Monthly Archive for August, 2009
This is why I'm rot
Spent the day alternately sneezing and looking dubiously out windows. No allergy attack can rightly convince me to step into a 103° Texas afternoon.
The rotting peach pit broke in half, revealing a sliver of a seed that looked like an almond. I peeled it out. It was soft and alive and I couldn’t bear to throw it away, so I stuck it in the peach flesh and threw the self-composting bomb into an abandoned lot. Maybe it will survive the drought.
I’ve been reading The Complete Butcher’s Tales by Rikki Ducornet. It’s so dead-on and risky, perfect nightmares. Kids putting dirty coins in their mouths, pious dogs, talking growths. Seriously feeling weird and good that Rikki Ducornet is out there in the world and that she was the inspiration for a Steely Dan song.
Here’s what happened on Weather.com when I tried to look up today’s temperature:
well okay
School starts this week and fittingly, Stanley Fish posts a blog about what English composition should teach. It’s a real tinderbox of an argument, a must-read for comp teachers.
I need to write four thousand more words by Friday. All I want to do after is read celebrity news. My brain is made of steel-cut oats. This will be the year we all get genius grants.
Look at what happened: Matthew Simmons made me a newspaper cake with a squirrel heart center. My favorite. In return, I will share with Matthew my new favorite type of apple.
you're welcome
I was surprised with a trip to the beach this weekend. We ate tentation apples and took long walks under stars. The explorers must not have made the decision to voyage while watching the sea at night; even the Gulf resembles a terrifying void.
Man seriously, sometimes I think about completing years of training and dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Adobe Creative Suite and becoming a graphic designer. It’s real fun to do; I like fonts. I could only do it for a living if someone wanted to pay me $65k to screw around and make one smallish poster every two months. I think it can happen. I’m going to move to California in advance.
The poster’s almost done for Five Things. I took a vintage photo and did the old-school cut out thing like in old ads when they had scissors and not the Adobe Creative Suite. I just have to wait on one band to confirm, and then Zach (an actual designer with some ideas about art) will put a logo on it for me (impossible in Picasa, impossible without thumbs) and then I will send it to my venue man Warren and he will have it made into a poster! It takes a village for me to get anything done.
My friend Meagan and I came up with our roller girl names in Eugene while reading a package of bacon: Side Meat and Fatty Part. We have this move where we hold hands and do a clothesline maneuver on unsuspecting members of the opposing team and audience. Say “Fatty Part” out loud. It has a good sound.
I’m thinking of organizing an offsite reading/party for the Texas Book Festival. Trouble is it’s Oct 31-Nov1 and I might have to compete with every Halloween party in town. I could set out bowls of cold spaghetti and peeled grapes.
If you're looking for exhilirating feelings, try running on a moving walkway
I’m home and now my luggage is home as well. We arrived separately. Turkish spent a couple days peeing on the rug I’d been meaning to throw away. Fortunately it was sitting on linoleum and I was able to scrub for a few hours and get all the dried stuff off the floor.
Excitement: A very kind review from Molly Templeton in the Eugene Weekly. My conversation with Zach is up over at Powell’s Books. He’s real funny. He’s working on a surprise that will be in the next Take The Handle and I cannot wait to look at it. Also, my Recommended Reading list is up. I talk about the golden age of children’s lit and then I give a posthumous shout-out to Shirley Jackson.
After a little worth-it wait, SKINEMAX I is alive and intense. The animation’s killing me. I want a bigger screen to look at it.
green tomatoes & mozzarella, cucumber gazpacho
The food in Seattle got me started saying “believe it.”
The reading last night was great. Aaron read a story of his and part of the mooning essay in the latest Hobart and I wanted to hear more of each. Mary Miller was deft and Kevin Canty said he’s loving her book and I agree; she’s the real deal. Then Kevin read “They Were Expendable” and it hit me in a place. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand and screwed up my mascara. He’s a master. The night ended with $2.75 steak bites at a wood-paneled steakhouse and the greatest pun.
Stories up: “Questions Asked While Sitting on the Laundry Room Floor” at Everyday Genius. Forgot if I said this but “Bury” was in Keyhole Digest June 2009. Mary Hamilton has a great story up at Knee-Jerk called “If You Look Under Our Skin.” I ran the morse code through a translator and for some reason the translations spit out in all-caps on another page made it very eerie. Neat feelings.
The last editing day was a long day but the reward was the Pacific Northwest. My pal Ian is putting me up, driving me about town, and directing me towards the best things to order off menus.
I read at Powell’s with Suzanne Burns. Suzanne read her story “The Miniaturist” from the new book out through Dzanc. She has a strong poetic feel for reading aloud and it felt good to listen. Kevin Sampsell gave us a warm and kind welcome. Ian and I went to Voodoo Doughnut after and I felt like a kid getting a treat after a winning the t-ball game.
On Tuesday I rented a Mazda 6 from a guy named Brian who kept calling it my car (“you’ll need this insurance in case you get in an accident with my car”). The Mazda 6 was okay but I had to weld the petal to the floor to get sluggish acceleration after 65mph. Automatic transmissions. Mazdas.
Still, it’s a good feeling driving into Seattle on I-5 and watching the water and boats and the buildings. I said hello to Matthew Simmons at work and we joked and drove around and then I ate some cucumber gazpacho. I felt a kinship with Simmons; we share some old favorite teachers.
The Seattle reading was rocking, with a good opener from Evelyn Hampton and siren music from Lotte Kestner. I had to follow a song that made my body feel funny. In attendance were Snack Pack and Mary Miller; can’t wait to see them read tonight at Powell’s on Hawthorne.
Drank coffee and had good breakfast talks with Simmons, and drove out of Seattle with Lotte’s CD playing the perfect accompaniment to a hazy cold morning. I pushed that crummy Mazda 6 real hard to get back to the rental place in time.
Back in Portland, I got to sit in on teen writing workshops and say hello to Van Wheeler, Natalie Serber, Gina Colantino, and host Jay Ponteri, along with friendly kind staff from M Review. I can’t wait to see some parts of AM/PM in the journal, which is tended to by people who care a lot about writing and design. Watching the teen workshops was cool; rooms of young people living in their teenage years and trying to write in the middle of that hurricane. Meanwhile they’re reading photocopied snippets of great writing and being guided through exercises by patient faculty. I kind of want this to happen to me when I am eighty. The teens were great and funny people, and the reading went well and they asked a lot of questions, and then a gaggle of screaming girls stopped my sister from driving away so I could get out of the car and sign their books and I felt for about three seconds like a singular nebbish lady Beatles.
I got to go see my sister’s new place. She moved to Portland from Tucson a few weeks ago and looks beautiful and happy in a city that suits her. She’s feeling optimistic about getting a job, and she lives in a neighborhood that is safe for bicycles.
Dinner and drinks and good talks about the hazy future with Jay and friends. Tomorrow Ian and I driving to Eugene, and I’ll read with my old friend Meagan Evans at the Wandering Goat on Saturday.
On the table next to me is a magazine called Secrets from 1925 which promises Actual Stories of Actual People and includes a story called “Love in Little Italy” with the preface: This little signorina tells you–in her own broken English–her confession of her struggle between her heart and her traditions.
