ancals

Blue Pulsar

2011-01-02T13:04:00.002-05:00

Lothar Quinte’s “Blue Pulsar”, Joan Miró’s “Bleu III”, and Yves Klein’s “Sponge Forest” – all have the same inward pull, the same mesmerizing blue. Quinte’s painting, which I saw at the MALBA in Buenos Aires this past August, forms a blue orb on a blue plain, sitting atop a thin red line that thickens, slightly, as it touches the orb’s bottom curve. And in Paris’s Centre Pompidou, Miró’s piece is for falling in, one of three panes of blue with the tiniest red dot and ever so slightly larger black dot, each flung toward the side, becoming swallowed up. Klein, whose work is on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, created his own peculiarly intense shade of blue, patented as International Klein Blue. He wanted immaterial art – paintings made with fire, cities of air. He was preoccupied with voids. Yet his shade of blue throbbed.

Elsewhere, at the Knoxville Art Museum, there is an exhibit more tangible. David Bates, an artist from Texas, did a series of monumental portraits documenting the aftermath of Katrina. Here there is no calm immaterial blue, but charred gray and red-yellow eyes and furrowed brows – devastation reflected in muddled flood waters. He began the series while watching the storm unravel on television and then travelled to New Orleans when it became possible to do so.

Both exhibits compel in their own ways. Bates focuses intently on pain while Klein tried to evaporate raw nerves. Both exhibits continue until February 13, if you find yourself in Knoxville or Minneapolis.

In Loving Memory of S

2010-08-13T13:56:00.009-04:00

My beloved cousin S passed away one week ago today. She'd been a girlhood idol of mine-- beautiful, vivacious, kind, complex. A dancer, a shiatsu masseuse, a certified psychoanalyst. A descendant of Freud. I remember her belly dancing solo at Town Hall in New York. I remember her dancing at my wedding, hand-in-hand in a circle with all the little girls and then salsa-ing with my brother. I remember her this past March, the last time I saw her, telling me how she'd danced for three hours at a New Year's party and that night had never slept better. She left us much too soon. Dear S, we miss and love you.

"Seder, 2008"

Mom passed the haroset around. “We bought a pound of it at D’vine,” she said.

S asked, “Are they even Jewish there?”

“Nah. Syrian Christians.”

“Not Lebanese?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Lebanese.”

“I saw the owner there. Poor woman has a full beard. Has to shave.”

“Electrolysis is expensive.”

“Take some haroset,” Mom said.

“No, I can’t,” S said. “The stuff is like mortar.”

“That’s the point.”

“It’s from Israel,” interjected Dad. “Taste the figs. Delicious.”

“We bought a whole pound,” said Mom. “Eat more.”

“No really,” S said. “I can’t.”

Later, after getting drunk on whipped cream (S does not drink wine), she explained how in the 1970s she contracted dysentery in India.

“Well, it was four months, and we were trying to stretch $600. Because the man I thought I loved was very frugal. He’d planned to ‘find’ himself before we met--”

“And did he?”

“Well, he wasn’t in India. He wasn’t anywhere. Anyway, he wrote to say how he couldn’t stand to be without me and I couldn’t stand to be without him. So I followed him there. And we travelled to ashrams and ate roadside food and drank chai out of desperation at places that owned two cups that they washed in the same dirty water. We weren’t careful. We slept in ruins, in the off season. June in southern India, too hot for Indians but we’re there, in this dry, horrible heat, until the sky turned black for the monsoons. Sometimes I had to put my foot down and say no to some of these places. A black mattress and no sheets? Once we were at a restaurant and after a few bites of food my head felt heavy.” She lolled her head down and swayed it side to side. “And I felt like I’d been knocked in the head with a hammer, and I said, ‘I have to lie down.’ Luckily, in every restaurant there is a hotel, so we took a room. And I couldn’t stop going to the restroom. Luckily, I was 26 with a lithe Achilles tendon, but I had to hold onto the wall. It was horrible.

“He had grown up in the Dominican Republic, so his intestinal track was built differently than mine.”

Then, for contrast, Guatemala.

“I went to Guatemala with my friend J to help her adopt a child. The husband didn’t go because he couldn't get off work. But I went, because J didn’t speak Spanish. Five days, with a day trip to Antigua. We were so careful about food—only cooked meat and vegetables. We walked through the markets and there was beautiful fruit and we were thirsty, but we held out. Every day, J would spend a bit more time with the baby, an enormous nine-month old, and the foster mother was there too. And then finally, this enormous baby fell asleep in her arms. And they’re in love with the kid, nine years later.”

Later, after the cognac Mom had doused on the fruit salad got to us, we got silly, playing hand tricks that old uncles use to scare small children (got your nose!) and school children imitate in the school yard, giggling, giggling, giggling…

And E told us how, living in the ghetto in a basement apartment once, at age 12, she’d woken up with a little frog in her palm.

Summer

2010-06-29T12:18:00.004-04:00

It's a balmy 59 degrees in late June Seattle, about nine degrees warmer than the average temperature in January, February, March, etc...And yet, I love this cool weather, and how every evening the clouds pattern differently. Last night, a giant paw streaked pale pink, blue, gray-white across the sky.

My reading list for the summer was ridiculously unrealistic, then I changed it and it is still ridiculously unrealistic, so there's no point in putting it here. But I will say that I'm reading War and Peace and Suite Française and they make for interesting companion pieces. There's a scene in the latter that refers to a scene in the former, about troops and villagers crossing a bridge (and Suite Française, in case you don't know, is about Parisians trying to leave Paris in World War II), and I got a certain twinge of readerly satisfaction from having so recently read the scene the more contemporary characters were talking about. The same sort of intersection gave me a similar twinge a couple of years ago when I was reading The Travels of Marco Polo (which I still haven't finished) and The Decameron (...also unfinished, for shame...) and both mentioned the same story of an old monk in a cave, this time without making direct reference to predecessors. I love picking up two books, supposedly at random, and finding those connections across centuries. Seeing the reference in the more contemporary World War II novel somehow made the wartime scene in Tolstoy more powerful, for being still relevant, and also had an ironic effect on the character speaking about the scene, who didn't yet experience fleeing Paris and didn't seem to take that prospect seriously.

On that intertextual note, here's another little piece I wrote this past quarter extending the myth of Prosperine. (The extension part begins with "In Hades..." and everything that precedes it is just to refresh your memory about what went down in that story.)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ceres implored Jove to return Proserpine to her. Jove replied that Proserpine may return, so long as she has not eaten anything in the underworld. But Pluto had given Proserpine seeds of the pomegranate, and she had eaten those glistening seeds, so she was bound to spend part of the year in Hades and part of the year on Earth.

So, the months she spent in Hades became our autumn and winter, full of thistles and bramble and numbing snow. And the months she returned allowed us spring and summer-- cherry blossoms and dogwoods, blackberries and huckleberries and rosy-hued nectarines and black plums.

In Hades Proserpine was dulled by dark winter. Pomegranates, with their juicy red-jeweled, bitter-centered seeds, were still on offer. Pluto sliced open this fruit and offered her a further wedge. Proserpine hesitated, tempted by this momentary distraction from underworld tedium.

“I want you to enjoy your time here,” Pluto said, still struck by Cupid’s quiver, still enraptured by Proserpine. “Please enjoy this fruit.”

“I can’t,” said Proserpine. “I know I’ll be further bound to this place. I know what will happen.”

“I’ll use my powers to prevent it. Longer summers, more lush vegetation. I promise.”

Proserpine knew that Pluto, struck by Cupid’s quiver, would keep his promise. She ate another wedge of pomegranate seeds.

Above, a confused Ceres watched the oceans rise.

Some Hunger Artists

2010-04-08T22:48:00.003-04:00

I'm taking a fabulous "show and tell" class that demands thoughtful imitation and analysis of a range of prose, ancient to post-modern. This week, I wrote a short-short in response to Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and thought I'd share it here.

Some Hunger Artists Go to Coney Island

Every July 4, across the street from Nathan’s on Neptune Avenue, three emaciated demonstrators sat on the corner in protest of the annual hot dog eating competition. They held hand-painted signs that read “wasteful”, “capitalist sludge”, “cruel”. But they were only three and they sat silently with grim expressions, so it was easy for the boisterous crowd to dismiss them or simply overlook them as the contestants dipped buns into water for ease of swallowing and gobbled them down with dog upon dog.

As their protests were unsuccessful, the competition continuing each year, the demonstrators thought of other ways to show the crowd that their lauding of excess was morally repugnant. They agreed upon an action for the next year’s demonstration that went beyond the previous year’s silent hunger strikes.

“Something spectacular, because the crowd only understands spectacle,” said one.

“Something that also shows our true devotion to the cause, an ultimate self-sacrifice,” said the second. The third, devoted to silence, said nothing. They hoped to permanently mar the spectacle of excess with their spectacle of sacrifice.

The next year, they each arrived on Neptune Avenue with a freshly sharpened cleaver and set up their old hand-painted signs beside them. They’d agreed with one another to be as swift as possible. Shock would be their friend (on a number of levels). At the start of the competition, as the contestants began their gorging, the protesters stood and swiftly lopped off of one another those limbs they’d previously agreed would be sacrificed to the cause. Taking turns, they hurled at the gulping contestants their severed limbs.

Nearby police, who’d always stood guard in case of such displays, whisked away the protesters. And the crowd, though at first aghast, thought it some outrageous joke and clamored for more.

Northwest Spring

2010-03-17T12:55:00.004-04:00

It came early this year. Earlier than the East, but also a month earlier than normal for Seattle. Cherry blossoms budding in late January and bursting in February. Then dogwoods. Then magnolias. The storm clouds were consistently inconsistent, but in them now instead of grays and blues there was also the reflected pink. On my birthday a tsunami warning. Then the fluffy white blossoms turned streets bridal. In early March, it was sunny and warm. M and I rented a canoe and paddled about Portage Bay, lightly buzzed from margaritas shared with friends earlier in the afternoon. We diligently avoided the Montlake shipping canal, the only instructions given by the boat rental place. Of course, even with my life vest on I was nervous of toppling over, every time a motor boat or yacht made waves and we bounced and I heard a faint trickling of water (was there a hole in the canoe?). Eventually I relaxed and we paddled proficiently and enjoyed the near-crisp views of the Cascades and Mount Rainier and contemplated life in Laurelhurst and Sandpoint across the water.

Driving to Portland this past weekend we caught even more spring. So much pink with occasional bursts of yellow forsythia. I couldn't remember a time I'd seen so many blossoms along the highway. Wandering the neighborhoods of Portland, we didn't need to stoop to smell the flowers, their fragrances wafted up to us. The friend we were visiting rasped with seasonal allergies. All the pollen, he explained, was stuck in Portland. The geography did not allow it to blow away. He told us it used to be called the sick place. Too much spring. I was relieved my own eyes weren't bursting with stinging moisture. We saw a play there at the Imago Theater, an "opera beyond words" about an authoratarian typing school, in which the task master (a bit like a business-y, malevolent bride of Frankenstein) skewered out one eye from each typist and hung the ball from its red cords above that typist as he or she sullenly tapped away. We brunched at Screen Door, where M spotted Catherine O'Hara, and then took the streetcar from Nob Hill to the waterfront. Of course we stopped at Powell's; M picked up Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends and I finally got Irene Nemirovksy's Suite Francaise, which I've been meaning to read for a long time.

Now spring break is upon us. We're heading back East to visit friends and family, where their own spring should be just emerging.

House of Monsters

2010-01-24T18:40:00.005-05:00

I had a lovely Sunday: brunch in the Pike/Pine area followed by coffee and a pink-frosted cupcake (sitting in Pepto Bismol chairs, listening to the Pixies and Radiohead) and stumbling through the rain into random shops. One shop on Pike, Snowmonkey's House of Monsters, tucked away above an ice cream and sandwich spot, is full of odd little toys, books, and art. Currently in the shop is the art of Xavier Lopez Jr, whose illustrations of toothy-grinned, bulgy-eyed children made my afternoon. Now to round out the day with some Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Not If, But When

2009-12-19T16:02:00.003-05:00

My parents are visiting. We went to the Henry Art Gallery yesterday, the oldest art museum in Washington State and also currently my favorite. It seemed similar to (though a smidgen smaller than) the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is sort of funny (but not really) in that the founder was an art collector from Minneapolis (more funny huh than funny ha ha, I suppose). Currently on until Jan. 31, 2010 are two photography exhibits: Mappelthorpe's early polaroids, and Eirik Johnson's large-scale photographs of northwest logging, fisheries, and the like. One piece from the permanent collection that has stuck in my mind is a 1990 sculpture entitled "Not If But When": four gray cuckoo clocks with no numbers or hands each ticking away as below them hefty hammers and sickles swing frantically.

Ebb and Flow

2009-11-18T12:31:00.002-05:00

The Fall 2009 issue of Yellow Medicine Review is now available: a hefty 350+ page book of stories, essays, and poems, including an opening essay by Andrei Codrescu exploring the four visits he made back to Romania since the fall of communism. Also, my story "Ebb and Flow" is tucked away in there. This themed issue has got me thinking about a number of stories that are now in various larval states.

Castalia

2009-09-29T21:27:00.003-04:00

A week from tonight, I'll be reading at the Castalia reading series, at Hugo House. The readings feature UW MFA faculty, students, and alumni. Fun!

Middle of Nowhere

2009-09-16T15:05:00.005-04:00

A very short story of mine appears in The Middle of Nowhere: Horror in Rural America, an anthology out from Pill Hill Press this month.

In other news, M. and I have explored and fallen in love with Georgetown, an artsy former industrial area south of downtown, chock full of studios in rickety old brick buildings (former bottling plants, iron and brass works). It felt like a combination of the Wild West and Red Hook. Their Art Attack (when studios are open to the wandering public) is every second Saturday of the month.

Helga and Nectarines

2009-09-08T13:21:00.006-04:00

I see people walking down Bellevue, dressed for work. On sunnier, warmer days, back in August, I saw them bounding down the avenue to catch their bus. Today, cool and gray, mist hiding the mountains and the water, they walk rather grimly, knowing that their idyllic blackberry summer is coming to an end. No more sea kayaking. No more hiking in the Olympic peninsula or on Mt. Rainier (yesterday, Labor Day: saw Imogen Cunningham's nude husband wandering in the milky sunshine atop the latter at the Seattle Art Museum). We're getting used to venturing to the farmers' market with plastic hoods against plops of rain. M. found a vendor with the most real-tasting nectarines we've ever had: more than flavorful, juicy, aromatic. Never have I eaten such a joyous fruit. The vendor, too, is a wonder. Tell her you want some fruit to eat today and some fruit to eat in a couple of days, and she dandles her fingers over the rows of nectarines, sniffs each fruit at the stem and tells you (to the minute!) when the fruit will be most delicious.

But I mentioned SAM. What else did we see? Cunningham was great: innards of flowers with enormous precision; a self-portrait reflected in a Danish lingerie shop; a fun house portrait of loopyily stretched grand kids; gap-toothed smiling children staring voraciously into her lens, eager to be captured on film.

And Wyeth. Only seven paintings, but by far the most crowded exhibit. Like Cunningham's nudes, there's a sort of milky luminance to his Helga, but less dreamy than Cunningham, sort of hyper real. As if he sees her more clearly than one can ever see anything. If that makes sense. He wrote that a really good painting will be mostly memory. I like that idea.

The most heavily advertised temporary exhibit was Target Practice: Art Under Attack, 1949-1978, an international survey of post World War II art trying to subvert, to do something else. A 1960s French artist shot paint at her canvas with a rifle; an Italian artist and a Japanese artist began stabbing their canvases around the same time period without knowing about each other; canvases were taken off their stretchers and crumpled into forms; canvases were gouged, drawn and quartered; latex paints were poured on the floor; paintings without paint or a canvas were contemplated, concocted. My favorite piece (though I'll admit this was my least favorite exhibit) was Andy Warhol's oxidized squares, at the end of the exhibit. He and his assistants urinated onto copper-based paint, allowing an oxidization process to create a rather lovely dappled patina. For all the violence and aggression of the show, it was a rather pretty piece.

Cross-Country Drive

2009-08-26T14:06:00.003-04:00

Eschewing sentences, paragraphs, and chronology, I’ve assembled a discombobulated list of lists. Like Gertrude Stein. But not.

Mileage: Approximately 3200
Days: 7 (5 driving)
Start Point: Brooklyn, NY
End Point: Seattle, WA

Parting Image of New York City: A fish-netted rump, bent over the entrance to the Holland Tunnel (a Jumbotron advertisement for Chicago)

A propos song accompaniment to parting image: Sir Mix A Lot’s “Baby Got Back” (nice coincidence: Sir Mix A Lot hails from Seattle)

Cities Stopped in to eat and/or sleep: Clarion, PA; Chicago, IL; Madison, WI; Twin Cities, MN; Sioux Falls, SD; Rapid City, SD; Gillette, WY; Sheridan, WY; Billings, MT; Bozeman, MT; Missoula, MT; Coeur D’Alene, ID

Detours: Corn Palace; Badlands National Park; Mount Rushmore; the Berkeley Pit of Butte, MT

Planned Detour, Skipped: Milwaukee, WI

Parting Image of Pennsylvania: An Amish man rifling through the woods behind a diesel station.

Parting Image of Ohio: a rest stop’s large rack of Amish and Mennonite-themed romance fiction

Most Displaced-Seeming Image: A tumble weed rolling down the street in Madison, Wisconsin.

Weird Recurrent Theme: Scarred Arms. Slashes on the man who picked up our old bed in Brooklyn; accidents and operations (including bolts) on a waitress in Gillette; purposeful horizontal lines on a waitress in our new favorite neighborhood bar.

Best Contemporary Art: Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. See esp. Tomás Saraceno’s bucky balls of moss, black webbing, and PVC pillows.

Best Architecture: Renzo Piano’s Modern Wing for the Art Institute of Chicago. The main hall is light, airy, soaring, and with a vista winking at Gehry’s bandshell in Millennium Park.

Wildlife spotted: Hawks, buzzards, robin redbreasts, eagles, grasshoppers, one rabbit, one fox, and multiple “Beware of Rattlesnakes” signs. One little brown dot in a Badlands canyon purporting to be bison (sadly, no binoculars).

Most Surprising, Spectacular and Varied Landscape: South Dakota, especially catching sunset in the Badlands.

Colors of the Rocks in the Badlands: Stripes of yellow, gray, and rust.

Most Pervasive Sound in the Badlands: Rattling (M: “Those are insects, not snakes.” Me: “Then why all the warning signs for snakes? Why all the rattling?” Debate on the difference between rattling sounds and buzzing sounds ensues.)

Number of Hitchhikers Seen: 2

Number of Religious Billboards: 6, 3 of which were anti-abortion, mostly in South Dakota (perhaps refer back to religious-experience sunset over the Badlands for partial explanation)

Most Jarring Billboard (non-religious): [Picture of a filthy public toilet] “No one imagines losing their virginity here. Meth can change that.” (in Montana)

Most Public Service Announcements Regarding Meth: Montana

Most Bleak, Monotonous and Post-Apocalyptical Landscape: northeastern Wyoming (brown hills, black shrubs, mining pits, oil derricks). Closely followed by eastern Washington (a vast desert of dull blue shrubs and dry fields, mini-tornados of dust on either side of the interstate; placards for peach and cherry orchards seemed like perverse lies)

Most Welcome Body of Water: Moses Lake, Washington, after which the desert of eastern Washington gradually turns into Cascade National Forest and we fear not opening the car window again.

Most Acidic Body of Water: Gathering ground water inside the Berkeley Pit of Butte, Montana. Popular myth has it that water fowl landing on the water die instantly. The newsletter given with admission to view the pit tries to debunk that myth. Also discussed in the newsletter: the curious iron-feeding algae thriving in the vinegar-like water.

Most Disappointed Tourists: The Corn Palace (South Dakota)

Most Frightening Industrial Complexes: The Exxon-Mobil and Philips Conoco plants (refineries?) of Billings, Montana

Most Disdainful & Smug Starbucks Employee: Inside the Crowne Plaza of Billings, Montana

My best driving: southern Minnesota (straight, flat, empty)
My worst driving: forgetting to take my foot off the gas entering a gas station in Bozeman, Montana (not to worry, nothing happened)

Worst Smelling City: Gary, Indiana (Gowanus Canal is beaten by Wolf Lake, which can be sniffed from 10 miles away)
Best Smelling City: Bozeman, Montana

Felt Most Out of Place In: Lulabell’s Café, beside the freight trains hauling coal out of Gillette, Wyoming.

Overheard Conversation at Lulabell’s: How to win a lawsuit in which defendant broke plaintiff’s ribs after plaintiff insisted on hitting on defendant’s 15- year-old niece in a bar (defendant himself brought niece into said bar). Speakers (both in cowboy hats and both with booming voices) were on side of defendant. Strategy: demand a jury trial and get at least two jurors with teenage daughters.

Most flavorful (and most expensive) burger: Ted’s (e.g. Turner) Montana Grill in Bozeman

Biggest Attempt at Appearing Green: Ted’s (recycled paper mats, 80% paper straws, claim that their cow and bison live happy lives)

Overheard Conversation at Ted’s: Favorite American sculptor, living or dead

Most Well-Travelled Orange: Bought in Sheridan, Wyoming, apparently shipped from Australia, and eaten in Seattle.

First Memorable Experience in Seattle: After arriving in town on an uncharacteristically hot day and schlepping boxes and luggage up three flights of stairs, falling victim to a drive-by water gunning on the corner of Harvard and Harrison.

Strange bookends to our journey: Watching the first half of There Will Be Blood in Brooklyn surrounded by our packed up boxes and finishing it in Seattle in the chaos of unpacking. Simplified take-away from the film: greed and religion go hand-in-hand until greed bludgeons religion to death with a bowling pin. Mm. Welcome home!

Yellow Medicine Review

2009-08-03T12:28:00.004-04:00

My short story "Ebb and Flow" has been accepted for the Fall 2009 issue of Yellow Medicine Review. This issue, guest edited by Andrei Guruianu, will focus on Eastern Europe twenty years after the fall of communism. Very much looking forward to seeing the issue!

Rifling

2009-07-09T19:25:00.003-04:00

We have an old metal filing cabinet that I think my father had picked up on a sidewalk once and that's been sitting in our coat closet for the past few years. The clunker's too big for our cross-country move, and I've started sifting through my files of drafts and copious rejection notes (ha ha...ugh). And at the very bottom of the bottom drawer, beneath my spare teaching supplies (do people still use overhead transparencies?) I found a large, yellowed index card, folded in half.

The outside was addressed "To Mother & Dad". The inside says this:
"I want you both to sit down and relax-- take a moment's respite from the tedious effort of gift unwrapping-- and turn on the KLH radio, listen for a few moments-- perhaps munch on a little Figi's cheese in the interim-- and pretend the KLH tuner is a gift, again this year, from a most frugal daughter- and try to be grateful!!! Love, L___"

Hm.

New Toy

2009-06-18T12:33:00.003-04:00

While I've been relying heavily on Duotrope to find literary magazines to submit to, I just found this new website that organizes information about litmags in a different, more visual way. While it currently lists only 450 magazines (compared to Duotrope's 1145), it color codes listings with bold borders indicating whether a magazine is more traditional or open to more experimental work, and there is also tag cloud showing the kinds of writing accepted by the various magazines listed. The site also allows for comments on particular publications, with the hope of one day posting "unbiased reviews" of mags on the front page of the site. Other neat tidbits of information include circulation data, which I've always found unwieldy to dig up, and acceptance rates as reported by editors rather than submitters. So that could be a nice counterbalance to Duotrope's writer-reported acceptances. If you're into that sort of thing.

High Line's Debut

2009-06-10T13:43:00.009-04:00

Yesterday, M. took me to the High Line, which officially opened its first section to the public this week. The only entrance for now is on Gansevoort and Washington. I felt giddy ascending the steps to what had been built up and built up and talked about and photographed and anticipated.

The rain had rendered the vegetation lush: wild grasses, purple and blue conical flowers, odd green spears and larger cones of muted yellow just about to burst open to something brighter. (I'd wished there was a guide to the plants, but could find none on their website, just a picture or two of echinacea purpurea.) There were spindly plants topped with magenta spheres and moody, bluish red petalled things, everything poking out of stylized cracks in concrete and elegantly arranged rusting train tracks, just as they'd done wildly, before.

And the views! M. snatched my attention away from the architectural botany to the strange and wonderful perspective on the buildings around us. Just-above-the-rooftops of the meatpacking district on the one side with wispy grasses growing atop awnings and views of pediments and cornices you'd never see from the street level without craning your neck and getting hit by truck hauling animal carcasses or a snarling Escalade.

On the other side, remnants of what is still a manufacturing zone. Whining machinery still grates the ear. You get a marvelous close up of the rotting neglect of buildings. Gorgeous patterns of mottled brick and peeling paint and metal doors leading out to no where, fire escapes rusted away long ago. Barbed wire catching plastic bags and shuddering rooftop ventilation systems.

Thankfully, the botany seems delicately designed with the olfactory in mind, wafting over any industrial smells.

We walked further north and M. seems to salivate at the view ahead, that explosion of West Chelsea architecture. I'm staring at a honeybee burrowing into a lavender poof of something and then he pulls us forward, under the gray Standard Hotel straddling the High Line. Slabs of concrete jut out of the hotel, reaching for the High Line without touching it, amputated by glass barriers that perhaps will one day be removed and planks put across the gap so park goers can be sucked into fancy pants lounges.

Gehry's iceberg / sail boat is moored along the northwest side, with Nouvel's winky windows behind, continuing installation as I write. We can stare into a yoga class in the Equinox near 14th Street and the students emege groggy from their corpse pose, befuddled by the voyeurs standing on this perch, snapping pictures of everything, shamelessly.

We recline on a cedar (?) bench that rolls a short distance along a track and wondered how long it would be before names were scratched into the slats of wood. A man in an army coat, circular sunglasses, and a thick gray moustache pointed whimsically up, shoots his enormously expensive camera right at our faces. He repeats this with the man beside us, assuring him he is only taking pictures of the gallery behind us.

At the fence on 20th St., a Parks Department sentry repeats a happy spiel: "This only the end for now. Section Two is scheduled to open next year. Check out the website for updates."

newsy news

2009-05-02T17:07:00.004-04:00

M. and I are moving cross-country to Seattle in August, something we've toyed with for a few years now. I'll be pursuing an MFA in fiction writing at the University of Washington-Seattle; he'll be doing his urban planning thing, hopefully (fingers crossed on this whole sour economy thing). We're ecstatic and planning a cross-country drive which will cover a swath of the northern states. This means I will have to finally take some driving lessons so M. doesn't drive all 2,000+ miles (even if I did have fun testing out GoogleMaps'experimental walking option: it would take us 39 days of non-stop walking, apparently). As it happens, that first trip to Vancouver and Seattle was where I drove for the first time, in an icy parking lot at the University of British Columbia; M. told me to drive in a circle and all I could do were figure eights.

On that note, here are two fun mapping sites:
1. triptopnyc
2. literature map

Chekhov

2009-02-12T19:34:00.006-05:00

For my birthday, M. is taking me to see Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Last year, we saw the Classic Stage Company's rendition of The Seagull (not to be confused with the production that was on Broadway, which I also wanted to see). Sometimes I still walk around the house imitating Dianne Wiest as Arkadina bellowing, god-like, "I am not Jove."

If you're into the Chekhov, apparently CSC's Uncle Vanya (with that handsome Brooklyn couple Maggie Gyllenhaall and Peter Sarsgaard) has been extended until March 8.

2009 Reading Queue

2009-01-25T13:36:00.003-05:00

I'm approaching the end of that wonderful tome Middlemarch and finding myself agog at the huge number of books I've acquired over the past few years and have not yet read. The culprit for many of them is Housing Works, where I can find used books for $0.50-$1.00, as well gifts from many folk who know a good book gets my little heart aflutter. Here are some books I hope to read in the coming year (in no particular order):

1. Absurdistan
2. War and Peace (the new translation)
3. Aspects of the Novel
4. Kafka on the Shore
5. Germinal
6. Three Lives, by Gertrude Stein
7. The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing
8. The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud
9. Best American Short Stories of 2008, ed. by Salman Rushdie (already reading)
10. Midnight's Children
11. Satanic Verses (I think it might be a Rushdie year for me...)
12. Natasha, by David Bezmogis

I'm realizing now this list doesn't include many books sitting patiently, quietly, waiting to be plucked off the shelf and to receive little bends and cracks in their spines. I think this will be a good year.

Garden of Earthly Delights

2009-01-17T14:36:00.004-05:00

Well, it has been eons since I've written anything here. Since I last wrote, I've gotten married, been to Spain, changed day jobs, spent two weeks in Wilmington, DE for work, and...whew. That's enough of an update on the personal end of things.

Tonight, M. is taking me to Martha Clarke's Garden of Earthly Delights. On our honeymoon, we gaped at Bosch's masterpiece in the Prado, but had to jostle with the expected swarm of tourists to enjoy all its bulbous glory. Now we are going to see this dance based on the painting, originally performed in 1985 and now resurrected for your viewing pleasure. The website has a fun feature where you can click on each part of the painting's triptych and gaze at all Bosch's details, both glorious and horrible. (Click on "the painting".) Enjoy!

Blame Frida

2008-04-28T09:27:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I look to visual art for writing inspiration. I have a stack of little Dover Fine Art Stickers for several painters (Kahlo, Klimt, etc.) that I'll randomly select and stick in my notebook and then write whatever comes to mind. Here's what spewed forth from Kahlo's "The Little Hart".

The little hart fled through the dark wood, hips hobbled by multiple arrows thrust in her body. Wind licked blood trickling down her fur, drying in spots, mingling with sweat in others. Brush crunched underfoot and she was conscious only of her labored snorts of breath and the thought that They were out there, waiting for her to collapse in exhaustion, ready to saw her limbs apart for their great spring feast.

Her antlers had only recently grown so long and majestic and she lowed at the thought of them being carved off and used as tools to separate her flesh from her skin. Or worse, as mere decoration, her head mounted on a wall as a show of might and extravagance.

A bird twittered in a tree and she realized she had stopped running, was actually stumbling. She looked up at a broken tree branch, jutting from the trunk she leaned against. Above, a blue patch of sky.

Then, a whistle, a swift thrust of sharp in the soft part of her arching throat. A buckling of the knees, the underbrush against her cheek, then nothingness.

Reading at Telephone Bar

2008-03-17T14:53:00.001-04:00

National Grammar Day!

2008-02-28T17:09:00.004-05:00

In case you were dreadfully unaware, this Tuesday is National Grammar Day. Here is an interesting rebuttal to the whole concept. Hooray for descriptivists!

The Boarder

2008-02-25T22:19:00.002-05:00

I just got my contributor copies of Western Humanities Review, which includes my short story "The Boarder". It's a lovely magazine with some beautiful etchings from the Saltgrass Printmakers. Ever since I made my first print at the Vermont Studio Center, I've been especially keen on the art form.

Hungry Hungry Writers (AWP on Day 1)

2008-02-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

Last week I attended the AWP conference. I'm probably eons behind other blogging attendees in reporting about my experience, but here's a bit about the first day.

Neophyte that I am, I exhausted myself on that first day, attending panels and readings and wandering the book fair from 9 am - 10 pm, buying way too many books and magazines way too early (no strategy-- none). I went to a panel on putting together short story collections, in which Steve Almond called short story writers "poets of the prose world". He gave fresh, honest advice about not letting agents or editors shove gimmicks on your collection (which appeared to make some other panelists shift uncomfortably in their seats). As such, deciding on where your commitment is and what your aesthetic may be before seeking representation may be helpful in staying true to your art. Noted.

After the panel, my grumbling stomach led me to room of pastry, bagels, and coffee. AWP attendees were heaping cheese danishes and pineapple slices onto little white plates. "What a pleasant surprise!" I said to a fellow writer as we munched on. Half-way through my raisin bagel, a Hilton security guard came in and asked if we're from the writing conference, with a look of disdain at all the AWP badges. "This isn't for you! It's for another group." he lamented. "Get out before my manager sees you." Twenty odd writers then scurried off with their half-eaten food. I felt like a coyote.

One of the readings I went to that day was the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" . One question posed during the Q&A was how the writers are able to stay motivated to write despite mounting obligations to other things (jobs, children, compulsive self-googling). Two recent mothers chirped that less time for them means becoming more efficient with the spare hour left for writing-- that they actually get more done. And while that's encouraging, I had to admire Amity Gaige's honest response: that she wishes she had more time to think and to wonder.

Perhaps more AWP stuff at a later time (jobs, wedding planning, and actual fiction writing may delay the next post...not to mention compulsive self-googling).

AWP

2008-01-16T21:57:00.000-05:00

I'll be attending the AWP conference here in NYC this month. I've never been to the AWP and I hear it can be a bit of a madhouse. As I understand it, there will be more attendees this year than ever before. Hope I survive the crush of the crowds!

Corduroy

2007-12-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

It's getting to be finals season, and I find myself tiring of business casual. I wore corduroy pants to work today-- corduroy being a fabric near and dear to my heart-- and walking around the unusually quiet English department reminded me of a piece I wrote back at McGill on a similar topic.

Silliness aside, I'm thrilled because I just got an e-mail from The Western Humanities Review informing me that my short story "The Boarder" has been accepted for publication! Hooray!

autumn books

2007-11-01T20:34:00.000-04:00

It took me most of the semester to read Halldor Laxness's Independent People and all its Icelandic digressions on sheep guts and merchant cooperatives; it took me four days to read Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli. But then, they are very different works. Even more different is Mile End, by Lise Tremblay, which I reread while in the thick of Laxness's novel.

How to put them all together? They do share a thread.

Independent People is the grandest in scope, putting rural Iceland and the stubborn shepherd Bjartur in an epic frame, with violent ghosts haunting sheep, World War I a distant event in the periphery, and America a destination to which a young, ambitious son escapes (and, we are told, dies). It is through Bjartur's son and daughter that we see a yearning for cities (the mysterious glories of Reykjavik never revealed)-- a tugging away from the rustic life Bjartur clings to, though conditions for the sheep and shepherds are so grim (we read of constant summer rain, green snot, heaps of snow, ring worms, and tuburculosis) it can hardly be described as pastoral.

The other two works are slender and focus their energies on those urban tugging forces. At first I thought Dreams and Stones was a novel, but it is difficult to call it that. A treatise on cities and imagination? One hundred pages of generalizations, punctuated with wonderful specificity? A long prose poem, perhaps-- a poetic myth. Trees vs. machines. City vs. countercity (our conceptions of cities). Does she say that memory = water? Or that water = oblivion? Or was there a more complex equation? There was an archaeological bend to it: dreams as stones. Stones as building blocks. Buildings, stones, as representations of our elusive dreams. Something concrete to dig our fingernails in.

There is no specific character in Tulli's work. A city emerges. Then groups of people. Workers and builders are of different classes. Our imagined Paris, Belfast, Hong Kong, New York. The A of the Eiffel Tower. The Arc de Triomphe. The mythic quality of the book complements Laxness's epic; the subject matter works well with the next and last book.

Mile End is set in Montreal. The obese narrator buries her anger under her layers of "yellow fat," drinks Southern Comfort in large glasses, and hovers toward psychosis as a mediocre pianist at a ballet school. Paris and New York are mentioned as stand-ins for other forces, influences on the Quebecquois city. So cities here have characters too, but the narrative, the characters are specific again. The language is more simple than Tulli's and Laxness's works and the underlying anger of the book seems to compel a quick read like a gust of hot air, whereas Bill Johnston's translation of Tulli's book requires a careful chewing of sentences. Laxness's book, finally, is sprawling and wonderful, but may send one's imagination careening to other places in multiple digressions (not always a bad thing). Read slowly and enjoy.

My Favorite New Toy 2

2007-10-21T11:52:00.000-04:00

The other day I stumbled upon a new fun toy: World Cat. Whereas last year I was obsessed with Duotrope's Digest, my new favorite diversion is seeing how many libraries carry obscure and not-so-obscure publications. It even tells you how far away the libraries are from a chosen zip code. Someone in Brisbane could be reading the Mass Review or Gender in Archaeology right this second. Wow!

Fantastic Women

2007-10-10T22:49:00.000-04:00

Last week M. & I went to a Tin House reading at the PPOW gallery in Chelsea. The evening was themed around women and the fantastic, with readings by Lucy Corin, Kelly Link, Shelly Jackson, and Samantha Hunt. The art work in the gallery, by Julie Heffernan, was most stunning, with pale female figures (self-portraits) in enormous fruit-or-flower headdresses and elaborate skirts made of animal carcasses. (I found the dead octopus especially charming.)

Whoever planned the minutia of the event thought of everything: magenta lilies filled the room with an almost-too-sweet-but-just-right scent; mini cupcakes frosted in a range of creamy pastels and dotted with bright pink, blue, and yellow sugar globs filled our mouths with delicious devil's food. Heffernan's work is, naturally, on the cover of Tin House's Fantastic Women issue. More events like this should be had. More.

The Massachusetts Review

2007-09-23T18:12:00.000-04:00

It's in my hands and it's lovely. The Fall 2007 issue of The Massachusetts Review arrived in the mail yesterday, with my story "Skitter" on pages 364-369. Sweet!

northbound escape

2007-08-15T16:58:00.000-04:00

I'm skipping town for 2.5 weeks, escaping New York's hot damp stinky breath till just before Labor Day. It's exciting because I get to show M. around Montreal (where its in the blessed 70s) and then get down to work for two weeks at the Vermont Studio Center.

In other news, my story "Skitter" is said to be forthcoming this October in the Fall issue of The Massachusetts Review. Naturally, paranoia prevents me from being more sure about that, but when I'll have it my hands I'll be a very happy lady.

F-train Scene

2007-08-02T12:28:00.001-04:00

It smells like Port Authority when we get on the train at Jay Street-Borough Hall. We were waiting for 20 minutes after getting off the A to transfer to the F. A carefully-enunciated announcement warned we would have to get back on the A/C and switch trains at the dreaded Hoyt-Schemerhorn Station and an orange-vested MTA worker had been barking the same- "No F-train, no F-train- transfer to the G at Hoyt-Schmerhorn"- waving his arms and indicating we should move to the other side of the platform like a bunch of large-eyed, dumb cattle. No signs had been posted anywhere indicating the change of service (not that that's so unusual) and people huff and scuffle.

Then, like a ghost, the F-train slips into the station, and all who'd waited on the platform roll their eyes and shake their heads. We get on and I sniff the air suspiciously. A woman (seated) with shaggy red hair and dirt streaked all over her face chatters about Chinese takeout to someone I can't see. Had she been in a fire, I wonder? Why was her face covered in soot? M. and I find a seat nearby and I try not to stare. Just another New York night. But I can't help it. She must've had the longest day.

Her eyes are made up. Despite the heat, she is in a black fur-lined coat, black pants, and black boots. The coat is open and she is wearing nothing underneath, revealing pale cleavage and tummy rolls. She is talking to no one (this much is now obvious).

Another woman, perpendicular to us with brown curls piled atop her head and black square-rim glasses, pulls on a thin sweater and apologizes to the man beside her for poking him with her sharp elbow.

"Cold?" he asks with a warm smile.

"Freezing."

He says he is hot. She says she is envious. He touches the top of her arm, laughing lightly, saying he's always too hot. She smiles upon the contact and I wonder whether she hasn't flirted in years and whether she wants to sidle up to his overheatedness.

"Good night," she says, getting off at Bergen Street. The man smiles to himself and gets off at the next stop.

The redhead in the fur coat remains on the train, ordering tuna salad from the banana at her ear. Then she puts the banana down and picks up a teddy bear in her lap (had this been her conversation partner all along?), and gives it tender kisses on the snout.

changes

2007-07-27T13:37:00.001-04:00

M, a.k.a. my betrothed, has a new blog called Zoned-In. It's all about hot topics in urban planning (adaptive re-use, congestion pricing, and the like) and makes for good, hearty reading (not that I'm biased).

In other (saddish) news, I've resigned from my post at 55 Words. It was a fabulous year; I'd missed being on the editing side of things since working on Scrivener at McGill and working with Rosemary on this project was a great way to jump back into the publishing fray. Seeing what people could do (and attempted to do) with such a restriction in form was a treat. Alas, I decided it was time for the guest stories to be received by a fresh set of eyes (not mention I've become greedy with my free time as I focus more on the novel). I'm looking forward to seeing how 55 Words evolves. I think every writer, particularly long-winded writers, should try their hand at the 55-word story.

A Splash of Color

2007-07-05T20:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, at the last moment, we decided to run out and catch the fireworks. We'd procrastinated because of the rain, then made a mad dash for the car, careening through the damp streets of Brooklyn till we hit the inevitable congestion on the BQE. Of course, little amateur shows abounded, afar in Red Hook and the like, which provided entertainment along the way. On the radio, Susan Cheever talked of the electricity that crackled between Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thoreau (coincidence?). We parked in Williamsburg, beneath many a gawking loft party, and shuffled in the drizzle to Kent Avenue, along the water. The big show had already begun, rumbling and growling over the water, red lights reflecting off Manhattan windows, smoke curling in the sky. A little boy cried for ice cream and a larger girl played with a whoopie cushion. There were, as M. puts it, the three H's of the neighborhood: the Hipsters, the Hasids, and the Hispanics, some entranced and many playing, ignoring the smiley face explosions, the green cubes, saving their awe for bigger, sparklier numbers...

Oh, I've added a bit of color to my website, via some photos I've taken over the last couple of years. I plan on changing up the photos every now and again. Let me know what you think.

Misc Updates

2007-07-04T14:46:00.000-04:00

I've finally put up two papers from my days at Teachers College, both from a course I took in Interactional Sociolinguistics this past fall.

I'm also in the process of reconsidering the design of my website. I'm actually considering adding some color (gasp!), though something stubborn inside me wants me to stay true to the simple black and white. Any comments and suggestions on that one much appreciated.

Finally, I've got quite a backlog of arty tidbits to report on, hopefully by the end of the week.

La Gloire de mon père, par Marcel Pagnol

2007-06-15T14:45:00.000-04:00

This is the story of a precocious French youngster at the turn of the 20th century. He teaches himself how to read and his mother fears his head will explode. Subsuqently, his family goes to the countryside for the summer (bien sur) and the central story builds around his school-teacher-father and boasting-uncle's big hunt in the mountains--and whether our little protagonist can join in on the bloody glory. I'm generally a fan of stories involving precocious children; the humor and charm of this short novel (see especially the section on nose picking), combined with the bucolic setting (the mountains! the herbs! the birds! the goats!), makes this a lovely (albeit mildly sentimental) choice for summer reading.

Summer Treats2

2007-05-08T16:34:00.000-04:00

I will be spending some time this August at the Vermont Studio Center. I was thrilled to be accepted and am very much looking forward to having time to write away from daily distractions and among so much creative energy.

Summer Treats

2007-04-28T14:22:00.000-04:00

Spring is in full force, in case you haven't noticed. All my windows are open. I can hear children screaming. Salsa blares; the rattles and chirps of birds make their way in too. My apartment smells like fresh laundry and various barbequed meats from yards down below. One of my students gave me a Japanese name. She translated the two syllables of my name, An-ka, into "Fragrance of Apricots." M. has informed me that cellphone radiation has killed 70% of the world's honeybees. Tomorrow I go to the Cherry Blossom Festival.

With that I bring you my ever-ambitious summer reading list! As I'll have a bit of extra time on my hands in July, I hope to actually write about some these books at that time. Also notice I will update the book lists in the sidebar to reflect what I've *actually* read recently (some of those books I finished long ago) and will perhaps finish some of the books that I've been chipping away at a glacial pace (is that a cliche now?).

Onward. The list over which I salivate:

My Name is Red, by Orhan Pamuk
Nana, par Emile Zola
Germinal, par Emile Zola
The Sound and the Fury, by William Falkner
The Decameron, by Boccaccio
Pierre et Jean, par Guy de Maupassant
Summer, by Edith Wharton
Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
Du cote de chez Swann, par Marcel Proust
The Golden Bowl, by Henry James
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos

I went on a shopping spree at Housing Works last month or so, and bought much of the above for $1 or 50 cents. Ah, I love that place.

Results

2007-04-24T22:48:00.000-04:00

The results from Readers' Choice #3 are in! Fun!

Dream+

2007-04-24T09:30:00.000-04:00

The concert was on a plane, for about 60 people. We were to take off from Central Park.

"Lagavulin?" The waitress nodded. I sat back in a red velvet chair. The pale man with a maroon-lipped grimace started up his accordian. He sang in a shrill falsetto, then a gravelly voice, absurdly low.

The plane took off; we flew over tree tops. Then, below us, the confetti of exploding buildings. The man sang higher, lower, louder over the noise below us. When all the buildings were gone, the man stopped singing and we had lost our voices. All we could do was whisper.

(When I was little, I used to have many bizarre nightmares. These seem to have dropped off as I became an adult--perhaps due to a drop in sensitivity. So I when I dream something like this, I have to take note. Usually I hold onto these scraps and see if the dream logic spins into a story. But since I can't or won't make use of exploding buildings, however gruesome some of the my stories have been, I've decided to post this here.)

Readers' Choice 3

2007-04-13T11:03:00.000-04:00

Our third Readers' Choice contest is happening right now over at 55 Words. The stories are fabulous, so go take a look and send in your picks! Then, get inspired and send in your stories.

silly random memory

2007-04-08T16:36:00.000-04:00

When I was in third or fourth grade, I started a writers' club and invited a bunch of my friends to join. We had our first meeting at my house and I was all in a kerfuffle about who would come and what kind of story they would bring. The first guest to arrive showed me her story about a beautiful black horse. At first I was impressed. Then it dawned on me that she had simply copied Black Beauty.

"You can't do that!" I scolded. Plagiarism wasn't in my vocabulary yet, but I was indignantly aware of the concept. Later, my mother scolded me. "Let her write what she wants," she said. "What do you care?"

A few more members arrived and I was giddy with power, having appointed myself president.

"Can't we say we're writing but just play?" asked one of the arrivals. I was furious but held my tongue. I gave in to the small troupe and we played with My Little Ponies and Barbie Dolls while I grumbled to myself and lamented the first and last meeting of my writers' club.

Nips & Bites

2007-03-30T09:24:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy winter and I am slowly emerging from hibernation. I passed my Master's essay (yay!). While it is probably not worthy of an academic journal, I am proud of it nevertheless and will probably add it and maybe one other paper to the essays section of my website as a .pdf file. Its title is "Argument as a Relative Threat to Face" and it opens with a scene of monkeys nipping at each other as Gregory Bateson wonders: how do they know which is a friendly nip and which is a hostile bite? The monkeys know and usually (usually) so do we. But that depends on culture too.

changes & updates

2007-03-23T17:49:00.000-04:00

A long while back, my friend Roohi asked me what the url for this blog was. When I told her, she said she thought it was a pretty clever play on words--"ancals--like annals, like the annals of anca"--and I smiled and nodded and pretended it was entirely intentional. I've decided to make "ancals" the official title. Thanks, Roohi!

Speaking of the unintentional, this month at 55 Words we've unintentionally put together an issue of animal-themed stories. In January we had a cluster of food-related stories, and in December we had some stories about sight and blindness. It's been interesting seeing these stories come together in clumps for no apparent reason.

Carciofes a la Malaise

2007-03-09T16:07:00.001-05:00

Carciofes a la Malaise

Photo from my reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe, courtesy of Max Tzinman.

A Hint of Spring, A Touch of Phlegm

2007-02-27T22:06:00.001-05:00

Well, it was my birthday today, and the weather was just as I like it: snow on the ground, spring in the air. Too bad I've got the last bits of bronchitis rattling around in me. Ah well.

Sunday night I read "A Meal" and "Lemon Tree Palace" at the Cornelia Street Cafe. As we were competing with Oscar night, and as one of the other readers was home with the plague, it was an intimate gathering, and very pleasant too. Chris Brandt read a series of poems on Thomas Jefferson, and another on Odysseus, and all were excellent. "Stars bouncing on waves" was a phrase from one of the latter that stayed with me.

After the reading, a few of us ate at the restaurant upstairs (delicious) and watched the snow come down on pretty Cornelia Street. A delightful night, with the only disconcerting bits in the fiction performed.

Telephone Bar

2007-02-13T10:46:00.000-05:00

Last night I read "Go East" at the Library Lounge, a lovely performance space at Telephone Bar. It's an intimate room for about 30-40 people, lined with antique mirrors and candles, and there's a fireplace on the stage with more candles. My legs were trembling pretty hard (no one claimed to notice), and luckily, I didn't shake my way into the fireplace and die a firey death. I'd agonized all week over where to add he-said's and she-said's to make the dialogue more comprehensible to the ear (thanks to a seminar I'm taking on teaching listening!). In all, the reading was a fun time.

My next reading is coming up pretty soon! Very much looking forward to that too.

Upcoming Readings

2007-02-01T13:35:00.000-05:00

Mark your calendars! I've got two readings coming up this month.

Monday, February 12, 8 pm- Telephone Bar- No Cover
149 2nd Ave (between 9th & 10th St.)

Sunday, Feburary 25, 6 pm- Cornelia Street Cafe- $6 (includes one drink)
29 Cornelia Street

Fun!

Tock Tick

2007-01-29T21:58:00.000-05:00

My friend Tim's musical Tock Tick is opening at the Prospect Theater on February 5. The enticing blurb promises dragons, seagulls, and interstellar gondoliers, among other things. I am very much looking forward to this show.

Vancouver

2007-01-26T16:18:00.000-05:00

M & I went to Seattle and Vancouver earlier this month. Here's a bit about Vancouver.

Vancouver is awash with construction cranes and gleaming green glass set before a ring of snowy mountains. The city is preparing for the 2010 Olympics, and it seems a city of pretty surfaces and fashionable people.

Our first day we wandered to touristy Gas Town (the closest approximation to an "old town" and hardly a central part of the city or dense mess of winding streets), and from there right into skid row. At the "steam clock", the major Gas Town landmark, a glassy-eyed man offered us a silver chain in exchange for food. As we moved along, there was a conflux of bearded hobos, gaunt prostitutes, men sleeping in the street; needle exchange and detox centers, shelters for women, and shelters for children . Payle$$ Meats sat beside Mission Possible. Balconies on a halfway house advertised nouns of encouragement: hope, faith, strength, courage.

This concentration of the needy struck us as odd, perhaps because the needy of New York are more diffuse and spread out, and perhaps more hidden. Here they seem to converge in one area, in stark contrast to the high-end gloss of the rest of downtown-- the joggers in Stanley Park, the highrises along Coal Harbour and in the West End, the yuppies of Yale Town. The rawness of skid row, I'm told, is older than the prospering sheen of the rest of the city. The institutions (the shelters, soup lines, etc.) are also relatively new.

We walked a good deal that first day, happy to end our wandering with martinis atop the Empire Landmark Hotel, slowly rotating over twinkling Vancouver. We admitted relief at not having been approached all afternoon. Later M. pondered the differences between the homeless in NYC subways and the homeless in Vancouver and other cities, hypothesizing that the relationship the homeless have with the subways here are unique and not present in other mass transit systems. We didn't take the Sky Train (though really it's more of a commuter rail) so we couldn't test the hypothesis.

The next day we were sore and achy and relied on the car. Abundant Granville Market (lunch: bratwurst and designer soda), foggy snow-crusted Kitsilano Beach (just lovely), and the UBC campus, separated from the city by a small forest. UBC was a bit of a disappointment; I enjoyed the small Belkin art gallery, warm and abuzz over a show opening, but we found the design of the campus odd-- parallel malls and apparently no welcoming central area. In the dark of the Thunderbird Arena, M. gave me my first driving lesson; I meant to go in circles and instead drove figure eights.

We finished our trip Saturday morning, with dim sum at Pink Pearl, touted as best dim sum in Vancouver. We were gluttonous fiends, feasting on all manner of shrimp, pork, taro, bean curd, and red bean paste-filled dumplings, in all manner of sticky and glutinous or crunchy wrappings. Two pots of tea and two bursting bellies later, were back on the road to Seattle, one last chance to gasp at cool snow-covered conifers, gauzy lakes, and violent mountain peaks.

Despite numerous comparisons to New York (Kitsilano=Park Slope; Mount Pleasant=Ditmas Park), the ecology and the landscape is wholly unique, and gives the place air of something fresh and vibrant. I can't imagine becoming complacent about those surroundings, but I suppose anything is possible.

Readers' Choice

2007-01-22T09:45:00.000-05:00

The results from 55 Words' second Readers' Choice Awards are in!

Narcissus and Goldmund

2007-01-16T18:13:00.000-05:00

A Reading Experience

I picked it off my parents' bookshelf. It was yellow and brittle, and the cover, designed by Milton Glaser, showed the blue profile of a shrewd-looking man, with red light falling on his nose and chin and where the whites of his eyes should have been. Someone had written "Ghost Motorcycle" on the title page, sideways.

I didn't know anything about the book-- the story, the setting, when Hesse had written it. Mostly I was intrigued by "ghost motorcycle" and what compelled some long ago reader to write those words on the inside of this book that now sat on my parents' shelf. It surely wasn't my mother or father--not their handwritings, not their idiosyncrasies.

I had only read one other book by Hesse, Siddhartha, but it didn't leave much of an impression on me. I was a distracted high school senior at the time, ready to leave the country. And the cover of this book gave away nothing-- the back copy was just piles of praise for Hesse. So I just dug in, as it should be.

I began reading Narcissus and Goldmund and was immediately engrossed by the medieval world and the innocent, young Goldmund. I enjoyed watching his internal evolution, though I found his teacher/friend Narcissus irritating (not that there is anything wrong with an unlikable character). Hesse writes philosophical novels and I bristled against his pitting art against philosophy, feeling against thought (can't art be logical? asked M when I told him about the book). The epiphanies at the end seemed to me forced, didactic, more rhetoric than human experience. But not entirely groundless, of course. Just needlessly simplified to make a point (methinks). I won't say whether art or philosophy wins, in case you plan on reading the book, but I don't think that would ruin the experience either way.

When I was in an early part of the novel, I asked my mother whether she had read it and she said once, in Romanian. A powerful book, she said, but she wouldn't read it again. At the time I hadn't reached the powerful parts (they are there)-- lust, love, and most important, the relationship we have with death and the creation of art. I would echo my mother's estimation. The book is most definitely worth a read, and not just for the sex and death, though they are the main players and the plague is one of the most haunting characters. But it is not going on my list of books to reread. I never found out what "ghost motorcycle" had to do with anything in the book (maybe nothing, maybe some odd mechanism for remembering a grocery list). Perhaps it was some connection only that reader and his or her experience could make with the book. That connection, that meeting of ideas between reader and writer, should be a relatively unique one. Perhaps that is what ultimately irritates me about didactic fiction, that I feel I'm being told what to think, what conclusions to make, rather than leading me to further thinking and my own conclusions. Ah well.

Focus

2007-01-07T14:23:00.000-05:00

Whew! Things are getting pretty busy around here. I'm finishing my master's thesis. Vaguely and very broadly, it's related to politeness, but that's all I should say at this juncture. I'm applying for writers' residencies for the summer, and the deadlines are soon after the thesis deadline, so that should be interesting. As a result, I may not be able to post as frequently as before (which I know is not so often, but I prefer a little restraint anyhow).

M. & I are off to Seattle and Vancouver next week, for a much-needed change of scenery. Hope to give an update on that when I get back, as well as jot down some thoughts on Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, which I finished last week. I may go through fiction withdrawal next semester, as I'm moving into my last leg of grad school. But hopefully I'll continue to make room for everything!

Oh, oh, last update! I've got another reading bubbling up. Will post the details later this month. It's at a place that recently featured ukuleles, raunchy Flemish poetry, and Ovid on a Celtic harp. Wee!

Readers' Choice

2006-12-27T17:03:00.000-05:00

We're running our second Readers' Choice Awards over at 55 Words. Voting opened December 22 and will close January 20, 2007. It's been fun watching the votes come in-- take a look at the stories and send in your picks! Hooray for reading!

Berlin

2006-12-16T13:00:00.000-05:00

On the first night of Hannukah, the family Szilagyi saw Lou Reed's Berlin at St. Ann's Warehouse, which has been promoted as "an evening to press between the crumbling leaves of fall." Indeed, with DUMBO all foggy under the Manhattan Bridge, the slow polished melodies and gritty explosions seemed just right-- if only it hadn't been unseasonably warm. Members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus performed as well and I was mildly surprised to see a youngin' from Spoke the Hub up there, singing "Sad Song". I had to wonder what little Timmy thought of the occasionally lurid lyrics (bad pun, I know, but my grandmother did think we were going to see "Lurid's Berlin"--wee!). After the quasi-rock opera finished, the adult performers came back for an encore. Lou et al. sang "Sweet Jane" and "Rock Minuet" and Antony sang something divine in between.

I also received "Kafka's Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 14 Recipes" which has been a fun read so far. I'm looking forward to Clafoutis Grandmere a la Virginia Woolf.

Cover Story

2006-12-10T12:10:00.000-05:00

A 55-word story from 55 Words is on the cover of the January 2007 issue of The Writer, as it "nicely sums up the appeal of flash fiction." How nice!

Eels & Feels

2006-12-08T09:25:00.000-05:00

One of my very first publications was an academic essay published by Hotel in 2002, entitled "The Sexual Life of Agnes Matzerath in Gunter Grass's Tin Drum". They've now made this volume available online as a .pdf. I had wanted to append "Eels and Feels:" to the beginning of the title but opted for something more staid at the time. The essay is on pp.70-76 if you're into that sort of thing.

Luchadoras

2006-11-29T10:43:00.000-05:00

The Center for Immigrant Families is hosting "Our Stories: Our Lives As Immigrant Women," a photography and storytelling exhibition at Carlito's Cafe, running November 19, 2006-January 19, 2007. The opening reception is this Saturday, December 2, 6-9 pm, promising music and food and it is free! I hope to get a peek at the exhibit once the stress of final papers ebbs.

In other news, the Dr. Chapbook launch was intimate and engaging. Dr. Rita Charon spoke of the power of narrative and how a literary approach to medicine can help doctors see from their patients' perspectives, and thus make them more empathetic and better doctors. After her talk, contributors to the zine read poetry and non-fiction, and then the odd duck read her short story "Very Big Furniture".

Google Me

2006-11-19T16:15:00.000-05:00

Last night I went to the closing event for the New York Literary Translation Festival. A whole slew of poets read one to two poems each, which kept the evening nice and varied. Probably the best reading of the night was given by Saviana Stanescu, who read her poem "Google Me!" from her book of poetry of the same name. A hilarious poem, and given her background in the theater, one of the most boisterously and vibrantly performed. Another highlight was José Eugenio Sanchez Garza, one of the six writers representing the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He read his poem "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" in the original Spanish. Despite my deficiency in Spanish, his animated performance transmitted the gist and I don't think I was the only Spanish-deficient audience member that enjoyed his reading.

Speaking of readings, I plan on reading a short story of mine at the launch of Dr. Chapbook, a new lit/arts zine at Columbia's postbac premed program. That'll be tomorrow at 7:30, if you find yourself in the vicinity.

Literary Events

2006-11-11T16:25:00.000-05:00

The New York Literary Translation Festival is next week, November 16-18. It will feature readings by Romanian and American writers, translation workshops, panel discussions on translation and publishing, and a closing night party with Romanian gypsy music at the Cornelia Street Cafe. I hope to get out to one or two events.

In other news, I went to the launch party for Collectanea's third issue, which has NYC theme. Highlights of the reading included ruminations on Norman Mailer's obituary, insane uncles, and Lou Gehrig. The issue should be online sometime soon, and will feature a documentary film short that I believe has some psychogeographic NY-theme. I'm looking forward to it.

Floradita

2006-11-09T15:03:00.000-05:00

A little vignette, a sort-of-review.

We went to Floradita, a Cuban diner on 125th St. The waiter had a pompadour, the counter top was a large shiny U. We sat in platformed section, looking down. An old man, fierce-eyed and dressed as a sea captain, stood by the door with his hands clasped behind him, a self-elected security guard. We ordered corditas, faintly scented of rum. I ordered the soup of the day, caldo gallego, white bean soup. I wasn't very hungry and expected something small, and the waiter's pursed lips and approving nod indicated otherwise. A hefty dish of white beans, potatoes, and maybe three types of fatty pork. Pork fat, I had always been told, makes everything good. Together we finished the soup and the waiter smiled at the empty plate. Go if you get a chance.

Lillies

2006-11-02T16:42:00.000-05:00

I saw The Tiger Lillies last night, at St. Ann's Warehouse. Overall, it was a very fun show, chockfull of the macabre and grimace-laced chuckles. The slow songs (done in a low, gravelly voice) were disappointing, but the more upbeat pieces sung in falsetto got the crowd stamping their feet. After, the S.O. and I danced on DUMBO's cobblestones all the way back to the F train.

In other news, there's a fresh batch of stories up on 55 Words, and if you missed October's goodies, you can always check the archive. Fun!

Snippet from a longer thing

2006-11-01T10:54:00.000-05:00

The weekend passed slowly, with the Saturday morning walk in the woods (with singing, of course), afternoon game of snooker, and dinner with the Grumleys in the nearby chalet. The Grumleys had two boys and a girl, a yapping terrier named Frances and a rasping parrot named General Attawalpa. Frances, when nervous and especially yappy, usually aggravated General Attawalpa, whose previous owners had taught him to say “Sucks to yer assmar.”

Mr. Grumley, a specialist in Peruvian archaeology at the local university, and Mrs. Grumley, a retired ballerina, took their family on weekend trips about as often as the Pieters. The parents usually had post-dinner ruminations while the children ran off to play, usually right about when Mr. Grumley extracted the pipe tobacco from his left pocket. Mother and Father Pieters generally took Mr. Grumley’s occasional dinner table lectures with good humor, as they were usually truncated by Mrs.Grumley’s inquiries about the development of the Pieters children in comparison to the Grumley children, and often, what that loud ruckus in the rumpus room was.

“Oh yes,” crooned Mother Pieters with earnest eyes, “Our Booboo is the head of his class. He will be a great biologist one day.”

“How nice,” said Mrs. Grumley. “Our Daniel wants to be a cardiologist and our George is an impressive athlete.”

“Now, now, dear,” said Mr. Grumley, puffing on his pipe, “Let’s not brag so much, or the greatness of our children might turn them to stone.” Mrs. Grumley giggled.

“He’s referring to Inka myth, you see,” said Mrs. Grumley.

“We know,” droned the Pieters.

From the rumpus room came a great crash, followed by silence. The four parents rushed in, saw Zanzibar standing on a toppled bookcase, hands on hips, pigtails awry. The three other children stood in one corner of the room, stunned.

“Oh ho ho ho,” laughed Mr. Grumley. “Trying to scale the Andes?”

Zanzibar blew here hair out of her face. “No,” she said, furrowing her brow. “I knocked over the bookcase, Bucko.”

“Now, Zanzi, why can’t you be a good girl for once? Go into the parlor, and wait for us there,” said Mother Pieters. Zanzibar fumed and stomped out of the room. The men re-erected the bookcase, and everyone helped re-shelve.

The littlest Grumley, with large green eyes and cinnamon curls, took her thumb out of her mouth. “Zanzibaw is scehwee,” she whispered to her mother. Mrs. Grumley nodded to her child, clucked her tongue in admiration at her three-year-old’s remarkable astuteness.

Crime Prevention Tips

2006-11-01T08:53:00.000-05:00

"If you choose to wear your iPod, cell phone, or PDA clipped to your belt for all the world to see as some kind of 21st century status symbol, remember that may not be the best safety practice..." (from the 26th Precinct Community Affairs Unit, emphasis in the original)

...In other words, don't be an idiot.

Transfer to Nowhere

2006-10-26T08:20:00.000-04:00

In Second Language Acquisition (SLA) there are two types of transference: linguistic and cognitive. Linguistic means you can see the influence of the native language on the second language in the surface of the structure-- grammatical errors, etc. This is part of the "Transfer to Somewhere" hypothesis, that you can see the influence. "Transfer to Nowhere" is more interesting in that it is cognitive and you can't readily see the influence. That is, one could have a perfectly grammatical sentence but it still sounds "off" because a native speaker would most likely never produce a sentence that way-- that your native language shapes how you express your experience of the world. So off isn't necessarily off or odd, I think it could also be refreshingly different. It makes me think about writers working in their second/third/fourth/etc. languages. Did Nabokov transfer Russian onto French onto English? I guess he (and Conrad) might be exceptions because they were so able to manipulate English (and I'm guessing their other languages). But then again, I don't think the influence necessarily causes language to sound off (though in many cases it might, and it does get mixed in with the grammar issues), at least in the cases of talented language users/manipulators.

The Last King of Scotland

2006-10-15T18:20:00.000-04:00

I saw The Last King of Scotland this weekend. What can I say? It made me faint (literally!). I'm not sure it was just the gruesome scenes at the end, though those images did seem to be at the front of my mind at the time. Some reviews have criticized the fictional Dr. Garrigan that becomes Idi Amin's personal physician for being overly naive and blind to the atrocities going on around him for a longer stretch of time than is believable (though honestly time was not clearly marked in the story-- how long had he been in Amin's service before things went bad?). In any case, the film is definitely worth watching (weak of stomach forewarned). Forest Whitaker did a phenomenal job as a charming, paranoid, and horrifying monster. I also appreciated the clips of the real Amin at the end of the film; they seemed to add an important sense of truth, whether or not the viewer was already aware of who Amin was. That those atrocities were real, that atrocities are being committed right now in other parts of the world.

Art & Words

2006-10-12T21:55:00.000-04:00

An art book I was very (very) marginally involved with is finally coming out and there will be an exhibit of the work at the New York Open Center October 28-December 4. The opening reception is October 28. It will be a Hallowe'en Party, and costumes are encouraged. Fun!

Lost At the Aquarium

2006-10-04T15:09:00.000-04:00

Eels slithered, sinewy, in the dark water of the dirty tank. Electric eels. Lala stared at them, watched them dance, mouth agape. Absently, she poked at her dry lips, twirled a soft curl. What made them electric, she wondered? She stood closer, pressed her nose to the glass, and smeared her little finger on the fog prints she created. Thought of Miss Janet in a hot pink leopard print leotard, teaching the electric slide in jazz/tap class.

The din of Mrs. Burger’s second grade class trickled away, but was easily replaced by new din. Lala looked at the information on the electric eel’s plaque. She read the words quickly, her eyeballs jumping from line to line, then looked back at the undulating animals.

“Did you just read that whole thing?” a strange woman asked, astonished. Lala didn’t want to hurt the lady’s feelings.

“No,” she said. This seemed to satisfy the adult. Lala looked around to find her classmates gone, the parent-volunteer having ushered them away—but when? How long had she been staring at the eels?

Lala walked toward the exit of the Eel House, picking her nose. She wiped her finger on the yarn around her neck, attached to a construction paper ID card. “LALA” it said in red glitter on glue globs. Her school, grade, and teacher neatly printed underneath in Mrs. Burger’s cautious hand.

Lala wandered from the dark building into the gray light outside. She squinted, and found the penguin habitat. The penguins seemed stuffed, standing so still on their plastic rocks, painted white to resemble ice and snow. Lala wondered if they were real. She peered closer. Finally, a penguin dove into the water, its awkward wings becoming graceful fins. Lala wanted to be graceful too. She gave herself a twirl, watching her skirt fly up, and skimmed her palms against the soft, ruffled denim.

She looked at the penguins again. One of them was stuffed. How lonely it must be, Lala thought. It was a very mild winter. Lala fidgeted in her wool tights.

She moved on, twirling her hair, and found the polar bears, great big lumps of whitish gray fur. They seemed to sleep, paws shielding their little black eyes from the harsh Coney Island light, the wrong type of salt wafting in from the Atlantic. Lala found them sadder than the penguins. One bear rolled on his back, paw out like an open palm. Then it rolled again, dragged itself up and dove into the water, its tired face becoming serene as a manatee.

Lala had enough. Where was her class? She was ready for lunch. The errant parent-volunteer, Chichi, had promised cupcakes. Lala had spied multicolored sprinkles. She considered consulting a security guard. But there they were, lining up at the gate to leave. She joined the end of the line. Mrs. Burger tapped her head, the last in the count. They filed onto the yellow bus with the squeaky green seats.

Art & Technology

2006-10-02T19:50:00.000-04:00

My brother Victor will be in Marseilles this week, showing his xBlocks at the Arborescence Festival. Their theme this year is "light," running the gamut from contemporary tributes to Cezanne to video games, with a particular focus on interactivity. If you happen to be in Marseilles, say hello. It looks like it'll be a good time.

Interactional Sociolinguistics

2006-09-27T19:28:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a course in Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS). It looks at how culture and society is replicated and created in social interaction, a microanalysis that has larger implications. One big area of research that I'm particularly interested in is how IS can elucidate intercultural/interethnic misunderstandings. A lot of work has been done on "gatekeeping." A study that's been mentioned in a lot of the introductory readings relates the story of a South Asian man interviewing for a job in London who missed multiple (almost imperceptible) cues to promote himself; likewise, the interviewers did not take into account/did not know/did not realize that promoting oneself is not an acceptable practice in his culture. Another area of research that looks interesting is cross-gender (mis)communication, which works on the assumption that genders are almost separate cultures.

We got a taste of the microanalysis in class this week, looking over transcripts of conversations and trying to find and interpret the contexualization cues. Repetition turned out to be an important feature for creating solidarity in a conversation (though that doesn't go across the board-- every situation is different). What I liked about the exercise was how similar it felt to literary analysis, taking apart the smallest features and finding meaning in them.

Stories and Such

2006-09-19T08:36:00.000-04:00

There are more stories up at 55 Words. The Readers Choice Awards is also on. This means you should go read the nominated stories and send in your votes. You have until October 1st but don't procrastinate! Go now!

In other news, my family finally published my grandfather's memoir, Bittersweet Memories. It's been an interesting process that stretched a bit over three years. I've read various chunks of drafts but I'm looking forward to reading it in book form, cover-to-cover. From the back flap:

"Born into the quiet and remote steitl of Falticeni; embroiled in the fight against fascist dictatorship; entangled in the farce of the Communist regim; escape into the free world.

This is the life of one Jewish man, representative for so many of his generation."

Brooklyn Book Fest

2006-09-18T08:49:00.000-04:00

Saturday I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival. I had a lovely time wandering the stalls with M; we caught the last half of Jennifer Egan, Pete Hamill, and Colson Whitehead's reading. All the readings in the Borough Hall Courtroom (a lovely place) were a madhouse, with lines to get in winding down the stairs and out the Borough Hall door. They also had audience members sit up in the judges' seats, which made watching the reading extra interesting, to see people's changing expressions of amusement, sleepiness, and sleepy amusement. During the Q&A someone asked all 3 writers if they ever get depressed reading writers they admire. Whitehead said he tends to read non-fiction when he works, and Egan said if she reads something that depresses her because it is so good she doesn't sit down to write right away. I found Hamill's response most reasonable and encouraging. That you'll never be Gordimer (the questioner said Gordimer is her favorite) and Gordimer will never be you. You bring your own unique experiences to your writing (and this includes everything you read). He added that he tends to read work in translation in order to get the substance of the work without letting the music influence his writing (like reading Tom Wolfe and putting 20 exclamation marks in a paragraph).

We also saw the next reading: Ben Greenman, Jonathan Ames, and Gary Shteyngart. That was a very fun group. Shteyngart gave an especially spirited reading from the start of his book (beginning with masturbation and ending with circumcision and, of course, infection), so I finally picked up a copy of Absurdistan and hope to read it soon, though now that school has resumed it may be slated for July 2007. Oy.
.

Conflux

2006-09-12T13:32:00.000-04:00

Conflux, the annual NYC conference on psychogeography, will be in Brooklyn this weekend. My brother took me to my first (and only) Conflux in 2003, when it was on the Lower East Side. He participated in a chess game on the street (he was a chess piece, the player dictated where he go via cell phone, a man with a papier mache horse head plastic-axed him somewhere near West 4th St.). This year will include a Smelling Committee and The Former Resident Project (when you leave a place, what do you leave behind?) among many other things.

Code Switching

2006-09-08T09:51:00.000-04:00

I'm excited. All right, I know I said that in the last post. But now, in addition to autumn, I'm excited about a symposium I've registered for, on African & Diasporic Languages. One of the recommended readings is on Code Switching, which is using different languages within a conversation. This immediately brought to mind a trip I took to Germany with my grandmother in 2003; we visited her cousin and uncle, and it was a quadri-lingual affair. My grandmother spoke Romanian with her cousin and uncle, her cousin spoke German with her family, her family spoke English with me, and everyone who knew Hungarian reserved that for curses and other colorful language. So I suppose the code switching there was between Romanian and Hungarian. I can sort of guess at the significance of it, in my very vague, impressionistic understanding of the two cultures and languages and their histories. I've been told Hungarian just has better swear words. I wish I knew more of the language than I do; all I can say is the arcane greeting, "I kiss your hand" and "igen" (yes).

In any case, I'm looking forward to the symposium.

Enter Autumn

2006-09-06T17:25:00.000-04:00

I'm excited for fall. Aside from the end of wretched, bludgeoning-sun summer, aside from the fresh breezes, crisp air and crunchy leaves and all that good stuff, I'm going to two fun shows at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo.

First, for Halloween I'm seeing the Tiger Lillies, who I first saw in Shockheaded Peter last year (the song "Snip Snip" is still in my head).

Then I'm going on a double date with M and my parents to see the world premier of Lou Reed's Berlin, in December. It's going to be depressing. Hooray!

Even sooner than that, I'm going to the Brooklyn Book Festival (yow!) and my friend Andre's play. Fun will be had.

Readers' Choice

2006-09-06T11:12:00.000-04:00

More stories are up on 55 Words. Stay tuned for a readers' choice awards: read the best stories of the summer (nominees announced later this month) and choose your favorites. What fun!

Death of a Dancer

2006-09-06T09:19:00.000-04:00

(A long-ish, journal-y post. A quasi-personal essay. And a plea to myself.)

On my super-basic website, in the about me section, I wrote that I'm a writer, dancer, and teacher. I should probably change that seeing as I haven't danced in almost a year.

I've danced on and off most of my life, most intensively in the last ten years. In high school, I replaced theater with dance as an outlet for the unverbalizable (is that a word?), choreographing wordless stories and sublimating excess energy. I took a brief hiatus in college, first to "adjust" (read: be lazy), then because I was rejected from Mosaica, the school dance group (needed to mend the ego with nutella sandwiches), and finally because of major surgery (a potentially book-long story I won't explain here). While still in physical therapy I took exactly one horrible ballet class, and later attempted to join some rogue "dance jam" group (compiled of Mosaica's rejects), a bunch of university students that didn't wash their hair and rolled around on the floor of some loft housing 12 or 20 people and their 50 cats. Didn't jive with me; I didn't last long.

Sometime in my third year of college I finally found a niche, though, a modern dance class that didn't bore me, didn't feel awkward, and was just the right amount of pain. A good pain. A healthy pain. When I fell into depression (a string of bad relationships + grandfather dying), I doubled up on classes ("I'm so glad," said my teacher, taking my check, "winter's a wonderful time to work, don't you think?") and threw myself into the thing, plunging to the wood floor and relishing in the buckets of sweat released, the bruises gained. My teacher told me I was making remarkable progress, which always feels nice.

Graduation, France, and back to NYC. I took Graham classes. In general I don't like Graham, I feel as if my bones are exposed and I think the discomfort is inherent and intentional and disquieting, but not in a good way. It's melodramatic and, with the wrong teacher, down-right irritating. Luckily there's one teacher in NYC that teaches Graham while doing Marlon Brando and John Wayne impressions and I took his classes semi-regularly, and laughed at his assurances that "if it feels wrong and painful you're probably doing it right." It was almost as good as the class in Montreal. I felt good about myself, I went back to my old studio from highschool and choreographed another piece for their anniversary weekend, had a wonderful (albeit self-conscious) time performing that and being in a larger piece by the director of the company, with out-and-out professionals. But after that performance last October I haven't been back to a dance class.

So what happened? School happened. No dance classes nearby, nothing apparently convenient on the way, so I learned how to swim instead at the TC pool (useful, sure, but not the same as a satisfying dance class). Am I being lazy? Yes, definitely. I'm worried about taking down the label "dancer"-- it might be the last nail in the coffin, though it feels like such a lie to keep it up there. And though dance has been this peripheral thing, not nearly as constant as writing, which as been front-and-center for a while, but this thing at the sidelines, it is frantically waving and quietly shouting (kind of like those nighmares where you scream, but no sound comes out), asking me not to just drop this part of myself. Well, we'll see. If there's a self-help group for lapsed dancers, I want in.

Little Miss Sunshine

2006-09-03T11:28:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, between bouts of wind and sprays of rain, I saw Little Miss Sunshine. I must say it was one of the best movies I've seen in a while, and it really cancels out the funk The Ascent put me in last month(though also an excellent film). Some critic in Entertainment Weekly gave Little Miss Sunshine a C or some such mark because it was neither realistic nor completely off the wall, but some mix of the two. What a dualistic simpleton. It was just the right mix of realism with something askew. Perhaps the little girl Olive was just a wee bit too cute but I could live with that; she was hardly the star (indeed, no one was). A feel good movie with suicide, Nietzsche, Proust, creepy 5-year-old beauty queens, and a druggie grampa with a heart of gold. Highly recommended.

New Template

2006-08-29T18:10:00.000-04:00

Well, I've been hunched over the computer labelling posts with the new blogger labelling thing. Because I like to categorize. But it's not as organized as I would've liked. Ah well.

What do you think of the new template? A little too pink? More pleasing to the eye? Go back to the simpler one? Comments, if you will. Or not.

Pet Names

2006-08-29T16:05:00.000-04:00

(Ignore the silliness; just playing with the beta features. Or, add your own pet names in the comments! Fun!)

Honey, Sweetheart, Pumpkin tootsiepie
Snookums, Shnookums, Shmoopiedoo
Cuddily Dumpling; Snuggily Bunny
Ginger Bucket
Sugar Bucket
Ginger Fish
Gibbledewidget and Wibbledegibbet;
alternatively, jibbledwidget and wibbledejibbet

Hodge Podge

2006-08-25T13:24:00.000-04:00

I'm mid-way through the 3-week break between my last summer course (my first teaching practicum, and a rather intensive one at that), and the fall semester. I think I've been balancing productivity and relaxation pretty well.

Thoroughly enjoyed my first reading at KGB, sent out another few stories (plan to send a fourth next week), finally organized my files in this great old cabinet my father gave me (metal, clangs), set up an RSS feed for 55 words (ok, so that took one, maybe two minutes).

Also seem to be getting a satisfying amount of sitting-and-reading time (short stories, The Sun is My Enemy, Lake Wobegon Days), and miscellaneous research. Yesterday I flipped through the old Britannica volumes we found in the basement, from 1981. Read about Romance Languages and Romania. I enjoyed the adjectives used to describe Ceaucescu's foreign policies: brave, bold, courageous. Mm. Today was less musty, more internet-y. Andy Warhol, Basquiat, funerary art. Ah, vacation!

I'm off to Boston for the weekend. I don't plan on doing much. Sitting. Watching. Taking in the smog of another city.

A Love Like Damien's

2006-08-22T10:04:00.000-04:00

My friend Andre Lancaster is making his directorial debut this September with A Love Like Damien's at the WOW Cafe Theater in the Village. I saw a staged reading of the play (by Andrea Davis) this past spring; it was quite strong on the bare stage, so I'm looking forward to the full production.

Less demonic

2006-08-21T13:12:00.000-04:00

Reading
Originally uploaded by burningsnail.

Here's another photo from Thursday's reading.

Squinty

2006-08-21T13:10:00.000-04:00

Squinty
Originally uploaded by burningsnail.

Here's a photo from my reading on Thursday. I look a little demonic, but I guess that's me getting *really* into character.

Sunflowers and Black Russians

2006-08-18T13:16:00.000-04:00

Good afternoon!

Last night was joyfulicious. My first reading, really (if you don't count "coffee house night" in my dorm, freshman year of college, dressed in black reading poetry I'd written in high school...heh).

I went last, after Matt Cav and Professor Arturo, both wonderful readers and writers, both so different from each other and from me (hooray for variety!).

The podium successfully hid my shaking legs, which stopped trembling somewhere around page 5 of 9. I really enjoyed performing. It's one thing to sit alone and write (also, a joy; also, torture-- but we love pain, don't we?). It's another to get to share your work with a responsive crowd and really get into the voices of your characters as you've envisioned them, get into the rhythm and intonation, take the appropriate pauses, make eye contact with and funny faces at perfect strangers.

I'm looking forward to reading again. I've created a mailing list for future readings and publications. If you'd like to join, just enter your email address in the sidebar. I promise not to flood your mailbox.

KGB-Tonight!

2006-08-17T08:48:00.000-04:00

I'm reading a short story at KGB tonight--it's called "Skitter" and its going to appear in The Massachusetts Review.

Also performing are Matt Cav, Kidd Lambert, and Professor Arturo.

In case you've never met me, I'll be the blonde woman gripping the podium,
trying not to fall over and praying my voice doesn't squeak.

I'll also be sweating profusely.

Antigonish2

2006-08-11T16:36:00.000-04:00

In case you're having trouble getting your hands on the current issue of Antigonish Review, selections including my own story are now up on their website. If you like what you see you should still support them though.

KGB

2006-08-09T00:01:00.000-04:00

Mark your calendars!

I'll be reading one of my short stories at the venerable KGB Bar, Thursday, August 17 (that's a week from tomorrow!). The reading is from 7-9 pm.

Hope to see you there!

Ascent Aspirations

2006-08-01T14:03:00.000-04:00

Ascent Asirations has republished my story "Cumulus."

Further Updates

2006-07-28T13:36:00.000-04:00

I went to Celebrate Brooklyn last night, to see the Kronos Quartet play the score for Dracula (and watch Dracula). A heavy mist rolled over the crowd and turned greenish under the lights by the trees. Less than a third into the film, thunder started grumbling and the sky started blinking and flashing. The crowd kept applauding the sky's thunder claps (though they also showed Bela Lugosi some love) and gave the musicians a standing ovation when the concert was cut short due to torrential rain. It was a very enjoyable 20 minutes.

I've finally updated the writing links section of my website (see "me, elsewhere" link in the sidebar).

Twelve 55 word stories are up on the 55 words site. Read them, love them.

On Teaching Writing

2006-07-28T13:09:00.000-04:00

I had a rude awakening in my practicum seminar yesterday. We talked about an article called "A challenge to second language writing professionals," by Ilona Leki, focusing on the claim that "Writing is personally fulfilling" and that that's one of the big reasons why writing is so important. Basically, Leki says this claim is bunk:

"The argument that learning to write is important because writing serves a few people so well is reminiscent of parents' argument to coerce children into practicing violin--some day the learner will be grateful. But we are not dealing with children, and we are not our students' parents."

The instructor asked how many in the room actually found writing personally fulfilling (we're a class of 8). Two or three including myself sheepishly raised our hands. Fact is, writing is not fun for a lot people, and torture for a lot of language learners-- a notion I never really considered but am beginning to understand. How can we ask them to see writing as "cathartic" if they're still struggling with the language (another question posed by Leki)?

So I was left with this dangling question: if students are not the creative type prone to playing with languages in the first place, do we not bother? Do we focus forever on English for academic purposes and business English and all-things-dry-and-pragmatic? That doesn't really lend itself to flexibility with a language. And that doesn't seem practical either. Hm.

First Lines Collage

2006-07-21T13:05:00.000-04:00

Pure silliness. See if you can match the first lines below with their stories (choices below collage).

It was winter. A string of naked light bulbs, from which it seemed all warmth had been drained, illuminated the little depot’s cold, windy platform. Inside, Old Jack raked the cinders together with a piece of cardboard and spread them judiciously over the whitening dome of coals. A spiteful scar crossed his face: an ash-colored and nearly perfect arc that creased his temple at one tip and his cheek at the other.

Running footsteps—light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery cloth brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches, following a stone’s throw behind. She was tall and slim, and though no longer young, had the strong firm breasts of the dark-haired woman. When he got on the bus, he irritated everyone. Poor Juan!

There were only two Americans stopping at the hotel. As soon as she arrived she went straight to the kitchen to see if the monkey was there. The monkey, named Senator Onesimo Sanchez, had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life. He held his breath an instant, dug his nails into the palms of his hands, and said quickly: “I’m in love with you.”

Lines from:
G. Verga, "The Wolf"
T. Capote, "A Tree of Night"
J.L. Borges, "The Shape of the Sword"
L. Heker, "The Stolen Party"
M.V. Llosa, "Sunday, Sunday"
L. Valenzuela, "The Censors"
J. Joyce, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"
F.S. Fitzgerald, "Tarquin of Cheapside"
G. di Lampedusa, "Joy and the Law"
E. Hemingway, "Cat in the Rain"
G.G. Marquez, "Death Constant Beyond Love"

p.s. More stories are up on the 55 Words site! Updated weekly! Write yer own and tell yer friends!

Happy Bastille Day!

2006-07-14T11:49:00.000-04:00

It's another sticky NY day and I'm miserably delighted with all the work I've got to do. Here are some updates (and shameless plugs):

-I've added new stories to 55words.

-I went to the launch party for Collectanea's summer launch party last night. Not as heaving a crowd as their debut, but a pleasant evening in from the mugginess, with some good stories to listen to. In case you missed it, my story "Bastille Day" is in their winter issue, with a podcast/radioplay version. I understand the summer issue will be up Monday.

-I started reading Flannery O'Connor's collected works and am thoroughly enjoying it. This winter I gobbled up Raymond Carver's Cathedral and quasi-gobbled Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats. School is making the gobbling-thing rather difficult, but at least short stories can be read in a single train ride. That's a real lifesaver. As much as I enjoy reading about how to make grammar interesting (I do!), sometimes I go through fiction withdrawal.

Antigonish Review

2006-07-06T19:51:00.000-04:00

The Antigonish Review has published my story "Reunion: Recovery," in its Spring 2006 issue (#145). Yipee!

55 words

2006-07-02T16:45:00.000-04:00

So I'm now the editor of the guest stories portion of Rosemary Mosco's website. There's a new email address for submissions: 55gueststories at gmail dot com. I hope y'all will try writing one--55 words, no more, no less. They're oodles of fun. I put one of my own up on the site (Ro originally had it on her livejournal). Take a peek .

Nausea

2006-06-29T09:14:00.000-04:00

Ride through the sickness. That's what she had to do. She leaned against the red wall and shut her eyes from the milling crowd and ambient, amniotic lights. Her eyelids shielding her from the flashing bulbs and the photogenic smiles.

She leaned against the wall and against his reassuring torso, standing behind, and listened to the lulling acoustic music, the music that spoke blue in the face of the all the red, that was the peppermint for her nausea. A tranquilized cover of "Eight Days a Week" almost droning, but beautiful in some narcotic way. She couldn't see the musicians if she tried, stuck there in the back on the stool the bartender had pulled out for her. She shivered once, twice, curled up into the music beneath her eyelids and rode it out.

Harvest

2006-06-23T12:28:00.000-04:00

(another story snippet)

On the balcony Luda dreams, feeling the morning air on her face. British women, she has heard, have beautiful skin, because of the moisture in the air. She thinks about this and lets the dew seep into her pores. Brown and white pigeons ruffle their feathers in a coop in the corner, coo-cooing at her and each other. She holds a butcher’s knife, idly twirling the point on her calloused finger. Which one will be for dinner?

Suddenly, a great white bird alights on the ledge, bristling, head cocking curiously. Luda stares at it. The cockatoo reciprocates. She fears it will speak, it will reproach her.

“Come in, come in, sweet bird,” she says, opening the door to the apartment. She'd love it as a pet. Would like to teach it to speak and sing. Pissou the cat looks out from under the kitchen table, two green eyes in the shadows, his black tail switching stiffly back and forth. The cockatoo has other plans: no apartment block for him. He leaves as abruptly as he came.

Luda shrugs. She puts the knife down on the ledge and opens the pigeon coop, selecting the plumpest of the bunch. She holds its body in one hand and delicately, lovingly, uses the other to break its neck.

Rockhurst Review

2006-06-13T16:51:00.000-04:00

My story "Lemon Tree Palace" has been published in the nineteenth edition of the Rockhurst Review (Spring 2006). It's a journal based at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri and it's printed on really nice paper, which is good for the color art section at the back. It's a lively mix of stories and poems, if I do say so myself, and a mere $5.

If you're interested in getting a copy, send the $5 to:

Patricia Cleary Miller
Rockhurst Review
Rockhurst University
1100 Rockhurst Road
Kansas City, Missouri 641100-2561

Comics

2006-06-12T14:16:00.000-04:00

This weekend I went to the MoCCA Art Festival to see my friend Rosemary and her new comics. I picked up her lovely, boldly-inked, and educational Mid-Cambrian Morning, about some crustaceans (?) living in a wacky period of evolution, 540 million years ago.

I also picked up a copy of Heart & Brain: A Turning Story, by Fay Ryu, as I naturally gravitate to pictures and stories about those (and other) internal organs. It's a wordless story of, you guessed it, a meeting between a heart and a brain in a garden. I won't give away the ending but it's both touching and devastating.

Finally, on a related note, Teachers College is having a gallery opening called "Learning Inside (and Outside) the Box". It's a show devoted to the combination of creative thinking with traditional literacy skills and it exhibits original comic books by children made over the 2005-06 school year. Follow the link for details.