Wanda Ball

The Aging Process

2008-07-23T14:13:00.005-04:00

First we lose the legs: the gout. Oh cursed scourge of the modern age!

Then, the elbows, and the ability to perform those feats of sexual acrobatics we once enjoyed so.

Next, the hundred and one activities enabled by the nostrils.

Finally, the ability to fly. You'll miss this less than you imagined. Why, it will be as if you had never known how to fly at all!

photo Robert ParkeHarrison

Hillary Clinton; Sex in the City

2008-06-06T12:27:00.009-04:00

I'm not usually in the habit of posting chunks of whole articles, but today's Judith Warner piece in the New York Times expresses what a lot of us have been feeling: horror at the level of gut-level anti-woman vitriol that Clinton's candidacy has unleashed. More on Sex and the City (I disagree with Warner) after the block quote.

Woman in Charge, Women Who Charge
by Judith Warner
Published 5 June 2008

Is it a coincidence that the bubbling idiocy of “Sex and the City,” the movie, exploded upon the cultural scene at the exact same time that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy imploded?

Literally, of course, it is. Figuratively, I’m not so sure.

And before I set off an avalanche of e-mails explaining why Hillary deserved to lose, I want to make one point clear: I am talking here not about the outcome of her candidacy – mistakes were made, and she faced a formidable opponent in Barack Obama – but rather about the climate in which her campaign was conducted. The zeitgeist in which Hillary floundered and “Sex” is now flourishing.

It’s a cultural moment that Andrew Stephen, writing with an outsider’s eye for the British magazine the New Statesman last month, characterized as a time of “gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind.” A moment in which things like the formation of a Hillary-bashing political action group, “Citizens United Not Timid,” a “South Park” episode featuring a nuclear weapon hidden in Clinton’s vagina, and Internet sales of a Hillary Clinton nutcracker with shark-like teeth between her legs, passed largely without mainstream media notice, largely, perhaps, because some of the key gatekeepers of mainstream opinion were so busy coming up with various iterations of the nutcracker theme themselves. (Tucker Carlson on Hillary: “When she comes on television, I involuntarily cross my legs.” For a good cry, watch this incredible montage from the Women’s Media Center.)

Stephen is not the first commentator to note that if similarly hateful racial remarks had been made about Obama, our nation would have turned itself inside out in a paroxysm of soul-searching and shame. Had mainstream commentators in 2000 speculated, say, that Joe Lieberman had a nose for dough, or made funny Shylock references, heads would have rolled – and rightfully so.

But 16 months of sustained misogyny? Hey — she asked for it. With that voice, (“When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, ‘Take out the garbage’ ” Fox News regular Marc Rudov, author of “Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables,” said in January). With that ambition, and that dogged determination (“like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court,” according to MSNBC commentator Mike Barnicle) and, of course, that husband (Chris Matthews: “The reason she’s a U.S. Senator, the reason she’s a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around.”). Clearly, in an age when the dangers and indignities of Driving While Black are well-acknowledged, and properly condemned, Striving While Female – if it goes too far and looks too real — is still held to be a crime.

In a culture that’s reached such a level of ostensible enlightenment as ours, calling a powerful woman “castrating” – however you choose to put it – ought to be seen as just as offensive as rubbing your fingers together to convey a love of gold coinage when you talk about a Jew. It’s nothing other than an expression of woman-hate — and the degree to which such expressions have flourished, in the mainstream media and in the loonier reaches of cyberspace this year, has added up to be a real national shame.

In lieu of Warner's comments on Sex in the City, I give you Jezebel's take on the nonplussed attitudes toward female sexuality expressed by many of Sex and the City's male film critics.

In other news, Hi! What have you been up to, my friends? Check out the comments on "Titles of Great American Novels," below. Clem and the Big Brunette have supplied some gems.

Titles of Great American Novels

2008-04-26T10:08:00.004-04:00

1. The Seventh Sandwich
2. Her Name Was Sienna
3. A Very Old Woman with Lint in Her Hair
4. PICKLES!
5. I See London, I See France

Any titles up your sleeves?

White Glove

2008-04-13T23:03:00.003-04:00

I'm a sucker for a sight gag.

And this is how it was done.

Adam and Eve and Steve

2008-04-01T00:18:00.002-04:00

One more. Then I'll stop.

Adam & Eve & Steve from kschaal on Vimeo.

Stuff White People Like

2008-03-29T17:51:00.005-04:00

3. Film Festivals
7. Diversity
16. Gifted Children
18. Awareness
23. Microbreweries
62 Knowing What's Best for Poor People

God, I hate white people.

What's that you say? I am white?

FUCK.

Catch the full list of Stuff White People Like.

Smoking Is Bad

2008-03-29T17:15:00.002-04:00

For Flight of the Conchords fans.

Smoking is Bad from kschaal on Vimeo.

Angry Erotic Sheep in the Woods

2008-03-29T17:12:00.004-04:00

Temptress at work.

Angry Erotic Sheep in the Woods from kschaal on Vimeo.

Dick Cavett on G.W. Bush

2008-03-29T16:59:00.006-04:00

From Cavett's very charming New York Times blog:

His speechifying has a strong odor of remedial reading about it, combined with an apparent fear that there might be some hard words ahead.

Mean Lady Writer

2008-01-27T18:00:00.001-05:00

Reading Nightwood for my exams. I think Djuna Barnes hates this character:

She defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person.

and

She wanted to be the reason for everything and so was the cause of nothing.

and

She was one of the most unimportantly wicked women of her time.

Lordy.

Herding Cats

2008-01-26T22:29:00.001-05:00

I like the guy with the lint roller.

Mystery Solved

2008-01-06T14:38:00.000-05:00

I've been putting off writing my Composition 102 syllabus for five days (120 hours). In those five days I've slept, cried, failed to return phone calls and emails, slept some more and cried some more.

It has not been a good five days.

Today I had an insight: I don't want to teach Composition 102.

Ergo, I don't want to write the syllabus for Composition 102.

Aha! Mystery solved. It only took me five days (120 hours) to figure that out.

I know. I need to suck it up and get over myself like the rest of the frigging English department.

But oh, this quarter! So much to dread, so little to look forward to. The studying for comprehensive exams. The writing of overdue papers long gone cold. The revising of stories I've revised so much I can't remember the originary joy that sparked them. Kristi M. asked me how my writing was going the other night, a perfectly kind question, and I responded like an insect facing the entomologist's pin.

And the grey, and the cold.

Readers, friends: help me have fun this quarter. Road trips, pirate movies, Target. Stupid shit like that. Help me remember that joy is why I write (or wrote).

Famous People I'm Sort of Related To

2007-12-03T10:36:00.000-05:00

1. My cousin, a nice Jewish girl who married a baron. A fucking baron! Now her kids are barons and baronesses. I hate her.

2. When Joni Mitchell lived in Detroit during the sixties, guess who her doctor was? My Uncle Sid! I pumped him for stories a couple years back. He said, "She was in crappy shape."

3. I once worked at a restaurant in the Philadelphia theater district. This one time, Robert Goulet came in. I didn't wait on him, but this other girl did. I can't remember what she said about him.

4. My cousin-once-removed was in the Incredible String Band. He was a scientologist, I think.

5. This film producer is my brother's wife's uncle. When the concentration camps were liberated, he and Alfred Hitchcock filmed them for the British government. At Thanksgiving, I said, "Does Hitchcock do a little cameo, like of him slumped in the gas chambers or digging a mass grave?" My family stared at me in silence. God, I crack myself up.

Reader, I touch thee with my meme: what famous people are you sort of related to?

Collected Poems

2007-11-28T21:19:00.000-05:00

Sophia over at Intagliod Up in Blue has a poem up by Kenneth Rexroth, "Runaway." One day in the nineteen eighties, my father took a used copy of Rexroth's Collected Shorter Poems from his briefcase and left it on the hall table. After he'd gone up to his study, I flipped through it, spied the words breast, thigh, erotic, and secreted it in my purse. My father never asked about his book. Same goes for his copies of Roethke, Hopkins, and a Penguin Poetry of the Forties.

My father and I didn't talk much. I was prickly, fragile, an ethereal machine of anger, and he wore his melancholy as a privacy. If you asked him, he would say he was tired from work, is all, and look away. Knowing him, I wouldn't be surprised if he failed to register the disappearance of his purchases.

But still, the exchange transpired: his briefcase, our hall table, my purse, my bedtable. And the books are still on my shelf. Twenty years later, I still read them. They succor me. They succor the ghost, the mouse, the thief I once was.

Is a gift that fails to recognize itself as such still a gift?

DELIA REXROTH

Died June, 1916

Under your illkempt yellow roses,
Delia, today you are younger
Than your son. Two and a half decades--
The family monument sagged askew,
And he overtook your half-a-life.
On the other side of the country,
Near the willows by the slow river,
Deep in the earth, the white ribs retain
The curve of your fervent, careful breast;
The fine skull, the ardor of your brain.
And in the fingers the memory
Of Chopin etudes, and in the feet
Slow waltzes and champagne twosteps sleep.
And the white full moon of midsummer,
That you watched awake all that last night,
Watches history fill the deserts
And oceans with corpses once again;
And looks in the east window at me,
As I move past you to middle age
And knowledge past your agony and waste.

- Kenneth Rexroth

I Am a Cultured Person and This Proves It

2007-10-04T12:43:00.000-04:00

Courtesy icanhascheezburger.com.

Oh, I Get It

2007-09-24T12:06:00.000-04:00

It's a porn search. Never mind.

Give Me Pink Wanda

2007-09-24T10:35:00.000-04:00

That's the latest Google search term to show up on my Statcounter. I salute you, Berlin, Germany! And I hope you find that Pink Wanda.

I Collect Titles

2007-09-23T23:11:00.000-04:00

. . . and write them in a little notebook. Here are some.

1. Proportion Not the Cause of Beauty in Vegetables. Chapter title from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry. Courtesy PG.

2. The Magic Pants of Doom and The Fucking Ice. Titles of stories written by real-life undergrads. Awesomeness.

3. Suddenly, Eggs! Courtesy AM Fine.

4. Debris. Poem title free to Jorie Graham knocker-offers.

5. The Corrections. The title of my next novel.

I Caught this Morning Morning's Minion, King-

2007-09-13T23:56:00.000-04:00

This morning I noticed a morning glory vine twined around the No Parking sign on the corner. I walked over and stood by it a while. The bees nosed down the snouts of flowers, the leaves nodded in the breeze, and sunlight dappled over the spun green mess of the thing. I breathed. A sense of well-being permeated me like sugar melting in warm butter. I ran inside, got my camera, and shot some pictures.

Memoirize Yourself!

2007-09-10T23:24:00.000-04:00

Bored? Mendacious? It's time to write your memoir! Simply fill out the handy-dandy survey, and the Memoirizer will compose a blurb. Here's mine:

WHO I WAS, WHO I AM, AND WHO I WANT TO BE

by

WANDA BALL

In WHO I WAS, WHO I AM, AND WHO I WANT TO BE, Wanda Ball tells the almost too- remarkable-to-be-true story of her rise from villain to hero, including her struggle to overcome her sexual voraciousness, her troubled relationship with her partner and children, and her addiction to drugs, all of which lead her to a life of crime and to rehab, where she found redemption and the strength and wisdom to write this cautionary memoir about the power and resiliency of the human condition.

Inspiring, huh? Let the bidding war commence!

Courtesy of the website for Brock Clarke's An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.

Does anybody know

2007-08-23T14:30:00.000-04:00

. . . how to get the time-date stamp off digital photos (like the ones below)? So ugly. Gah.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

2007-08-21T21:06:00.000-04:00

First I visited my family at the shore in Massachusetts . . .

My mother snips herbs onto oven-baked chicken. Yum!

Action shot! L to R: my sister Elgene, nephew Sammy, and his buddies Jake and Jake (I know) decorate Sammy's birthday cake.

Birthday cake decorated with M & M's, pretzel logs,nonpareils, electric blue icing, gummi peach rings, the number one, yellow licorice, gummi bears, chocolate icing, and gummi worms. It's not too much, is it?

Enough with the food photos. Let's see some dog shit! Our "eccentric" neighbor placed a tiny homemade sign in each dog turd on the street in front of her house.

I drove to New York to interview Famous Writer Lady and do some sightseeing.

Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY.

Wing's Castle, Millbrook, NY. A fantastical dwelling built by Peter and Toni Wing using mostly discarded materials.

An alcove.

Handmade stained-glass windows. The colors!

Performing Arts Center designed by Frank Gehry, Bard College. The roof.

Back to food. Del's Dairy Creme, Rhinebeck, NY.

I finished my frozen custard and watched the place close.

Hudson, New York

2007-08-14T09:59:00.000-04:00

Aug. 7, 2007.

A dusty promenade overlooking the river. Hazy and hot. Below me, two bikini'd teenagers, hip-deep in water, pull a motorboat toward a boat ramp. A man backs a boat trailer down the ramp until the trailer is submerged, and the girls slide the boat on the trailer with surprising deftness. "We did it, we did it!" they squeal.

Another man sits at a picnic table ten yards away, reading. Occasionally he looks up at the girls and the boat. His heavy-bodied black lab noses around the grass, looks at the girls for his own reasons, and barks. The table stands under a tree by the water, next to a row of small anchored yachts. An oddly domestic scene here at river's edge: the dog, the book, the picnic table. I imagine the man will return to his boat and sleep after night falls.

Across the water is a leafy green island. White birds fly along its shoreline.

Quiescence. Voices, barks, train whistles. The breeze is tuckered out. The humid air exudes a heat that is as much pressure as warmth: hard to move through and inhale. Sound and birds cut through it, quick as blades. Seagulls wheel and keen; I think: effortful meaninglessness.

How to Be Fashionable

2007-08-13T12:14:00.000-04:00

This from a profile of British fashion designers Marcus Wainwright and David Neville in Sunday's New York Times. The pair met in boarding school; their designs cost thousands.

"It's important that our clothes have a sense of history," said Mr. Wainwright. "I've been wearing these jeans every day since February, and they've never been washed. I'm breaking them in."

I wonder if crapping your pants will also help that oh-so-special sense of history come alive?

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

2007-08-09T22:58:00.000-04:00

DOWN THE SHORE
I was on the phone with my sister Elgene, who was calling from her shore rental.

Elgene: I just saw a crab run across the sofa.

Wanda: Was it really, really tiny? Like, flea-sized? ARE YOU ALL ITCHY DOWN THERE?

Elgene: No. I could see its little pincers. It ran underneath one of the cushions.

Wanda: It might climb up your vagina while you're watching TV.

Elgene: That's exactly what I was thinking!

Wanda: Then it would impregnate you. And your husband would say, I'm sorry, Elgene. You say you've been faithful but THAT SIX-LEGGED CHILD IS NOT MINE.

The thing is, it could totally have happened (the crab part). Someone could've brought it in on their towel or bathing suit, and now it's scuttling around their living room. There might even be a school of minnows or giant squid along for the ride.

THE MOODY WRITER LADY
Thanks for the good vibes during my interview with her here in New York County. Some of you might have seen her talk in Funkytown last winter so you know she does not suffer fools gladly. Thankfully, the Xanax mickies I slipped her did the trick! And not only that, my Olympus recorder worked beautifully. If you ever need to buy a not-too-expensive voice recorder, ask me.

MY LONG, MOODY BLOG SILENCE
I know.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION
Today I visited the Vanderbilt Estate in upstate New York (pic above). I know it's all grand and opulent and shit, but on a certain level, it's hideous, just hideous. The place is crammed with antiques shlepped over from Europe and Asia, and the architecture apes a neoclassic chateau. So much excess and artifice, with the Louis XV bedroom suite (hers) and the embroidered crown over the bed (his). And yeah, they slept in separate bedrooms. All I kept thinking was, these people are deeply unhappy. Who needs to spend so much money to construct an erstaz ancestral past but the desperately insecure?

Sightseeing with a commie. We ruin everything.

Hot off the Press!

2007-05-21T19:40:00.000-04:00

Buy it now! Poems by a fine poet and dear friend. Lyrical, full of surprises, and fond if ironic, to use the poet's own words.

Mr. Hilter

2007-05-20T12:41:00.000-04:00

Click here.

Starts slow, worth the wait. Nice suburban couple runs into unexpected guest at mingy seaside boarding house. A plus: see Monty Python subtitled in Portuguese.

Lady Writer

2007-05-14T22:36:00.000-04:00

Famous Lady Writer is in town. Tonight she gave a talk on the relationship between writers' fictions and their real lives. She began her talk by recounting a comment she received at a reading: "You write so convincingly about adultery! Have you ever had an affair?" (The answer was no).

Famous Lady Writer went on to discuss Lorrie Moore, whose "People Like That Are the Only People Here" was billed as fiction when it was published in the New Yorker, yet was accompanied by Moore's photo and a pull quote: "Are you taking notes?" "No." "You're not?" "No, I can't. Not this! I write fiction. This isn't fiction." Famous Lady Writer argued that the New Yorker gratuitously blurred the lines between Moore the writer and Moore the person.

Famous Lady Writer also cited Alice Munro as an example of a writer who couldn't possibly draw from her own life for her fiction, because her stories incorporate such a wide variety of plots and characters. Her comment piqued my interest; first, because I adore Munro, and second, because Munro strikes me as precisely the kind of writer who's always mined her biography heavily, from her early stories of clever, ambitious girls escaping the provinces at whatever moral cost, to her later stories of successful, creative women older women from the provinces reckoning with aging parents, troubled adult children, and past loves. The interesting question for me is how Munro is able to remain so compelling, despite a certain obsessive recycling of themes and characters.

So in the Q & A following her talk, I asked Famous Lady Writer what she thought. I prefaced my question with the comment, "I'm sure you've read much more Munro than I have."

Famous Lady Writer: Well, if you read more Munro, I think you'll see what a range she has. Especially now, she writes so much about mortality.

Me: Yes, I think her characters are aging with her.

Famous Lady Writer: If you read more Munro, you'll see that I'm right.

Honestly, what kind of rhetorical strategy is that? I don't know whether I'm more chagrined by her patronizing attitude or by my tactical error: my initial show of deference invited her condescension. She took my rhetorical humility at face value. Doesn't she know she's supposed to respond in kind, with her own show of modesty?

EDITED TO ADD
I change my mind: I heart Famous Lady Writer. She's been with us all week, and she's lovely: warm, down-to-earth, approachable. I don't know what was up the night of her reading, but please don't hold it against her.

1 2 3 4

2007-05-08T10:58:00.000-04:00

This video by Feist will put a smile on your face and a blue jumpsuit on your soul. And the best part is, she's Canadian.

I'm back in town, playing catchup, getting used to walls, and missing the antelope. I know you won't rest till you've seen this list:

Animals I Have Seen in Wyotana

Wild turkey, deer, antelope, sandhill crane, golden eagle, garter snake in grass, sheep, cattle, dead mouse, housecat, rabbit, rabbit mounting another rabbit, rabbit smoking cigarette, coyote, big fish leaping out of creek, prairie dog, weasel, red-tailed hawk, red-winged blackbird, magpie, skunk (smelled rather than seen), barred owl, pheasant, flicker, rough-legged hawk, horses, moonlight, cowboy, ghost.

Photo taken outside Devils Tower National Monument, WY.

Ranch Tour

2007-04-24T16:26:00.001-04:00

Read some Fine poems here.

On a ranch tour today, I learned that vetch is a good forb; a lek site is the intimacy room of the sage grouse; a golden eagle will kill a sheep, lug it thirty feet in the air to its nest, and eat it; the residency foundation is trying to get federal designation as an Important Bird Area (I.B.A.); and antelope run seventy miles an hour.

The picture above is of the creek (crik) behind my studio. Storm's a comin'.

I'll give you a buck if you write a poem or short short (Clem!) entitled "Important Bird Area."

More Blogs!

2007-04-23T21:37:00.000-04:00

Good Lord! New Funkytown blogs are popping up faster than Divine can lick poo off the sidewalk (that's for you, L-bo). Click on them over there in my Blogroll >>> and enjoy.

What's new at the Manly Rural Writing Residency:

1. Bunnies courting. I watch them from my studio window. They touch noses, hop straight into the air, disappear for a while, and return smoking cigarettes.

2. Taxidermy. People really go for that here.

3. N, a filmmaker and scrabble-playing genius, taught us this immortal line from the Patty Duke Show theme song: "A hotdog makes her lose control."

4. "Brokeback Mountain" (the story) was written here, in this very writing retreat. Or around here. Maybe. Anyway. I read the story in my studio and sobbed uncontrollably for an hour, as I did after seeing the movie. Oh, the thwarted lives. The thwarted loves.

5. Writing. Yup, doing that too.

Pet Stop

2007-04-19T23:08:00.000-04:00

Hello all,
My posting will be spotty for the next two weeks--another writing project. In the meantime, please enjoy this moment, courtesy of a rest stop on route 90 south of Billings, Montana.

What's in Your Hair?

2007-04-15T15:01:00.000-04:00

What's in your hair?

1. Lint.

2. Bluebirds in flight--nondescript little birds until the sun hits their back feathers just right and then it's like God has entered the room. The blue! The blue!

3. Three-pound dumbbell.

4. Stick of margarine.

5. Cloaca.

6. Red-haired girl who sucker-punches you, runs a couple yards away, red hair streaming behind her like a proud flag of pain, then bursts into tears, as if it is you who has injured her.

7. Smaller hair.

8. The Constitution of the United States of America.

This is a meme to all and sundry. What's in your hair?

Pink for President

2007-04-11T14:26:00.000-04:00

Okay, so check out this video of Pink singing "Dear Mr. President." Powerful populist statement or Michael Moore-ish manipulation? She performed this last night on Jimmy Kimmel and I was blown away. Goosebumps on arms, lump in throat, fire in belly. So yeah, it worked its liberal devilry on me. Does it work for you?

I think you should show this to your students and ask them to do a rhetorical analysis of it. Logos, pathos, ethos.

I should note that Pink is a Philly girl like me, and in her butch haircut and hippie sundress, she exemplified everything fine and good about that town. She was relaxed, unpretentious, sharp, and funny.

Although if we'd met in high school she'd probably have kicked my ass.

EDITED TO ADD
I just substituted a clip of her singing on Kimmel for the clip I'd originally linked to. This one's better, more restrained. Plus she *sniff* salutes during the line about the troops.

My God, am I a sucker.

Family Music. Sufjan Stevens. All Popular.

2007-04-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

Before you had your own, what was your family music?

The soundtrack to the Band's "The Last Waltz" has been cued in my sister's station wagon for months. Funny to think that her two kids, born 1991 and 1994, now know all the songs by a band that made musical history forty years ago. The kids have their favorites. They sing along. This is the music that will be ground deep into their emotional DNA: the sound of family, claustrophobia, love, history.

My family music nobody's heard of anymore. Did anybody else out there listen to Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods? Loose-limbed, hippie-lyrical improvisations on guitar, keyboard, and drums. Or Judy Collins? Nothing like Judy Collins to place you as the child of liberal urban academics. Brecht's wrathful "Kill them now . . . or later?" is a great line for any little girl to spout at the dinner table.

SUFJAN
Last night I saw Sufjan Stevens, who sings a lot about childhood, family car trips, and memory. Like the Beatles or Glenn Miller, he has a genius for harnessing orchestral power in service of a pop sensibility. The band last night included a French horn, bassoon, string quartet, fifth violin, electric guitar, piano, keyboard, pump organ, and female backing vocalist. Sans bass and drums, Sufjan relies on equal parts rigor and invention to supply that visceral rock rush. His methods include dramatic surges in volume and tempo, percussive passages played by the band en masse, and crackerjack timing by all parties. It sounds fucking great.

I confess, I'm not crazy about Sufjan's hushed, deadly earnest acoustic numbers. Did I mention I despise Bright Eyes? Also, some of his childhood reminiscences come off as a little fey or twee or something. Singing exclusively about childhood marks you as an artist not yet out of your adolescence. At the same time Stevens's idiosyncratic lyrics are a refreshing alternative to the usual pop fare, so I won't complain.

POPULAR ALL OF A SUDDEN
Ever since I "chose" to switch to Blogger Google Beta, or whatever the fuck they call it, my hitcount has ballooned obscenely. Like from thirteen to 168 visitors to Wanda Ball a day. All Google Image hits. Sweaty fourteen-year-olds furtively seeking out pictures of tanning bed himbos, Zach Hanson, Johnny Knoxville. This is not my audience, people. Should I limit the site feed? I don't want to cut off folks searching for stuff about AWP, New Stories from the South, or writing residencies. At the same time, I can't start soliciting ads and make money off the increased traffic, because these images, are, ahem, borrowed from other sources. What should I do, people? Vise me.

EDITED TO ADD
Check out Chickywang's Sufjan report. Dang she funny.

Annals of Sexism in the Literary World, Pt 20 Million

2007-04-04T19:58:00.000-04:00

This just in from Reuters:

Impac Dublin Literary Award Finalists Announced
Salman Rushdie of Britain, Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer of the US, and J. M. Coetzee of South Africa made it to the shortlist of eight contenders yesterday for the $135,500 International Impac Dublin Literary Award, billed as the world’s richest prize for a single work of fiction. Other finalists are Per Petterson of Norway, Peter Hobbs and Julian Barnes of Britain and Sebastian Barry of Ireland.

Let me recap: the world's most valuable literary prize--more generous than the Nobel, the Pulitzer, or the Mann Booker Prize--will go to one of seven men, not a women in the lot and only one person of color.

Good thing, too. What would we spend the money on? Baubles? Midol? Tampons?

May the Bluebird of Happiness

2007-03-20T19:35:00.000-04:00

Dear Readers: I'm taking a two-week break to WRITE STUFF and won't be posting much. This morning I saw one of these, above. Good sign, huh? The only better omen would be a nice, crisp hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk. I was about to say, "on my pillow in the morning," but then I realized that might give you the wrong idea.

I Like Having Poets for Friends

2007-03-15T23:53:00.000-04:00

Sophia has come through with a wonderful Fun Gift Unit, I mean poem. Read it. It's delicious!

And now it's your turn.

Fun Gift Unit

2007-03-14T16:26:00.000-04:00

That's all I have to say.

Actually, it's the title of an email in my bulk mail folder. I love this phrase and I want you to write a poem about it.

Yes, you.

Ann Coulter Is Vicious and Anorexic

2007-03-12T19:07:00.000-04:00

The first is a character flaw, the second a disease. But really, what if the two are related? What if Ann just had a nice meal--a big bowl of pasta and a piece of pie, say. Then, maybe? She would quit with the homophobic slurs and the personal attacks on grieving women.

My diagnosis isn't based on her publicity photos alone. Oh no, I have evidence. My sister went to a swanky Brooklyn party where Coulter was a guest. Coulter's emaciated state was unmistakeable and disturbing. My sister and her friends had that queasy feeling you get when a bad person is very, very sick. Sort of like the feeling Roy Cohn, notorious gaybasher, Joe McCarthy hatchet man, and closet case, must have elicited from his enemies in the last stages of his AIDS-related dementia.

So Ann? Go on. Check yourself into rehab. And be nice.

Mwah!

2007-03-08T23:55:00.000-05:00

Here are A and K, co-directors of the best arts center/ writing residency in the world. Aren't they adorable?

I highly recommend their place, which they've literally built with their own hands. (And I don't mean literally like I literally had a cow). Google it--it's the only writing residency in Arizona.

How to Save Money

2007-03-08T23:25:00.000-05:00

. . . courtesy of VIZ magazine. I especially like the suggestion for "repurposing" old phone books.

1. Foil pick-pockets by placing a freshly toasted "pop tart" in each pocket. Would-be thieves will quickly rupture the fragile pastry and receive nasty finger burns from the steaming hot jam inside.

2. A length of plastic drainpipe with a roller skate at each end makes an ideal home-made "car" for snakes.

3. Stop bread from drying out by keeping it in a bucket of water.

4. Don't waste money buying expensive binoculars. Simply stand closer to the object you wish to view.

5. Avoid jet lag by simply taking an earlier flight, thus arriving fully refreshed and on time.

6. Put a stop to car thieves by siphoning off all your gas whenever you park your car, and carrying it round with you in one or two plastic buckets.

7. Always keep a stick of butter in your pocket so that if you get your head stuck in railings you'll be able to grease your ears and slide out.

8. Old telephone directories make ideal, free personal address books. Simply cross out the names and addresses of people you don't know.

Find the full list at www.wisebread.com.

Daddy, Daddy, I'm Through

2007-03-07T21:41:00.000-05:00

According to the new issue of Blueprint magazine (Martha Stewart's new name-free print vehicle),

setting up a home bar doesn't have to be a headache.

In fact, after you follow Blueprint's insanely elaborate directions,

you can have a spread that will impress amateurs--and make professionals nod in quiet approval.

"Nod in quiet approval"? Whose fantasy is this? After the nod of quiet approval, does the "professional" whisper in your ear, "Now Daddy loves you, even though you're a dirty, dirty whore"?

Oh, wait. That's my fantasy.

Arizona. Now, with Photos!

2007-03-06T00:58:00.000-05:00

Everybody else is blogging AWP-Atlanta, and I'm feeling left out. Mind you, I could have gone to Atlanta. I chose not to. God knows why. I had to do my laundry or something.

What'd I do instead of partying in Atlanta? I polished off the story revision I was working on in Tucson. I mailed out another story and met the new crew of Funkytown University grad student recruits. Howdy, suckers! What a rare experience it is to sell my experience here in Funkytown--telling the recruits how much I've learned and how much I admire the faculty, all of which is true--even as I refrain from telling these fresh-faced young folks that my two-and-a-half years here have been the unhappiest of my life. They don't need to know that, do they? Shh. It will be our little secret.

I think the best solution to Funkytown is getting the hell out of it. Two weeks after returning from Tucson, I'm still feeling focused, productive, and upbeat. (Of course, it helps to know that I'm leaving town again in another two weeks).

Let's look at some Tucson pictures, shall we?

I think I kind of fell in love with Tucson.

Something about the light. Arrowing down through the empty blue air, it lends an iconic presence to everything. The most banal objects--tree, house, car--are lit up like God's own, viz:

and:

and even:

Here's what John P. Klum, an early settler of the region, had to say about Arizona:

I loved the west. The open spaces. The desert mountains; the illusions and disillusions.

The museum in Tombstone had a photograph of Klum: mounted on horseback, sporting a duster and shaggy beard, he looks like Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. He was an easterner who never went back. Buried three wives here. Started a newspaper, more loyal to the Apaches than his government or peers. I see how these people, the people I met on my first night in Tucson and Klum back at the turn of the century, fell in love with this place. It's a place to come clean, to imagine yourself all over again, to believe that you'll never fall for an illusion or settle into disillusionment again.

Photo Stuff
Click to enlarge. They look way better.
1. Gates Pass, Tucson, sunset
2. Nopale fruit (I ate the flesh and got some hair-thin spines embedded in my lips)
3. Mission San Javier del Bac, Tucson
4. Dot's Diner, Bisbee
5. U of Arizona scoreboard viewed from university library, sunset

These photos are my own. More to come!

Lest you imagine I spent my writing residency sightseeing and eating bonbons, photos 2-4 were taken after my residency was over.

Arizona Journal, Day 6

2007-02-13T22:35:00.000-05:00

Today I went to this really old church. That's a picture of it above--Mission San Xavier del Bac. It must have been older than my dad! It had statues of a bunch of gay-looking people and the paintings looked like the artist just dropped Ecstasy. I'd rather have gone to the mall, but at least it was free.

Not really. Inside, the ornamentation is multiform, profuse, exuberant. The walls and ceiling are larded with bright sculptures of saints. Outside, the church is immaculately white. A Native American family--the church is on the Tohono O'odham Res--sold me fry bread. It's like funnel cake--dough dropped in fat and deep-fried, then slathered in cinnamon sugar or refried beans. Some scruffy dogs circled and begged scraps.

A British couple stood in front of a statue of a saint clad in Native garb.

She: I have no idea who she is.
He: Local girl who made good?

In other news, Woodmere, New York found me through this Google search:

My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddamnit, I’m lonely.*

Very noir, Woodmere. Very noir. What are you, twelve?

*This sentence does not appear in my blog.

Arizona Journal, Day 5

2007-02-07T23:17:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Round Rock, Texas, for my first Google hit after posting last night:

masturbation tanning beds male

Yes, my sweaty-palmed friend, with your weirdly colonized erotic imagination, you're what makes it all worthwhile. Copyediting, scouring the internet for images, laborious keying in of HTML code. Hope it was as good for you as it was for me.

Wanker.

Today I have nothing Arizona to blog about, so instead I will do this meme originated by Crazy Little Thing Called Blog: five songs that make you feel incredible.

I'm a lot older than Crazy so I get to pick more songs.

Also I'm a depressive, so nothing makes me feel "incredible," as you put it, short of crack cocaine. So here it is, folks . . . .

THE EIGHTEEN SONGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL SORT OF OK!

1. Marquee Moon by Television. An inordinate amount of great pop music is about heroin. Come to think of it, give me Lou Reed's whole back catalogue.

2. Sweet-Lovin' Man by Magnetic Fields.

3. Take Me to the River by Al Green. Also Pretty Woman. Less famous than Talking Heads' and Roy Orbison's covers, but maybe better. Green's got a way with syncopated, mid-tempo funk. The soul of slink!

4. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue by Van Morrison and Them. Also Mystic Eyes and TB Sheets. Van's early stuff kills me. Check out the organ intro.

5. Baby, You're a Big Girl Now by Bob Dylan. Can I just claim the whole album Blood on the Tracks? Please?

6. Jackson and If I Were a Carpenter by Johnny and June Carter Cash. Their harmonies slay me. Speaking of great husband-and wife-teams . .

7. In this House that I Call Home and The New World by X.

8. Break up the Family by Morrissey.

9. Anodyne by Uncle Tupelo. Ok, it makes me feel awful. But I love feeling awful.

10. Sweet Lil Thing by the Eels.

11. Sweet Home Alabama by Lynyrd Skynyrd. It's a Florida thang, y'all.

Too many songs by Aimee Mann, Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry, and Tom Verlaine to count.

12. I've Been Loving You Too Long by Otis Redding.

13. King Harvest Has Surely Come by the Band. Also please may I have Tears of Rage and Stage Fright.

14. Teardrop by Massive Attack.

15. I Believe When I Fall in Love with You It Will Be Forever by Stevie Wonder.

16. Chicago by Sufjan Stevens. Orchestral pop confection with abrupt tempo changes. What's not to love?

17. Sexy Motherfucker by Prince.

18. Astral Weeks by Van Morrison. The whole album. You want me to choose? Go ahead, make me. I dare you.

I meant to post this like three weeks ago but Blogger was all fucked up. Here it is: great new poems in Coconut.

Now I touch you with my dirty, dirty meme: Coral and Clem. Clem: you're the guy I went to Subtropic U with, in case you forgot your top-secret fake blogger name. And maybe Amfine and Kristi Maxwell, if you're reading this?

Arizona Journal, Day 4

2007-02-06T17:09:00.000-05:00

I'm eating a late lunch at Pancho Villa's, a Mexican dive here on 4th Avenue. Not bad--eggs with chorizo, refried beans, and fried potatoes. The salsa is good, even the mild stuff my gringa stomach likes. Best of all is the horchata, the creamy, cinnamon-spiced rice drink that soothes my burning throat and mouth. Guerro Canelo is next on my list, a lunch place on 12th Street suggested by the hippie dude at Cup Cafe. It's in the barrio, and as y'all know, I love restaurants where I'm the only whitey/anglo/gringa in the joint. I just point and grunt at the food on my neighbors' table and the waitstaff seems to understand.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICANS
I was up till 5:30 this morning writing. Of course, most of that time was spent chastising myself for my lack of emotional self-sufficiency (I'm lonely), discipline (I don't start writing till midnight), and worldly success (I'm living on tortillas and beans). Then I said, "Oh, fuck it," and got to work.

I did indeed write too much, as I warned myself against yesterday, succumbing because this full-fledged scene I cooked up solves lots of the problems of the first draft. But also because it's a doozy! A teenaged boy masturbating to a scientific article! It was so fun imagining myself into his consciousness. Although I'll have to vet the scene with a certified Man--I don't have, um, first-hand knowledge of all the mechanics. Insert poorly-executed wink here. Tonight I see if there's any way to integrate the scene more fully, without upsetting the balance of the story. Is this interesting to you? It's not interesting, is it. Just think about the masturbation part. That's exciting. Oh, I can just see the Google hits piling up.

Sign of the day: Old Pueblo Parking Lot. Just pitiful, people, in so many ways.

Arizona Journal, Day 3

2007-02-05T16:34:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I took a walking tour of El Presidio, a historic area downtown near the Convention Center. The architecture is beautiful and eclectic, influenced by Native, Victorian, Mission, and Frank Lloyd Wright styles. Many of the houses along Main Street have thick adobe walls dressed up with Victorian gingerbread and lace curtains. I loved seeing the Anglo styles mixed up with desert vegetation: dracaena, saguaro, prickly pear.

In the cool, tiled courtyard of the Pima County Courthouse (pictured), I came upon a young guy in gangsta threads with a lowrider bicycle. The wheels were maybe a foot tall, and it was outfitted with leather seat, twisted gold metal trim, and chrome name plates. He wouldn't let me take a picture because he does tours, taking ten of the bikes at a time out to Vegas. A teenaged couple walked up and admired the bike while I plied the guy with questions. He made the seat cover from an old purse; he fashioned a medallion for himself from a gold bicycle chain and scrap leather. When I told him he was a real artist, he said, "Naah, I just get bored."

As I was attempting to peek over the wall of El Presidio Inn Bed and Breakfast, a sixtyish couple emerged from their SUV and motioned me over to the back door of the compound. "Would you like to see the courtyard?" It was lush and beautiful, with fountains and lemon trees. It's amazing what a skirt, a camera, and a hopeful look will do for you in this town. I've met more people here in three days than in three years in Funkytown.

REVISION, OR MURDERING THE BABY
Late last night I had an insight into the revision process. I tend to write short and tight; seven-page stories are the norm for me. Not to boast or anything, but my first drafts tend to be highly polished, allusive, and concise. While I can't spin an action-packed yarn to save my life, economical I can do. People have said to me, Revision must be a breeze for you--your work is polished already. But in truth, revision is hell for me, hell! When your stories are only seven pages long, rewriting is like performing brain surgery on an infant: one tick of the knife, and you've murdered the baby.

Part of the reason I've sent so few stories out is because nothing feels done; half-revised stories lie around my desk like the toaster oven your big brother disassembled when he was ten and never quite put back together. But last night, it hit me: the reason I’ve had such a lack of success with revision is that I try to do too much. I insert a full-fledged scene when a single sentence is all that’s required, I cut a paragraph when a word will do. Part of the problem may be, dare I say it, inappropriate advice; most teachers are used to guiding students who write too much rather than too little. (In fact, most people write too much, rather than too little, a state of affairs I’d give my eyeteeth for). So the teachers advocate a slash-and-burn approach, when, in truth, for work on this scale, tiny adjustments are all that’s required to make a huge impact.

This is a shiny-new, twelve-hour-old theory. I hope I’m right here. It’s not just me who thinks my current revisions aren’t satisfactory; my professors send them back, too. And for the sake of my sanity and self-esteem, I need a publication bad. Any publication at all—at this point, some ten-year-old's Xeroxed zine will do. Know any?

Arizona Journal, Day 2

2007-02-04T14:25:00.000-05:00

Last night I went on a walk and ended up at the bar of the Cup Cafe, the nice little restaurant inside the famed Hotel Congress. A fiftyish hippie dude--"I'm not from here, I came here in the seventies"--told me he likes to compose haiku when he bicycles. The motion of his peddling sets the rhythm of his poems. When he gets off the bike, he runs to his desk and writes down the finished poem. On my other side sat a chic fortyish woman from Montreal, in town for the giant annual Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase. She told me she was a gemologist, which at first I thought was something like a cosmetologist, but apparently it requires rigorous schooling involving geology and math and other things.

After dinner I came home to a big party for A's birthday. Lots of interesting people there--A & K have great friends--and I got to see the big house where A & K live. Dang! It has sixteen-foot beamed ceilings, tile floors, and adobe walls. The high ceilings give everything a kind of drama and import, as if this is the party that will be written up in poetry biographies forty years later.

D, one of the other residents, asked me if I read when I'm in the middle of a writing project. Sometimes, I said. I can't, he said. It's like trying to remember one song when another is playing. Isn't that great?

The night before last, A. said to me, "As much as I hate people, I love them." Happy birthday, dude.

Arizona Journal, Day 1

2007-02-02T23:58:00.000-05:00

In the north, the mountains.

Above the buses and sidewalks, above the shoppers and dogs, above the cacti and willows and cowboy drunks, the Santa Catalina mountains. They're there like a recurring dream or the idea of something: God, your mother, someone’s death. Irreducible, eventual.

I flew into Phoenix Thursday night around 9:30. The interstate down to Tucson was crowded with trucks. We sped past a landscape of degraded genericness: gas stations, strip malls, fast food joints, each highly lit and marked with aggressive particularity. I peered out the van window at the full moon and tried to imagine this land as it was fifty years ago, desert. Gorgeous austerity. Even when we reached an empty stretch of highway, lit towns and exurbs hovered at the fringes of the horizon. We were always on the edge of somewhere.

I’m doing a two-week stint at a writers’ residency in Tucson, Arizona. A and K, the women who run it, are lovely. Last night I went out with them to Grill, an all-night joint on Congress. A two-man band played rockabilly. The snaggle-toothed singer, his face framed by sweeping, pencil-thin sideburns, played the guitar and worked the drum with his foot. His face contorted with effort as he sang. Two women at my table got up and danced together beautifully, one smiling, the other solemn. When the band took a break I talked to a woman with a fedora perched on her messy blond hair. She told me that Tucson is a vortex, a center of energy. You’ll meet a person and realize, that was the person I was meant to meet. All the people I talked to had the same mystical feeling about Tucson, about its lively shambly quality and friendly creative folks. I guess the ones who don’t have that feeling, leave. I listened to them with a sense of longing and disbelief.

The colony is housed in a historic Mexican compound at the end of a busy, artsy strip. A and K have renovated the whole place themselves, lovingly outfitting each cottage with thrift-shop furniture and artwork by friends. Outside, cacti and palm trees edge winding paths strung with colored lights. It’s really wonderful. You’ve got to come here, people!

Greedy versus Fair

2007-01-30T19:03:00.000-05:00

In a profile in the January 22 New Yorker, environmentalist Amory Lovins has this to say about the failings of the free market:

Markets are meant to be greedy, not fair. Efficient, not sufficient. They're very good at short-term allocation of scarce resources, but that's all they're good at. They were never meant to tell you how much is enough or how to fulfill the higher purpose of a human being.

I like this approach--it's pragmatic, rather than ideological. Capitalism is good at some things, not so good at others. And his take allows for the existence of the soul.

The soul? What's that if not ideological, you say. But Lovins doesn't allow his stated interest in "the higher purpose of a human being" to cloud his appreciation of capitalism's benefits.

Read the article to get a fuller sense of Lovins's idealistic pragmatism. Can't find it online at the New Yorker? Try Lexis Nexis. Or on top of the toilet tank in your bathroom.

Here's to You, Mrs. Robinson

2007-01-24T15:47:00.000-05:00

My handsome, funny teenaged nephew is a celebrity. Go to the Oscars website and click on the promo video. He's the one towards the end of the video with a question for Mrs. Robinson.

Here's the story: Ollie and his buddies were hanging out in Brooklyn, their home turf, when who should walk up to them but Spike Lee, the director of the video. Okay, so maybe not Spike Lee, but Spike Lee's representative. At any rate, his crew filmed them right there, with the kids throwing out lines and Lee, or his representative, running the camera. The spots are written up in today's New York Times (unstable URL) and will be broadcast on ABC starting today.

Woo-hoo! My baby's a STAR.

EDITED TO ADD:
Alas, the promo video has been removed from the Oscars site, post-show. Too bad. *sigh* Ollie coulda been a contenda.

Touched by a Meme

2007-01-17T21:59:00.000-05:00

I saw two red-bellied woodpeckers in the park today. They were high up in the trees, but their powerful bills and meaty little jackhammer bodies cut unmistakable profiles, even at thirty feet. Then the winter sun caught the brilliant red feathers along the back of their heads and necks--the woodpecker mullet--and I knew I was in red-bellied territory.

I've been touched by a meme. What are five little-known facts about you, asks Kristi at .oar. Funny you should ask.

1. I worked as a waitress for fifteen years before I went back to school for my BA. Amazing, because I am only twenty-nine.

2. I've also worked at a dairy farm, test marketing center, and whorehouse.

Okay, I never worked at a whorehouse. But I got you for a moment there, didn't I?

3. I suffer from the same eye ailment that caused James Joyce to go blind (iritis). Due to the miracle of topical steroids, my eyesight is clear as a bell. Or a whistle. Or something.

4. I know a lot about experimental feminist video. Go ahead, ask me. You'll see.

5. I am one lucky duck, but I need to keep reminding myself that.

Now, I touch you with my meme! Go forth and meme! Jezebel? CLT?

Better than Despair

2007-01-04T19:22:00.000-05:00

Sophia at Intagliod up in Blue and Chicky Wang are sharing the first poems that knocked their socks off. Here's mine. I stumbled on it at fifteen, a lonely atheist harnessed in an advanced state of adolescent despair. When I read Hopkins's words, I felt my heartbeat quicken and the hairs on the back of my neck prick up. This was better. This was better than despair.

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell; the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

Happy New Year!

How to Find Me

2006-12-13T17:44:00.000-05:00

My top internet search referrer is this photo, which I, um, borrowed from another website, http://www.laurafries.com, to accompany my mother's recipe for latkes. Sorry for stealing your traffic, Laura!

Here are some other unusual search terms that threw traffic my way.

1. *kyle chandler urinate* This phrase does not appear in my blog. Honest.

2. *melancholy mood eating instead of solving your problems* Aw, sorry hun. I feel your pain.

3. *why do butter tarts go sugary on the bottom* I salute you, Belleville, Ontario! I don't know why they go sugary, but I'll eat them if you don't want them.

4. *give me pic of that one dude that was hanging on a tree while the boat slew up* This is just weird in about five different ways. First of all, "slew." I guess it's a regional thing? Well, I'm going to start using it. All the time. Secondly, who could possibly think that "that one dude" is an appropriate descriptor? I can just imagine Google going, "'That one dude'? I know just who you mean! Hold on a sec while I go get his picture!" And "the boat"? What boat? Oh, of course. That boat. What was I thinking.

First Snow in Funkytown

2006-12-07T10:41:00.000-05:00

I like this picture of a nighttime snowfall by Andrew Luetgers at mnartists.org.*

. . . and this one of Broadway by Daniella Zalcman.*

*click to enlarge

Here in Funkytown, specks float downward half-heartededly, as if they are not really all that interested in any of this. They'd rather just look around. The sparse layer of snow atop the pavement and grass looks dirty. Does this count as snow? It doesn't feel like it counts.

I Score a Ten

2006-12-03T11:52:00.000-05:00

Here it is: the long-awaited . . .

HOW ETHNICALLY CANADIAN ARE YOU?*

1. Do you have childhood memories of your brother playing floor hockey with his best friend John Boettgen in the attic above your bedroom, the sound of the puck as it slid over the linoleum flowing into your dreams like the glorious Saint Lawrence River?
a. Yes, all the time.
b. No.
c. Where is the Saint Lawrence River?

2. Could you not get enough of salt-n-vinegar potato chips when you were visiting Welland, Ontario for Passover, yet you promptly forgot about them as soon as you returned home to suburban Philadelphia?
a. My God, yes! How did you know?
b. No.
c. What are salt-n-vinegar potato chips?

3. The Toronto Maple Leafs: talk amongst yourselves.
a. Yes, how did you know?
b. No.
c. Is ice hockey that game with the sticks?

4. Did your father correct you for saying sah-rry like Some Goddamned Statesider, when everybody knows the correct pronunciation is soe-ree?
a. Yes. I'm sorry!
b. No.
c. That's why I've been in therapy for the last twenty years.

5. How do you feel about over-the-counter codeine?
a. It is our God-given right!
b. No.
c. Why. Do you have any?

6. How do you feel about Pierre Trudeau?
a. He was our Canadian JFK!
b. He was our Camelot!
c. He did Margot Kidder, and look at her now.

7. How do you feel about bilingual English/French education?
a. Incroyable.
b. Comme ci, comme ca.
c. C'est affreux!

8. What is a butter tart?
a. A delicious confection containing 10,000 calories per bite. Enjoy!
b. No.
c. Why. Can you get me some?

9. Even though it was sold long ago, will the memory of your late aunt's house in Welland, Ontario always be associated with that distinctive scent of roast beef, history, and home?
a. Yes.
b. No.
c. I do not know of this roast beef of which you speak.

10. How do you feel about statesiders?
a. Bunch of gun-toting morons.
b. Bunch of gun-toting morons.
c. Bunch of gun-toting morons.

SCORING
All a's: Congratulations! You're ethnic Canadian!
All c's: Congratulations! You're deeply confused!
All b's: Goddamned statesider.

*See previous entry, below.

How Canadian Are You?

2006-12-03T11:23:00.001-05:00

Not very. They need to have a test for us "ethnic Canadian" or "hyphenated Canadian" types. And why no questions about butter tarts? What the hell kind of Canadian wrote this thing, anyway?

You are 67% Canuck!

Good for you! You make me sorta proud. Yeah, sorta proud, not really proud, but sorta proud. You show potential and that is something to be sorta proud of. If you actually did well, then I could be really proud, but you didn't so I'm sorta proud.

How Canadian Are You?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

All Positive and Shit

2006-11-30T17:03:00.000-05:00

I'm usually not all positive and shit. I'm a Jew, and I consider negative thinking my special inheritance and secret weapon. Hey, it got us through 3,000 years of plagues, exiles, blood libels, pogroms, more exiles, and Holocausts. If you expect the worst, then you're all prepared and shit!

Even so, I'm going to go all Holly Hobby on you today. Imagine my button eyes and stitched-on grin as I tell you

THE THREE THINGS I'M THANKFUL FOR

1. This morning I handed in the second of two long papers, both of which I've been working on off and on for a year. I tend to suffer from immobilizing imperfection, so I was trying very hard to follow poet William Stafford's advice and lower my standards. Here's the story: Stafford instructed his students to write a poem a day.

"We can't do that!" said his students.

"Oh yes, you can," said Stafford. "Just lower your standards."

For perfectionists like me who could conceivably produce nothing en route to pursuing perfection, the advice is about the best intervention possible. I wrote my papers! And they're fine! They're not perfect, but they're good enough.

2. At today's optional review session for my American Lit class, my two favorite students showed up. Basically, they asked me questions, and I furrowed my brow earnestly and responded, "Well, what do you think?" in my most professory voice. It's amazing to see them using their imaginations and making the connections. One student compared Young Goodman Brown's long night in the forest to the Indian captivity of Mary Rowlandson. Isn't that great? The other day, another student said about Whitman's

I too am not a bit tamed . . . I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world

that Whitman was referring to the untranslatability of all the new, urban Americans to one another. After a while you feel like, you don't even have to teach them. You just make them read the stuff and they make the connections on their own. It's a pleasure to feel so superfluous.

3. Zade is reading tomorrow! Her poetry is luscious, heartbreaking, and rich in surprise. Plus, she always looks fabulous. Can't wait to see and hear her.

I am in your base killing your dOOds

2006-11-26T19:07:00.000-05:00

Ye olde medieval version.

Feeling undigital? Encylopedia Dramatica provides this handy explanation of "I am in your base killing your dOOds":

The phrase originated in on-line multiplayer games such as Command and Conquer. While player one was innocently building tesla coils and general infantry, player two is in player one's base, killing his dOOds. Player one doesn't even notice, so player two sends him a message:

I am in your base killing your dOOds.

This line can be used in many situations. You can use it to tell your friend that you are fucking his wife, to tell a convenience store clerk he is being robbed, or to your colon right before you shove your

Oops! For the first time ever, Wanda Ball edits for tastefulness. You can imagine what comes next. Here's a hint: it has to do with sexually violating one's person using one's own severed member. But I would never say that.

Up Is Up But So Is Down

2006-11-22T15:02:00.000-05:00

In a review of Up Is Up But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Meghan O'Rourke laments the departure of downtown literary culture from New York City. In its place, she suggests, the internet links us to downtowns all over America:

In an era when real estate is costly but virtual space is cheap, the community that once could be found only on Astor Place exists online. Today, there are plenty of magazines and Web sites continuing the do-it-yourself tradition of Downtown. But they’re largely in the yonder regions of America, where outfits like Spork (out of Tucson) and Forklift, Ohio (out of Cincinnati), to name just two I like, are publishing irreverent work that swipes at the mainstream.

Tucson! Cincinnati! Have the cognoscenti gone mad?

Ruth Brown, 1928-2006

2006-11-17T19:41:00.000-05:00

My friend Dahlia took me to see Ruth Brown sing at Dino's Lounge in West Philadelphia when I was a teenager. We were the only white people in the place. Brown sang "Mama, He Treat Your Daughter Mean" and a bunch of her other hits just as tough and sassy as you please. Her in-between song pattern was a stitch. At one point, she stopped singing, peered into the audience, and said, "Hey! You two!" The bar manager directed the spotlight on Dahlia and me, and Brown told the audience, "Give 'em a round of applause!"--meaning, give us a round of applause for coming to a "black" bar. Of course we were mortified, unsure how to read Brown's combination of warmth and aggression--just as she wanted, I think. Later, she gestured to her wig and false eyelashes and asked us all if we thought she was beautiful. We did.

Sass is an amazing thing. It builds the ground under you as you walk it. It creates the right to say something like snatching a quarter out of a child's ear. Ruth Brown's sass was bright and sharp as lemon, as copper, as sunlight. Sing on, sing on, sing on.

Dolly Ball

2006-11-13T00:34:00.000-05:00

By way of introducing my mother, Dolly, here's a verbatim transcript of a conversation about my upcoming trip home for Thanksgiving.

D: And don't bother with the three-ounce toiletry samples. You can use our stuff. Toothpaste, hand cream, mouthwash, douche . . .

W: Douche? Are you sure you have enough? I'm planning on douching big time over the holiday. I'm talking ten, fifteen times a day.

D: I'll stock up.

Is It Wrong to Be Happy about Somebody's Infidelity, Self-Deceit, and Addiction?

2006-11-03T22:26:00.000-05:00

I know the answer already: it's wrong, wrong, wrong. Even so, I'm unaccountably thrilled to read this in today's Yahoo News:

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The Rev. Ted Haggard said Friday he bought methamphetamine and received a massage from a male prostitute.

Haggard, as you know, is president of the National Association of Evangelicals and actively campaigns against both gay marriage and homosexuality.

Meow

2006-11-01T13:24:00.000-05:00

The other night, KCB wondered if one could obtain a feline nativity scene. You know, Jesus and Mary and the three wise men as furry, fish-lovin', mouse-chasin' cats. But wouldn't that be sacrilegious, mused Chicky? The baby Jesus with whiskers, claws, and, God forbid, a tail?

It turns out there are many, many feline nativity scenes available for purchase. KCB turned up just a few:

One word: polyresin.

A class act: blessed kitties in gold-trimmed ceramic.

Very crafty. Penguin Jesus, too!

Baby Jesus without tail.

Baby Jesus with tail. So, so interesting.

Authentic Native American feline Jesus. Just as the tribal elders have decreed!

So have a great holiday, and I hope the baby Jesus refrains from placing a mauled, half-dead sparrow on your pillow as a special Christmas treat.

Heartless Bastards

2006-10-30T22:25:00.000-05:00

It's always both gratifying and discomfiting when the object of your private affections becomes an article of public consumption. I was just watching "Friday Night Lights," when what should come up on the soundtrack but the Heartless Bastards.

That's a good thing, right?

Hush Sessions

2006-10-29T11:34:00.000-05:00

Ooh! Visit our friend's beautiful poem on versedaily.com today.

They were careful as prepositions with each other
when the gifts grew dull.

See? Who else can use the word prepositions in a lyric?*

*said the one-time copy editor.

Teachable Moment

2006-10-25T20:02:00.000-04:00

WB: . . . and so, class, Poe's Gothic is in some ways a response to the Enlightenment priviliging of logic and rationality. I mean, really, what could Ben Franklin possibly have to say to the speaker of "The Raven"?

Five hands shoot up.

WB: Um, it was a rhetorical question? But, okay, *pointing to student* you.

STUDENT 1: I'd say, everything in moderation! Quit your drinking! Go out and get some exercise!

WB: Um, okay, great? You? *points to student 2*

STUDENT 2: I'd say, what does the raven represent to you? Why is it so hard for you to let go of Leonore? I mean, I know you love her and all, but--

WB: People! Can't you see! There is no reasoning with the speaker of "The Raven"! He's just going to sit there and moan about the woman he probably killed and some weird talking bird! He's C-R-A-Z-Y-crazy!

Twenty students stare at WB in stony-faced silence. "But you asked," says one.

WB: *sighs* That'll teach me to ask rhetorical questions.

Suitcase of Devilry

2006-10-25T15:23:00.000-04:00

Here's Clem's report on a concert he attended last week in Funkytown:

I missed the first guy (Burning Star Core), but I did see John Weise (boring balding guy behind laptop) and Wolf Eyes (who were fantastic). Their set consisted of: weird long saxophone, homemade stick bass thingy, gong, drum machine + sampler, suitcase of devilry (which consisted of what appeared to be a broken answering machine, small mixing console, and various springs that, when touched, generated said devilry), three microphones for screaming/uttering, and two-stringed electric bass. It was much pleasing. Their final song was a crowd pleaser, which I recognized as the second song from their previous record Burned Mind, entitled, "Stabbed in the Face."

"Stabbed in the Face"? Doesn't John Tesh do a cover of that?

The Talking Pig Goes

2006-10-18T15:22:00.000-04:00

The smart and funny writer Jim Shepard, "patron saint of the maladjusted," visited Funkytown. Last night he read unto us a long short story, "Sans Farine," about an executioner during the French Revolution, to be published in November's Harper's. Today he met informally with a group of graduate students for a Q and A.

These are my notes. If not in quotation marks, Shepard's words are paraphrased, with more or less skill and accuracy.

A good general rule for writing: "The talking pig goes." Shepard does a lot of research for his fiction, and he's tempted to include in the story every cool thing he uncovers in his research about Columbine or John Ashcroft or French executioners. But some details don't move the story forward; he may end up with only four items from his research that prove to be "emotionally resonant," as he puts it. So out goes the talking pig.

Even when he does an enormous amount of research on a subject--such as, say, Charles Lindbergh (sculptor Isamu Noguchi invented the baby monitor in response to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, he told us)--in the end, Shepard may not write a story about him. The subject remains merely a fascination, not a person with whom he feels "emotional congruency"--not someone from within whose consciousness he could write.

Of the balance between reading current fiction and the classics: "at what point do you stop eating and start exercising?" (Also a good analogy for the balance between reading and writing).

Shepard expressed admiration for stories by Flannery O'Connor, as well as "Helping" and "Emergency" by Denis Johnson, for the ways they resist the "tyranny of the epiphany." Johnson's and O'Connor's characters know exactly what they shouldn't do--but do it anyway. No epiphanies there.

"Sans Farine" is deliberately excessive in its graphic depiction of executions, botched and otherwise, by sword, rack, and guillotine. Shepard read for just under an hour, pacing as he did so, in a hot, close room with cramped lecture-hall seating. In the Q and A, I confessed to Shepard that while I admired the story immensely, I wanted to run screaming from the room. Shepard responded thoughtfully, first noting the tension between exploitative versus redemptive uses of violence in fiction and film. Shepard, who also writes about film for The Believer, admires Scorsese's Goodfellas for the way it demonstrates the corrosiveness and the seduction--the "evil small boy's joy"--of violence, and how it implicates you, the viewer, in that pleasure. He observed that writing violent stories can be taken as an aggressive act toward readers; for him, such a story is a way of working out some rage at himself, but can get read as rage at the audience. I actually knew just what he meant, and I think it helped me understand my own writing a little better; sometimes you brutalize characters for your own sins.

We went to lunch with Shepard after the Q and A (on his dime!). He's a lovely guy and a hoot.

Backyard Aphasic

2006-10-16T11:17:00.000-04:00

. . . is the subject line of a recent email message touting the economic benefits of online poker. Here's the full text of the message, poker bits excised:

In fact, as a Tourism attraction, the view from afar can be as exciting as the view from the top!

Cast your mind back to 1974 and Johan Cruyff's turn that so bemused Swedish right- the ball square so the team did not concede possession. See the Empire State Building inside and out through the ESB Virtual Tour. But France legend Zidane may forever be haunted by the moment of madness which He has been a key leader in the development of DOE's Science Grid as well as

POKER BITS GO HERE

Estimates of increased opium cultivation in 2006 highlight the challenge confronting The 2006 Fifa World Cup drew to a close on Sunday with Italy claiming their fourth and end the tragedy we are witnessing in Darfur. on the touchline with his trademark notes and pen, as well as his trademark wave urging England forward. Send an online ESB postcard to your friends and family right from your computer.

came from the group stages.Cameroon stunned holders Argentina in the opening game of 1990, Senegal did the

old David James was Robinson's deputy, followed by Scott Carson, who is surplus at
This time round, classic encounters have been hard to find.McClaren has talked a good game so far - now he must prove he is the right man for

William E. (Bill) Johnston was named Project Manager for the Energy Scienceswas very much on the body of England's World Cup ambitions.

Kone and Argentina's Maxi Rodriguez - scorer of one of the most wonderful WorldMacedonia, Israel and Russia then he will not survive his four-year contract.

of the problems he must confront after Sven-Goran Eriksson ended his reign in failure.NASA's Information Power Grid.
recognition as a leader in Grid development uniquely qualify him to lead ESnet.Great players make great games - how will anyone ever forget the way Pele's Brazil
Macedonia, Israel and Russia then he will not survive his four-year contract.first time they managed to win a World Cup match on penalties after three failed attempts.
This goalless draw was the first time Portugal had failed to win inside 90 minutes atThat will greatly enhance the capabilities of researchers across the country who

McClaren needs results quickly because his was an appointment that was hardly well-We must devote all of our energies now to secure its immediate and full implementation.

MORE POKER CRAP

He was replaced by Aaron Lennon and was seen on the sidelines looking anguished asIn fact, as a Tourism attraction, the view from afar can be as exciting as the view from the top!

Pure poetry, my friends.

People Who Need People Who Need Toilets

2006-10-04T23:06:00.000-04:00

I'm all over the NY Times these days. In today's "DNA May Implicate Malibu Stars' Toilets" we learn that

County officials initially will focus on properties with heavier toilet use, such as restaurants and Barbra Streisand's estate.

The article goes on to explain that Streisand's estate belongs to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which hosts weddings, conferences, and tours.

I liked the article so much more before I knew that.

TV Guide for the Perplexed

2006-10-03T22:29:00.000-04:00

Have you seen Virginia Heffernan's review of "Friday Night Lights"?

If the season is anything like the pilot, this new drama about high school football could be great — and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee and has months or years to go back and agonize over line breaks and the color red . . . (Today's NY Times--unstable URL).

Good God, Virginia, get a grip. "Friday Night Lights" is good, but I mean, it's not that good. What it has going for it are beautiful shooting, cutting, and Yo La Tengo-esque scoring by W. G. Snuffy Walden, who's apparently scored every "serious" television show ever produced since "thirtysomething." "Friday Night Lights" is gorgeous, even more gorgeous than the crop of beauteous new shows this season--"Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," "Smith," and "Kidnapped," to name a few--all of which boast atmospheric lighting and kinetic camerawork and editing. "Friday Night Lights" also has in its corner Kyle Chandler, who's shed his pretty-boy good looks and aged into something much, much more interesting and affecting. Ever catch him in "Early Edition" or even "Home Front"? Well, he's finally learned how to act. In the past, with his earnest, aw-shucks drawl, Chandler angled for an iconic Gary Cooper-ish quality; now, finally, he's acquired the gravitas to pull it off. Hell, he can even intone lines like, "We will all fall," and make them work.

The pilot, was, admittedly, wonderful, as television goes. But the female characters are not as interesting as the male ones by half--with the exception of Chandler's wife, played by Connie Britton. She may not be as good as I think she is, but I have hopes.

Other shows:

I enjoyed "Smith" and think it's worth watching, but probably won't because we can't watch everything we like, now can we? Virginia Madsen, in particular, was so good. One look at her warm, melancholy face, and just like that, the story is told. I watched the pilot of "Kidnapped" with high hopes--Dana Delaney! Tim Hutton!--and was disappointed--self-serious crap, to my mind, but maybe it gets better? So this season--for all thirteen of you who are reading this--I'll be watching "Grey's Anatomy," "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," "Friday Night Lights," and "Ugly Betty," another fun, imaginative show with a distinctive visual style and a nifty take on telenovelas.

Lastly, I caught the last fifteen minutes of "How I Met Your Mother" last night, and it was so funny! It seems to have found its comedic niche--not bland "Friends" bonhomie, but over-the-top "Scrubs" lunacy. Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan, especially, have some great comedic chemistry going on.

What shows will you be watching?

Detritus

2006-10-02T23:29:00.000-04:00

1. Favorite NY Times headline of the day: "Penn State Houses Big E. Coli Collection."
I don't want to actually read this article. But I'm glad it's there.

2. Latest Line of PB Teen furniture: "EXTREME STORAGE. TO MATCH YOUR LIFESTYLE."
I bet the people who came up with this idea thought they were being so, so smart.

3. There is no three.

4. Why does everything have to come in threes?

Peda-peda-peda-gogy-gogy-gogy, or, On Strictness in Teaching

2006-09-24T11:20:00.000-04:00

I love Chickywang's advice to new teachers:

Get interested in what they think. Ask them why the writer/ inventor/ scientist/ historian/ public figure/ molecule / hominid / etc. chose to do/ came to do whatever thing they do they way they do it. Why does it happen that way? Or make a statement and say, “Why is that?” e.g. “People are creeped out by movies about 9/11 – why is that?” That is all I know. Vis a vis behavior problems: take them out in the hall and tell them to knock it off. During class, don’t use phrases that include words like “Cherry” “ass-fuck” or “vagina”. Come to accept some days are a wash. Go Socratic. Go long.

Aside from the ass-fuck and vagina business--oops, there goes Pedagogical Method No. 1!--I plan to implement all Chicky's techniques.

Me, I taught my first class of the quarter on Thursday. Literature! Like a real person! I did my best to scare the shit out of my students, but I think I might have been a little too effective. In the interest of being clear about my expectations, I informed the class that I gave out very few A's, that I consider them sacred and want them to mean something. Sort of the way some people feel about sex? But I digress. So I gave them the business and looked at them, and THE CHINS OF SOME THEM WERE ACTUALLY QUIVERING. I saw MOIST EYES. MOIST EYES! Oh God, I thought. I've lost them. They're hurting. Now none of them are going to do any work because they figure they can get only B's anyway, so why bother.

I've had this problem since I began teaching--actually, ever since I babysat as a teenager--I'm too much of a hardass. Then, at the end of the quarter, I wonder why I was so tough on them. The vigilance and strictness seem so needless, such a waste of bad karma. The ones who are genuinely committed to intellectual engagement are going to work hard, regardless--you can't force a change in values. Or can you? I mean, I try to make critical thinking fun and sexy and all that, but isn't it our job as teachers to push them hard, too, past their comfort zones?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

The Lakeside Collection

2006-09-20T10:54:00.000-04:00

All right, so I'm a snob.

I never said I wasn't.

I'm one of those Volvo-driving, NPR-listening, losing-candidate-voting intellectuals. Me and my kind have lost touch with the heartland and capital-P People. We are responsible for the defeat of the Democratic party. If only we'd downplayed this whole feminist angle. If only we'd gotten back to our roots and embraced our faith, even if we never have and never will believe in God.

But all is not lost for us. I've found a company that can help us get in touch with the real people, the people who pay taxes and mow their lawns and raise children. It's called The Lakeside Collection, and it will sell you a Set of 3 Holiday Tissue Rolls featuring images of snowmen, reindeer, and Santa Claus. That's right, wipe your ass on a saint, like a real American.

For my daughter, I can't wait to buy the 10-piece Cleaning Trolley with Working Vacuum. This gem contains a wheeled trolley with space for a trashbag and a cleaning rag, just like the ones used by janitors all over America. I want the best for my daughter, only the best.

Then there's the Super-Soft Nascar Throw, with your choice of airbrushed images of Kasey Kahne, Jeff Gordon,Tony Stewart, and Dale Earnhardt, whose name is a registered trademark. Wasn't Earnhardt the one who was killed in a car crash? Damn, didn't see that one coming.

See, the Dems have to understand, we need to make the people of America feel more comfortable around us. We need to say "nucular" instead of "nuclear" and downplay that whole reproductive-rights-for-women thing. Women controlling their lives? Icing on the cake, people. Why is "pander" such a dirty word around here?

We Dems need to let our fellow Americans know we identify with them. And if it takes stocking our bathrooms with sacrilegious toilet paper and glorifying the most mind-numbing work known to mankind and emblazoning our furnishings with images of suicidal maniacs, well so be it. That's the way to win an election.

Inexplicable Crushes

2006-09-18T14:54:00.000-04:00

Why do I love them? Why?

1. Horatio Sanz of Saturday Night Live
2. Rudy Boesch of Survivor: Season 1
3. Johnny Knoxville
4. Zac Hanson. And no, I don't mean the present-day Zac. I mean THE UNDERAGED ZAC.
5. Mrs. Slocum from Are You Being Served. Dude, I dig the wig.

So who's your inexplicable crush? Go on, tell me. I won't tell a soul.

Who Needs Sex? Who Needs Cocaine?

2006-09-12T16:17:00.000-04:00

When I was eight, I ate a fizzy sherbet with a liquorice dip, and I was never the same.

Twenty*-odd years later, I searched high and low for this distinctive British sweet. I scoured the internet. I quizzed the spouses of my brother and sister, both of whom grew up in the U.K. Chickywang took on the project, querying candycentric friends and relations. But without its proper name, the elusive foodstuff was not to be found.

Last weekend, on a shopping jaunt to a warehouse store full of aisles of international imports, I came upon my childhood treat.

You dip the licorice stick in a paper tube of sugary dust and lick the particles off the licorice until you have consumed both meal and utensil. The paper tube exhales puffs of sweet, fizzy powder, the licorice stick grows slick and gummy with saliva.

It is just as I remember it.

How many things can you say that about?

Two Things I Saw Posted in the Subway in Manhattan This Summer

2006-09-11T10:21:00.000-04:00

1.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense.
--Rumi

2.
Si ves algo, di algo!
(If you see something, say something)

Where were you five years ago today?

A Beautiful Poem

2006-09-10T17:33:00.000-04:00

. . . by my friend and yours. Read it here!

ENDLESS SHRIMP

2006-09-07T18:32:00.000-04:00

Does endless summer take too long for you?

Does endless love trigger your intimacy issues?

Well, why not eat some ENDLESS SHRIMP?

I don't know if ENDLESS SHRIMP defy the universal laws of space and time, but they're mighty good eats. Mosey on over to the local Red Lobster and get a load of these yummy, breaded SUCKING VOIDS IN THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM.

They'll taste real good AND shatter your belief in a stable universe.

Food and Death

2006-09-05T15:51:00.001-04:00

I was over at Cute Overload and some of the message-board commenters were all Oh, Poor Steve and Crocodile Hunter Killed? No! and so on. I don't understand these people. The man spent a lifetime working IN CLOSE PROXIMITY TO LETHAL PREDATORS. What the hell were they expecting? The Yahoo headline read, "Crocodile Hunter Killed in Freak Sting Ray Attack." IT WAS A GIANT STING RAY, PEOPLE! It wasn't a freak attack, it was inevitable. If not the sting ray, then the python or the piranha at the next gig.

Don't get me wrong--it's a tragedy that such a charismatic young person was killed, and I feel for his wife and young children. But this outpouring of shock and outrage strikes me as naive at best, disingenuous at worst. If you hang around with man-eating creatures, sooner or later you're going to get et.

In other news, boy did I have a good meal on Saturday! (Following the train of thought here?) Clem, Georgia, and I feasted on pan-fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, biscuits and onion rings at the Echo Restaurant in H____ Park. An all-white meal. Then we split a piece of homemade blackberry pie served warm with ice cream. It was so good. Remember this, people--homemade pie at the Echo. That's all I'm saying.

The hard drive on my ibook has crashed and I feel like someone's died. My sense of loss feels entirely out of proportion. After I came home from a night out Saturday, I opened my front door and was greeted by a crushing sense of sadness--no friendly computer awaited me. My ibook is so deeply integrated into my habits and rituals--how will I read the Sunday Times now?--and, even more than the phone, serves as my chief source of contact with the outside world. My life is empty without you, my love. Get Repaired Soon.

Park Report
I know, you skim over my besotted descriptions of the flora and fauna in B___ Woods with varying degrees of boredom and indifference. But indulge me here. Although this small park is located smack in the middle of town, surrounded by buildings on all four sides, heavily used by a contingent of dogwalkers, joggers, fishing people, and trysting male lovers, it plays host to such a dazzling variety of species.

The other day, for instance, I stood not fifteen feet away from a doe and her fawn, both of them as long-legged and doe-eyed as Audrey Hepburn. Quite a crowd gathered to watch, including a kid who trailed after them, squealing, "Here, boy! Here, boy!" The deer demurred, preferring to chomp on the parks' carefully tended hosta plants.

Came upon a half-grown woodchuck the other day. Upon spying me, it broke into a run and emitted a FIERCE SNARL before diving into its hole. It even curled its lip. Such a lot of indignant ill will in so small and furry a body.

NB: The totemic white cat lives. I hadn't seen it all spring and summer and feared it had died.

The Bronx Is Up, the Battery's Down

2006-08-30T11:34:00.000-04:00

Here, at long last, is a report from my NYC trip.

1. Bus from Boston to Manhattan
A South Asian family clambers aboard, laden with fragrant bags of food. Maybe, if I ask nicely, they'll give me some? As the bus pulls out of the station, a tweedy older white couple removes two neck pillows from their luggage and inflates them simultaneously. The pair wears the neck pillows for the duration of the trip, whether reading, eating, or talking.

2. Port Authority bus terminal
Half the reason I bother taking the bus to NYC, as opposed to the train, is the wondrous Cupcake Cafe on Ninth Avenue across from the Bus Terminal. This improbably-situated hole-in-the-wall is home to the densest, butteriest cupcakes known to humankind, decorated in the most lavish manner possible (see image above). Take the bus. Eat the cupcakes. You will have known what it is to live.

3. Chinatown the next day
My favorite place in Chinatown is Joe's Shanghai Restaurant on 9 Pell Street. I dined family style at a large table with fellow patrons, stealing surreptitious glances at my tablemates' soup dumpling eating strategies. Said dumpling is a fragrant, doughy packet of seasoned meat and savory broth and must be first poked, then dribbled, then slurped, then nibbled, in order not to be worn on the front of your shirt. (In case it's not clear yet--soup dumplings contain soup). Ah, soup. So good.

4. Culture
But I didn't just eat in New York. Oh, no! Lourdes and I saw "Legacies: Contemporary Artists Reflect on Slavery" at the New York Historical Society. The same day I went to Chinatown I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and saw "Raphael at the Metropolitan: The Colonna Altarpiece"; "On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag"; and "Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge," a really amazing installation about Hurricane Katrina.

5. But Wait! More Food
The last day of our stay Lourdes took me to a Dominican place in Washington Heights, Galicia Restaurant at 1506 St. Nicholas Avenue between 185th and 186th. The Galicia is a nondescript takeout place and lunch counter with linoleum floors and flourescent track lighting. But the food! We sat at the counter and sampled three fried snacks: pastelitos, quipe, and bolas de yuca, all intensely flavorful, distinctively seasoned, and minimally greasy. Lourdes said they have great soup, too. On the street afterward, I purchased habichuelas con dulce, a sweet, warm, starchy dessert that you eat with a spoon, like pudding.

6. The Iguana
A three-foot-long iguana roamed the aisles of the Community Bookstore in Brooklyn just before closing time. "Sorry," giggled the proprietress when the beast appeared as fascinated by Brooklyn Authors: Fiction as I was. The woman wrapped her fingers around his fleshy midsection, dashed to the rear of the store, and plunked him in his cage, a toothed and tailed baby who'd escaped his crib.

What Does Kakutani Look Like, Anyway?

2006-08-29T22:16:00.000-04:00

Funny. I was expecting a mousy Joyce Carol Oates-type with big glasses.

Kakutani Garrotes Franzen

2006-08-29T11:57:00.000-04:00

I almost feel sorry for the guy.

Almost.

Do You Find This Reassuring?

2006-08-29T11:43:00.000-04:00

Product information on new frypan:

For safety, please keep pet birds out of the kitchen. Birds' respiratory systems are sensitive to many kinds of household fumes, including the fumes from overheated nonstick pans.

Top Five Names for My Imaginary Heavy Metal Band

2006-08-26T11:42:00.000-04:00

1. Heavy Water

2. Asthma

3. Abbess (accent on last syllable so it's, like, a homophone for abyss)

4. Water Kress

5. Rabbbi (formed by bass player and drummer of Abbess)

PS. Happy Birthday, Alexander!

PPS. What's the name of your imaginary band?

Park Report

2006-08-24T18:51:00.000-04:00

The snake was moss-green, with two golden stripes ribboning along his back. A garter snake, less than two feet long and not much thicker than a finger, he lay on the sidewalk just ahead of me. His body remained in its calibrated curve as he traversed the pavement, the movement slipping down his body like a calm shiver. He slid off the sidewalk and spilled onto a muddy embankment. I drew closer. The snake's tiny, jewel-like head emerged from the crumbling concrete edge of the sidewalk. Poised. Motionless. No human can remain that still. I bent down to get a closer look, and he vanished.

Basil and Peaches

2006-08-22T11:34:00.000-04:00

Here are two super-easy, incredibly delicious recipes for the end of summer. Both basil and peaches are available in abundance at the farmers' market downtown on Saturdays.

Blender Pesto for the Freezer

Tastes like the color green.

From Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook (1973).

Enough for about 6 servings of pasta

2 cups fresh basil leaves. Hazan suggests you rip (not cut) the larger leaves into smaller pieces.
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons pine nuts
2 cloves garlic, lightly crushed and peeled (Lightly thunk big can of tomatoes on them—peels will come right off)
1 teaspoon salt

1. Put the basil, olive oil, pine nuts, garlic cloves, and salt in the blender and mix it at high speed. (You could do this in a food processor, too). Stop from time to time and scrape the ingredients down toward the bottom of the blender cup with a rubber spatula.

2. When the ingredients are evenly blended, spoon into a jar. Seal tightly and freeze. (Instead of freezing immediately, I made pasta that night and froze the rest in an ice cube tray for later).

3. Before using, thaw overnight in the fridge. When completely thawed, mix in 3/4 cup freshly grated parmesan or Romano pecorino cheese by hand. After the cheese is evenly incorporated, mix in 3 tablespoons softened butter. (These portions aren't ironclad--if you're making only three portions, eyeball it).

4. Before spooning the pesto over pasta, add to it a tablespoon of so of the hot water in which the pasta has boiled.

Baked Peaches (Croûte aux peches)

You must understand that it is worth risking corpulence, heart failure, and an untimely death to eat this.

From a book of Monet’s recipes.

Oven 325º Serves 6

6 thick slices bread, crusts removed
3 ripe peaches, cut in half
6 tablespoons sugar
1/2 cup butter cut into 6 pieces

1. Generously grease 8-inch pie plate or jellyroll pan and arrange bread. (You can line the pie plate with parchment or foil for easier cleanup.)

2. Put peach on bread cut-side up. Sprinkle with 1 tablespoon sugar and 1 piece butter. At this point the ungodly excess will make you sick. Press on.

3. Bake 20 mins till peach is cooked through and the bread crispy.

4. Serve warm or cold with cream poured over it.

Note: To print, click on "Basil and Peaches" under "Previous Posts" on the right--otherwise you might print out the entire blog.

Enjoy!

Consumer Report

2006-08-21T16:32:00.000-04:00

Trader Joe's Thai Lime & Chili Peanuts taste exactly like the smell of citronella mosquito repellent. I mean, exactly.

The River and the Horses

2006-08-20T11:18:00.000-04:00

So yesterday I was, you know, driving my car when--

Driving!

Driving my car!

That's right, people, that would be me, driving a rental car hither and yon, practicing my driving on the unsuspecting people of Funkytown. So far I've had a pickup full of irate teenage boys jeer at me through their open windows--What, twenty miles an hour isn't fast enough for you?-- and a suburban mom roll her eyes when I tried to inch my car ahead of her into the right lane at an intersection. But I haven't killed one person, so I consider it a very good driving weekend indeed.

I still don't own a car. I have twenty pages of downloaded advice on how to buy a used car, but it's all a little baffling. What the fuck does a welding spot look like? And how will I know a master cylinder when I see one? Chickywang very kindly provided me with her own instructions, cautioning me never to buy a former rental, because "renters will have a blow party and smear pizza over the windows." Thank you, Chicky.

Yesterday afternoon I drove and drove and drove some more. I drove out to a farming community northwest of town. I didn't realize the M river was my destination till I pulled into the parking lot of a honky-tonk bar next to the water, surprised by a sense of arrival. There were motorcycles and pickups parked out front. To the side was a shuttered stand advertising melons, corn, tomatoes, 8-6.

I walked down a grassy path by a softball field to get to the river. Fishing $2, read the sign. A young girl in a lawn chair sat by the water's edge, pole in hand. The water was satiny brown--good for catfish, maybe, or trout. The bank sloped shallowly down to the water. I knelt and molded the clayey mud; it was disconcertingly fleshy between my fingers.

Across the road was an amateur rodeo full of young women. Their bodies were fierce and taut as they willed their horses to circle each oil drum without knocking it down. They cheered one another on. They burst into the ring at full gallop, as if momentarily forgetting they ever intended to stop.

It was dusk when I drove back. Lush pompadours of clouds sat in the sky ahead of me. I sped home, windows open, inhaling cool, sweet air. The river and the horses. The women swift and free.

Word Cloud

2006-08-08T23:01:00.000-04:00

Apparently, I'm highly interested in GOD, GOOD, PEOPLE, and BED.

What does your word cloud look like?

Hint: it has something to do with the most commonly used words in your blog.

Down the Shore

2006-08-02T23:11:00.000-04:00

Today we watched a storm come in over Stony Beach. First the thunder. Then the sky darkening darkening darkening. A little creamy pink patch to the left. Far-off bolts of electricity twitching into the water. The wind picking up, whitecaps on the waves and a seagull poised above us, flapping furiously, going nowhere. The water preternaturally green and bright.

Then it began to rain. We picked up our beach chairs and wine and ran to my sister's car. Every two minutes a cell phone would ring and one of the women in the car, all mothers of young children, would have a conversation like this.

CHILD'S VOICE: Can I sleep over Ollie's house tonight.
MOTHER: No. You have Science School tomorrow.
CHILD: But Mom.
MOTHER: No.
CHILD: I don't understand. Are you doing this because you don't want to set a precedent?
MOTHER: Shut up.

And so on. The other night, my twelve-year-old nephew had what he described as his "best birthday ever." My sister and her husband borrowed a friend's video projector. They taped a big piece of paper on the wall, popped some popcorn, and projected a bunch of old movies (Some Like It Hot!). Eighteen kids packed into the ten-by-twelve foot living room of my sister's summer rental, sprawled on the floor and squeezed onto the sofa. My mother walked over to peek and reported that some girl was sprawled on top of my nephew with a bowl of popcorn in her lap. Uh-huh. No wonder he had such a good time.

I have more to report on my trip to NYC (foodfoodfoodfood) and my time at the Unspecified Writing Conference with Danny and Sadie. But now I must to bed. Tomorrow, back to Funkytown.

Photo courtesy Rod Watson

Things Written in Margin of Notebook at Essay Workshop with Professor L at Fancy-Schmancy Writing Conference

2006-07-26T17:24:00.000-04:00

Note examples of Professor L's old-style New York accent, with translations.

Neil Young Nation by Kevin Wong. Funny Canadian memoir.

Geniuses have always had the most persuasive demons.

Da Charactuh (The Character)

Yiddish as language of disgust, contempt, weariness (a hand gesture for each of these springs to mind, accompanied by eyeball rolls)

Home Country (potential title of earnest, politically correct book of essays I will never write)

Mawty (Marty)

Messs (mess)

"On Procrastination." My next essay title.

"Morning Pages." Writing exercise whereby you place a notebook next to bed before sleeping. Before exiting bed the next morning, before getting coffee or even peeing, write three pages nonstop.

Answehs (Answers)

Tummler. Comic. (Yid.). Professor L's term.

"I spent my childhood blowing my nose." Someone told me I should write an essay about this.

"Book of Days," essay by Emily Fox Gordon.

Choowklid. (Chocolate).

Tenduhnesss. (Tenderness).

Imp. Wastrel. Trammel. (Good words).

"There are always more deer." The advice of a workshopmate's father to her when she was learning to drive, occasioned by the appearance of a lone deer on the side of the road. E.g., where there is one deer, there may be more.

Do not start an essay by recounting a dream.

Solvitar ambulando. This means, "Solve a problem by walking around thinking (or not thinking) about it."

Netflix Alert: Overlord

2006-07-13T21:33:00.000-04:00

I saw Overlord (1975) more than twenty years ago, and its depiction of a young British soldier headed for the beaches of Normandy has haunted me ever since. Director Stuart Cooper incorporates archival footage of D-Day to extraordinary effect. Rent it.

Finally! Proof I Am a Girl

2006-07-11T22:05:00.000-04:00

Contents of Toilet Kit for Three-Week Trip:

1. Neutrogena sun block
2. Vaseline
3. Whole Foods hand salve
4. Eye drops
5. Topical steroid
6. & 7. Two kinds shampoo
8. Purpose face cream
9. Olive oil soap
10. Soft & Dri deodorant
11. Nivea eye makeup remover
12.Hairbrush
13. Rubbing alcohol
14. Coconut oil
15. Clinique eye pencil
16. Shiseido eye crayon
17. Tweezers
18. Nail clippers
19. Razor
20. Cargo lip gloss
21. Bandaids
22. Dental floss
23. Bedhead Manipulator
24. Kiss My Face shaving cream
25. Toothbrush
26. CVS tanning moisturizer
27. Pepcid antacid
28. Eyeglass sleeve
29. Cotton balls
30. Q-Tips
31. Tampons
32. Advil
33. Hand sanitizer
34. Hand mirror
35. Gator Gubba lip balm
36. Stila blush
37. Revlon lip gloss
38. Eucerin hand cream
39. Origins lipstick
40. Cover Girl lipslick
41. Listerine oral care strips
42. Revlon eyeliner
43. Assorted bobby pins, barrettes, hairband, and hairclip

At this moment, I loathe myself.

Where I'm Bound

2006-07-11T14:53:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow I set off on a three-week journey. First, Lourdes and I crash at my sister's temporarily-vacated apartment in Park Slope for four days. I plan to eat my way through New York. Topping my list is the peculiar and amazing cupcake bakery near the Greyhound Terminal. Later, soup dumplings, steamed pork buns, blintzes, stuffed cabbage, arepas, and fried plantains. And that's just on Day One.

Next, I go to Unspecified Writing Conference, where'll I'll be participating in a workshop with Mr. Big Nonfiction Guy. Danny and Sadie will be there, too. We plan to form a gang and beat up the other kids for lunch money. More on that later.

Finally, I spend five days at the beach with my family. Our family has been going to the same shore town cum scientific community for the past fifty years. My summers were spent attending Science School, an excuse to wade thigh-high into swamps in search of "specimens," and racing through the corridors of the lab where my father worked. You need any specimens? I'll pick you up a squid or something.

Hope the rest of your July is cool, sunny, and steeped in obscene wealth and privilege. I'll try to send a dispatch or two from the road.

The Dinner Date

2006-07-07T00:18:00.000-04:00

Gents! Look no further for the the answers to your dating questions.

Pink Cookie

2006-06-30T11:10:00.000-04:00

I like this picture.

courtesy of www.supereggplant.com.