A Year of Unending Poems

The Magnetic Poetry Calendar with my poem inside arrived today. It looks great. Inside the box was also a letter from Becky Hickel, a member of their product development team (and a wonderfully kind lady who leads you to believe that everything they say about Minnesotans is true,) who wrote:

Hello 2006 Calendar Poets!

Here are your complimentary copies of the Magnetic Poetry 2006 Calendar in which your poem appears. Congratulations! Have a great year of basking in the limelight and keep on writing!

In 2006, it will surely be November all year long in my apartment, since that's the month in which my work is featured. My friend Laura commented that I seem to be amassing an eclectic list of pop-culture-y credits. I suppose that's true. You can get your own calendar here.

Good Morning

Spoiler Alert

I have just returned home from the movies. Tonight I used the ticket that I won from using Blingo to see "The 40 Year Old Virgin" starring Steve Carell, which is a good movie to see if you're not paying.

Perhaps the most entertaining part of the evening came when the young man sitting next to me, who upon seeing one character's blouse fall open to reveal her generous breast, exclaimed "Yo yo, Marvin, that look like your stepmama nipple."

From the Department of It Just Goes to Show You

Number of chickens trained by European scientists to choose between photos of human faces by pecking: 6

Chances that college students select as "most desirable" the same face chosen by the chickens: 49 in 50.

*research by Stefano Ghirlanda, Universita di Bologna, as written in Harper's, September 2005 issue.

Featured Listener

First, see the previous post regarding Anne Bramley's amazing Eat Feed podcast. Naturally, because of space constraints, my responses were truncated. Rather a lot. It's fine with me; I understand the nature of the beast.

So, as promised, here are the full-length answers:

1. Where, when and how do you listen to Eat Feed?

My favorite place to listen to Eat Feed is on the Q101 bus, which I take from my office on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan back to Queens. In New York City, the Subways can be rude, loud places, with the exhausting seat-jockeying, the blaring bing-bong of the closing doors. The bus, however, is quite different. Because busses, in some ways, are very time-sensitive (they're actually on a fixed schedule, believe it or not, and mostly stick to it) riders generally catch the same one each time -- so you end up riding home, as I do, every afternoon with the same driver, the same ten or fifteen people you see each week. My ride is about 30 minutes, barring any traffic ridiculousness, which is usually just enough time to get through one episode of EatFeed.

The Taste of Vermont episode took me back to my early years in New York, when I was barely out of high school, living with three roommates in a (what I now know to be cramped) apartment on Broadway and 34th Street in Astoria. One of them, an actor and singer, made frequent trips to Vermont to find work tapping trees for syrup making, and she'd bring us huge jugs of the Grade B stuff, which I think is always richer and filled with more deep caramel flavor than the lighter Grade A some people prefer. So that afternoon, with the Q101 stuck on the Queensboro Bridge because of some reason or another -- maybe even no reason at all -- I thought about all those breakfasts we had together.

2. Three things in your fridge or larder right now:

In my fridge you will always find a tub of quince paste, because it seems to last forever, no matter how much manchego I eat. I also have an old peanut butter jar, now filled with roasted red peppers that came from Caputo's Bakery in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where they make (basically) everything themselves. Their peppers are always rich and charry-tasting without the high-pitched sugary flavor you can get with some of the store-bought brands. And if you look in the fridge door, there are two one-pound bags of flax seed, which were sent to me by my mother, and considering that I've had them for several months, and even though I grind them onto everything, they'll probably be in there forever, too.

6. Favorite section of the grocery store:

I love to go food shopping because the grocery store is one of the few places where I get the genuine feeling that anything is possible. I always peek into the carts of the people in front of me in line, all the dozens of ethnicities that live in my neighborhood, and see what they're buying, often wondering what in the world are they going to make with that.

I never make a shopping list. I just look into my fridge before I leave the house, think a little bit about what I'm craving on the short walk, and then shop a little here and there, without paying too much attention to what I'm getting. (This makes for both interesting and disappointing trips to the fridge in the middle of the week, I know: "oh, no cheese, what's a guy to do?")

I'm lucky, I have about 8 grocery stores within walking distance. My favorite section in all of them is the aisle that has everything wonderful packed in jars: bitter orange marmalade, ginger and mango chutney, Jamaican jerk seasoning, chipotles in adobo sauce, black olive paste, hearts of palm, thai curry paste. I love seeing everything stacked in my cabinets, I love opening jars and getting that satisfying pop.

7. Your favorite small shop, online resource, or open market to shop for yummy food:

Without a doubt, my favorite place to shop is the Union Square GreenMarket. It's particularly crazy on Saturdays, with people dragging bikes, babies, dogs, skateboards, musical instruments, anything through the market, buying everything from flowers to fresh caught fish to baked goods to cat grass. It's also a way to meet the real people who are growing and nurturing the food you eat.
Don't miss the perfect maple syrup at the Deep Mountain Maple stand, where they also have sell delicious maple candy and a ginger syrup that's like pure sunlight on your tongue.

Dinner with Oetzi?

I was asked by Anne Bramley, the brilliant host and creator of EatFeed, the very best food podcast you'll come across, to answer a few interesting questions for the EatFeed website as part of their future "Featured Listener" section. When everything is posted there, I'll let you know. In the meantime, here's a sampling:

Q: If you could travel back in time for a meal, where and when would you go?

A: During the filming of "Inherit the Wind" Katharine Hepburn cooked Spencer Tracy his favorite meal, which is said to have been salad, grilled steak and a hot fudge sundae. I've read that Mae West used to rehearse her vaudeville act in her mother's basement with her future husband and co-star Frank Wallace, and when they'd finish, she'd serve them pig knuckles with sauerkraut. And advances in science have determined -- so they say -- that the last food eaten by the 5,000 year old Iceman found frozen in the Alps consisted of red deer meat, wild grasses and unleavened bread.

None of these are the most interesting meals, perhaps. But, imagine the company.

What I'm Reading Now

I came back from Florida last Saturday to find a package from my friend Richard Dworkin. He is a friend of Lynne Tillman's, and she wrote a book called No Lease on Life. Which is a story about a poor, crime-ridden, crack-addicted apartment building on the Lower East Side -- it's actually quite funny.
It has a refrain (of sorts) of jokes throughout, which is why Richard always wanted me to read it. He had Lynne sign it to me and that was very nice of him. Normally, I'm a snob about author inscriptions if the reader and author are strangers to one another. But I love books signed to me if I know the person. Or if they arrive like they did here, surprisingly and from good friends.

Blingo!

Everyone immediately start using BLINGO as your new most favorite search engine. It's just like Google (in fact it uses Google's search engine,) but what makes it so amazingly better is that you can win prizes just for searching for all the crap you're always searching for anyway.

For example, tonight I won a free movie ticket, just for trying to figure out how to work some Torrent software.

Also, we all hold cyber-hands in a circle and then if I win something and you're my Blingo Friend, YOU win the same prize I do. And you were just sitting at your desk doing nothing.

For all the geeks out there using Firefox as your most favorite browser, Blingo allows you to add it into your search box in your toolbar.

Smart, huh.

Teaser Trailer

We never meant to hurt anyone. I don't think we did hurt anyone. Everyone who signed on knew what they were in for. They chose this; don't forget that. You don't know how important our work was to these people. They would have done anything.

There has been a lot of discussion, a lot of attention paid to whether or not what we did was right. But I think that question can only be answered by the people we were able to help, and there were dozens who recovered what was lost.

Memories are vast and strange, they often read like a foreign language, even to ourselves. Mapping and recording this part of the human experience is slow and sometimes painful, yes. And there is a learning curve, yes. At times we thought it was impossible. But we were wrong in that regard.

It is possible.

Could I have a glass of water? I'd appreciate it if you could turn the fan on too, please. It's warm in here, is it not? Well, no matter. Leave it then.

Regret

I think the Black Eyed Peas, who seem to be continually in earshot this summer, are the kind of band who you might enjoy for about two albums and then five years later, the entire consciousness of the nation wakes up and realizes that they've been acting like stroke-addled dunderheads, and they begin to laugh at the very notion.

At the Beach

Here we are in St. Augustine Beach. It has occured to me that everyone who reads this blog on a semi-regular basis--read: my mother, my brother, my boyfriend (sometimes)--are here with me. I'm here at the public library, using the computers for free. Next to me is a man, maybe mid-50s, buying a Swiss watch from their website, and on the other side, some people are buying something from Best Buy.

Mario is three computers down, looking serious and handsome.

Missing New York, but happy to be here, too. See you all soon.

Vacation.

I am off to St. Augustine Beach, Florida with my family and my boyfriend tomorrow. This morning we packed our luggage, bought dried fruit, nuts and sweets from Sahadi's, and I made my way back to Queens on the Subway in order to work a little bit on Yield, which I both did and didn't. The last few pages are impossible today, so frustrating that I am spreading them out over several hours, meddling with the bookshelves, the fridge, this blog even, anything to keep from sitting here and writing.

Somtimes I am completely undisciplined: I watch movies, turn over my Netflix queue, download music, write emails, play with the cats, nap, organize something, thumb through my favorite cookbook. But it somehow gets done.

And what I most love about living in New York, is that you can't wait to get out of the city, and then when you return, you're always so glad to be back.

A Way of Working

In 1982, Ms. Didion did a series for the New York Review about the American presence in El Salvador. I found an audio recording of her reading from one of those pieces in which she explains that for these pieces, she would "look at something." She would "see what there is, and read what there is to read, and think about it, and see where it takes you."

I love this idea.

Bleeding Fingers

I am nearing the end of my latest round of revisions to the manuscript. This round being that I am re-typing it into a fresh, clean Word document, editing and adding bits as I go along. No cut and paste for me. In my mind, I'm frosting a cake, smoothing the icing to create a seamless surface.

I was unsure of how this trick might work at first, but I have found that I know the book now better than I ever have. It has allowed me to re-learn it from the beginning, having all the previous revisions in my head. The last few months have been about blowing it apart and rearranging the pieces, and now it's finally being assembled.

A few steps closer...

New for 2006!

As my blog quickly descends into geekdom and away from literary thought, I present to you the new coaster, The Voyage, which is going up at Holiday World in Indiana. This coaster is creating lots of buzz in the coaster world, and could overtake a lot of the major coasters that are currently in operation.

The Voyage (okay, so the name is crap...it's part of a new Thanksgiving-themed land at Holiday World, so what can you do?) is a wooden coaster that will hold the record for the most airtime in the world, and it's a whopping 1.2 miles long

You can read all about The Voyage and see pictures here and if you really want to geek out, you can click here and view an POV video.

The Voyage is designed by The Gravity Group, LLC, a relatively new design firm (but with tons of experience behind them) and will be built by Philadelphia Toboggan Coasters, Inc.

Proof

A journalist/blogger was killed in Iraq today, which is unfortunately further proof of the power that words can have.

You can read about the story and the work Steven Vincent was doing all over the Web today, or at:

The Guardian

BBC News

Al Jazeera

A Note for Sarah in Chicago, Upon Moving to Her New Home.

Meanwhile, back in New York:

Backtracking

I started writing something for this blog this morning, relating my feelings and apprehensions about a future event that involves several other people. And I stopped, unsure of how to make it right.

Ms. Didion said "Writers are always selling somebody out." The quote is overused, of course; it is often misunderstood. It is sometimes assumed to mean that writers are always on the lookout for a story, the story, a subversive way to undercut your subject matter.

What she meant, however, is that no matter how close you are to the subject, no matter how elegant or respectful your intentions, your perspective on a series of events, or another person's experience is still your intractable perspective. You are always viewing the material from the outside; you are viewing it as just that: material.

I am better suited to writing fiction, where I can wrap the real events in layers of structure and character, mix plot with pacing to remove all traces of the veracity of the situation. I am not good at "reporting."