, stretched her back toward the ceiling, and then sat silently in the doorway, not in or out of the kitchen. The cat stared at her with a look that was half boredom, half subtle judgment—engaged but still distant, remaining an external observer; Daniel sometimes called her The Auditor. Lucy thought perhaps she had been sent from heaven, or some greater place, to record the doings and misdoings of this particular household. The quality and consistency of meals provided. Toy mouse allotment, treat-time frequency. Crinkly plastic bag on the floor availability.

“Where is mother?” Lucy said.

Baroness merely blinked, as if she were seeing through a new pair of eyes.

Lucy, an excerpt: Part 3 of 4

2011-04-19T14:20:00.000-04:00

There had been two husbands. The first was a Swiss banker who came through Le Havre periodically on business. He was small-framed and wiry, not handsome in any particular way (but certainly good-looking in Lucy’s eyes) with long skinny fingers and a thin moustache. After almost two years of once-a-month dinners and urgent sex in his bland hotel room, with bad sheets and bad paintings, he whisked her away from her uncharming family when she was twenty-one. He provided her with a weekly allowance and a lovely two-bedroom apartment in the Marais, leaving her to do as she pleased. They always got along, and their sexual life remained interesting, even toward the end, but they could never build anything outside of their private life together. There was a separateness that never disappeared, something always felt out of place. Mutual friends never gelled. A pea nagged from under the mattress. Their relationship eventually became rather like that of siblings, and after a short and unsentimental conversation one morning, they parted.

The second husband was American, a droll businessman from the Midwest. They were together for seven years, off and on—mostly on—and eventually they realized that they hated each other completely. Both admitted to twisted fantasies involving the unfortunate death of the other, poisonings or tragic parachuting accidents. His sagging features grew more prominent every season, his belly rounder and rounder until no belt in any ordinary store would fit him. He said it was her cooking, and somehow managed to make even that sound like an insult. And Lucy often started arguments on purpose. The divorce was painless at first and agonizing after.

There had not been children.

Lucy was the kind of woman who believed (Helena thought foolishly) that one can wear jewelry in silver, gold and copper all at once. Her bracelets jangled up and down her arm whenever she turned the page of a book, or pushed her hair, which was often frizzy and unkempt, away from her face. Helena realized—having been Lucy’s best friend for more than twenty years, and practically her only close friend in America—that older French women were allowed a certain freedom of behavior. A looseness of personality. If their lipstick was slightly smudged it was okay. If their hair was colored one shade too orange, their collar too severe, all was forgiven.

Helena was expected home some time in the afternoon. Lucy had come that morning to shower (she preferred Helena’s water pressure to her own) and spend maybe an hour making sure everything was put together, maybe get some soup going for dinner—an herb and vegetable concoction she was famous for; Helena’s favorite. There was an iron skillet on the stove, still shiny with butter from Daniel’s breakfast; he never cleaned up after himself. She could not determine what exactly he ate, the data were few and vague: a sticky spoon, no plate. She lifted the spoon to her nose, breathed in the bright smell of…marmalade, surely. She resisted the impulse to stick it in her mouth and suck on the tacky residue. Instead, she put the spoon into the sink.

Lucy, an excerpt: Part 2 of 4

2011-04-16T14:18:00.000-04:00

She grew up in Le Havre. Her father, whose job had something to do with city planning, was aloof and wooden, and he tended to his houseplants as Lucy thought he should have attended to his daughter. He talked to them each evening, wiped the dust from their leaves with soft kitchen rags, played the sort of music he suspected they preferred—Brahms, mostly, but sometimes Liszt’s Foust Symphony. They thrived.

Her Chinese mother (whose devotion, it seemed, was bought out of the back pages of an adult magazine, though Lucy was only willing to admit this once she reached her own complicated adulthood) spent most of her life cajoling the neighborhood housewives into playing Mah Jong, which they claimed was difficult to grasp, and took too much of the afternoon to play. Lucy thought it was probably her mother’s opaque instructions, not to mention the cluttered, dusty living room and her mother’s odd, off-kilter hors d’oeuvres: cucumber sandwiches with whole-grain mustard, broken hunks of hard, salty cheese. They stopped coming after a while, one by one claiming that they had other obligations, something at church, shopping, or simply ‘a conflict.’ Her mother eventually gave up; the phone quit ringing all together. With her husband’s savings she opened a flower shop.

As a teenager, Lucy worked there every day after school and on Saturdays. It was an endless parade of anonymous happenings, strangers impressing upon her the utmost importance of the event: funeral, birthday, anniversary, funeral, anniversary, birthday, funeral. Lucy took the job very seriously—she took any kind of work seriously—and her mood was often affected by the customer’s occasion. It was too easy to absorb other people’s sorrow; she sopped it up unconsciously. Four funerals in one day and forget it, she was cooked, wilted like a piece of lettuce. There was once two fiftieth anniversaries in the same afternoon, and so she rode her bike home elated, taking two turns around the neighborhood, breathing the air and laughing.

She bounced into the house, and her father asked if someone had filled her skull with meringue. She pulled her diary from underneath her pillow, where surely it was safe from marauding intruders, drew a radiant sun, and next to it wrote (in English, should her mother discover it) the words ‘silver dust’ and ‘orange glass.’

Her mother spent all day on the phone to China, crammed into a closet masquerading as an office, leaving Lucy the details, and after a few years every event felt the same. She learned to translate the fumbled, emotional orders: the uneasy fastidiousness of a memorial arrangement, an attempt to say something memorable, but afraid to come off as clichéd; the basic anniversary bunch, requested by husbands with bad taste who usually defaulted to whatever she thought best; the murky, inside-jokey birthday requests. There were men who wrote dirty messages to their mistresses and widows who sent flowers to themselves. In the end, no one ever complained that their arrangement was wrong, or not what they ordered, or unattractive. And no one ever called to say that their arrangement was gorgeous, or especially fragrant, or just perfect.

“I would love to work in a flower shop,” Helena said, an hour after having met Lucy in line at the market years ago, back at the beginning of their friendship—they decided to have a cup of tea. “To be surrounded by so much beauty all the time,” she said. Lucy was enjoying the conversation so much, that when it came time to refill her cup, she neglected to replace the teabag, and for five or ten minutes drank only hot water laced with a brown cube of raw sugar. “But you have your paintings,” Lucy told her. Helena said the paintings were more like bills that needed to be paid, or else they were watched pots of water waiting to boil.

Lucy said that as for the flower show, indeed it was very beautiful. What she didn’t say—or had learned not to say after telling the story to heaps of reporters and having it read quite differently in print—was that when you work in a flower shop, you are constantly reminded that none of the flowers are for you. The blooming jungle encroaches—fronds of sweet alyssum, frangipani, St. Christopher’s lily—and you begin to disappear. She thought it was a little childish, and was embarrassed to admit that she felt that way.

Lucy, an excerpt: Part 1 of 4

2011-04-12T14:14:00.002-04:00

I'm currently working on a new novel, and although I wrote this for it, I'm afraid it doesn't belong. So, here is a chunk of writing, presented in four parts over the next week or two.

Lucy Laurent stood in the middle of the living room naked underneath an ivory bathrobe, dripping water onto the floor. She had a wrinkled lotto scratch-off in one hand, a grimy quarter fished out of the bottom of her purse in the other, her body poised in a feminine rictus of anticipation: poised, articulate and sturdy. The coin warmed in her hand, seemed almost to sweat in her fingers. Her heart began to thump; she felt the pulse of blood pressing behind her eyes. Thoughts crowded her. Miles of deep black ocean is separated from endless blue sky by only the smallest molecular skin. Exactly when does water turn to air? Are surfaces beginnings or ends? Perhaps they are their own breed entirely. Lottery jackpots, car accidents. Brain diseases. We are always one flashing instant away from a new life.

Lucy took the edge of the quarter and pressed it to the flat silver panel of the ticket. She scratched back and forth, concentrating, moving fluidly from one side to the other, leaving no stray bit of gray. The printing came off in rubbery curls which stuck to the moist knot of her fist, and when she tried to brush them away foggy streaks appeared on the glass tabletop. First, two fat piggybanks appeared, bursting with green bills and grinning, their eyes morphed into shining dollar signs, almost possessed; Lucy blew air through her cheeks and groaned. The possibility that there could be another hiding underneath the third square was too much to consider, and her mind began to swirl with ideas, with new and ornate futures.

“Okay,” she said out loud. She took a deep breath and laid the ticket on the corner of the end table.

Lucy did not need the money. She was not exactly rich, though she once had been—two apartments in Paris, a Spanish-style beachside sprawl in Miami, a small farmhouse in the South of France, where she went when she didn’t want to be bothered—and as her career slowed down, she sold them all to younger, richer actresses whose breasts seemed to get larger and larger as the years went on. She lived comfortably, mostly off residuals from a French television series in which she starred. “Les Trois Reines” ran for five seasons in the early eighties, and was still in syndication around the globe, translated into twenty-three languages at Lucy’s last count, sometimes airing three or four times daily. The critics called the show predictable and derivative; audiences loved it.

Lucy never intended to be a great actress, just a working one—she once laughed out loud when she heard another actor talk of the indignities of doing your own laundry unless of course the part called for it—and the celebrity that came with a television career was both flattering and unpleasant. People named their babies after you, they wrote detailed sob-story letters asking for money, they acted like you were old friends. But restaurants often brought complimentary champagne, and she always got the best hotel rooms. Lucy was rather legendary in Europe though no one recognized her in California—the show was deemed “too French” for Americans. That was okay. Strangers did not expect her to be funny on command. (The show had been recently released in a DVD box-set, which Lucy habitually and mistakenly called DDD. It provided a new audience, a younger audience, and she had once or twice been recognized by admirers here and there—if she spent the day in San Francisco, for example—all of them proclaiming that they were her “biggest fan.”)

Overall, she was happier now than she had ever been, which in itself was something to be happy about, the gradual upward slope which proved so elusive, a life not benchmarked by weddings and children and other standard charts of successes, but more what she felt was the real deal.

Lots of Shows

2011-04-04T11:40:00.003-04:00

In the last few weeks, I've seen a lot of theater. It felt like the old days. Back then, I saw things three times a week. I eagerly awaited the New York Times special section on The New Season. I circled things that I didn't want to miss. At some point, I lost bandwidth. Most things I saw were bad, or average. I felt like spending more time at home. But lately, I've been out in the world again, taking it in. I'm reminded how much theater can be a conversation--how it can be the leaping off point for having conversations. Hooray for New York theater! (And TDF!)

John Leguizamo's Ghetto Klown

This is Mr. Leguizamo's fifth solo show, and I'm beginning to wonder if there's anything left to tell. He's a fantastic performer--his energy is the driving force here, his charisma--not the material, which, if you've seen his solo works before, you've already heard most of this. It's really a great show, funny, charming...I just wish it were a little deeper, a little more....everything. After two hours of great, the show ends with a mixed-up phone call bit that felt, to me, kinda lame. But...it's still great! Right?

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures

The new Tony Kushner play is so fucking exciting, so much fun, and deeply moving. In (very) short, it's about a guy who calls his family around him so they can vote on his impending suicide. As with any Kushner work, it's about everything else--desire, family, betrayal, love, hope, and yes, capitalism and socialism. The second act reaches a near unintelligible cacophony of arguing, and I remember thinking that very few other plays have felt so alive on stage to me. And nobody--Nobody--does hope like Kushner. Back in January, I saw the Signature Theater's revival of Angels in America, which is maybe, despite its subject matter, one of the most hopeful works of the 20th century. But, this play, I felt, is less hopeful. I felt like the playwright is older, more weary, less sure. And that was perhaps the most devastating part of the "play." It's 4 hours, deeply sad, sometimes hilarious, full of messy characters you find hard to love. Go.

The Other Place

Laurie Metcalf stars in this new play by Sharr White at the Lucille Lortel, for the MCC Theater. I'm so glad Ms. Metcalf has been on stage so much in the last few years; she is an actress of incredible strength and transparency. What's true in this play is really the question--and, in the end, I found myself asking the question of the playwright whose decision-making I question a bit. There is a scene at the end which plays a bit too MOTW for my tastes--and feels a bit like he's trying to rescue the play from an unhappy ending, which is what is really called for here. But, the set is beautiful, the actors are great, Ms. Metcalf is extraordinary.

The Book of Mormon

It's as good as they say it is. If you're looking for a night of big laughs and beautiful, precisely-executed musical theater, then rush out. (If you can get tickets.) You can find 100 other reviews about how great it is--and it is really great, Tony's galore come June, you watch. But I will say a few other things 1) it's not half as offensive as it should be, or could be. In the end, I think the writers settled for a musical that will make tons of money and tour forever. They're smart enough to play to a Broadway audience in a Broadway house, not a midnight-in-the-village audience, know what I mean? 2) The two leads, though wonderful alone, are missing something in their scenes together...their duo-chemistry is a bit deflated. 3) You can only do a musical about the Mormons because punchlines about them aren't in bad taste because they haven't been persecuted throughout history. You can't do "The Torah" or "The Koran" and say how insane all the mythology is, you'd be thrown out of town for racism and anti-semitism. It helps that Mormons are (generally) white, too. But...ultimately, I think the writers all know this, and they've made a big, hilarious, sometimes-moving--and here's the important part--new and original--musical.

Visiting Tennessee

2011-03-25T21:05:00.005-04:00

I recently flew to Chattanooga, stopping in Atlanta to change planes and wander about Concourse B for forty minutes. The first thing you notice when you change planes in Atlanta--aside from the constant stream of families, as there are no families flying out of LaGuardia on a Monday morning--is the number of men and women in military uniform. It's easy to forget that we are still at war. Either because of this, or in spite of this, I ate ice cream for lunch.

My father picked me up from the airport and we drove directly to the Waffle House, where I ate cheese-n-eggs, with hash browns scattered well and raisin toast. The raisin toast at Waffle House always comes with apple butter, and I'm glad to know that some things never change.

As we ate, I thought about the time my dad was in NYC for some kind of work, and I met him for dinner after my drawing class at SVA. This was maybe eleven years ago. We sat at the Lyric Diner on Third Avenue and I ate two grilled ham and cheese sandwiches. He didn't eat anything, for whatever reason. I felt at the time that I was starting to be a different person. At the Waffle House two weeks ago, I felt that I had returned to the person I was before that changing--the kind of tossed-at-sea uncertainty that the 20s can bring. So, maybe it's not a changing, just a day-trip. My dad paid the check and I felt full of greasy food and I was glad to see that some things never change.

We ate through the week, my mom's cooking, my own cooking, the cooking at a downtown restaurant, where my mother was introduced to the St. Germain cocktail, and later tried to order it at a comedy club bar where they didn't know what that was.

We drove out to see my friend Mary Beth's new house, which she basically built herself, on about 7 acres of land she purchased from her alpaca/llama-farming neighbors/employers. Her directions included the line "Turn left at the antique mall and go about 10 miles." It seemed to take forever to get there. But her house is a beautiful monument to self-sufficiency and a healthy reminder that sometimes the old way of doing things is the best way.

Her pantry was filled with canned goods--tomatoes, jams, pickles, corn--which sparked in me the desire to can everything this summer. And put up a big shelf of jars in the kitchen. Mostly that desire has faded. I tried to buy a book about how to do it well at the Strand, but they didn't have what I wanted. Friends with extra books about canning, and some with canning equipment, have promised to give them to me: "Really, you can have them." Their lack of faith doesn't bode well for my own future in canning. Look for an update long about August.

My friend June met me at The Castello Plan for dinner a few days after I got back. There were pea shoots on the special, and she and I shot looks at each other when the waiter mentioned this. It's still too cold for pea shoots, we said. When will spring come? Morels and ramps and green garlic and asparagus and tristar strawberries. I need all of you.

Tom in Siena on TNB

2011-03-15T13:23:00.004-04:00

I have a new short story, "Tom in Siena," which is up on The Nervous Breakdown.

Tom stepped out of the bar into a pool of yellow-ochre light from the streetlamp. Yellow-ochre is the color of this country, he thought, and terracotta. His brain, bathed in a loose veil of red wine and whatever the Italian football players made him drink, seemed to drift along behind him like an awkward, dumb animal. “Catch up,” he said out loud. “Put your hand in your pocket and find your keys,” he said, to the cracked sidewalk, to the slice of sinking moon, to anything listening. “Why is everybody so goddamn nice around here?”

Elizabeth had been gone for 37 days. Which is to say that his older sister had been dead for 37 days, although Tom was still unused to this idea, and still preferred to think of her as simply away. She was missing until further notice, and he needed only to locate her. She had gone to a paper-making workshop in India, to a yoga retreat in Western Massachusetts, to a vegan commune in New Mexico. She would return. Eventually. She would be renewed.

This is a story I've worked on in fits here and there throughout the years, as you can see in this post from a year ago and this post from 2006, where I didn't get it quite the way I wanted. It's finished now, though. I hope you enjoy it.

Read the rest of "Tom in Siena" here.

Arcadia on Broadway

2011-03-03T14:23:00.003-05:00

During the play, I kept thinking to myself: "I could say on Facebook that the play is performed with much vigor." This says a few things, I think. It mostly says something unpleasant about the way I--or maybe we--have begun thinking about our experiences: as status updates. It also says something about the play, or perhaps more specifically, my reaction to it. That I was not engaged.

Something about Tom Stoppard's work is beyond me. I find his plays extremely frustrating. I am not a stupid person, but I can never understand what is going on in them. I literally cannot understand their plots. Two hours into it and I am still wondering why any of this matters? I go to Wikipedia to figure them out. I always feel like his characters are frozen in the space of the play, and when it ends, they will also end. They never feel like real people to me. So...the tutor is really the hermit, after all? And he gets embarrassed in the newspaper? That's it?

The most exciting moment for me came when Hodge, the tutor, sets a letter on fire and places it on a silver tray where it burns away to ash during his conversation with Lady Croom. Real Fire!! I wanted the letter to catch the whole table ablaze, and the actors to go screaming into the wings and we'd all trample each other to get to the doors. I don't really want this to happen. But I wanted something more exciting than what was happening on stage. (Is this unfair of me?)

All this said, the actor's are really performing with much vigor. Billy Crudup is doing his cocky/smart/charming/asshole thing he's really good at, Raúl Esparza is doing the brooding miserable thing he put to perfect, brilliant, transformative use in John Doyle's 2006 revival of Company...only in a more lazy way here. Bel Powley, as Thomasina, is so marvelously fun to watch--funny and sharp and honest and generous. The rest of them are, well, fine. At several points, you get a sense that the actor's weren't given much blocking and are asked to just wander around and indicate their own frustration through their physicality.

Oh well, can't win 'em all.

Sunset Never Disappoints

2011-03-02T17:42:00.002-05:00

Oscar Bingo!

2011-02-25T21:23:00.005-05:00

I made some Oscar Night Bingo cards, complete with Red Carpet "Free Space." There are ten different ones, for those of you who are having more than a few people over. Download them here.

Attn: Awkward-Wording Police

2011-02-22T08:12:00.003-05:00

How was Your Winter?

2011-02-18T20:23:00.004-05:00

When I first began working at the Union Square Greenmarket, I would hear farmers ask, longabout mid-April, when everyone was returning for the season, “How was your winter?” I like this question for its allusion to the past, to a time when the winter could actually make a huge irrevocable change in the future. Structures collapsed, animals didn’t make it, people died. Things are mostly different now, but farmer’s live closer to the edge than most of us. Their stakes are always higher.

We had a tiny touch of warm weather today, the kind of sunlight-surprise that fills the market with what I (somewhat) lovingly call “Unprofessionals.” People who, bless their hearts, ask, at 10:00am, things like: “Are you going to be here for fifteen more minutes?” And then they never return.

People have difficulty trying to end the brief relationship they enter into with us, mostly by accident. They make promises, they ask questions like “What days are you here, I want to know when I should come back.” But, see, we can tell when you are never going to come back. It’s okay to just say thank you and walk away. Really.

I have a thing: I hate when the weather changes and it’s all people can talk about--the news does a “story” on it, small talk in elevators are ripe with (usually) groaning office workers, and Facebook, which I like, and which has increased the chatter exponentially, lights up with everyone having the same reaction: “Snow!,” and “Snow, yay!” or “So hot outside,” and “Ugh, so hot.” But, today was the kind of day that teaches you just how radical a change in weather can be, how affirming a piece of sun on your hair really is.

Something I think about a lot is how convenient it is that the Earth so matches with our sense of time, space and beauty. I know, right?!?! I really do think about this. Of course it does, we came from the Earth. But, I still find it pretty incredible that what we find most aesthetically pleasing is what there is in the world: vistas, waterfalls, mountaintops. Maybe this seems obvious, but I am still amazed by it. By how well we fit with our planet. (Right now, for the purpose of this idea, we’re opting for naiveté, and not discussing how good we are at destroying it, too.)

I’m also amazed at the earth’s ability to give us what we need when we need it. Today, a glorious, sunwashed day, sixty degrees, after months of--literally--freezing and darkness. Coming right when I felt like I couldn’t take another windy, flat, gray winter Friday, with the city still covered in giant chunks of black, sooty snow, covered in cigarette butts and dog shit. Seriously.

Today was extraordinary, and I know more about “How was your winter” tonight than I did yesterday. No, really. All of this is very, as they say, tree-hugger....and dammit if there isn't something--OMG--spiritual-ish growing somewhere inside me. But that's what I'm talking about. That's what the sun can do. One of the customers, certainly an Unprofessional, remarked: “I didn’t remember how I could be this happy.”

More Born This Way

2011-02-03T06:11:00.000-05:00

There is a fabulous new blog called Born This Way, and I submitted a picture of myself to it, where it was published on January 17. In addition to the picture they posted, my mother sent a few more, which I am sharing with you here. Fabulous!

Here I am in (probably) 1985 with my teacher's board and glittery-streamer baton on Christmas morning, and below that, playing a fey round of mini golf.

In the Moment Chili

2011-01-30T19:28:00.009-05:00

My friend Jane, as is her custom, demanded that I blog the recipe that I mentioned in my Facebook post this evening. She is a tireless advocate for transparency in cooking, and has on several occasions forced me, despite my reticence, to give up the secrets that have made my cooking so remarkable. So, while I sit on the couch waiting for the above chili to simmer, I will do my best to share with all of you, the legions of devoted readers, how to make my version of "In The Moment Chili."

The cornbread I make is probably like any other one you might make yourself. 2 cups cornmeal (local and stone ground if you can get it....if you use horse-powered you win,) followed by 2 teaspoons of baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, more salt than you think, some pepper, followed by 2 eggs, about 1.75 cups of buttermilk, and a glug of maple syrup. Mix this all together, but don't over mix it, and then let it sit for 10-12 minutes while you do this below.

Here's the important part: You need a cast iron skillet that's about 100 years old, and that belonged to your great grandmother who lived in Atlanta your whole life in a house that you loved. If you don't have this, another cast iron skillet will do, but you know I can't promise anything. Put 3-4 tablespoons of butter, and big swirl of canola oil in the skillet, and then put it in an oven that you preheated to 400 degrees. Let the skillet get very hot in the oven, melting the butter and heating the oil. When you pour the batter in, it should sizzle. Then leave it in the oven about 20-22 minutes. When it take it out, turn the cornbread upside down on a plate, and let it cool. If you want to, you can drizzle over some melted butter, or, if you have it, some hot pepper maple syrup, like I did.

It's called In the Moment Chili because that's really what it is--it's whatever you have plus whatever you feel like. Taste it every time you add something, and see what your mood asks for--more heat, more acid, more salt. So, tonight, my version went like this:

3 small onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 lb. ground pork
2 chopped chipotle chiles
2 cans crushed tomatoes
1 cup of water
1 big can black beans
1 big can small red beans
1 sweet potato, cubed
lots of salt
juice of two limes
big shake of ground coriander, some oregano, some curry powder, 2 shakes of cayenne.
a bit of garlic powder
Secret ingredients: 1/2 cup of cocoa powder, plus one mug of coffee.

So, you do all of this like you think you would--onions & garlic in some olive oil, plus pork, and then so on down the list, and then you let it simmer until it's super thick and delicious. I like to be able to stand a spoon up in the middle of the pot. Like this:

How you serve it is really up to you--I like a big chunk of cornbread in the bottom of a bowl, then pour two scoops of chili on top, then put some shredded cheddar. Be generous with everything--it's a bowl of chili, and it's Sunday night, right?

Gorilla-At-Large

2011-01-24T16:44:00.000-05:00

Thanks to my tireless and wonderful mother, these very very old stories of mine are finally seeing the light. At some point, I would sit and dictate to her and she wrote down whatever I said. Behold, Gorilla-at-Large:

Doubling-Back

2011-01-19T20:03:00.005-05:00

After Kip's birthday two weeks ago, a bunch of us ended up at Odessa, eating potato pancakes, kielbasa, and peirogis, and drinking beer. There were too many of us to sit at a single table, so we split into two, our table talking mostly about theater--shows we did and didn't like, the great performances of 2010, Patti vs. Bernadette. I think we bored Joe. Sorry, Joe. I thought to myself: Please let it be like this for the rest of my life. I really did think that.

It felt like old times. When I first moved to New York, my roommates and I always ended up at Odessa, or Veselka, or Kate's Joint, after having seen something (good or great or bad) at Theater for the New City, or PS122, or The Ontological-Hysteric. Or somewhere else. Then, the long--it seemed at the time--ride home on the F Train to Astoria. We felt like part of the culture. We were part of the culture.

I admit, I'm getting sentimental. Later the same week, I watched the Martin Scorsese documentary "Public Speaking," which is about Fran Lebowitz. Fran talked (among other brilliant things) about the richness of audiences back in the day--about how they demanded the best, every single time, because they had seen everything. In Patti Smith's "Just Kids," which I was also reading at the time, she writes about the opportunities artists had in the 60s and 70s. Opportunities that could never be now.

My tendency is to think that all this nostalgia is just, well, that. But then, we went to see the revival of "Angels in America," and during the intermissions of "Perestroika," the couple sitting next to us talked on and on about how the liked or didn't like the various choices that the characters were making. He said "I don't know any of these performers." His date (sister? friend? girlfriend?) said: "I hate plays like this where everyone is just talking." I felt a bit deflated.

It's a good thing that the play is a masterpiece. It lifted me back up. The Signature Theater's production is terribly, terribly good--even if one wonder's if Zoe Kazan's earthy strength is right for Harper, and why Christian Borle seemed to be playing everything so weird to me, or if, as my agent wrote, "why Joe seemed to be given the most unhappy ending. Well...besides Roy." Zachary Quinto's performance as Louis is nuanced and obvious at the same time--his technical skills are sometimes on the outside, and I liked that about it. The thing is, though, all these things make the play, the experience of being in the theater with a piece as fucking brilliant and difficult and striving as Kushner's, and actors as sharp and skillful as this ensemble, more exciting. It was really, truly fantastic.

The rest of this story is about me noting how everything seems to be talking to itself. Novelists recognize this as a message from the universe that it's time to get serious. Or, at least, I do. This kind of doubling back, these overlapping strains of thought are your subconscious trying to tell you something about what you're thinking about. Your job is to translate that into the work. Not that it's easy.

The second novel has been such a struggle. Huge roller coaster emotions, false-starts, insecurities. It must be going just like the first one went, but I don't remember making the first one that much. Really. It just kind of came out of me, boom, like a sad, confused hustler bursting out of a party cake the shape of a rain-soaked New York City. (Lol?) And for the last three years before it was published, there was 250 pages of it--lots of clay, as it were. When I sat down to work with it, there was lots to work with. This new thing is still a mess, stretched out in too many directions, too many characters that don't know what their stories are. Sometimes I don't know how I'm going to do it. No, really. I feel like I might explode. I feel like I'm going crazy.

I try to feel buoyed up by the life around me. But we're so close to the edge of crazy, we're right on the other side of this thin membrane. I feel totally pressed against it sometimes. It's a good thing there are so many things to keep us, the collective us, together. Friends who, half-drunk, say things like "Would Arthur Laurents just go ahead and die already?" And Kip. And potato pancakes and vegan turkey sandwiches at Kate's. And the F-Train. And Fran Lebowitz and Tony Kushner. And Patti Smith. And Patti vs. Bernadette.

(Who are we kidding? Bernadette, all the way.)

Poem for the Singer

2011-01-07T08:10:00.000-05:00

Like cards from a trick deck,
you deal yourself out to me
in measured, calculated hands.
As if gambling was too rich for you.
As if slight of hand was your trade.

Tossing away all these
un-nervy feelings, these,
what do you call them, low-Richter stuff,
like a boring receipt, or a toothpaste cap,
would be a silly, silly thing, I know.

So, I keep them,
wadded like a gum wrapper,
or filed like last year's daybook.
Things you are sure will come in handy
in the very near future.

Covers 2010

2010-12-24T09:16:00.002-05:00

I'm taking a vacation from the blog, returning in mid-January. So, in the meantime, here's a new bunch of covers to enjoy when the radio only wants to play Christmas Music.

DOWNLOAD HERE.

Includes:

-Another Day in Paradise, by Copeland
-Fall on Me, by Cry Cry Cry
-Folsom Prison Blues, by Brandi Carlisle
-Lovestoned, by Kaki King
-Walking in Memphis, by Cher
-Angel from Montgomery, by Ani Difranco
-All is Full of Love, by Death Cab for Cutie
-Anyone Who Had a Heart, by Shelby Lynne
-Black Star, by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings
-What You Are, by Joan Osborne
-Crying, by k.d. Lang
-Stairway to Heaven, by Dolly Parton
-Sea Lion Woman (piano), by Feist

Yelping / Chinese / Eyeballs at Xmastime

2010-12-21T12:15:00.004-05:00

Kip woke on Monday morning in a kind of yelping terror that lasted only a few seconds, which he has done on a few other occasions. This time, due to the cat--the one that normally sleeps on my head all night--dug a claw into his arm. Not aggressively, not out of fear. This was the cat's strategy for getting his attention. Thinking: If he wakes, he will give me food. The yelping makes me wonder what deep ravines Kip was wandering when the clawing occurred. How dreadful to be jerked awake like that. And of course, as he was, so was I. (These are the new horrors of the otherwise lovely co-habitation.)

Later I ended up at M. Shanghai in South Williamsburg for dinner. Who knew that there was really, really good Chinese food to be had in a weirdo bar-ish joint on Grand Street? Apparently, the whole n'hood, as the joint was hopping on a Monday night. If you go, have the scallion pancake, the chicken shumai, and the crispy chicken in ginger and spicy sauce. Dang the food was good. Drinks came cheap-ish, too.

I met a woman there, she had recently lost her father, and I recognized in her the kind of unmoored openness that sort of grief imparts. Or maybe I didn't, maybe it's unfair to presume that I could "see" anything in her. But...We begun the evening making small talk about small talk. We talked about what happens when you meet a stranger, how inevitably someone will say "Nice to meet you," and we generally want to ask "Really? Is it really though?" We decided that even small talk has its charms, even if both of you know how meaningless it is in terms of context, the ritual is meaningful. And, of course, you can have wonderful meetings like this one. We remarked on that as well. How it actually was nice to meet each other.

What does it mean that I am attracted to this kind of grief, or, more precisely, that I want to return to it over and over in my work? Does it mean anything? There is a certain clarity in the madness grief creates, a kind of obsession that fuels and comforts my obsessive nature. The ability to return to images over and over, the overlapping of feelings, the outsiders perspective, amplified. I guess this is what interests me: the translation and transformation of the otherwise standard experience. And I think it reflects what I believe to be true, that we are all so very, very close to the edge.

I've discovered, in my not that many years writing, but enough to know what I'm talking about, I think, that I keep returning to loss over and over. I write about things leaving us. People, objects, memories, families, previous selves. This sounds a bit morose, maybe. I don't think of it that way. It's just where I am lately.

Tonight I am taking my friend Robert Maril (AKA DJ Executive Realness) to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular. I saw it a few years ago, and I think we decided at the time that we would go every three years or so. The time is now. Robert has never been to see it, and I am excited to have the same experience relived through someone new--another thing I am obsessed with. (Does this reveal something about my control freakishness?) I told Robert: "Are you ready for your eyeballs to be raped by the spirit of Christmastime?" He said he was. Hooray.

Some Almost-Winter Pictures

2010-12-15T10:25:00.007-05:00

Week-End Happenings

2010-12-06T14:00:00.004-05:00

This week was the first real cold at the Greenmarket--highs in the low 40s. So began the flood of questions about "When does the market end for the season?" It doesn't, and sometimes I think we wear it as a badge of honor, even though it wrecks our bodies for a few days after. And we're not even to January yet, where it can be a high of 25 degrees. I loathe it, and I vow to fight it, and win. I finally understand what's important about how the farmer's greet each other in the spring: "How was your winter?" Because surviving it is a big deal. This will be my fifth winter out there. Some of the farmer's, this will be their thirtieth. I'm lucky to be a part of it all.

On Saturday, I bought a Christmas tree from the guys over at Trumansburg Tree Farms. The guy that sold it to me, whose name I have forgotten, or forgot to get in the first place, admitted that he, like me, and like lots of us, aren't really the farmers. "I live in Brooklyn," he said. "Me too," I told him. "What else do you do?" he asked me, because everyone at the market does something else. "I'm a writer," I said. (I am still new to this answer, but I am trying to own it. Writer in 2011!) "Like everybody in Brooklyn," he laughed. "No," I said, "I really am one."

And then he tied the tree up, folding its branches toward the top, shrinking it into a kind of bundled Fraser Fir joint. (I like the Fraser the best, or a Balsam, but check out these others.) As he was tying the tree he said, "What would make a tree want to do this, fold up like this, what evolutionary purpose does it serve?" We joked a few minutes about how God made them that way, so that we could celebrate his son's birth in style, and we'd need a good way to carry the trees home with us. I don't think this is very funny now, but we seemed to think it was then.

On Sunday morning, Kip and I had brunch at Casmir, a French bistro-type place, with flavors by way of Morocco. Joining us, it was their idea actually, was my friends Pam and Rachel, and their new baby, who is five months old. I like kids, don't get me wrong, but why are people who have kids weirded-out when Kip and I say so resolutely that we do not plan to have, nor want, children of our own? I suspect I know the answer to this, or answers. But I have noticed it a lot lately, as we, I mean I, have reached the age when all the people around you begin to have children or get married, or move away, or move in. Brunch was lovely. I'm happy that Pam and I have stayed more or less in touch over the years, and even happier that one of the pleasures of living is seeing your friends grow into themselves. Also, I am happy for spicy-tomato sauce with feta, capers and eggs.

Later on Sunday, we decorated the tree, which I both like to do and hate to do. I have a short attention span as it is, and a habit of entering long, dark tunnels of sentimental memory, so bringing one ornament after another out of bag after bag and box after box--it can really wear me out. But it got done, thanks to Kip. He is good at making the most out of anything, and I am good at reigning it in at he last moment so that it doesn't become, you know, the most. The tree really is fantastic.

This week, I'm cooking and prepping for our big party on Sunday night: lemon marshmallows, foie gras with sauternes gelée, pork pies, spiced ricotta tartines, pheasant sausage with Madeira, curried peanut dip, mushroom strudel, roasted tomatillo guacamole....and of course, Kip's famous hand-decorated cookies. Maybe I'll see what else I can cook up.

25 Things I'm Thankful For

2010-11-28T09:16:00.005-05:00

Ted made a list, inspiring me to do the same.

1) That I was wrong about thinking I shouldn't move in with my boyfriend.
2) A warm bed filled with my kitties.
3) Art on every wall, everywhere.
4) The complicated relationship to your writing that being published creates.
5) Good reviews.
6) New York City's utter, unflappable, inspiring awesomeness.
7) Kip.
8) Kip's patience with my everything.
9) Friends who live very close by.
10) Parents who get it.
11) Central Air.
12) The Greenmarket community.
13) My editor & my agent. Because everyone said that Yield wasn't publishable except for them, and turns out, it was.
14) That I have a desk job where I can iChat with Cory and Robert and Jeff.
15) That Howie made enough of the best maple syrup in the world to keep me employed another year.
16) Complicated questions that people ask and struggle to answer well.
17) The DVR.
18) Antibiotics.
19) The MoMA, The Met Museum, The Whitney, The Guggenheim, etc.
20) Jokes.
21) The Theater Development Fund.
22) The incredible bounty of local food.
23) Poets.
24) Homosexuals.
25) Having friends in so many lines of work: dentists, psychotherapists, drummers, photographers, teachers, graphic designers, fashion thinkers, singers, DOT workers, performers, artists, writers, journalists, bartenders, farmers, waiters, chefs, lawyers, zine-makers, dancers, yoga teachers, real estate agents, puppeteers, activists, old folks home managers, playwrights, actors, film editors, sound technicians, and circus performers.

Joanna Newsom at Carnegie Hall

2010-11-24T11:44:00.004-05:00

Few of us know anyone who plays the harp; basically none of us have been near enough to touch one. Part of the success of Joanna Newsom's show last night at Carnegie Hall has to do with the kind of magic that an instrument like that creates. The posture in the player--this kind of open, holding, wide elbowed stance--combined with the mystery of the dozens (and from the balcony it seemed there could be hundreds) of strings, and finally the strange fact that its difficult to determine when the player is actually touching the harp, and when the sound is simply vibrating out of it. Only in close up, does any of it make any sense.

Less successful, and ultimately what made the evening feel a bit like a deflated exercise, was Newsom's ambiguous relationship to her audience, and the awkward moments of harp-tuning, which left enough blank space that, upon Newsom's suggestion, the audience began shouting out "questions." "Brooklyn loves you," someone said. This is interesting to me, because I have a feeling that most of the people in the audience had traveled from Brooklyn. Was he sending a collective message? Sent from the "better" borough? (There is a feeling among young hip people that Brooklyn rocks and Manhattan is square.) Was this person unconsciously indicating a kind of sentimental otherness?

This went on twice for not long, three or four minutes perhaps, but the energy lagged, and I wished that the band, or Newsom herself, had prepared some kind of other business for this moment--comedy, a story, talking, banter, anything. If anyone has seen Alison Krauss and Union Station perform, you will know that they are always tuning, but they have created many "bits" to do during this boring, and stagnant tuning sections, which bring the audience back into the show. Sure, it feels casual when they do it, never calculated, but AKUS would never, ever, allow their audience to set, or shift, the mood of those moments. Maybe this comes with having performed on stage together for 20 years--a luxury Newsom and her band does not have--a kind of seasoned, professional ease.

"Can I play Ryan's banjo?" one audience member yelled, during this tuning/question section. "No," said, Neal Morgan, on percussion. He then asked the audience to have a kind of meta-moment where we imagine her playing while she actually didn't, and then he counted out 5 seconds of quiet, while we all listened. Ultimately, this is kind of asshole-ish, taking the, yes, stupid question "Can I play Ryan's banjo" and then making the extra large point of showing the audience how stupid the question is, by extrapolating its stupidity by making us all engage in a similarly stupid interaction. More stupid does not counteract stupid.

Early in the evening, Newsom spoke of her nervousness, how it wasn't until she got on stage for the sound check that she realized, okay, Carnegie Hall may be Carnegie Hall, but it's just a room with the most incredible acoustics. Joanna, hello, it's not just a room. Tell that to Sissieretta Jones, or Marian Anderson. Or Judy Garland. Or any of the thousands of amateur musicians who would kill to get on that stage. At the same time, however, her fans do not see her as the girl at the party: "What does it feel like to be a goddess?" screamed one fan from a few rows away from where I was sitting. Morgan responded: "Trick question, Joanna actually isn't a goddess." This was too clear.

I think she could be. Her music, as beautiful, ethereal, strange, unstructured, long, wandering, so different from anything else you hear--where was all that in the show? It was there in the songs, sure, but something else seemed missing. Even the long-winded biography printed in the playbill was reductionist, made to seem as if, ho hum, Joanna was playing harp in her basement and then, oh wow, people liked it, and thanks to a lot of illegal downloading and enough actual sales, now here she is.

Do young musicians in this new-folk scene refuse to take themselves that seriously? Does a kind of formal live presentation reduce your hipster street cred? These were the questions I wanted to ask.

Scattered Light

2010-11-22T09:01:00.000-05:00

The other night, I took this video of Jim Campbell's new outdoor sculpture "Scattered Light." There are a few pieces in the park, but the only one you will care about seeing is this one, which is described as:

Scattered Light, will feature nearly 2,000 LEDs encased in standard light bulbs, suspended within a support structure spanning 80 feet in length and standing 20 feet high and 16 feet wide to create a vibrant light grid across the center of Madison Square Park’s Oval Lawn. The LED bulbs, programed to flicker scattered light, will create the illusion of figurative images that explore and reflect the human experience amidst the urban landscape, creating the appearance of giant human shadows crossing a floating 3-D matrix of light. As one travels around the piece, the vantage point alters and the light figures begin to abstract, blurring the boundaries between image and object.

Scattered Light is on view until February 2011. More about it by looking here.

Scattered Light by Jim Campbell from Lee Houck on Vimeo.

Hansel & Gretel

2010-11-19T05:53:00.000-05:00

My mother was digging through some old papers and books of photos and came across this. It's a story that I dictated to her and she wrote down. I was four. Embiggen to enjoy. (Also, my mother's handwriting hasn't changed one bit since then.)

The Women

2010-11-15T19:07:00.003-05:00

I have been voraciously reading the Paris Review interviews. In particular, I am fond of the interviews with Annie Proulx, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Joan Didion. Joan Didion! (Joan also has a new book out next year, Blue Nights.) It occurred to me this week, after devouring these incredibly well-conducted and interesting interviews, just how much of my work is informed by the work of women writers.

It's surprising, in a way, to me, because my first novel is basically devoid of women--which was a conscious choice from the beginning, to have removed that kind of perspective from the narrative. I don't know why it was important that I do that. Perhaps in a few years I will have a better sense of it. No promises.

Other women I read, also voraciously: A.M. Homes, Jennifer Egan, Donna Tartt, Katherine Dunn, Janette Turner Hospital, Miranda July, Rosellen Brown, Octavia Butler, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Ruth Reichl, Kathryn Harrison, Sarah Schulman, Sharon Olds, Naomi Shihab Nye, Barbara Kingsolver, Caryl Churchill, Amy Bloom. I could go on.

Take this list and go get their books.

Morning Poem

2010-11-10T07:17:00.001-05:00

You spread yourself across me,

breath like yesterday's wine,

telling stories of Vancouver and Australia,

far-flung places where your happiness broke open,

spilling out onto the bent dashboards of rental cars

and shiny bed frames like this one,

and said: Good morning.

I could smell the earth on you,

the soft red clay from your

long walk through the Utah desert,

which collected at the edges of your body,

places not covered in technological fabrics

that ripped just the same as any other.

Ankles, wrists, the neck.

The lesson I learned from you is:

Not every love is like another, and
Not every message gets returned.

Can You Move the Vortex? on The Nervous Breakdown

2010-11-04T13:41:00.004-04:00

I have a new short essay up over at The Nervous Breakdown, which is, as they say, "An online literary publication type deal."

It's basically about this:

"...My entire 20s were spent living in a neighborhood which, either by default or by careful consideration, made me the writer that I am today, and I was afraid that if I moved away from it, I wouldn’t be able to write as well, as much, or at all."

and this

"If my identity was a product of the neighborhood, and my novel was a product of my identity, was it wrong to presume that the novel—extrapolated to my ability to write anything at all, forever and ever again—was contingent upon my living at the corner of 34th Street and 34th Avenue?"

Please click on over, share it, "like" it, etc.

Sunday Morning

2010-10-26T18:45:00.000-04:00

I was doing some research on ARTstor the other day. (ARTstor is an on-line repository of thousands of images from hundreds of institutions across the world. If you are looking for inspiration and Google images ain't doing it for ya, I highly recommend them.) I managed to come across the many variations of "Sunday morning" in art throughout the years. It seems that since the beginning, mornings on Sundays have been the kind of quiet, thoughtful, restorative moments that we all look forward to at the end of the week.Here are some of those Sunday mornings:

Sunday Morning in front of the Arch Street Meeting House, Philadelphia

Attributed to, John Lewis Krimmel, 1811- ca. 1813

Thomas Hovenden

Sunday Morning, 1881

Mary Heilmann

Sunday Morning, 1986

And of course:

Edward Hopper

Early Sunday Morning,

Things I am Thinking About This Week

2010-10-15T21:12:00.002-04:00

-Sorry it's been so long. Sometimes the world makes too difficult for me to compose my thoughts. Between gay bashings, gay torturings, Obama's idiocy regarding DOMA and DADT, Carl Paladino's iciocy, a brief bout with a seasonal cold, and what might be a touch of early seasonal-affective disorder or plain old creative comedown, I have felt too spread out to make any real sense.

-We saw La Bête on Broadway, which starred a very underused David Hyde Pierce and Joanna Lumley, being steamrolled over by the very good, but very exhausting and not particularly specifically-memorable, Mark Rylance. All the performances are quite lovely, but they are, sadly, weighted down by this play that, well, I just didn't want any part of after fifteen minutes. In writing circles, we might say "I am not the audience for this work."

-Delores Van Cartier, which is the name of the lounge-singer in disguise played by Whoopi Goldberg in "Sister Act," is the best name I've heard in a while.

-Is Sister Act ever really coming to Broadway?

-I found it fascinating that there was press regarding the fact that Jonathan Franzen's fantastic novel "Freedom" was not nominated for the National Book Award. (I found the book to be wholly-engrossing, purely pleasurable, and carefully, wisely written. Pretty fucking fantastic.) It was as if people couldn't stop talking about how they are ready to stop talking about it.

-Does anybody still order transcripts from television talk shows?

-Kip is sitting next to me on the couch, making us a White Tree of Gondor from aluminum armature and sculpey. I am the luckiest guy in the universe.

Reading in the Waterfalls Room at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

2010-10-04T12:09:00.002-04:00

Who You Are

2010-09-29T21:44:00.004-04:00

1.
On Sunday, some of us went to see Laurie Anderson's new show "Delusion" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I first encountered her work in high school, when ou theater class was looking at artists whose performances were some mix of sound, visual art, theater and "performance art," which still has a certain dreadful ring to it, I think, for most people. We were learning about boundaries in theater, or lack of boundaries. I loved what we studied. Some day, I thought, I will see Laurie Anderson in person. She will do what she does, and I will be who I am. A lot of my thinking back then had something to do with who I would be once that person emerged. Does everyone think this way in high school? That the real you is somewhere inside waiting to get out? Perhaps this feeling never ends for some people--but I feel, at my (I know) very young age of 32, that I am finally who I am. So, with that, I saw Laurie Anderson.

I was somewhat lost for the first half of the performance--not lost in that I wasn't following the story, which is not to say that her work is a linear story--but I felt that my experience of it wasn't as rich as it could have been. I was fussing with the seat, those awful balcony stools at the Harvey Theater, which surely were put there as some hideous last resort. I was distracted by the Werther's Original hard candy that my friend Jaime brought, and which was doing this incredibly thing to my taste buds, because I hadn't tasted a Werther's Original in many many years, and it was like a supersonic journey through time to the last time I tasted one as soon as it went into my mouth.

But then, she started talking about the moon. Specifically, she was talking about NASA's plan--a very long range plan, something along the lines of 5,000 years--to move all industry and manufacturing to the moon, thus leaving the Earth to repair herself without interference. Then she talked about how the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese were arguing about who owned the moon. Everyone claimed it.

After that, and until the end of the show, I was transfixed--absorbed into the music and the emotional waves pouring out of her and over the audience. I really felt like who I am.

2.
On Tuesday night some of us went to see James Franco play Allen Ginsburg in the new movie "Howl," which is based on the poem. I didn't know anything about the movie in advance--which is actually unlike me. Turns out, it's not the typical biopic where they show the hero going through his trials and then he finds success and becomes famous, etc. Or dies. This was something excitingly different.

At first the acting style seemed jarring--everyone seemed to be in on something, a very subtle wink at the audience, because we all know that Ginsburg was a genius and his work will probably live forever and ever and change lives of young poets and writers (and gay kids) for eternity. But eventually, between the animation and the interviews and the incredibly lucid language of Howl itself--you just get won over by the man himself...as played by James Franco. Basically, it's like 90 minutes of poet porn. Go.

After the movie, over beers and burgers and quesadillas and sweet potato fries at Trailer Park bar after the movie, Jenny Romaine and I were talking about muses. Who is yours, or what is yours? I told her I didn't believe in that kind of mysticism--that the work is just the work and I either don't know where it comes from, or don't want to know where it comes from. (I then proceeded to go on and on about Joan Didion and how everything I do is for her, or maybe because of her, I can't tell the difference...and Romaine asked me if I was sure I didn't have any muses.)

Then I thought maybe I was misunderstanding her.

So, things got late, and we kept talking, and talking, about what publishing has meant to me. (In sort: all great things you can never prepare for, and some uncomfortable things which change the relationship you have with your work...but mainly very, very good things.) And I decided that, since it was after 11:00pm, and all I wanted at that moment was to be in bed covered in cats and talk to my boyfriend about our days, I would take a cab home. And I decided that somewhere along the way, in the cab, I would figure out who or what the muse was. (If not Joan. Of course.)

Along Fourth Avenue, there was a building under construction--being built or being renovated, sometimes it's difficult to determine in this town--and it was covered by a large blue tarp, the basic blue tarp you can buy at any hardware store. The wind was blowing softly through the window of the cab when it stopped at the red light in front of the building. And this soft wind was making the tarp billow, curling out and back, brushing against the concrete, making the most delicious, satisfying, crisp, singular sound. It hit me: that's my muse. Not the building, not the tarp itself--but the sound of it.

Things can be that simple, which is what I couldn't articulate back at the Trailer Park bar. I am still learning things. It takes a long time to figure out who you are.

Coming Up!

2010-09-27T06:39:00.000-04:00

A few more events on the calendar:

Wednesday, Sept 29 - 7:30pm
Bar on A, 170 Avenue A
part of Guerrilla Lit Series

Saturday, Oct 2 - 9:00pm
Brooklyn Museum of Art
part of First Saturdays

Tuesday, Oct 5 - 6:00pm
Dixon Place Lounge, 161A Chrystie Street
with Sam J. Miller and Alexander Chee

Wednesday, Oct 27 - 8:00pm
Nowhere Bar, 322 East 14th Street
part of PANIC!

This is a Test

2010-09-19T20:35:00.005-04:00

The day after the 9th anniversary of September 11th,
we stood at the edge of the great hole in the ground,
where the great buildings once stood,
and watched thousands of birds caught
in the two great columns of light,
which are lit each year to mark the memory of the day,
of the lives that were lost,
and the thing that happened.

We do not reach desperately into the cold dark.
We do not grope for meaning in the great black sky.
Rather, we are blinded by the brightness of our grief.
We spend hours wandering the density of it.
We are unguided, made tired hungry zombies
by the rich colors of our memories,
and the instinct to find safer climates,
where winters
and sadness
can not find us.

The sign above the roadway of the Williamsburg Bridge,
as we drove from Manhattan to Brooklyn,
which is designed to warn drivers about traffic
and construction issues ahead,
blinked over and over: THIS IS A TEST.

Yield at Your Local Library

2010-09-12T07:47:00.000-04:00

You can find Yield at the following local libraries. God bless them, every one.

-Birmingham-Jefferson Public Library, AL

-Mill Valley Public Library, CA
-Santa Monica Public Library, CA
-Torrance Public Library, CA

-Denver Public Library, CO
-Douglas County Library, CO
-Pikes Peak Library District, CO

-Ferguson Library, CT
-New Haven Free Public Library, CT
-Pequot Library, CT

-Alachua County Library District, FL
-Orange County Library System, FL
-Sarasota County Library System, FL

-Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, GA

-Ames Public Library, IA
-West Des Moines Public Library, IA

-Bloomington Public Library, IL
-Champaign Public Library and Information Center, IL
-Highland Park Public Library, IL
-Shaumburg Township District Library, IL

-Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, IN
-Monroe County Public Library, IN
-St. Joseph County Public Library, IN
-Tippecanoe County Public Library, IN

-Johnson County Library, KS
-Wichita Public Library, KS

-Lexingon Public Library, KY
-Louisville Free Public Library, KY

-Merrimack Valley Library Consortium, MA

-Anne Arundel County Public Library, MD
-Caroline County Public Library, MD
-Cecil County Public Library, MD
-Prince George's County Memorial Library System, MD

-The Library Network, MI
-Superiorland Library Coop, MI

-Ramsey County Public Library, MN

-Mid-Continent Public Library, MO

-Cumberland County Public Library, NC
-Durham County Library, NC
-Greensboro Public Library, NC

-Bismark Veteran's Memorial Public Library, ND
-Fargo Public Library, ND

-Ocean County Library, NJ

-Brooklyn Public Library, NY
-Finger Lakes Library System, NY
-Onondaga County Public Library, NY
-Suffolk Cooperative Library System, NY
-Westchester Library System, NY

-Cleveland Public Library, OH
-Columbus Metropolitan Library, OH
-Cuyahoga County Public Library, OH
-Dayton Metropolitan Library, OH
-Marion Public Library, OH
-Public Library of Cincinnati / Hamilton County, OH
-Worthington Public Library, OH

-Tulsa City-County Library, OK

-Washington County Cooperative Library, OR

-Reading Public Library, PA

-Ocean State Libraries, RI

-Salt Lake City Public Library, UT

-Norfolk Public Library, VA
-Virginia Beach Public Library System, VA
-Williamsburg Library, VA

-King County Library System, WA
-Seattle Public Library, WA

-Beloit Public Library, WI
-Northeast Wisconsin Public Library, WI
-Lakeshores Library System, WI
-South Center Library System, WI
-Milwaukee County Federated Library System, WI

-Eastern Panhandle Library Network, WV

Oh, and in the U.K.: The British Library.

An Elaboration

2010-09-08T21:33:00.003-04:00

The Q&A part of a reading can be difficult for the writer. You're trying to understand the question which is sometimes asked from the back of the room with a mushy mouth. You're thinking of what you want to say to answer the question, and you're wondering if you are making any sense, and wondering whether you are going on too long, or not long enough. And so, I wanted to take a minute to elaborate on one of the questions that I was asked at last night's Barnes & Noble event, in hopes that if I didn't completely get the right answer out, I'm taking a second chance here.

Q: Do you get writer's block?

A: I don't. I've never had trouble getting words out of me, but I constantly have trouble getting the right words out. So far, at least, is has never dried up. I think non-writers ask this question because they think it's something that every writer feels every now and then. I think writer's ask this question because they are looking for ways out of it--they want to know if you have any practical strategies.

So, the only strategy I have is this: make your work less precious. Kill your babies, as they say. If you are having trouble writing, write something else. Write something you think is awful, something you'd never want anyone to see. You have to remember that you're a living, breathing artist, and the work you produce is going to be uneven. It's going to be fragile, and it's going to need time to mature and become something great. (This is why novels take a long, long time; we want you to feel the passing of time that happened during the making of it.)

This is not to say that I want you to make your work "less good." I don't, and you shouldn't either. It should be the most fantastic, the most political, the most beautiful, the most perfect version of the story you have inside you that is dying, unbearably, to get outside of you. But that kind of writing only comes with revision, and until you have a first draft, you can't revise. So write, write, write through the pain, through the blockage, just write.

And if you really, truly, impossibly, can not write....then do something else for a while. Pausing is not the same as stopping. While you're taking a break, make colored paper collages with cheap materials you buy from the 99 cent store. Make brioche. Listen. Listen deeply to what's close and . Keep the movement in your brain, and keep the movement in your fingers.

If you're working on a novel, at some point in the writing of it, it will want to be the only words. (I think Alexander Chee was the first person to tell me this would happen, and like most things he says, it was true.) You will be unable to read the newspaper, or other books. You will be unable to concentrate on anything but the narrative that your characters are living in. This is the opposite of writer's block, when the story and the paragraphs will be coming faster than you can get them down--like a storm on the prairie that you can see coming from far, far away. But until this happens, let yourself be distracted by the museum, by Bernadette Peters in A Little Night Music, by the brioche, by the long chatty conversation with your mother on a Friday night.

Well, now this post ended up being a bit rambling and not very sense-making either. This is a difficult question to elaborate on. Thank you to the guy who asked this last night--from the back of the room, in a clear voice.

More Events!

2010-09-04T08:40:00.001-04:00

Three more readings coming up. You can find the entire list here.

Saturday, Sept 11
7pm
Von Bar, 3 Bleecker Street
with Rakesh Satyal and Frank Polito

Saturday, Oct 2
9pm
Brooklyn Museum of Art

Wednesday, Oct 27
8pm
Nowhere Bar
part of PANIC !

Buy the Book!!

2010-09-01T08:29:00.003-04:00

Yield is finally in the world, on bookshelves (practically) everywhere, and in warehouses waiting to be shipped to your gleaming front doors.

I think the best way to buy the book is from an independent bookseller. But if you prefer, you can order from Amazon.com, where you can get the paperback or the Kindle edition. Barnes&Noble.com also has paperbacks and digital editions, and of course there is always one of the best indie bookstores in the (known) universe, Powell's.

If you live in New York City, you can get signed copies from the Barnes & Noble on 6th Avenue and 10th Street, or starting Sept 3rd, the Union Square B&N. You can also order signed copies directly from my website--and those books come with a cool free bonus gift!!

Also, some more reviews are in!

"Solid, unsentimental storytelling distinguishes Houck's first time out."
--Publisher's Weekly

"Five Stars."
--Echo Magazine

"Perfect emotional pitch...a brilliant, beyond-coming-out story."
--Book Marks

"Surprisingly thoughtful, emotional and erotic."
--Instinct Magazine

I am so thrilled to be able to share the book with everyone, finally.

Away in Vermont

2010-08-26T17:06:00.002-04:00

I am sitting at a very old, very beautiful dining room table in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont half-listening to a story on NPR about butterflies. Someone has figured out a way to tag and track butterflies, the same way they tag eagles or sharks, but I didn’t hear all the details of the story—the how the do the tagging, and what the tag physically is—because I am working on some new writing projects which I came here to hopefully finish, and those are taking most of my attention. Some of the butterflies which were tagged in Vermont ended up at the Connecticut shore. Some of them ended up in Mexico, where they usually go for the winter months. To me this made the butterflies sound like retirees.

Moments ago, the 21 year-old son of the friends that I am staying with came into the kitchen to tell his father, my host whose dinner table I am sitting at, what kind of noises that his car is making. “Angry grinding noises,” he says, and then he makes the noise for all of us—a loud, angry grinding sound which makes all of us laugh. This is a perfect moment, and it rivals the joy of feeding the forty chickens in the backyard, which I did this morning. “I’m not good at laundry,” the kid says, when he is asked to help. “I am good at my own, but I always mess up if I have to do someone else’s.”

My novel will be released on Tuesday. So I am here for a few days of brain rest and rejuvenation before that experience begins. I have no idea what to expect, but I am expecting to feel a lot, to have a lot of reactions. And I want to be in the kind of mental place where I can take it all in. I was reading an article in Vanity Fair about Angelina Jolie by Rich Cohen who wrote: “I noticed everything…as you notice everything in a video game: because who knows what you’ll need, what will mean your advancement, what will be your demise.” I realize when I read this that this is why I have come to Vermont: to ready my brain like September is a video game. I’m doing a lot of events.

On the way up here, I stopped to get gas at the same exit where I was in March of 2009 when my agent called to tell me that someone was about to make an offer on the novel. I figured it was a lucky place, so I bought four scratch-off lottery tickets. The lady who sold them to me asked me which kind I wanted, and she pointed to the big acrylic case where all the rolls of tickets were held. “Red?” she asked. “These red ones are the most popular.” This is when I became suspicious of her motives, perhaps wrongly-so, because I went against her recommendation and bought the blue kind—Sparkling Diamonds—and ended up not winning. Four dollars, goodbye. Oh well. I still win: my novel comes out on Tuesday.

Garden Update!

2010-08-16T08:38:00.006-04:00

I was relieved when my friend June said to me: "It's not really about anything other than growing." I was complaining that my shishito plant was only yielding one or two peppers every three weeks or so, which, to give you an idea, when I cook them for part of dinner, I usually start with a pound or so. June clarified that the act of gardening is often less about the physical reaping than the excitement of just watching something do what it does.

Thus, the morning glories have finally started blooming all over the railing. I like them, despite how they take over everything and at one point began shooting out into the cucumber and I had to intervene lest we have our whole garden taken over. It's true, they don't have much dignity, but they are beautiful.

The green peppers are finally growing--there are these two on the plant, and a few more starting. Actually, I think these will be red or yellow peppers once they are mature. That's the shishito behind it.

Finally there is the "Mideast Prolific Cucumber" plant, which spun itself all over the concrete and hung down the back of the railing into the yard, covered in flowers, but for many weeks made no attempt at a cucumber. Then I went to water and low-and-behold! There is a single huge cucumber hiding under a leaf. Look how it's just resting on the dirt! Who knows what mysteries the garden holds!

Death of the Poet

2010-08-08T22:58:00.007-04:00

You said you'd done 200 push ups, and then
we looked at each other.
I said: "Your arms look like it."
You said: "Do they?"
Then we said nothing for a while.
I thought you were comfortable with silences.
Then I realized that you didn't have
anything to say.

If I have to write one more poem about the distance
between you and me
--the singular me and the royal you--
then I'm going to die a slow,
mournful, ugly, selfish death,
writhing in cowardly pitifulness,
like something out of a Paul Verhoeven
movie, but not the popular ones.
The ones they don't show anywhere at midnight.

A Happy Expectation

2010-08-03T18:14:00.004-04:00

Things are good. I am finally starting to get excited about Yield being out in the world. That might sound crazy to those of you who are not me--and, um, I guess that's all of you. A box of finished books arrived the other day, and I stacked all of them up on the kitchen table. I looked at them, I held them in my hands. The transformation into a physical object is the real magic--I now know what a sculptor feels when the stone at last reveals itself to be a lady, or a beast, or a flower. I think what I mean by "finally getting excited" is "finally feeling content." There are a lot of fears that come with publishing--and I think I've somehow figured out how to work my way around those fears, how to process through them, and now I just have a kind of happy expectation.

My friend Andrew brought me a plum tree from the orchard where he works. Kip planted in the backyard, digging through the dirt there, which, we discovered is mostly clay and stones. It's beautiful, just standing there. It seems like it's waiting for something. Or perhaps I have projected this sense of anticipation on it...in any case, as a gesture of gratitude, I took Andrew a copy of the book. And right there in the market, he started reading it. I watched him pick it up every now and then, dipping into it between customers, like a person can do when you work the kind of retail that we do. That, I really loved.

In addition to all the events I previously mentioned, there are a few more in the works--one more New York City date, and some others that need some ironing out. Stay tuned. I can't wait to share all of it with all of you.

Sold for $20

2010-07-24T20:54:00.003-04:00

Back in the early spring, a photographer from Getty Images came through the Greenmarket and gave a bunch of us twenty dollars* each for taking our picture. Here's what emerged from that brief session--me and David looking slightly uncomfortable, but twenty bucks richer:

Here's how Getty categorized our picture:
People, Casual Clothing, Confidence, Happiness, Freshness, Table, Jar, Abundance, Retail, Vertical, Looking At Camera, Waist Up, Outdoors, 20-24 Years, 30-34 Years, Front View, Stubble, Cheerful, Caucasian Ethnicity, Standing, Smiling, USA, Day, New York State, New York City, Adult, Young Adult, Mid Adult, Syrup, Large Group of Objects, Two People, Young Men, Mid Adult Men, Only Men, Portrait, Photography, Farmer's Market, Adults Only.

*It's certain that I am violating the model's release that I signed by posting this picture here--or at least I am violating the Getty Image Bank's rules about who can post what without payment. But I loved the categories too much not to post it, and were I to go through the motions, and I priced this vaguely via the site, it would cost me about $600.00. So....

September Readings

2010-07-21T12:59:00.003-04:00

If you are in or near the NYC area, please come out to hear me read, and get your copy of YIELD signed, at any of the following events:

Tuesday, Sept 7 - 7pm
Barnes & Noble, 82nd and Broadway
Reading/Signing

Tuesday, Sept 14 - 7pm-9pm
Sugarland, 221 North 9th Street, Williamsburg
Book Party with Open Bar/Reading

Thursday, Sept 16 - 8pm
Happy Ending Lounge, 302 Broome Street
part of In The Flesh Series

Wednesday, Sept 29 - 7:30pm
Bar on A, 170 Avenue A
part of Guerrilla Lit Series

Tuesday, Oct 5 - 6:00pm
Dixon Place Lounge, 161A Chrystie Street
with Sam J. Miller

Fridge Poems, Vol. 5

2010-07-18T18:36:00.000-04:00

Someone gave me--maybe it was my mother--a set of magnetic poetry pieces, which spent almost 10 years stuck to one side of my fridge. In the first few years I spent living in my apartment, people made poems with the tiny words, but eventually, it became uninteresting, or too difficult, or some other reason. No new poems were made, but the old ones stuck. When I moved, I tossed the tiny pieces, but saved the poems that my friends had written via my digital camera. The pics are bad, but the poems are real. This is volume 5 of 5.

A Moment of Stuckness

2010-07-12T21:11:00.003-04:00

For dinner tonight I made pesto from Greenmarket basil, as well as some basil that I picked from our container garden on the back porch. I kept dumping things into the food processor that I was trying to get rid of. First, it was a quarter cup of cashews, to go with the normal basil, lemon juice, and walnuts since I didn't have pine nuts. Then it was a cup or so of steamed broccoli, which was leftover from last night's dinner, then it was some frozen peas that I felt like needed to go somewhere (read: my belly.) It was a diehard Italian's nightmare, certainly.

Now Kip is upstairs watching The Golden Girls on WE, and I'm downstairs typing this and spending time with The Bean, who, as you might have previously read, isn't ready to join the other two cats in co-habitation just yet. She seems perfectly happy down here, though she does sound what we call the "Love Alarm," which is a kind of happy-sounding, somewhat-impatient sounding series of chirps and meows, which we can hear all the way through the apartment. The other day, we decided to let the three of them re-meet each other, and expecting the worst, were surprised when she hissed dramatically, and the boys were scared shitless and went running back upstairs to their part of the apartment. You just never know.

The days and nights seem slower since we moved in together, somehow. This is a good thing, not a complaint. I just want to get back into the motion of writing, which has eluded me for the last several months. First I was packing and sorting and throwing away, then I was unpacking and re-sorting and still throwing away, and now I am basically settled, but can't seem to find the steam again. The new novel is in that early stage of becoming material, but still too early to be anything substantial. In other words, I can see all the flaws, but can't do anything about them yet because I'm still working through it. Rather, the book it still deciding what it is. This is kind of a nightmare place for me to be. I feel both trapped by it, and far away from it. I try to start new sections, pick up at a new place each time, but that has just left me feeling even more fractured and unhappy with it. This is always the case at some point. Just because it's a familiar feeling doesn't mean it's not unpleasant. Ugh.

Fridge Poems, Vol. 4

2010-07-08T22:35:00.000-04:00

Shows / Peppers / Hearse

2010-07-01T19:38:00.000-04:00

--On Sunday we went to see Billy Elliot, which was, I regret to say, mostly stale and without focus. I think the original production was probably outstanding--the direction is the only thing that saved it from being a completely worthless evening. There are some fantastic visuals and, thankfully, the action never seems to slow. But the show has to compete with the film version, which is arguably flawless in its emotional pitch, and its ability to hang on to a moment. There were no moments in this show, only people doing what they do eight times a week.

--Alternately, we saw the utterly engrossing and fantastic revival of La Cage aux Folles on Tuesday, with Kelsey Grammer, and the incomparable (and now Tony Award-winning) Douglas Hodge. How refreshing, how inspiring, how fulfilling to see something so grand and real and hilarious! This show is full of moments. The gags come freely and lightly, with a kind of joy about them that I haven't seen on Broadway in a long while. (I'm remembering the first few performances of Spamalot, where the audience was just so crazy excited about what they were seeing.) This show felt like that. If you are nearby, or far away, go right now to see it. It's spectacular.

--Our shishito pepper plant made one giant pepper. We were shocked! Remember a while ago when I was talking about how I didn't really see plants. I didn't really get the miracle of them? Here is the miracle of growing things. You leave for work and when you come home there is a shishito pepper waiting to be plucked off, tickled with olive oil, blistered in your great-grandmother's cast iron, dusted with sea salt, and savored. Look, I shouted to nobody, a miracle! I showed Kip, "Look!" "Where did that come from?" he said.

--Here is a really new, really beautiful song by Ani Difranco.

This Nightlife

2010-06-28T10:55:00.002-04:00

for Robert Maril

It's 100 degrees in New York City,
and the only thing that can save you,
is the insane sparkling explosion of
Dr. Brown's Black Cherry Soda
on your tongue, like the future's version
of what a cherry used to taste like,
before the absence of bees
eliminated them not only from our mouths
but from our memory.
Then a stranger, a boy with cutoff jeans
and a string of red plastic beads says,
"Where is fashion in a time like this?"

--Acidic light, laid over the walls and floors
like a bright blanket of paisley laser beams.
--You holding onto me, attaching yourself,
saying, "This nightlife,"letting the idea hold in the air.
--Then, "I can't do this anymore."

Fridge Poems, Vol. 3

2010-06-24T10:34:00.000-04:00

As Featured In

2010-06-21T12:21:00.005-04:00

Many months ago, they made a movie called "The Backup Plan" with Jennifer Lopez. In it, she is a single lady who falls in love with a cheese farmer. And this cheese farmer sells his cheese as a farmer's market that, at least in the film, is a Hollywood-looking version of the Union Square Greenmarket. Deep Mtn. Maple, whose farm I work for, sent dozens of empty bottles to be filled with tea, or some other brown liquid, so that the maple syrup stand in the film--this is supposed to be the Northeast, remember, not a California backlot--would look real. This attention to subtlety would give the film's audience an almost unconscious sense of place. Or maybe it would be totally unconscious, since this is as much screen time as we got: (See that yellow tent behind JLo that says "Deep Mountain?")

Interestingly, or perhaps not interestingly, there is also a shot of this stand.....Northeast farm fail.

Fridge Poems, Vol. 2

2010-06-16T06:33:00.000-04:00

Trying to See Plants

2010-06-13T13:48:00.008-04:00

Today, we went to Lowe's. We got lots and lots of pots, huge bags of dirt and some tools. Our new house has a garden out back--er, rather, about 300 square feet of dirt which we hope to eventually make into a garden. (Is a garden a place, or a place-in-progress, or does it matter?)

As I said to my friend Nick, "I don't really see plants." Which is to say that, yes, I see them, but I don't really register them as something I'm interested in. Does that sound crazy? Since I'm a person who spends his weekends at work in a place overtaken by the glorious bounty of the earth? I can't remember the kinds of things that each of them needs. Lots of water or not much water? Lots of sun or shade? And what is partial sun? And remembering to pick and prune and cut and all that, I just can't figure any of it out.

Thank goodness for Kip. He has put everything that I bring home into the kind of container it likes, seems to know what they will need when they need it, and hasn't complained at all when I bring home strange things like . (I am not as easy-going when it comes to, well, okay, everything.) We don't want to put anything into the ground that we plan to eat--who knows what's gone on back here for the last fifty years--so for the time being it's all in pots. Eventually, we hope to rip up this strange material the previous tenants put over the ground, and figure out what to do with the space. Decking? Chairs? Planting boxes? A pool?

Here's what we're growing so far: Green Grape Tomatoes, some other kind of tomato, Peppers (red and yellow, shishito, orange thai, serrano, poblano), Genovese basil, sweet thai basil, French and lime thyme, French tarragon, rosemary, cucumbers, lavender, Turkish parsley, Crimson Climber Morning Glory, Moonflower, and Giant Salmon Rose Zinnias. Does that sound like a lot?

And here's what it looks like:
If any of you have tips you can let me know. Like, forreal.

Fridge Poems, Vol. 1

2010-06-09T22:28:00.003-04:00

Brooklyn !!

2010-06-03T07:33:00.002-04:00

Kip's cats were inseparable, like a single animal with one set of thoughts--twin boys, mostly Russian Blue, skittish but loving and lively. They slept together, ate together, smothered us with their furry nuzzles in the bed together. Then we woke up one morning two months ago to find Joel walking funny. Actually, the way he was limping his hind leg made me feel as if something was seriously wrong--my instinct said this can not wait until later, he needs to go to the doctor right now. I wondered if he'd broken his foot in the night, or caught a toe somewhere and had to pull himself free. The vet said that it was bone cancer, and his legs were eaten up with it. We aren't the kind of people to let things drag on and on, and so Joel never came home. Since then, Zane has been a new, refreshed kind of cat--demanding more and more attention in the cutest, most delicious of ways, and wanting nothing more than to be by our sides at every moment. Yesterday, when I moved my two cats from Astoria to our new apartment in Ditmas Park, I wondered how the meeting would go.

When Zane saw Bad Thing (yes, that's his name) for the first time, electricity fired through the air and Zane made the most incredible, completely recognizable--which is to say, human--movements. It was so clear. He thought it was Joel, then upon realizing that it wasn't, he blinked, set down his head, and let out a sad, guttural wail. I'll never forget it. This first, tiny interaction was enough to send me into a spiral of sadness and longing, which I'm sure was nothing like the confused tunnel of memories that Zane was going through. We recognize that cats are "like" us a little bit, but we too often see ourselves as different creatures. What a beautiful, extraordinary, unexpectedly emotional moment.

Since then, they have growled, hissed and postured, in every room of the new house, trying to figure out who belongs where--maybe not understanding that as of yesterday they both belong everywhere. The most coveted area is, of course, the bed, where both of the humans are laying flat for long periods of time, and are most likely to hug and squeeze and love them. We'll see how that works out.

The move has been a lovely one, despite the days of stress and anxiety and uncertainty, and I am sure that when the boxes are all unpacked and the house starts to look like somewhere people could actually live, we'll settle in nicely. People keep asking if the move "went well." It did, despite my movers showing up 2 hours late. Although the hardest part is the part we're doing now--the deciding not only where to put everything, but more importantly, how you want to move through your space. How do you want to sit in your new office? Where should each "category" of kitchen item live? What art do you want to look at when you sit in this chair, or that chair? How do you work the dishwasher, and the new-fangled stove that preheats to 400 degrees in 6 minutes, no really.

Bean, my more adorable and more, um, Rubenesque cat, has spent the last 48 hours under the guest bedroom in the basement. She has come out once to pee--that I know of, and a few times I can coax her out for a few minutes of loving and a little sip of water. The last time I moved--9 years ago, when she was 4 years old--she stayed wrapped up inside an overcoat on a chair for three days. I want my happy little girl back.

I'm thrilled, don't get me wrong. The house is so beautiful, and so full of promise and opportunity, not to mention the most luxurious washer/dryer and central air that a person could desire. Oh yeah, and we have a backyard--it's a wreck right now, but soon (soonish?) we'll have a deck and some plants and a little garden party.

But...promise me that we made the right choice. Promise me that the bumps in the road ahead will be remembered as tiny victories over the things we used to think were problems, but really weren't. Promise me that soon we'll all end up, the five of us, napping and talking and loving in the bed with no growling or hissing (or snoring from the boyfriend). Promise me that everything will be alright.

What I Am Thinking About This Week

2010-05-24T20:59:00.007-04:00

Today, as I begin changing everything I can think of from my old address to my new address, I am thinking of every place my information resides--banks, insurance, magazines and post office, credit cards, AAA, more and more, and more that I surely have forgotten. I'm also thinking about all this Facebook privacy stuff, how everyone is going crazy reacting to the idea that maybe your "information" has been compromised, and what is going to happen when your "information" is leaked to "outside sources." And, on top of that, I'm thinking of the census takers who I see walking around neighborhoods, with their clipboards and their open, hopeful faces. And also their begging and knocking on doors and talking to people who are too confused, or jaded, or suspicious to answer the questions. In short: I am thinking about all the ways in which we want and don't want to be known.

I am curious about the shock and surprise people are having, or are at least expressing, when they find out that Facebook, a free service, has shared their "information" with third party websites in order to, well, sell you things. I only ask: What did you expect from a website that asked you to enter all your "information" and then tracked every click of here and there? Also, What information are you trying to protect? Also, it only knows what you tell it.

I am thinking about one of my favorite things in New York, which is the moment when you put something on the curb that you don't need any more and then you go to get a Vietnamese ravioli, and when you come back, it's gone. I am thinking about how I love, love, love the efficiency of this. And I am even imagining what the object must feel when it is given a new home, and suddenly made useful once again. This makes me think of Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Famous" where she says "I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous/or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular/but because it never forgot what it could do."

Right this moment, I am thinking: I should not have eaten the entire of bag of potato chips.

"Now you have to start letting it go," said Peter, my editor, after I turned in the final draft of my novel. I thought I had been doing that since 2005, which was when I originally finished it. (I say that--originally--because not only did Peter ask me to write a new scene or two, and to adjust a thing or two, I think I probably could have tinkered with it for another five years. It's true when they say you never finish a novel, you just stop.) But I hadn't really let it go. Do you ever? I tell you this about Peter firstly because he was right (as per usual) and also because I notice myself wondering how I am reflected in the work, and wondering how to let go of that. Just tonight, I handed a galley to a friend of a friend and thought "Oh, there I go, into his hand, into his head, and digested." (Of course, this is not really how we read books, and I know that, so I am aware that it's me and not the real thing that's happening.) What's interesting, and hard to deal with, apparently, is how I want to be known for the book, but also distance myself from the book. Oh, art, you are so complicated and wonderful and I love you!

New Occupations

2010-05-19T11:17:00.002-04:00

Pie-rate
Phishmonger
Revengineer
Turban Planner
Cluckmaker
Investment Bonker
Flautaist
Buttler
S'morrier

What You Find When You Go Through Everything

2010-05-13T19:54:00.000-04:00

Go Ahead and Pre-Order, Folks

2010-05-07T20:56:00.002-04:00

You can now pre-order Yield from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's, or you can even track down an independent bookstore in your area who will order and (probably) hold a copy just for you. They might even know you already and are interested in what smart people like yourself are choosing to read. I know I am interested in what you are reading.

Amazon also offers a Kindle Edition, for those of you who have too much going on to, you know, actually turn a page. (Actually, if someone out there has a Kindle, please buy the digital edition and use the Text-to-Speech feature for me--I want to hear the Kindle read it out loud....creepy!)

The web page for Yield has also been revamped quite a bit, with a downloadable excerpt, an interview with me about the book and my writing process, and the Reading Group Guide for those of you who want to read Yield together and talk about it--which I love. On the same page is also a map I created using scenes from the novel as well as my own remembrances of New York City, and also some of the settings and ideas that inspired the novel. If you are the type, join the Facebook group.

Once the book is here, you will be able to order signed copies directly from me. And if you, indeed are reading Yield in a book group, I am happy to make an appearance at one of your meetings either via phone or Skype--all you have to do is ask.

from 1997, Part 3

2010-05-04T07:40:00.000-04:00

This, the last entry in the journal:

1-2-98. 3:30pm.
Moved in somewhat. Boxes are still everywhere, everything impossible to find. I seem to need everything at once. I'm living in Chris's room until I have a bed. We watched the video of [our high school performance of Brecht's Caucasian] Chalk Circle.
The space is great, a little nervous, but excited. We had a good dinner at some cafe on St. Mark's, which I liked, I'd go there again. Blackened salmon with mashed sweet potatoes. Mom and Dad are doing well. They like the city.
Furniture shopping today. Sleeping here will be tough. I have all this noise outside my window to combat. Talked to everyone back home. No one is helping each other. I don't know what to say. I hope I can really be myself in this place. Like really be the best version of myself here. It's wonderful what's already been established. But Chris's room is a mess.

from 1997, Part 2

2010-05-01T22:33:00.000-04:00

More from the three pages of my journal. At this point, I'm still in the car with my parents, driving north from Chattanooga to TN.

12-31-97. 12:30pm.
Had a long conversation about T with my parents at a McDonald's somewhere outside of Asheville. Hearing them react shows me how good I've got it. I got my Dad to open the back of the car so I could get my CDs, and now I've got Shawn Colvin with me. Still snowing heavily, hopefully we won't run into any problem on the way. I feel good. I'm sure we'll be fine. I'm supposed to call T tonight. I hope he doesn't break anything or burn the house down.
We have almost 5 more hours of driving until we stop for the evening. That will put us into NY about 2:00pm on New Year's Day.
Just now remembering chemistry class and Becky in the 10th grade. And all the notes we passed. We had a good time.

from 1997, Part 1

2010-04-28T08:20:00.000-04:00

I have too many books. Wait, is there such a thing? I have decided that there is. Before we move, I've decided to parcel down my library to a few hundred. I am always buying new ones, so there's that. I hope to move into my new apartment with an empty bookcase.

In the shuffling around, I came across a blank book that was, for three days in 1997, my journal. I have never been good at keeping a journal, they always seemed like too much work going into something that wasn't "the work." But this was a nice surprise. Here's what I was writing on the day before I arrived in New York City, when I was 19:

12-31-97. 7:53am.
Just left Chattanooga for NY. Been driving for only 20 minutes. My cold is annoying but if I can live through my parents doing what they do I'll be fine. I left T at home. I think I really got to him last night. Like me, he is a sentimentalist. I just told him the truth. That we are all worried sick and we loved him too much to watch him do what he does lately. Or what he doesn't do I should say. I think T has always existed inside his head and I suppose he'll go right on.
A new environment will be good. I don't know about all of us in that place. Everyone is counting on me to bring something to it, some kind of maturity, or something. I'm ready. I'll get to play housewife for a while.
Saw my parents holding hands in a movie the other day. Haven't seen that in a while. It made me glad. The snow outside is beautiful. It's nice to have it on the ground. The world is uncomfortable and vulnerable, just as I start to go.
Success has to be in the plan. If not, what? Wish I had my CDs and stuff. Maybe the silence will be good for me. Well, escape only a little bit. I wish I had a puzzle or something. I am amazed at our ability to continue.

Sunset in Astoria Park

2010-04-25T15:31:00.000-04:00

from Wendell Berry

2010-04-22T08:02:00.000-04:00

In Wendell Berry's fantastic essay "In Distrust of Movements," he manages to say clearly what I have been thinking for years, but have never been able to articulate as wisely and wittily. The essay is primarily a discussion of the intersection between the food movement and all other movements, but also speaks to the tendency to reduce action and activism to too-specific ideals.

He writes:

People in movements too readily learn to deny to others the rights and privileges they demand for themselves. They too easily become unable to mean their own language, as when a “peace movement” becomes violent. They often become too specialized, as if finally they cannot help taking refuge in the pinhole vision of the institutional intellectuals. They almost always fail to be radical enough, dealing finally in effects rather than causes. Or they deal with single issues or single solutions, as if to assure themselves that they will not be radical enough.

And so I must declare my dissatisfaction with movements to promote soil conservation or clean water or clean air or wilderness preservation or sustainable agriculture or community health or the welfare of children. Worthy as these and other goals may be, they cannot be achieved alone. I am dissatisfied with such efforts because they are too specialized, they are not comprehensive enough, they are not radical enough, they virtually predict their own failure by implying that we can remedy or control effects while leaving causes in place. Ultimately, I think, they are insincere; they propose that the trouble is caused by other people; they would like to change policy but not behavior.

Apartment Hunting

2010-04-18T22:14:00.003-04:00

For the past six Sundays--my only day off from three "day jobs"--Kip and I have run ourselves all over parts of Brooklyn looking at apartment after apartment, in many different neighborhoods, at many different levels of nice and nicer (some were decidedly not nice) until, this week, we decided to move ahead with a beautiful space on East 7th Street in Kensington. Barring any unforeseen strangeness on the part of the owner, or, say, plumes of volcanic ash, we should find ourselves unpacking boxes and arguing about paint chips on June 1.

So, today, I got to spend the time doing what I like to do best: eat, sleep and watch TV. Kip can sleep through anything, and does, so I usually wake up before him, sit around surfing the Internet and chatting with other early risers, and then after and hour or so, I crawl back into bed and see if I can get a few more minutes rest. Then we lay there petting the cats and talking about what we plant to do with the rest of the day.

We decided that since we didn't have to schedule or re-schedule apartment seeing, wrestle with agents who show up or don't, whose listings are either genuine or not, and whose interest level is probably in direct proportion to the amount of distrustful, shocked looks we tried to hide while they showed us something that had been on the market for many, many months. Not to readers: You don't want to live in an apartment with floor drains in the middle of every space they are calling a bedroom.

There were, however, some incredibly beautiful spaces, and for not that much money. We looked at a place in Crown Heights that retained all the original woodwork from the 1910s, and, oh yeah, had three fireplaces. But, ultimately, the layout was a bit strange and we couldn't figure out how to use the space with the way we wanted. We also looked at a full three-floor house in Lefferts Gardens that was, quite simply, not to be believed. Front porch, backyard, two-car garage, three bedrooms upstairs, three bathrooms, washer and dryer, dishwasher, antique stove, and more and more and more. We decided that we couldn't afford it. Or that we could afford it, but then we'd find ourselves house poor. (Additionally, I didn't want to pay the outrageously high broker's fee to a broker who showed up 15 minutes late in his white Corvette and departed quickly to make it to his martial arts class.)

I'm nervous about the changes ahead. But also looking forward to them. Here's hoping that the cats make friends, that the presence of the dishwasher means that Kip actually does the dishes that I dirty when I cook, that the central air lulls us to sleep every hot summer night, and that the small square of dirt in the back bursts forth with whatever we plant there. Movin' on up, indeed.

If You Can Hear Me

2010-04-10T23:19:00.003-04:00

If you can hear me,
know that I love you.
Years from now, after
you have solved the housing crises
of the thin, coast-stroking nations
of Southeast Asia,
and rounded the spikes of classism
in the wide, collapsing communities
of South America, with
your youthful grin,
I will smooth myself against you
like a balm of kisses.

After you have wrestled with
the sea monsters of all literature
you tuck yourself inside a wooden shoe,
and sleep the great sleep of
a brave boy who jogs up and down stadiums,
absorbed by the sound of
your heartbeat, which does for me,
what hope does for you.

Re-Reading

2010-04-05T22:14:00.005-04:00

I'm sitting here with the unbound version of Yield that will soon go to a printer to be returned to me in galleys. I've been told by the production editor at Kensington to check for "the accuracy of data, typesetting and editing." This is the first time I've seen the book look the way it will look when it is actually a book. Initially, I wrote in 11-point Times New Roman--probably because this was the default on my Word at the time. Then when I started sending the manuscript around to agents I changed it to 12-point Courier because this seemed to be the way they all wanted it. (I was probably wrong about that, but here I am.) Now the book is in something else, I don't know what it is, but it's fluid and has a nice blankness to it, a kind of anonymous-looking font that fits well with the story. But, I've never seen the book like this, and it's proving difficult to adjust.

When I was writing, I paid close attention to the white space on the page. I paid close attention to single words hanging off a line. If a single word fell at the beginning of the line by itself, then I changed the sentence so it wouldn't be like that. I think, now that I've had some distance from the writer I was in my early 20s, that this was all: an attempt to control what you can't control, a concern for something that doesn't really matter that much to the reader, who isn't you, and who doesn't care about that kind of thing, or at least doesn't notice, and also the only way I knew how to tell if the writing was, well, musically, how it should sound.

Suddenly, the book is new again, looking beautifully together, but still strange to me. I'm reading it again, page by page, remembering all the nights spend struggling with it, all the weeks that summer where the pages were plastered all over the walls, the circled verbs, the highlighted sections of imagery, the re-ordered chapters just to see what that was like.

Books sitting on hard drives only serve to corrode the will. But as grateful as you are that you're being published, you feel a certain sadness--not sadness, actually. Growing pains, maybe. You relive the insecurity of starting the thing, the uncertainty of the characters in the beginning, and you remember all the nights spent alone at the desk and the amount of work you have put into it is overwhelming and, perhaps as self-protection, almost impossible to remember.

I'm excited. But also anxious. And insecure, and suddenly shy about it. The reader won't have the same emotional peaks that I have when I read the book--they will have their own, of course, at least one hopes--mine are mostly about my own experience during the crafting of it.

So many disparate things can be true all at once.

The Cover

2010-03-27T09:56:00.000-04:00

Three Upcoming Readings!

2010-03-23T07:22:00.001-04:00

FRIDAY, March 26
7:30pm Doors, $15.00 (no one turned away)
One Arm Red
10 Jay Street, #903, Dumbo, Brooklyn
(F to York, or A/C to High Street)
as part of: Great Small Works Spaghetti Dinner.

WEDNESDAY, March 31
8pm, Free!!
Nowhere Bar
322 East 14th Street, Manhattan
as part of: LOVE PANIC!
also with Jimmy Lam, Nyna, Brandon Lacy Campos and Chadwick Moore.

SATURDAY, April 3
8pm, Free!!
envoy enterprises
131 Chrystie Street, Manhattan
as part of: Brother, My Lover
also with Justin Bond, Saeed Alan Siama, Aaron Tilford, and Colin Fitzpatrick

Spring Cleaning and Other Things

2010-03-18T21:03:00.005-04:00

--Jennifer and I went to see Keigwin+Company last night at the Joyce, which was fabulous. The most real revelation of the evening: horizontal lines with vertical lines going in a diagonal is so satisfying. If you are here in New York, and you can still get a ticket, do go. If you are not in New York, I bet you wish you were. This piece, Runaway, (which for the Joyce run was scaled down a bit) was, for me, the highlight of the evening.

--The plan for the next few weeks is to get some of this shit out of my house. Spring cleaning, if you will, of the shelves and the psyche. Thinking about publicity for Yield has given me such explosions of excitement and anxiety, that I feel I need to get back to the center somehow. I have so many books. Really. And some of them could find new owners.

--Theatrical Roundup! We saw Looped, which sucked hard. We saw God of Carnage, which was, well, what I expected it to be. There seems to be a lot of these plays in the past few years, where adults act like children and are terrible to each other, and they are supposed to be comedies. Janet McTeer, in this one, however, is remarkable, and brought me to tears in her final speech, which is, believe it or not, on the phone. Back in January, we saw the 39 Steps, which seemed stale but born of some brilliance, and then I saw Turandot at the Met, which was incredibly good.

--If you are nearabouts Ft. Greene, check out No. 7 Restaurant, particularly for brunch. We've had, at this point, everything on the brunch menu, and everything is great. I particularly like the fried hominy which comes alongside the grits, and the banana butter that comes with the waffle. Yo can also get a half fried chicken at 11am, which seems intense, but a lot of tables were ordering it as a shared course, which I also recommend. Of course, when you go, the menu might be very different, which is what I also like about No. 7.

See what I mean about wanting to be here?

Being Present

2010-03-12T20:18:00.008-05:00

I am thinking these days about presence. About what creates it. About what makes it real, or maybe palpable, since what is real and what is unreal, these days, I find difficult to decipher. (And, of course, the other huge question here is: Does real matter?) More specifically, I am thinking about how much energy it takes to be present. To respect another person's presence by showing up, by becoming present yourself.

I am first thinking of how being present can take everything out of you. As evidence: me standing on South 4th Street and Bedford Avenue, waiting on the blessed B62 (which, by the way, hasn't gotten better since the restructuring.) There was a man standing there as well, mid 50s maybe, something slightly off-kilter about his clothing. (But this is New York, and you never know anything about anyone, really.) I notice that he's looking at me. Not looking at me like one New Yorker looks at another New Yorker. He's trying to make eye contact. I get the feeling that he wants to ask me something. (This is natural at the bus stop. People often have logistical or directional questions at bus stops, and I, apparently, look like the kind of person who has the answers.) So, I take the bait, and look back at him.

"My wife died," he said. "Two weeks ago. She was 62 years old." "I'm sorry," I said. He said thank you, and we stood there a minute, quietly, waiting on the bus, with this fact suddenly between us.

For the rest of the day I carried all that around with me, and before I crawled into bed, I spent an hour playing thrashy folk songs on the guitar, maybe annoying the neighbors, until all that was out of me and I felt like myself again. He needed to say it out loud. He needed to give some of the weight to someone else so that he could go on with the motion of living. This makes sense to me. Sometimes saying something out loud can make it real. Or sometimes we say things out loud that aren't true at all, and it's a way of feeling the realness of them, if only an instant, like trying on a new pair of strange glasses, or like sliding your feet into a pair of your father's shoes. That guy just needed me to be present. Or, by default, my presence contributed his relief. Even if he made it all up, I was there, and we shared that weird, horrible, tragic conversation. And there was nothing to say afterward.

Second, I went to MoMA to see the Marina Abromovic retrospective. In addition to filling the 6th floor with lots of photos and videos, there are several recreations, or "reperformances" as Abromovic is calling them, by actors, dancers and other performance artists, of her previous work. Meanwhile, for the duration of the exhibit--about 700 hours that is--Abromovic herself will be seated at a table in the main atrium. Museum guests are invited to sit across from her for a duration of their choosing and do nothing but meet her gaze and feel whatever you feel, in a piece called "The Artist is Present." This is what it looks like, from the outside:

Sitting in a chair for an hour is difficult. Try it for 700 hours, all the while under the gaze of lights, viewers, the art world, critics, fans, people who hate you, etc. Marina ain't kidding, y'all. I've been thinking so much about presence after seeing this piece because of the way the reperformances failed to create the kind of excitement, mystery, emotion, verve--any of the things you feel when you see "The Artist is Present" in the Atrium.

So then what is creating that feeling? The situation is so simple, and other than blinking and the slight movement from her breathing, she didn't move at all for the half hour I stood watching her. So how can it be that the reperformances don't carry the same weight, if the actions are the same as in the original pieces? And Abromovic herself has been coaching and training the performers for the past several weeks. It begs the question, what is performance? Is it the sum of the actions, or is it the intention behind the actions? (I recall Yeats here and "how can we know the dancer from the dance?") And if the reperformers are supposed to be truly in the moment, and truly present, then why not call them performers? Why divide the past from the present, if what you are looking for--I think--is the magic of the moment?

In the new piece, Abromovic is basically doing everything at once, controlling every aspect, either directly or indirectly, by just being present. One museum-goer opted to sit across from her for about two hours. This made me angry--this person was taking up so much time, other people were waiting, how selfish! But what does that say about my sense of time? What does that say about my own selfishness? What does it say about what I think about the act of being present, and the limits, or extensions of it?

One of the things I like most about "The Artist is Present" is that the catalog copy calls the piece "generous." Such a rarity in art, I think. A kind of slow, meaningful present generosity.

News of the Week

2010-03-02T20:42:00.004-05:00

--Sometimes I find myself standing in my living room, looking over the shelves, reaching for a book I've read ten times, twenty times. This week, I pulled down Oyster by Janette Turner Hospital, which I first heard about from a Booksense76 newsletter--do those still exist? I wrote this post a while back about her, which popped into my brain when I decided that I had already said all the things I was about to say again. One of the things I wrote then was that her work is: "a response, a reaction, a dialogue with the entire scope of art and artforms: music, opera, poetry, painting." This is true, even more than I remember it. Oyster is complicated, difficult, incredibly rich with language and room and intellect. And I love it.

--I hate teenagers on the bus. I realize that the only time they have to be themselves is the short, unsupervised hour between when school ends and when they arrive at home. So, in a way, the bus is the pinnacle of their real experience with each other. I'm just depressed that the way they talk to each other is so cruel, so destructive. (I do not remember my teenage years being like this. Were they? Was it because I had a group of weirdo friends who made theater together and drank wine at the teacher's house?) Everything to them is about saving face, about being in the middle, not too much of anything. They don't even listen to each other, they just talk, make grand statements about the lesserness of each other. It's disguised by the talk of phones and shoes and what she or he said, and how they said it. Am I a grumpy old person cursing the kids for stepping on the lawn? All of it makes me feel very alone. And I hate it.

--Charles Busch and Julie Halston, and a victorious cavalcade of other fantastically talented people are performing in "The Divine Sister," down at Theater for the New City. They say it's totally sold out, but you can get on the wait list. Do try. It's extraordinary. I think what I find most refreshing about Charles's work is that every one of his plays, when you take away everything, all the references and laughs and over-the-top everything, his work is about finding who you are, and loving who you are, and making the past right, and owning yourself in whatever way you have to. It's theater like nobody else is doing right now, or has ever maybe, and I don't know how the walls of that little theater can ever contain all the joy that they create together. And I love it.

Something New

2010-02-28T07:10:00.000-05:00

Tom stepped out of the bar and into a pool of yellow-ochre light from the streetlamp. Yellow-ochre is the color of this country, he thought, and terracotta. His brain, bathed in a loose veil of red wine and whatever the Italian football players got him to drink, seemed to drift along behind him like an awkward, dumb animal. “Catch up,” he said out loud. “Put your hand in your pocket and find your keys,” he said, to the cracked sidewalk, to the slice of barely visible moon, to anything listening. “You’re going home alone, and you aren’t as drunk as you’re acting.”

Editor's Note

2010-02-22T22:41:00.005-05:00

Back in December of 2008, I wrote this post, a kind of reflection on the year that had been--turning 30, for example. (It has turned out to be superb, not the hellish shift that some people swore it would be.) The post was also about how I felt about writing, about publishing, about work in general. I've been thinking a lot about that post, and whether it makes any sense to amend it, or maybe clarify it. I realize now that it was really about how I felt about what I thought publishing was. Everything I said back then was true. Or it was true then when I wrote it. And, for the most part, it still is true. But I think I've realized a few more things about myself, and about what it means to create things.

I wrote that "my interest in the 'book' world has waned." What I meant, I know now, was that my interest in who got what kind of advance, who the hot new writer was, who was being talked up in magazines--all that had waned. This, I know now, is not the "book world," but the "media world." I'm not sure what took me so long to understand the difference. I wrote that "the enchantment of publishing has worn off for me." What I didn't realize at the time was that actually publishing, actually being published, feels so completely different than what I thought it would feel like. (And the book isn't even in the universe yet...so I'm curious and scared and excited and worried about what happens then.) It is, at the most basic level, a feeling of being understood.

Oprah told a story once, on the DVDs of her show that you can get from Netflix, about how she got the role in The Color Purple. She had never wanted anything so badly. She was convinced that she was going to get the role, she was convinced that she wasn't. She found herself, finally, at a fat farm, trying to lose all the weight that she has struggled with for so long, and she's walking laps around the track, and feeling so overwhelmed by everything, that she bursts into tears. She realizes that she has allowed the want of this thing to control every aspect of her life. And in that moment, she says to herself, okay, I give it up to god. And then, and only then, does someone come out of the house and say "Ms. Winfrey, Stephen Spielberg is on the phone for you." He says to her, "Get off that track right now, because if you lose one pound you can't have this role." Sometimes I love Oprah's stories. It's as simple, and as complicated, as that.

I think at the end of 2008, I came to my own Color Purple moment--I had given it all up to the Goddesses of the Universe and, in turn, they gave me what I wanted. Or needed. "Be careful what you say that you 'need' around here," my brother said when I was in Orlando visiting my nephews, meaning toys and things. I understood what he was trying to say, but sometimes those things are the same. Sometimes what you want is what you need, and when you get it you feel elated and understood and grateful.

Olympic Fever, Sort Of

2010-02-12T19:33:00.005-05:00

I am sitting down to watch the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Olympic Games, and to eat my Thai food, which was delivered quickly and efficiently by the new place on Broadway. I had forgotten about all the package pieces that NBC does--including tonight's brief "Canada 101" by Tom Brokaw, in which he explained that Canada was nice enough to "share" their stars of music, film and television, and then flashed shots of Celine Dion, Jim Carrey and Seth Rogan. Wait, share?

I used to get really excited about the Olympics--now my feelings are a bit colored by the incredible amount of money spent on advertising and sponsorships. There is so much branding and marketing moments, one can hardly see the athletes for the logos. It's beginning to look too much like NASCAR. Also, no mention of (openly?) gay Johnny Weir in the package piece about American male figure skaters. And the sad news, before the games even begin, of the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili.

But there are some real moments in my own Olympic history:
--I'm thinking of the nights spent at Keith's house, staying up far too late watching the Ladie's Figure Skating Final back in Nagano.
--I'm thinking of Midori Ito, arguably the most incredibly talented figure skater of all time, and the time she landed the first triple axel in competition (1988,) and the time she landed the first triple axel in Olympic competition (1992.)
--I'm thinking of the night back in 1994, when Michelle O'Born's mother announced, much to our teenage dramatic dismay, the medal results that she had seen earlier in the day, just moments before the final group of women took to the ice for their warm-up.

Okay, so maybe all of my big memories have to do with figure skating. How gay is that? Also: How gay is this? Also: Rice noodles are fucking good.

How Can One Sleep with So Many Feelings?

2010-02-07T10:51:00.005-05:00

for Sean Quinn

Yesterday after midnight at the Polish bakery,
there was a long line of old women standing outside,
each bent, with thick-soled shoes and
hands hidden in pockets,
equal parts patience and urgency,
with probably simple but particular needs.
Inside, the women waved bills and fingers,
stretching themselves over the counter,
paper wrapped pastries inside paper bags,
inside plastic bags.
I had the feeling you have when you realize
that a lot of people know something
that you don't.

How can one sleep with so many feelings?
You lay down and close your eyes,
and the sleep washes over the feelings,
washing them out to sea, where they float,
like note-filled bottles and other man-made trinkets,
for years, for lifetimes, for generations,
or until the next day's tide,
returned to you by the moon,
or a song from your days in Hoboken,
or the name of your favorite lover,
or the memory of the lover that left you, who,
restless, asked the same question to himself
and heard no sensible answer.

Some Assholes of Late

2010-02-03T07:04:00.004-05:00

1) The Supreme Court of the United States
Okay, only five of them were assholes, but it was enough for the outcome of Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission to end in granting corporations the "right" to spend unlimited amounts of cash on elections. Because if there's anything we need in this world, it's more corporate influence over what people see and think about--especially when those things we are supposed to think about are candidates who support or don't support the interests of those corporations.

2) Live Nation / Ticketmaster / Department of Justice
Last week, the Department of Justice decided, after about a year of investigation, that Ticketmaster and Live Nation, two enormous, controlling, for-profit, monopolizing companies could merge into one company....as long as they divvied the pieces up in a way that made, well, some kind of sense to the DOJ -- including forcing Ticketmaster to license it's ticket-selling software to other outlets. (What other outlets, you are probably asking.) Live Nation had the balls to say this: "This is a good and exciting day for the music business, and we are close to finalizing the creation of a new company that will seek to transform the way artists distribute their content and fans can access that content." Call me crazy, but I can't see how any of this will mean anything other than more fees and even more limited access to the rather static number of tickets available to events.

3) James Cameron
When accepting the Golden Globe for best picture, James Cameron said: "....If they start the music, it's going to be an ugly scene. No, this is quick, uh, you know, I just wanna tell you kind of how I feel right now, this is such an exciting evening and just walking through here, walking in here with all you, you, great creative amazing people, I look around this room and I see the faces of the people that I respect, that I've admired for years, some of you I know and have worked with, many of you I'd love to have the opportunity to work with, and I just think, 'This is the best job in the world.' You know? It just really is. And I just want you to give it up for yourselves....You know, Avatar, I guess asks us to see--they're telling me to wrap it up, but they're afraid to start the music--Avatar asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other, and us to the earth, and you know, if you have to go four and a half light years to another, made-up planet to appreciate this miracle of a world we have right now, you know what, that's the wonder of cinema right there. That's the magic. Thank you." What a fucking douchebag. What's going to happen if they start playing the music, Jim? What other stupid threats can you lay out on the table? They want to play the music, but they are so afraid!

Hey Tim from St. Louis, This One's for You

2010-01-29T19:04:00.004-05:00

This week, a lot of information was passed down from the Universe. Sometimes your job is to sift, stir well, and respond. Sometimes your job is just to listen. This post is sort of a combination of both. (Which, by the way, is what I have decided a blog is. Mostly.) So, here are all the things I am trying to make sense of this week:

--J.D. Salinger died. This is a tragedy.

--People at the market wondered whether Salinger wrote anything else. If, say, there were stacks of manuscripts tucked away in safe deposit boxes. People wondered if there was nothing.

--I saw in the bookstore that Knopf has published a collection of Nabokov's note cards, called The Original of Laura, which would have turned into a novel, maybe, at some point, had he lived long enough to finish it. He wanted the notes to be burned, but his wife, as the story goes, "could not bear to destroy her husband’s last work." Could not bear to see her future royalties disappear, if you ask me. Or maybe that is harsh. But art is personal. And me, at least now, I wouldn't want any half-done art in the world after I have died.

--An unfinished Ralph Ellison novel has also been published, Three Days Before the Shooting. Juneteenth, which was published earlier, was culled from this same material.

--My friend Jane wonders, in this post , if writers "become better and better at considering [their] audience not purely out of generosity or thoughtfulness, but as a strategy for getting what [they] want?"

--But there is my dear Meg, in videos of old Circus Amok shows, which are hosted on the Hempispheric Institute's website, streaming, for all to see, enjoy, study, relive. Even though she died some years ago--there she is, real again, her movements and gestures, her stature, her economy.

--Is seeing Meg on video anything like the Nabokov note cards? Or the Ellison novel? Or Jane wondering if writer's get better at getting what they want as they become better writers? Because what does it mean that these novels are published after the writer, ostensibly, isn't in control of what he wants?

Help. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Recalibrating

2010-01-26T18:58:00.003-05:00

Saturday, for me, was one of those days when I don't have patience for anything. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me--the customers were perfectly tolerable, the weather was bright and unseasonably warmish, the day went by without incident. But somewhere, my molecules were out of order, shifted perhaps. Uncertain. This feeling has continued through the days, and I've decided that the only way to shake it is to clean out the closets. Literally. Or maybe figuratively. Both?

Jennifer said today on the phone, "That sounds awful, reliving every past moment with every old piece of clothing." But I feel the opposite. It frees me. I feel released from the promise to hold that memory forever. I feel released from the need to carry around the object that contains the history. The old, the unwanted, the style-less--notice that I didn't say unfashionable, and note the difference--will go either to the Salvation Army, or to the Greenmarket's textile recycling program.

The Get-Rid-Ofs:
--The Tommy Hilfiger plaid button-down that I wore every other day when Meg and I went to London. I wore it underneath the hand-altered sweater that Becky made for me when she was at RISD, which I am keeping.
--The woven white Oxford that I wore to Meg's memorial service.
--The Club Monaco striped thing which I wore only once, to a few compliments, I think, but which now strikes me as unlovable.
--The handmade, very expensive shirt that I wore to Amanda's wedding dinner. It was always too big for me, and looked a bit sloppy, but back then I didn't know better.
--Shorts, shorts and shorts.

The Keeps:
--The REI anorak that I wore every day in Iceland. It was lost for a few years, living inside an old coat that I never wear--like Jack Twist's shirt was folded inside Ennis Del Mar's. It might find a new life.
--The English Laundry shirt from a few years ago, before they went all too-too. Anybody have solutions to a little yellow around the collar? Bodies betray us, there, I said it.
--The train conductor's cap which was handed down to NYU by the costume department of the musical "The Capeman." Andrea thought I should have it, and I still do.

The Uncertains:
--The fabulous vintage Wrangler shirt bought from eBay for only $5.00, but which I can barely fit into now. Create a new, thinner you? Or accept the you that is now?
--The insane Edwardian overcoat, which fits me beautifully, but, like, can I work it?
--Some AMOK costumes that I've worn over the years. They are flawless, singular pieces. But do I need one more bit of frippery?

Next week, the chest of drawers.....

Warnings: Poems

2010-01-24T14:16:00.003-05:00

I have a new book of poems!!

Warnings is a limited-edition chapbook of thirteen poems. Vietnam, the Staten Island Ferry, Berry Avenue, Passolini, Plath, Swedish Fish and more....

With a cover by David Bivins!

Click here to buy the book.

Tuesday Evening

2010-01-19T20:02:00.004-05:00

Mario and I sat at the Gray Dog on University this evening and drank tea while we talked about lemon cookbooks, citrus cookbooks, his sister, his niece, my nephews, cooking, romance, books, writers, tops, bottoms, Daddys, the problem with Daddys, and on and on. Also about how it takes a certain person who can tell you a certain thing, and other people can tell it to you, but you don't hear it unless it comes from that person.

Then we walked over to find the new Comme de Garcons Black store, (which is on 10th Avenue and 17th Street if you're looking.) They have about 50 pieces of clothing, all blacks and some whites mixed in. The men's section has fewer pieces, but they are all fabulous--if you are the kind of person who can wear that stuff, which I am not. (Though I really loved these flannel overdyed things which are right out of the future and also the now, know what I mean? Mario tried on an insane pair of dropped-crotch pants and we discussed how one could wear them. The salespeople, two of them, both adorably hip and skinny, helped describe how someone would wear these pants--how they were dress down-able, or up-able. How the wool has a certain sheen so it's "you know, more," she said.

Mario, who was my boyfriend once, talked with them about the clothes for a few minutes. I was reminded what it was like dating him--how this whole other language came out when he started talking clothes with other clothes people and how it made perfect sense to those who were speaking it. I've always been fascinated by inner-circle talk--the industry chatter of lighting designers, chefs, hairstylists, mechanics, piano players. All that stuff.

Then we walked down 10th Avenue to find Chef Morimoto standing on the sidewalk in a t-shirt and sweats, talking to a woman. Then we walked across the street to the new Colicchio and Sons (formerly CraftSteak) to look at the menu. It looked exciting--no more $100 steaks that no one is buying--more home cookin' with a few surprises, big flavors and classics shifted a bit. And then there was Tom himself, standing inside in his chef's coat, talking to some staff. The hostess stood watching us through the window, and I felt like if I had made eye contact, she'd have beckoned us inside and we'd have wined (or beer'd, as there is a whole new "Tap Room" menu as well) and dined ourselves silly. We didn't, but knowing that we could have--that was enough.

New York in January

2010-01-12T08:40:00.000-05:00

Two Things

2010-01-08T21:05:00.005-05:00

1.
I'm not really a skier. Too much equipment, too much boots and poles and gloves. Too many layers. I like all the things that surround skiing. The whooshing sounds the other skiers make in the powder. The slow, swaying ascent to the top of the lifts. The warm fires in the lodge--though I've really only been skiing in places where the lodge looks like a cafeteria. I like the way your body feels spent and accomplished at the end of the day, and the hot shower that accompanies the exhaustion when you arrive back home. The Frito-Chili Pie that you eat to replenish the energy that you spent, the wine you drink and the champagne bottle you put out on the porch to chill and forget to open.

But the skiing itself--ostensibly the point--is another story. I'm scared of it. I'm afraid that if I start down the hill then I'll never stop. I'm afraid of the uncertain motions that the earth feels like its making underneath you. I don't like that the green circle trails at one mountain have no resemblance to the green circle trails on other mountains, and that you don't get to see the elevation changes in the trails when you study the map they give you. I don't like that your friends tell you that you can "do it," and you believe them, and then you nearly expire of frigid disbelief in what your body can accomplish on its own.

I think to really enjoy skiing, you have to be a little bit outside of your body, or, rather, you get the most benefit, the most pleasure from the skiing experience when you are willing to let go enough that you feel like you're flying. You want it to feel effortless. And so, paradoxically, in order to feel those real moments of effortlessness, you have to really be grounded in your body--you have to let your body make thousands of tiny movements and adjustments as fast as your body can make them. The movements have to be totally instinctual, unconscious.

Earlier this week, while I was at the top of the second section of a blue square trail--Fox Tail at Mountain Creek, in Vernon, New Jersey--I started thinking that maybe the only way to be outside of your body, is to really become it.

2.
The B61 bus is now the B62. Well, actually, they have split the line into two lines--the B61 now runs from Red Hook to Downtown Brooklyn, and the B62 runs from Downtown Brooklyn to Long Island City. Apparently, the Red Hook section of the line kept making the buses late, and then they would all stack up and make for a line of five or six buses all hitting a single stop at once. Or, they would all sit around at stops waiting to get back on schedule--and this makes the riders late.

I'm not sure where a person finds out about this before it happens. I found out when I was standing on Bedford and South 4th Street and the B62 arrived, which was a bus I'd never heard of. And I take buses a lot. There was a sign inside the bus that explained their thinking. I'm on board with this--ON BOARD, get it!--but I'm curious to see if it actually changes anything about how long it takes to get from one end of town to another, or if it actually makes the buses less late. What they should really do is stop that dumb curb installation at the intersection of Classon and Flushing Avenue--THAT'S why the bus uptown from there is always so dang late, because to squeeze all those lanes of traffic into the one within a single block is absurd. But I know why they do what they do. They do studies, right?

All this is to say: changes are happening.

Weekend Update

2009-12-22T13:08:00.000-05:00

It took me about an hour and a half to drive home from the Greenmarket on Saturday night. We ended up getting about 9 inches of snow, with parts of Brooklyn getting as much as 14. After closing up the syrup stand, we went to have dinner at The Spain Restaurant, which is one of my favorites. When people ask me what it's like, I say, "It's 100 year old drunk waiters in polyester bolero jackets." It's also the place, when asked if they could bring something for the vegetarians, said: "I'll bring some potatoes." So, after dinner, we made it back to our parked trucks and slogged ourselves through the oncoming blizzard. Taxis were sliding all over Third Avenue. On the Queensboro Bridge, the visibility was so bad that you couldn't see any light from the city, from Queens, from the cars in front of you. I'm glad I made it home without incident. I was glad that I had a large heavy vehicle, and not some tiny plastic car. Perhaps the most New York-ish of images, was, of course, some delivery guy on a bike, at 10pm in a blizzard. How we do love our delivery.

I'm writing a set of discussion questions for Yield, which will be in stores in Sept 2010. I'm not sure what do to about this. What do people want to talk about, or think about, after they have read my novel? In some ways, I think that the author is the worst person to write these questions. Perhaps I am the best person to answer the questions once they have been written? Or, maybe the readers are the best people to answer these questions? I'm not sure what to think about this.

Kip and I are headed to South Carolina and Tennessee for a few days after Christmas. We hope to see Laura and Amy while we are all in the same place--perhaps convening at a Waffle House, which Amy has learned to love.

I'm taking a short break from the blog--and will see you in the beginning of the new year.

Love to everyone.

Ugly in Art

2009-12-16T08:12:00.004-05:00

This was posted in the mail area of an apartment building in Greenpoint.

Dinner at Per Se

2009-12-12T06:00:00.002-05:00

Back in October, some friends and I went to eat at Per Se, Thomas Keller's outpost in the Time Warner Center. It was, hands down, the best food I have ever eaten--as a whole experience. (That is to say that I have had some pretty transcendent pork tacos from a shopping cart in Jackson Heights, but that's another story.) What was most remarkable about the meal was how easy it was. Truly unhurried, relaxing, incredibly polished service. Flawless food with impeccable details and additions. An amazing view of Columbus Circle and Central Park.

I emailed the restaurant to ask for a copy of the menu, since there was clearly no way I was going to remember everything we ate. And drank. But, um, I do remember a 1985 Sauternes....plus the half bottle of champagne we started with, and two more bottles. (I don't remember what the wines were....except that they were perfect.) Per Se offers two tasting menus: one meat, one veggie. There was also two amuses, plus an assortment of bread things that came around in a basket as we wished. But for the main idea, here's what the meat-eaters had:

--"Oysters and Pearls": "Sabayon" of Pearl Tapioca with Island Creek Oysters and Sterling White Sturgeon Caviar.

--Hudson Valley Moulad Duck Foie Gras Poele: Hobbs Shore’s Pancetta "Melba," White Wine Poached Honey Crisp Apples and Braised Tuscan Kale with Tellicherry Pepper "Mignonnette"

--Sauteed Fillet of Florida Pompano: Razor Clams, Compressed English Cucumbers, Piquillo Peppers, Petite Onions and Cilantro Shoots with Pimenton "Vierge"

--Scottish Langoustines "a la plancha": French Breakfast Radishes, Haricots Verts, Globe Artichokes and Sweet Carrots with Parsley "Pudding"

--Four Story Hill Farm's "Supreme de Pigeon": "Confit de Cuisse," Buckwheat Crêpe, Brussels Sprouts and Chestnut Purée with "Jus de Pigeon"

--Rib-Eye of Marcho Farms Veal "Roti a la Broche": Yukon Gold Potato and Chanterelle Mushroom Gratin with Hakurei Turnips, Creamed Turnip Greens and "Sauce Périgourdine"

--Consider Bardwell Farm's "Dorset": "Sablé aux Quatre Épices," Butternut Squash Confit, Belgian Endive and Toasted Pumpkin Seeds with Blis Maple Syrup Vinaigrette

--Pear Sorbet: "Silver Dollar" Pancakes, Bosc Pear Compote, Anise "Bavarois" and Almond Crisp

--"Tea & Biscuits": "Millionaire’s Shortbread," Sweet Tea Panna Cotta and Chocolate "Crémeux" with Darjeeling Ice Cream

--"Peanut Butter & Jelly": Peanut Butter Mousse, Concord Grape Jam, Peanut "Génoise"
and Grape Sorbet with Dried Milk Tuile

--Mignardises

Advertisting Blanks

2009-12-08T21:40:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite things about the MTA are the sections of tile in advertising transition. The many layers of posters and graffiti become modern art pieces themselves. I love how these are created randomly, and yet always come out looking so beautiful.

Do you have some of these at your station? Send them to me and I will add them here.

An Open Letter to New York State Senators Aubertine, Addabbo, Diaz, Huntley, Kruger, Monserrate, Onorato, and Sachowski

2009-12-03T13:17:00.002-05:00

Dear State Senators,

The votes that each of you cast yesterday should fill you with shame. When you returned to your homes in the evening, to your spouses and children and beside tables, did you feel a sense of accomplishment? Did you think that you had honored your commitment to democracy and government? Or did you wake choking in the middle of the night, grasping desperately for a glass of water, your body caught in the twisted sheets, knowing that the choice you made was the resentful, hateful, bigoted choice of a coward?

I am afraid that you slept soundly. I am afraid that you think that this is just how some things go in Albany, that votes don't mean what they really mean. I am afraid that you cannot see what you have done. I am afraid that because of your ignorance you do not understand that your votes are not simply votes to deny the rights of thousands of loving, hopeful, trusting, giving, caring and tax-paying people--many of whom voted for you--the right to happiness, and equal protection. Your votes are expressions of pure, unequivocal hate. You have said: It's okay to hate gay people.

Do you understand that heterosexual marriages are actually made less sacred by the choices that you have made? Do you understand that if the love between two women who wish to marry is a threatening advance on the stability of your marriage, then your marriage has no stability at all?

Though you may not see it, this is not simply a vote against gay people who want to share a life together. This is a vote against every gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or questioning child that gets bullied, beaten, assaulted and abused--on the playground, in classrooms, and in the very communities that you represent. Your vote is a vote against their future.

Of all the reasons to have the institution of marriage open to every one of this country's citizens, perhaps the most important is this: So that our gay and lesbian children feel valid. So they can grow up to be productive, loving, active members of the American idea in action. Your vote has said to them, loud and clear, that your neighborhood and your government thinks that you are worthless. That worthlessness, which is the worthlessness that you have incited, encouraged and have now perpetuated, will cause some of those children to attempt suicide. Some of those who try to kill themselves will succeed. They will shoot themselves with guns, or hang themselves in closets, or slice open their fragile young wrists.

I hope that when this happens--and sadly, terribly, regretfully, it will happen--that you are visited by their ghosts in the night. I hope that the dark room you are sleeping in turns suddenly cold. I hope your body feels icy, frozen with the knowledge of what you've done. I hope that you wake shaking, and screaming in fear.

Sincerely,

Lee Houck

Important Ages

2009-12-01T14:20:00.001-05:00

1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 25, 29, 30, 31, 37, 40, 48, 49, 50, 55, 59, 60, 62, 65, 70, 75, 79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100.

GrammarPiano TweetCloud

2009-11-29T19:32:00.004-05:00

TweetCloud, this cool new website, is "a service that lets you generate a cool looking cloud of the words your tweets mostly contain." I like that they call this a "service." This is what mine looks like:

Ms. Difranco at Town Hall, 2009

2009-11-25T16:04:00.000-05:00

Ani Difranco played the Town Hall last Saturday night, and I was there. My friend Robert Maril, who later asked that in this blog post I describe his hair as "shiny" and "with body," joined me for this, my 37th Ani show. This indicates some kind of insanity, surely. (That's approximately $1700 in tickets, if you're quick at math.) But here's what I think I have finally discovered--after so many performances in so many cities across this country, even a show in Paris: I think more clearly, more crisply and thoroughly, at an Ani Difranco show than anywhere else.

My first show was in Knoxville, back in 1996. That night's recording of Dilate made it onto her 1997 record "Living in Clip," minus the part in the middle of the song where she stopped, and proceeded to have a quite valid, fussy, frustrated and yet especially articulate in a way that only Ani can be, scolding of the audience for singing at the top of their lungs. As I recall, she said something along the lines of "This song is not a soccer chant." She would never do that now, as far as I can tell--and the way she keeps playing Both Hands as the first encore song over and over starts to push her, and the song, into Closer to Fine territory. (Some of you will know what that means.) The birth of her child, her second marriage, and I think the election of Barak Obama, all of this has made her more relaxed. She seems to really be enjoying herself again.

It was dark back in 1997. Things started to get more exciting in the early 2000s, but by 2003 she had seemed to wind herself down into another period of, well, Ani-inwardness. The songs from that period are lonely and cold. She toured solo for a while, and then when band members started showing up again--her sound changed dramatically. Most recently, with the incarnation of the previous two years--Todd Sickafoose on bass, Allison Miller on drums, and Mike Dillon on percussion--have made her music sound more robust, more textured, more grounded than ever before.

Because this show was on a Saturday night, there were lots of younger people in the audience. It might be unfair of me to presume--but lots of them seemed to be teenage girls perhaps dropped off by their parents in cars. (I went to my first Indigo Girls concert in 1992 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta this way--we sat in the very last row.) Two rows in front of us, were a gaggle of young ladies who insisted on dancing and swaying and singing to every song they knew. That they knew the songs is the important part. It makes me think that the experience, for these kind of concert-goers, is not about the music or the moment, but about recreating the private experience they've had in their living rooms and bedrooms and iPods.

If you feel one thing at home alone listening to Ani, you want to feel the same thing in concert--such is the logic, I guess. And because the swaying and dancing doesn't extend to the new songs--that is to say the songs that Ani hasn't released yet, and therefore only the savvy, and increasingly numerous, internet traders know them--to my eye, it's even less about the show. A few times, the dancing girls attempted to get the people sitting around them to join in, standing and dancing and singing and generally annoying everyone around and behind them. As if their own experience would be made better if they were not so alone in their revelry. As Joan Didion might write: "The narrative is already in place."

So, back to the way I think. I've seen her so many times that it feels like a family ritual--some of the same notes are struck here and there, like a favorite dish at a holiday meal, and then some new things appear and disappear, changing as the seasons do, but staying the same. Something about sitting there, in the dark, watching the lights change and watching Ani sing, listening to those songs I've been listening to for almost twenty years, some of them, it just feels comfortable. My brain shifts into a happy neutral.

I'm glad she's delving into her back catalog more these days. She Says, a song from her 1991 record "Not So Soft," has been appearing in the middle space of sets lately--a revised guitar riff and slightly shifted melody makes the song even more lonely, even more beautiful. I almost write "if that's possible." But clearly, with Ani, it is.

Here's the setlist:
Anticipate
Providence
Coming Up
Alla This
November 5th, 2008
Albacore
Splinter
She Says
Which Side Are You On?
Overlap
Unworry
Lifeboat
Fuel
New Bible
Mariachi
If You're Not
Untouchable Face
--
Both Hands
Hypnotized

Circa 1985

2009-11-23T08:18:00.002-05:00

This Week

2009-11-17T19:33:00.005-05:00

Part One:
One of the (many) benefits of living in the great City of New York is that cultural events happen here on a very large scale. The downside of this is that everyone wants to attend these events, and when something comes around like Lady Gaga at Radio City Music Hall for two nights only, way more than 12,000 people clamor for tickets at 10:00am on that fateful Friday only to discover that, surprise, you are too, too late. Even the presale tickets were gone at 12:00 noon the day before. But somehow, StubHub was selling tickets throughout each section, orchestra and all three mezzanines, days and days before even the date of sale was announced. People on Craig's List were selling Orchestra pit tickets weeks ago. This speaks volumes about the terrible truth of how the music industry and its cronies and friends-of ruin the music business for fans. But then, after it became clear to me that I was not getting tickets, and no one I knew was able to get tickets, I realized that maybe this wasn't such a big deal after all. Everything Lady Gaga does is about visibility, about being seen. So, I figure, whatever she does those two nights, I'll see it. It will be on YouTube, or all over the blogs, she'll Twitter her thanks to all her fantastic gay fans, and perhaps this monopolizing of the imagery and webwaves, maybe this is what Gaga is all about.

Part Two:
Tonight's dinner turned out terribly. Does rice expire? Even when you have it in the fridge? I guess it does--it sort of fell apart, like puffed rice does in leftover cereal milk. I was trying to re-create this leek and white truffle risotto that I made a few weeks ago when some friends were over to watch the Emmys. That night is was spectacular. I was actually surprised it came out so beautifully. But, like other things, and like a lot of people, I need a little reason to shine. So, when it came time to make this big pot of dinner this evening, I felt half-assed about it, and the results are hideous. If I weren't alone, I'd throw it out.

Part Three:
The new Margaret Atwood novel is intriguing, as one might expect. I'm having a weird reaction to it--I'm loving the writing, the specific sentences. But the overall narrative isn't that compelling to me. And this is odd, considering that this one, The Year of the Flood, is kind of a continuation of a thought, a sort-of sequel to one of her books that I loved, Oryx and Crake. I sit on the B61 and read and read, and I keep wondering when the story is going to start. In fact, today I skipped ahead and read the first two pages of a later part of the book to see if there was something maybe I wanted to get to. The good news is: There was. So, I continue on.

Part Four:
I just finished the new Dan Chaon novel, Await Your Reply. This was a totally different experience. The story itself is so exciting, so twisty and slow-to-reveal itself, that I couldn't wait to get to the end. I felt really torn about it. The writing is so beautiful, and so concentrated and thoughtful, that I wanted to take my time. But the what-is-going-to-happen was pressing on me so much that I wanted to stay up all night and read and read and read.

Part Five:
The madness of the holidaze has begun. What to do for a holiday card this year? When to schedule the tree-trimming party, in which people don't actually tree-trim but admire the tree-trimming that you have done earlier in the day? What to buy people? Whether to buy for people? How long do marshmallows keep if you ship them?

Part Six:
Can we see Levi Johnston naked already?

A Very Early Story

2009-11-12T12:06:00.004-05:00

Learning to Write, Part 3

2009-11-09T20:25:00.008-05:00

My friend Jane over at Leaf-Stitch-Word tagged me in this meme she created. She asks us to look for three essential markers, practices, or maybe habits. She asks, "What can you tell me about your twisted paths to becoming a writer?" I'm going to take this in three posts. Thanks, Jane!

Part Three: Since Always

This meme has been really difficult. My instinct is to say, at this point, in trying to chart my path toward being a writer, something like: "It's just who I am." I don't ever remember doing anything else that was as satisfying.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes that she believes that "...meaning itself [is] resident in the rhythms of words and sentences." She is writing about meaning in the large sense--capital M, big ideas, Meaning Of Life. When I read this, on the 6 Train underneath Lexington Avenue, I wanted to blast off into the sky, exploding off the ground like Neo does at the end of The Matrix, having finally understood that he is infinitely powerful, unbeatable. Nothing--absolutely nothing--feels more right to me than a string of words that say what you have been feeling all along.

I love reading because it is singular--not like other performing arts where the experience is collective. The intimacy of a book is different than the intimacy of a concert, or a well-made play. The experience is, I think, a more direct line to the reader's emotions and sense of space, self and emotion. It's an entirely cerebral immersion. I'm not trying to say that it's the best way to experience a work of art--I'm just saying it's my personal favorite.

From Eileen Myles

2009-11-06T21:45:00.003-05:00

Most likely, we travel to exist in an analogue to our life's dilemmas. It's like a spaceship. The work for the traveler is making the effort to understand that the place you are moving through is real and the solution to your increasingly absent problems is forgetting. To see them in a burst as you are vanishing into the world. Travel is not transcendence. It's immancence. It's trying to be here.

--From the essay, "Iceland" by Eileen Myles