Rifling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Grammar Day!

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.