Morning Disco

I bought a new lamp for my bedside table recently; it has three settings and you turn it off and on by simply touching the metal base. However, it's right near my alarm clock, and sometimes when I reach over to hit the snooze button, as I like to do on occasion, my sleepy arm brushes against the lamp and it rolls through the settings quickly, once or twice in a single second, like a dance party or something. If someone was looking at my bedroom window, I wonder what they would think.

Holiday

It took me 14 hours to get from New York to Chattanooga on Friday -- about as long as it might take to drive -- during which I spent time in four airports, and took four different modes of transportation (car to plane to car to train to bus to plane) How I prayed for a boat. And with all the shitty life-happenings that occured in the last four months, on top of the stress that comes with the (lack of) help given by the airlines, add that I'm tired and hungry and my battery is running out in my iPod -- I just cried all the way from Baltimore to Charlotte. If anyone noticed, they didn't asked me what might be the matter.

Airports are safe places. The whole time that the flights were delayed or changed, I didn't worry about a thing. I'm here, they'll take care of me, I kept thinking. Only when everything fell apart and I found myself in a taxi, in DC rush hour traffic, and then on a MARC train to BWI -- all places I've never been as an adult -- did I begin to get nervous. What if all this is wrong, I thought. What if I end up carjacked by crack addicts and thrown naked into a drainage ditch, left only for the wolves to have their fill, the buzzards to pick at whatever's left, and the maggots to finish me, finally. (Even in our nightmares, writers sew up the ends.)

My nephew, almost 16 months, is smart and adorable and knows about 20 signs -- my brother and my sister-in-law have taught him some sign language (some American and some invented) and it allows him to communicate exactly what he wants even though he doesn't have all the words. He has signs for Milk, Juice, Eat, Diaper, All Done, Where Is It, Drive, Sleepy, Please, and a bunch of other things. Although, as my brother pointed out, he seems to think that 'Please' actually translates into a kind of overriding Now-You-Have-To-Give-It-To-Me.

I think my legs were confused this morning when I asked them to walk the five blocks to the subway, since for a week I've been sitting on my ass. Between the transit strike last week and being in Tennessee just after, they seemed to have forgotten what to do.

Gay Husbands

Yesterday on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the topic was gay husbands. Meaning, the focus of the show was really straight women who wake up one day to learn that their husband of 7 or 15 years is gay. Some of the men had long-term relationships, some just slept around; one of them had more than 1000 sexual partners throughout his thirty year marriage.

The show was frustrating, because Oprah didn't seem to get it. I think she dumbs herself down for the at-home audience -- asking the questions that not so much she wants to hear, but that they want to hear, asking her guests over and over again for a simpler explanation.

"Why do you get married in the first place?" Oprah asked.

The men gave the usual answers: I thought I would change; I was really in love with her; I thought that it had been only one time with a man and that the feelings would pass.

These are not, however, the reasons.

What do we value in this country? Marriage, family, money, success, fame, having a strong religious faith (of a certain kind, of course,) and perhaps education, though I am reluctant to add that one. What we don't value is personal happiness. Which is to say that until gay people are 1) considered a whole, essential, integral part of our society, and 2) given the same rights as every individual living in that society, then gay men will forever marry straight women as a way of arriving at those very values that we hold high. Only until there is a new normal.

Never did the idea come up -- which is to say that Oprah never mentioned this idea -- that gay people are maligned, disenfranchised, oppressed, made jokes of. And periodically tied in chains and dragged behind pick up trucks until their limbs come off, or barb-wired to fences, beaten and left for dead in the desert.

"I still don't understand why you would get married in the first place," Oprah kept asking. None of the men gave the real answer: Because I didn't want to be one of them.

Word of the Year

The word 'Podcast,' a combination of the words 'broadcasting' and 'iPod,' has been named Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. Defined as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player," the word will be added to the online version of the dictionary during the next update early next year.

Some of my favorite podcasts include:

EatFeed: The food podcast that takes you back in time, across the country, around the world, and back to your own table.

Downstage Center: A weekly theatrical interview show, featuring the top artists working in theatre both on and Off-Broadway and around the country.

The Leonard Lopate Show: Conversations with writers, actors, ex-presidents, dancers, scientists, comedians, historians, grammarians, curators, filmmakers, and do-it-yourself experts.

Studio 360: A national radio show about arts and culture, hosted by novelist and journalist Kurt Andersen and produced by Public Radio International and WNYC. Current issues, events and trends in art are a jumping off point for an exploration of ideas that aren't necessarily "news," yet are provocative and offer a lens on experience that only art can provide.

Mike Birbiglia's Secret Public Journal: Every month, comedian Mike Birbiglia travels to the far reaches of the earth. Occasionally something interesting happens. So he always brings his secret public journal.

For the coaster geeks:

CoasterRadio.com: CoasterRadio.com is a weekly podcast dedicated to roller coasters, theme parks and thrill rides.

In the Loop: Weekend Review: A weekly show that brings you an in-depth look into the amusement park industry.

Strike, Day 2

Today is the beginnging of the second day of the transit strike. I realized at some point yesterday how New York can skew your perspective on the rest of the country. Half the day had gone by before I realized that in Chicago, in St. Louis, in Kalamazoo, life was moving as usual. Of course, I knew this, but to know something and to know something are two different things.

Strangely, in my mind, I had shut down the movement of the whole country. I suppose between the man-on-the-street madness of New York 1, our city's 24-hour local news channel, and front page stories in all the papers that were laying on the counter at the diner where I had lunch -- The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, and severeal smaller local papers -- I had somehow convinced myself that no one could get to work.

Small Joys are the Biggest

Excerpts in Limbo, Vol. 2

They listened to the open connection, the blank space between them. She saw him sitting at his desk, surrounded by all the papers, the keyboard and the telephones and fax machines, the millions of other mechanical instruments emitting hidden blooms of electromagnetic rays in every direction. All that concrete and metal and glass. New York—the jungle that eats itself, jarring the molecules, vibrating its inhabitants like tuning forks.

Lois Beatrice Payne

My maternal great-grandmother, Lois B. Payne of Atlanta, GA, age 90, passed away on December 10, 2005. She lived in a nursing home for the last few years, suffering from--or perhaps lost within--Alzheimer's Disease.

As printed in the obituary which appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on December 12, 2005: she is survived by her daughter, Allene Cornelius of Atlanta; 4 grandchildren, 6 great grandchildren; 1 great great grandchild; a brother, Lee Pittman of Dawsonville; a sister, Marie Walston of Atlanta; and several nieces and nephews.

She was buried in Crestlawn Memorial Park, next to her late husband, Garnett, who died in 1976. The Rev. Keith Willard, a distant cousin, officiated, and in addition to suggesting that when he saw her on Sundays she looked as if she had stepped right out of the Sears Roebuck catalog--you should read that as a major compliment, which is how it was intended--he managed to include some sentences that I wrote about her in an essay a few years ago: about her kindness, about how easily she fit inside my arms. My friend Foster and I agreed that what was left out was that she made the best carrot cake in the history of the world. And that she hated her middle name, Beatrice, which, for some reason, everyone pronounced Be-AT-trice.

I know too much about death lately. Everyone will be able to say that at some point; most already can. But this one is okay. She lived an enviable life, in some sense: full of family, food so good it borders on sin, and a peaceful way about her that more people should emulate. (This is not including the time she began shooting squirrels in her living room with her BB gun, but that's beside the point.)

It's true that people never leave you as long as you don't forget them. I wrote about her briefly in my first novel, Yield, having given one of my own memories to my narrator, Simon:

"I sit down on the couch, pick up a ceramic figurine off the side table, a little elephant with the trunk raised. It looks fifties-ish, like those accessories that were at one time fashionable and perhaps indicated some status. I used to see that stuff in my great-grandmother’s house—a delicate feminine hand holding a pinkish, glossy conch shell, turned up, its open end to the ceiling. She kept rosy-colored emery boards in it. Then, in her bedroom on the make-up table, she had a strange box, one green and one red light bulb in the base, directed up to three tiger-striped clam shells. The center shell held a crucifixion, the bleeding Jesus near-naked and tiny. I’m not sure what forces this memory to surface—maybe the stillness of this room. Could be anything, really."

Brokeback Mountain

Yes. It's as good as they say it is--one of the most truthful, honest adaptations of a short story I've ever seen. The acting is extremely good. Much of the talk has been how it is really Heath Ledger's film--and it is--but one of my favorite moments is when Jake Gyllenhaal (as Jack Twist) manages to break your heart in about three seconds when he is forced not to look at his naked friend squatting and bathing himself with hot water from the kettle.

The film is quite tense, with not a lot of space for the audience to breathe, to let go of that anxiety, despite the slowness of the story, the spaces created by the leaps forward in time. You know that their love is already doomed from the first few frames. After the movie I felt completely displaced. The images are with me still, and days later, I am unable to get Jack & Ennis out of my head.

My only criticism is that -- perhaps to be expected -- there isn't enough flesh in the film. I don't mean naked celebrities, I mean the sweat, the hot breath, the dirty boys that they would, of course, be. And the sex scenes aren't quite as touching or rough as the scenes of Jack & Ennis wrestling each other to the ground, bloodying each other's noses. Ang Lee's direction in terms of the actual skin against skin is a little precious.

But I was angry at the Chelsea audience, full of gay men who reacted in bursts of laughter and titillation when Ennis's lonely wife catches her husband kissing and embracing Jack in the stairway outside their apartment. It seemed to me the wrong reaction--it felt salacious, and cheap, like some juvenile woo-wooing you'd hear from the studio audience of Friends. And I guess, foolishly perhaps, I expected more out of them. I always over-estimate the public.

It was obviously just a release of that uncomfortable tension, but I wondered later if we, as gay people, do not truly believe in love between one another that deeply, that unabashedly gut-wrenching and rare. Because it took all these straight people--a straight director, straight actors and screenwriters--to make one of the most affecting, realistic gay love stories ever put on film.

"What a waste of two lives," a friend wrote to me the next morning. If you find that kind of love, steal it. Pray that when it happens, you are wise enough to live it.

Going It Alone

On a train ride home over the weekend I was having a discussion about what I'm going through, and about grief in general. "How are you doing?" they want to know. Then there are serious faces and sometimes as much as a hand on your shoulder. "How are you reallydoing?"

What I find difficult to explain is that I am perfectly fine -- and yet I'm completely wrecked. I get up in the morning, I go to work, I see movies, I laugh at parties, I get excited about doing fun things. I'm really fine. No different from my "normal" life, as far as I can tell. Except that I am also sad all the time.

Imagine that someone buries a tiny black stone inside your body which never warms and always pains you, or the sharp edge of a bullet fragment is embedded in your side, and that small piece of jagged metal just lives inside you for the rest of your life. None of them bother you constantly, but more when you move differently, when your posture or attitude is otherwise compromised. When, like this morning, you see an armored truck parked outside of a bank.

You take on a bit of color, and the sadness is just something you carry. It changes you slightly, another tiny weight to add to all the other weights that everyone carries.

"Why don't you call?" your friends ask. And what is really difficult to explain -- and, I assume for people to understand -- is that talking about it doesn't necessarily help. Going to parties doesn't help. Watching TV doesn't help. Being alone doesn't help. Nothing you do or don't do really makes any difference. And the only thing that does fix it -- time, presumably -- is the only thing you can't do anything about.

Kate Bush

I love the new Kate Bush record, Aerial. It's so lovely and so out there--in one song, she simply sings the digits of pi. And when, like today, I feel sort of witchy-woman, environmental, spacial, sound-texture-y, when I want to think about seas of honey, or kings of mountains, I know that she's right there with me. Or maybe I feel that way because I'm listening to her.

Is that some chicken or the egg shit, or what?

My Address Book

I've spent the past several nights doing my Christmas cards, which have become a sort of annual event -- at least in my own mind. I do look forward to them, and occasionally people will ask about them nearabouts Thanksgiving. After I figure out what the card itself is going to be, I go through my address book and see who's still where they were last year, and who I need to get a new address from.

The writer Alan Gurganus said that his address book was the most important book he'd ever written -- it was filled with his friends who had died of AIDS, hundreds of them, he said. And I just listened to Joan Didion on Fresh Air talk about how it was impossible to cross people out of her address book, and so it, too, was filled with the dead.

There are only two entries like that in my address book. One of them just says Mer, for Meredith Helton. The other one, Meg, had so many addresses that her section is filled with smudges of black marker. I've used four different pens, and drawn arrows pointing my eye to the appropriate house number or zip code.

There are phone numbers of men who I no longer speak to, or who I wish I had the courage to call again, or that I never really spoke to consistently in the first place. Wishful thinking, perhaps, on my part. The playwright, the paralegal, the video editor, the photographer, the dancer from Mexico whose name isn't there because it is too painful to write it.

I've been thinking about how you can trace the months as you move through the alphabet, how many years pass when you turn a page.

First Snow

A few days before Thanksgiving, the weather in New York begins to seriously turn. You can have days in the low 60s up through Halloween sometimes, and by the second week of November, you're asking the universe how long this loveliness might last.

Not for long, it answers.

The cold arrives suddenly, almost unexpectedly, even though you remember it from the year before, even though you've lived here long enough not to be fooled.

The first snow of the season blanketed us over the weekend, so that when I woke up on Sunday morning, my fire escape and window sills were covered in soft white powder. I love New York in the first few hours of the snow--not later, of course, when the piles of black sludge, as high as people, sit on street corners through mid-March slowly shrinking, and every afternoon you step over piles of frozen dog shit, and suspiciously yellow ice forms on low drifts--but it can be so beautiful in that early moment; we're taken by surprise. The noise of the city settles for an hour or so, as if it had finally found some sort of peace.

On Being Mistaken

I woke up this morning thinking that, perhaps, it had not happened. Your body can--literally--memorize another person, unconsciously. And it precipitates into actions: dailing the phone number without thinking about it; making mental lists about what to say to them when you see them next. And, of course, as sad as you are, the one person you want to talk about that with....well, the option does not present itself.

What helps:
-Music (some music, not all music)
-Reading
-Ambien

What doesn't:
-TV
-Food (everything tastes the same right now)
-Regret

But before all that, before NPR started yapping in my ear at ten to eight on my alarm clock like it always does--why do I listen to commentary about whatever inane thing the President did the day before so early in the morning?--I got up around four having to pee.

My mother, more than a year ago, sent me a Halloween-ish box which included two Ring Pops, these being the sort which contain a tiny battery in the "setting" and a little LED that blinks, lighting up the candy.

I was suddenly confused by the orange flickering on the end table, thinking it was a candle that I had perhaps forgotten to blow out. Then when I realized that three days ago I had eaten this blinking, light-up novelty of a sucker--and here it was still plugging away--I just laughed.

Famous People

This week has been the week of famous people. On my way to work this morning I was practically run over by Stephen Sondheim running to hail a cab, and then when I turned the corner, there stood Kurt Vonnegut on his landing, smoking his morning cigarette and watching the window washers fill their buckets on the sidewalk.

On Saturday afternoon, I went to see Syriana downtown, where Billy Crudup sat in front of me with his girlfriend, Claire Danes. I wonder if Billy was ever a dancer; he has that dancer's posture. I learned from IMDB that he has been the voice of Mastercard's "Priceless" campaign since 1997.

Ms. Danes is very beautiful, and has that same blank slate quality about her in person that she has so well performed in Shopgirl, and in The Hours, which is, for me, one of her best performances. At one particularly unpleasant to watch moment of....well, torture in Syriana, she turned completely around in her seat and covered her eyes, cowering as if under bomb threat.

Shoe-Shiner Story

He waits, holding the book under his arm like a bird, like an embarrassing gift—the truth is that it is his armor. He removes the dust jackets because it is better if his reading preferences are a mystery to the public. He believes that everyone is judging his character by the kinds of books he chooses to drag up onto busses, into restaurants. He believes this because he judges others this way. The yellow boards of the book are held together with ivory cloth. Gilt letters are stacked on the spine.

Behind the glass is the shoe-shiner, legs crossed at the ankle, sitting on a leather-topped bench, head tilted back, reading the Daily News folded in half, marked at the Sports section. The shoe-shiner touches the tip of his greasy finger to his tongue, brushing it along the bottom side of the paper, taking a page up with it. He looks up, into the eyes of the man outside who is clutching a book.

This is the first moment. Years later, around long wooden tables and empty bottles, with circles of friends on three-day weekends, even having told this story countless times, they will bicker over who saw who, and what it meant, and what the other felt. The fairness--to the naive, to the young--will seem like an argument.

The reader pushes the door open, leaving fingerprints on the glass, cursing himself for the blunder, the body’s constant betrayal. If he had his choice, he'd live forever a life of the mind. The shoe-shiner stands up, motions his palm out to the chair, and at the sight of this delicate gesture, the reader corrects himself: No, he thinks, never merely the fragile, sweatless life of the mind.

The reader sits and the shoe-shiner goes to work. The reader watches the tendons in his forearm rippling like the tendrils of tiny sea creatures. The other foot is placed forward. And suddenly, faster than he intended, he is spent, finished. The shoe-shiner places his hand on the top of the shoe and taps it twice, allowing his fingers to stay longer. The reader looks down at him. The shoe-shiner removes his hand, and looks at the floor, the way you turn away when a child who wants to feel older dresses himself for school.

This is the second moment. Except the shoe-shiner won't remember this detail, and the reader won't remind him of it until they are old men--leaving it out of all the wooden-table-three-day-weekend storytellings, saving it only for each other. And when the reader finally re-enacts the bashfulness, the shoe-shiner will once again feel that knotting in his stomach, that flutter.

The reader steps down. And they kiss. Lips pressed against lips, a hand pressing against the shoe-shiners chest, the smell of polish and rags in the air. His tongue tastes like satin, or warm silver.

It is not the sort of kiss that evokes waves crashing against the shore or flowers blooming in fast-forward. Instead, it is a fast kiss, over too soon, and the reader feels blindfolded, standing under a sky filled with fireworks. When he finally opens his eyes, he can only smell the fading blue smoke, which reminds him just how beautiful the world once was.

Parade Dialogue

A: You're missing the M&M balloon.
B: [from the other room] The what?
A: The M&M balloon.
B: There's an Eminem balloon?
A: No, two huge M&Ms.
B: Two huge Eminem's?
A: No, like melt-in-your-mouth.
B: That's gross.
A: No, like the chocolate candy, M&Ms.
B: Oh.

Grief = Love

A strange feeling: that perhaps I want to stay inside this grief a bit longer, so as to let Meg stay with me for one more hour, another week, through next month, during the horrible motion of the holidays. Retreating from the world into the memories, into the joys of our life together have been extraordinarly comforting. I say inside this grief because it can feel like that. Like a down-filled comfortor. Like protective armor.

The conventional wisdom dictates that you should pass through your grief not quickly, not too slowly, but at whatever pace is right for you. So, I suppose what I'm saying is that I'm not quite done feeling sad. And why should I be? The one year anniversary makes a difference, I keep hearing. And it's been only two months. Two months today.

I'm not incapacitated. I'm still in basically a good mood everyday. (But, for those of you know know me, you know that's pretty relative, anyway.) Maybe this bluntness never goes away. Everything I've read says that it does not. People in the same situation (predicament?) say that it does not. And I wonder, is it strange, unhealthy? Is it abnormal to want to hang on a little longer? There is joy in the sadness, if you look for it.

I started to title this post "How Grief Can Feel Like Love." But what I'm trying to say is that grief is love.

On Mythology

Margaret Atwood was on the Leonard Lopate Show discussing her new book, The Penelopiad, which is part of a series of books retelling great myths, written by great writers. Atwood mentioned in the interview that dogs do not have mythology because their language does not include a past or future tense. They do not ask "Where did I come from?" They do not ask, "What will I be?"

Myths have been given a bad wrap in American culture. Save for, oh, The West with a capital W, and George Washington telling no lies, etc., what stories do we tell over and over? I sometimes wonder if the myths of the future will be told about Bill Gates and Fifty Cent.

Americans view myths as lies. George W. Bush refers to myths as false ideals: "...the terrorists' most powerful myth is being destroyed."* And if I say to you "the myth of politics," or "the myth of morality," even if I say "the myth of grapefruit," what you hear is something that is already understood to be false.

Perhaps someday we will return to the days of mythology in the truest sense. Where the whole of human experience--vast and impossible to comprehend--is shared through stories told to one person by another. Where the pains of the present can be ameliorated by the lessons of the past.


*State of the Union Address, February 2, 2005.

Open Letters, Vol. 2

Dear American Express,

In response to your message found on the piece of cardboard printed with your logo, which was wrapped around my cup of peppermint tea that reads "Careful, the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot," please let me say: Boy, you weren't kidding.

Regards,
Lee

Joan Wins!

Joan Didion was awarded the National Book Award last night for her illuminating work of non-fiction The Year of Magical Thinking. As if there were any doubts.

"There's hardly anything I can say about this except thank you," Joan said, and then thanked Knopf, her publisher, having been glad to be asked to pursue "something that was not exactly anything but personal and that it would work."

Reflexology

Mario surprised me yesterday with a trip to the reflexologist. It was a lovely experience on several levels, both from a purely physical perspective, but also in the kind of mind-numbing brainlessness that I could use some of lately.

For an hour (or however long you choose) you lay back in this comfy chair while one of the talented practitioners at Angel Feet pokes and massages and pulls on your feet, ankles and hands in the most wonderful way imaginable. They were playing music (strings, in our case,) and there was a noise machine which sounded like an ocean and the occasional babble of what might have been actual water, though I could not swear to it. I was mostly concerned with trying to relax.

An interesting thing happens when you really let your mind loose. You begin to hear some things, and not others--for a time I would focus on the waves and not even be conscious of the music, and other moments the opposite. All the things which are stressing me out were still in my head, only I seemed to have placed them in a kind of mental fish hatchery, an organized system with separations, and borders which allowed each one to seem manageable, decipherable, conquerable.

The woman who worked on my feet was gentle yet firm--sometimes vaguely painful in a good way--and at the end of the session she sat next to me for a few moments to discuss all the things that are wrong with my body. "Your left leg is much more open than your right," she said. I know this. Some people show stress in their neck and shoulders, some clench their jaws or grind their teeth. All mine tends to go into my right hamstring and calf. Call me original.

She held my foot up again, "And this part has a lot of stress, you are holding it here as well." I watched her finger trace the outside of my foot, from the base of the heel up to the center of the arch. "What part is that?" I asked. She sat straight up, and indicated the muscle which sits on top part of your butt, and then just above, her lower back on the right side.

This area has indeed been causing me a lot of hassle lately. (I attribute most of the pain to me carrying around Elizabeth Kostova's 650 page novel The Historian in my bag, which rests just there on my hip as I walk. Though, if I'm going to feel discomfort, to Elizabeth's credit, I can't think of a better cause. Perhaps hurting your forearm from lifting too many toast points spread with foie gras, but that's another story entirely.)

I sat in the chair a few minutes longer in silence, my feet wrapped in a warm towel, a chenille blanket thrown over me, in the dim light listening to the ocean, until Mario peeked his face around from his side of the screen. "Are you okay," he asked. I was.

Attack of the Bacteria, and the Subsequent Defending of the Body by Medicine

I woke up last Thursday with the eerie kind of "I feel like crap," feeling which I immediately recognized as something more than my usual morning stupor. I knew that I had to go to the doctor. I knew that there was something actually wrong with me, and that something needed medication. Bodies have a way of telling you what you need if you listen closely. Meg used to say that when you went grocery shopping you could hold whatever vegetable in front of your solar plexus, and if your body naturally leaned toward the food, then you were deficient in whatever vitamins or minerals that food would provide. This is, perhaps, my hokey, sounds-like-voodoo interpretation of what the actual technique involved, but I think I got the basic idea. I needed antibiotics for my throat. And I knew it.

I went up the road to the Rapid Medical Center, a vaguely-decorated office on Broadway in Astoria (where I have been twice before in the eight years that I've lived in this neighborhood) and filled out the paperwork -- after learning that they did not take my insurance -- while occasionally staring into the fish tank, which was empty of fish.

I was called back into room number 1 (though I did not see any other rooms along that hallway) where a nurse took my temperature, my blood pressure, and asked general health questions like "Are you allergic to any medications" and "Do you have any diarrhea?" Moments later, the doctor arrived.

He is a large Chinese man, with thick glasses and an equally thick accent. He proceeded to again ask me the same series of questions that the nurse asked, putting check marks beside what she had written, as if to clarify that my answers had not changed in the last two minutes. Then after listening to my breathing through the stethoscope and looking into my ears, nose and throat, he began sketching something on the paper. He turned the clipboard around to show me a rough drawing of a man, basically just a torso with a head, and then he circled the entire chest with a red pen. "See this," he said. And then he drew an arrow pointing to the throat. "This is what is wrong with you," he said.

My first thought was, of course, "Well, yes, I could have told you that." But I sat patiently while he scrawled the customary impossible-to-read prescription for antibiotics and a cough syrup with antihistimine. The entire experience only reconfirmed my instinct that -- in some cases -- we should be able to prescribe medication for ourselves. Or, for each other, as needed.

While layed-up I watched Kinsey, Born Into Brothels, the last few episodes of season four of Six Feet Under, and several hours of television. I also managed to see Shopgirl in the actual movie theater.

Willy Porter

Sean and I had the pleasure of hearing Willy Porter play at Joe's Pub last night. We got there early enough to get a prime spot in the cushy loungey area, and the place was full without being crowded. The audience was sort of rowdy and calm at the same time--a much more "adult" audience than you find at, say, your standard Ani Difranco or Indigo Girls show. That is to say loud but appreciative. The setlist was, I thought, mostly the greatest hits (that's not a criticism,) although a high point came when his piano player, David Adler, in what seemed a jokey appeal to New Yorker's urban and ecclectic sensibilities half-assed played the intro to the Gorillaz' hit "Feel Good Inc" and after some goading from the audience, they finished the tune with the kind of improv-bravura that only musicians who play together a lot can do.

Willy is now recording each night's shows in 24-bit audio, and then selling freshly burned CDs to the audience immediately after, as a kind of souvenier meets 'let's compete with piracy' marketing idea. It works. There were lots of people in line to purchase the show--myself included--and Willy goes home with a pocketfull of cash. Other artists are getting into the idea including Bauhaus, the Black Crowes, Peter Gabriel, and notably Prince, who was doing this several years ago when the technology first appeared.

I've also been spinning a trio of new records on my iPod: Madonna's "Confessions on a Dancefloor," Imogen Heap's "Speak for Yourself," and Floetry's "Flo'Ology."

Messages

Saturday night was the most recent opening of my friend Barb Monoian's amazing endeavor "Musee de Monoian." She has included me in her gallery space based solely on the fact that Barb understands how one sort of art can be meaningful in context of another, i.e. my words next to a painting, both built around the same theme, even though we worked independently and do not know each other, can potentially create something interesting.

And Meg visited during the opening; I am sure of it.

I had pointed out my pages and showed some friends where they were in the cacophony of artwork, and then I bent down to sign the guestbook that goes along with this particular exhibit. And the DJ began to play Sade. Meg and I spoke to each other all the time in Sade -- it sounds rather strange to other people, I find; it sounds corny. But to us it was something different, a shared something that seemed between only us.

I stood up and spun around. "Are you hearing this?!?" I shouted, to Mario, to Laura and Amy, to anyone who would listen. I wanted someone else to hear it. I wanted the message to be witnessed by someone else, because I was afraid, for only a moment, that I had invented it.

Congratulations

My friends over at Eat Feed have just been honored with the much-deserved Podcast of the Year Award.

The judging committee was asked to look at the following: a) a podcast that stays on-topic and provides unique information to a niche audience not widely available elsewhere, b) a podcast with an informative website and (optionally) quality supporting printed collateral, c) a podcast with exceptional listener loyalty.

Eat Feed does all this brilliantly. Congratulations, Anne!

Details, details

There comes a time when you realize that you have to go on with your life.

The moment that you have to go on with your life comes at the instant you first hear someone has died--in this case, the afternoon of September 22, 2005, when my phone rang. But the realization comes later. And with it you begin to see that for most of the last five weeks you've been floating through the hours without any real direction.

In the beginning, the logistics save you. Buy a plane ticket. Make phone calls. Organize something. Is someone bringing food?

Where before I was always thinking: "Okay, I can't do anything, so I might as well write a check and lick a stamp," now, as the news finally sinks in, the details that previously were your salvation from madness become impossible. Who cares if the electric bill lays on the table for three months? Who cares if the phone rings?

Sweeney Todd

Last night Mario and I went with our friends Michael & Calvin to see the new Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. It was extremely good. Patti LuPone, Michael Cerveris, and the rest of the extraordinary cast are all brilliant, and their performances play like they're having so much fun that it might be illegal--and I'm sure they really are having this much fun.

The director and designer, John Doyle, has stripped down the show to it's absolute minimum, with the performers not only singing and acting, but working as the entire orchestra. Ms. LuPone plays the tuba, orchestra bells and other percussion, and she plays the triangle with more wit than I previously thought possible. They sing and act while playing, they carry their instruments around on stage, and the whole thing is so gripping, the performances so believeable, that the illusion is completely genuine. London absolutely appears.

I suspect this production will have wavering popularlity with out-of-town audiences, since not only is the subject matter dark and quite adult, but I think primarily this show will serve to draw the line between theater goers who want to be entertained, and theater goers who want to be entertained and involved. Because the show has very few props, and only one set which does not change, you're left with only the brilliant actors and your own imagination.

I smell Tony....big time.

On Learning

Becky tells me in an email that I should stop trying to figure out what's going on. "Quit trying to give yourself an explanation," she writes. But I'm not sure (for better or for worse) if I know how to not try to figure things out. That's what I do. It's how I process. In fact, I find it difficult to imagine anyone going through the world and not trying to figure it out.

And in an incredibly appropriate art-meets-life/art-is-life kind of twist, I'm trying to finish this novel, Yield, which I've been writing here and there for the last oh, what, five years? In Yield I've been exploring the idea of resistance to progress, resistance to life changes, it's the resistance that causes the stress. How like a filament in a light bulb, it's the resistance that causes the tiny thread of metal to glow. And I just thought it bizarre, and also one of the wonderful things about making art and writing novels, that I am teaching the same lesson to my narrator that I'm trying to learn in life.

Captain Sulu Comes Out

Another story which appeared (sort of) all over the news today was that of the coming out of actor George Takei, perhaps best known as Capt. Sulu on the long-running hit series "Star Trek." Takei received a star on the Walk of Fame in 1986, and wrote a well-reviewed autobiography in 1994 called To the Stars.

I offer three punchlines:
1) ...to boldly go where no man has gone before...
2) Is that a taser in your pocket, Mr. Sulu?
3) Mr. Sulu, all ships to dock at Uranus.

What I Need

I've taken up with the "What I Need" bandwagon. Google (or Blingo) your first name along with 'needs,' all in quotes, and allow the Wonders of the Web to tell you what you need:

Lee needs a fresh challenge
Lee needs Love
Lee needs a decent nickname
Lee needs hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend himself
Lee needs to be blue not black
Lee needs to muster the political courage and vision to tackle these issues
Lee needs to hear the truth
Lee needs matches
Lee needs to be created
Lee needs rest

What do you need?

1000 Paper Cranes

A group of people in Northampton are gathering together to make 1000 origami cranes for Rafael Sevilla, the 24 year-old armored truck driver who killed Meg on September 22. In Japan, it is believed that if you fold 1000 cranes for someone who is ill, they will get better. According to the police, Rafael was hospitalized for "some time," while other reports have said up to two weeks. It is the hope of these friends, the community there, that with the gift of these 1000 paper cranes, Rafael can come to some kind of peace with what happened.

I'm glad to see that someone is reaching out to him--I've had the impetus myself on occasion, though I doubt I would ever pursue it. I wonder what that might be like for him, to open a box full of intricatly folded paper, symbols of peace, wellness and hope. I wonder whether it will be a relief, or another burden.

At the other end of things are the ways in which strangers take up someone's death for their own purposes. I came across a blog the other day--a new habit of mine is Googling Meg, searching for mentions here and there--in which the particpants spoke of her as if she had simply been a casualty of the ways in which bike riders are maligned in our society. Perhaps they are--indeed the are--but the vitriol was unsettling. About Rafael, a person unknown to him, someone wrote: "needless to say, he ended up being late for his cash pickup anyway." Other people said: "Some of those truckers are so irresponsible, this one's been such an A-hole, murderer!!!" and "I hope the driver not only loses his job but gets thrown in jail for a long, long time as well," and: "money really IS the root of all evil..."

I have always said that I feel worse for Rafael than I ever will for me, or for any of us who were close to Meg. Because we got to have her. She loved us; we loved her. She was part of our lives rather than just a path that intersected it. So, needless to say I, for one, do not think he should be thrown in jail for a long, long time; I do not think he was particularly irresponsible. And I do not think he is an asshole murderer. The place where the accident happened is on a slope uphill. This means that after she was hit, Rafael had to sit inside the truck, holding his foot on the break so as to not let it roll back. The policemen said that when they arrived to place blocks behind the wheels Rafael was extremely distraught and had sweat completely through his clothes.

Those of us who occupied those inner electron shells around Meg's life have not exactly been avoiding each other, but we haven't spent a lot of time talking either. Some letters have been exchanged, a few phone calls here and there, but we are naturally existing mostly in our own circles once again. Instead, I send love and laughter in coded messages into the air, set aloft like falcons, in hopes that they return.

Excerpts in Limbo Series, Vol. 1

Daniel sat in the dark, his thighs hot from the laptop, his face bathed in a glowing blue wash. The light from the screen shone out into the room, the plants stretched into indigo-hued shadows, the vases looked rimmed with a shiny sapphire lining. Lucy retired to her guest room; Helena turned in right after dinner. Even Baroness, after spending an hour curled up on the floor, went to sleep with her mother, where she stretched out on the end of her bed.

Danny was left with the elaborate witticisms found in Internet personal ads, bloated with the enormous crush of irony and the horrors of modernity pushed to their extreme: disconnect, desperation, isolation. Everybody competing for companionship, buried in word games, completely devoid of the flesh and the elegant exchange of molecules. Daniel imagined thousands of people across the globe, hundreds of thousands maybe, all clicking away, listing preferences and statistics, uploading doctored photos. Fudge a little here and there, they’re never know. Invent the person someone wants to date. Yuck.

Nevertheless. Here he was.

Scrolling through the promises.

He filled out his own ad months earlier. What do you look for in a partner? A fair amount of distance. List some of your hobbies or interests: Watching billiards on television. Using too much conditioner. What is your idea of the perfect date? Not a lot of talking and a couple of magazines.

He wasn’t that courageous.

Instead, Daniel filled the spaces with answers that seemed (to him, at least) to be sufficiently vague. A few general cultural benchmarks, which would help readers fit him into their own structure: he wrote that he read D.H. Lawrence, which was somewhat true (he had read D.H. Lawrence, but didn’t necessarily consider himself a reader of D.H. Lawrence;) he wrote that he listened to “all kinds of music,” because people are too sensitive about music, and a list of specific bands or singers, even vague genres, could raise acres of red flags; and, finally, that he liked “independent movies with solid scripts” and occasionally enjoyed a “summertime blockbuster about saving the world while blowing things up.” He also included some random obscurity, which he suspected could be read as interesting and original: he liked ping-pong and Strawberry Charleston Chews. It was a precarious balance. So much engineering.

Open Letters, Vol. 1

Dear Employees of Banana Republic,

Enthusiasm does not equal sincerity.

Regards,
Lee

An Evening with Joan

Last night at the 92nd Street Y, Joan Didion read from her new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, and then took questions from the audience. After the introduction, in which the speaker once again spoke that most famous line from The White Album, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan walked out to the podium in a black jacket and black skirt.

She is a tiny woman--that's not a new idea; she's written about her physical appearance a lot over the years--and I thought that maybe it was hard to find clothes that fit her; the jacket seemed a bit too large, and so different from the I.Magnin get-ups her heroines (are they heroines?) so often wear. Then she opened the book and began to read.

The Year of Magical Thinking is so textbook Didion that it almost leans toward parody; the first paragraph deals with the date and time the file "notes on change.doc" was last modified on her computer. And yet, it it rings so utterly true and original, so deeply personal that it feels like a completely new genre. As if with this book she has finally proven what she always believed to be true: "...that meaning itself [is] resident in the rythms of words and sentences." Joan writes at one point about the "shallowness of sanity," about how eight months after John's death she realized that for most of that time she had been--quite literally--crazy.

I recognized that madness.

During Meg's memorial, one of the people who spoke seemed to miss the point all together--and I remember thinking that I could not wait to get home to New York so that I could call Meg and tell her what sort of ridiculousness went down in her honor. And when I was in Meg's apartment, cleaning out her drawers, parcelling out her clothing and keepsakes to people who I thought might, too, hold some meaning in objects, I thought that Meg had installed invisible video cameras in the corners, and that later, or even from a dark room behind a false door, she was watching, making notes, critiquing our behavior. I knew this was true even as I recognized the insanity of it.

When Joan was finished (she read the first 22 pages) she closed the book, said "Thank you," and walked off the stage. She returned a moment later. "I forgot the question and answer part," she said. "Sorry."

The questions, taken from notecards submitted from the audience, were mainly lukewarm: "How did you get your start in journalism?" "I backed into it," she answered. "I was working at Vogue and occasionally they needed a piece written and so I wrote it." Next question: "How is writing fiction different or similar to writing non-fiction." "It's not that different," she said. "I think people who do them both don't regard one as more important than the other." The moderator then remarked, "And I suppose there are deadlines in journalism whereas fiction is rather open-ended." Joan deadpanned, "Yeah," failed to extrapolate on that idea, left it at that, and the audience laughed. Another question: "Did publishing this book change the way you thought about grief?" he asked. Joan didn't hesitate, "Writing it changed the way I thought about it."

She talked for a moment about John toward the end. "I knew him about as well as you can know a person," she said. "But there are still some questions that I don't think I could answer for him."

There was a very long line for the booksigning, though it moved quickly. She sat behind a desk in the art gallery, now wearing a pale blue scarf wrapped around her neck, and her trademark huge glasses set to her side. Barnes & Noble was selling the new book, along with paperbacks of Where I Was From and Vintage Didion. Most people had those, but there were a few older books peeking out of purses here and there.

I slid my copies of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Play It As It Lays across to her. "Thank you, Joan," I said. And she looked up, "Oh, and thank you," she said. She signed the first, smaller than most of my other signatures, with less force on the page. And I noticed she had her purse lying across her lap. Then she signed the second. "Thank you," I said again, and walked away.

Stamp Poem

If she had been a stamp, I think
she would have been the three cent,
or another such small, eccentric denomination.
She would have been
the ones you forget are made,
the ones you see rarely,
the ones you use in times of emergency,
when you are out of regular stamps,
and your letter can only be rescued by forgotten
stamps, the old kind with glue gone brown,
which you cull from the back and sides of a junk drawer,
left there maybe by your grandmother,
when she was still alive to mail you letters.

Perhaps I just want her to be a stamp,
So that someone could send her back to me.
So that I could send her back to you.

Conversation

I was waiting for the D train at Seventh Avenue today, trying to get downtown to meet a friend for a movie, and a man came over to where I was sitting and sat down. He was in his mid-thirties, handsome and well-dressed; he had a lot of stuff with him: a box with a handle, an expensive-looking tote, a bag with a bit of ribbon attached, as if it were a birthday gift, and a plastic Ziplock which held two sugar cookies.

"Is this going downtown?" he said, pointing to the empty track in front of us. "Or here?" He pointed to the tracks behind me.

"They're both going downtown. Where are you trying to go?"

He let his bags fall around his feet. "I'm trying to get to the World Trade Center."

"E Train," I said, "This one here." I showed him, gesturing to the sign above us which showed the big blue circle. I returned to my book.

"That's a good color on you," he said. I was wearing a dark brown cashmere sweater, probably my favorite. "What I mean is, that's a good color on you." The same words here were meant to clarify something, though I was unsure what. "I'm a make-up artist, that's why I noticed. I'm also an image consultant."

"Oh," I said, not looking at him too much, still focused on the pages in my lap, trying to disappear from the world.

"I've just been at the Hilton for hours. There was an auction. A charity for children." He continued talking, and I wasn't sure if he was trying to make conversation, or pick me up, or if he was just listening to himself talk, like practicing talking. "I was one of the items. It was weird. I mean, you could bid on me." He rubbed his eyebrows. "You could win a day of shopping and make-up consultation with me."

And I wondered, when he clutched his make-up box close to him, if perhaps he was leaving the auction unbought. He was out of order somehow, like one or two molecules out of the trillions that he was made of were slightly misaligned, and it was jarring him to the point of near-madness. "So, that was weird," he said.

I almost said to him that I knew what it was like to build yourself back up one atom at a time, holding yourself upright day after day when all you wanted to do was to fall over and sink into the earth, closing your eyes. I almost said to him that even when you expected to be tied in a straight-jacket and thrown into a padded cell because your mind had become so unhinged--even when you were begging for that straight-jacket, when you wanted it--all you can do is wait it out.

"You know, I've never done that before. So that was strange." I told him that I thought it probably was strange. He looked back at me, started to say something, re-thought. Then he said "I just want to go home."

The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan's new book, The Year of Magical Thinking has been nominated for a National Book Award for non-fiction.

If you haven't read it, do; and if you're voting, vote for Joan.

Soldier's Girl

Last night I watched Soldier's Girl, a made-for-television movie about the life and death of Pfc. Barry Winchell, which stars Troy Garity, (Jane Fonda's son) as Winchell, and Lee Pace as Calpernia Addams, the transgendered performer who was his partner. Winchell was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in 1999 by Pvt. Calvin Glover, 18 years old at the time, in what many newspaper reports then called "a possible hate crime," even though it obviously was one. He was attacked in his sleep, by the way.

It is not bad film, though it is not any great work of art -- despite exellent performances by Pace and Garity. My question is why, when we have films where someone falls in love with a transgendered person, do they never seem to know? It is as if Hollywood, or whoever is controlling movies these days, is willing to make a love story (which Soldier's Girl most certainly is) but they are not willing to make a QUEER love story (which Soldier's Girl even more certainly is.)

Near the end of the film, there is a sex scene where Barry performs oral sex on Calpernia -- tastefully shot, of course -- where she throws her head back in surprise, as if to say to the viewing audience "He is pleasuring my male genitalia, finally. I am rapt. He loves the whole me." (Calpernia has since complete sex-reassignment surgery and is living in California, working in health services.)

What seems missing from all the movies I've seen about transgendered people (am I forgetting any?) is that they never address the fact that their partners are, in some way, attracted to them precisely because they are transgendered. This is not to say that they are freaks, or kinky, or interested in any sort of subversive sexuality -- most people who sleep with transgendered individuals have a completely vanilla sex life. But then again maybe it is.

What we have are films about love in the cleanest sense of the word. "Straight" boys falling for wacky, sharp-tongued queer boys who want to be girls. Can someone please make a film about a guy who know's he's queer, has an interesing world view, and then falls for the trans-girl?

Tall order, I guess.

Ken Park

I snapped at my boyfriend on Saturday for no reason. I can be snappy at times, but I've usually got some rationale for it; this was simply uncalled for. Further evidence that grief puts you completely out of your mind, so that often you wake up feeling like a stranger. It's like a morning fog that never burns off.

Last night I finished watching Larry Clark's much-hated, and wrongly-vilified second film "Ken Park," which is unavailable on DVD and was never released commercially*. It's not terrible, not boring and not over-done. It's a nice blend of what seems to be almost documentary-style footage of teenagers sitting around doing nothing -- smoking cigarettes, bitching about their parents -- and yet the conversation will turn, suddenly the writing becomes measured and calculated. It's good screenwriting.

*Ken Park is decidedly not for everyone.

On Talking

I've started to wonder sometimes if people are tired of hearing me talk about Meg. Because it's in my head at every moment of the day (mostly) it's difficult to determine how much I'm really talking about it and how much it's just me thinking that I've been talking about it.

Last night, some friends of mine cooked a lovely dinner for Mario and I: big red-leaf salad, good bread, penne with local-made sausage, a zucchini/eggplant parmesean. Lovely. And before we sat down I just started talking about it: "I guess you want to hear about all the Meg stuff?" These friends had plans to drive to Northampton for one of the memorial services, but were unable to make it at the last minute. So, naturally, I feel like it's my job to translate the experience of the memorial services, and all the details of Meg's life, and many people want to know the details, often the exact logistics, of her death: where was she riding, what kind of truck. "Now, what happened?" they ask uneasily.

And because I've told the details so many times, talked about the orange spray painted lines on the pavement which marked the trucks wheels, told how I held my hand on the concrete where her head was, I find myself just dumping it all onto people, throwing it all out at the wrong speed.

How like me to be worrying about other people in a time like this.

So Many Movies....

Run....don't walk....to see the Capote. It's elegant, heartbreaking, complex, and superbly acted. I smell Oscar....

Also saw, Proof and Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which are both films worth paying money to see.

From the Department of You Can Chart it Now, Apparently

Farther v. Further

I learned today that the current preferred usage indicates that farther be used as an indication of physical distance, for example: "The granary is a few miles farther." And further should be used in instances of a more metaphysical nature: "Your question might require further examination."

Last Meals

Ted Bundy: burritos, mexican rice, salad
Gary Gilmore: steak, bread & butter, peas, cherry pie, coffee, milk
Timothy McVeigh: 2 pints mint chocolate chip ice cream
Karla Faye Tucker: banana, peaches, salad, ranch or Italian dressing

from Dead Man Eating

The Writer's Job

"This is bear fur," Becky said, as we waited in Alessandra's van outside her mother's house, also the house Alessandra grew up in, for her to return from delivering medication, and speaking for a moment to her brother, who cares for their mother. The clump of fur was attched somehow to the dashboard, and I touched it, brushed the back of my fingers against it.

It was exactly how I knew bear fur would feel: rough, thick, dry but water resistant. "How do you know what bear fur feels like," she said. And I tried to explain this, although I don't know how successful I was, but I told her "That's my job as a writer. To have already anticipated everything that might be, to have already translated those sensory experiences."

It sounds huge, impossible, and maybe overly self-confident, but that's what I love about what I do. Even if I don't know the truth, even if I've never really felt bear fur before, I can imagine what it's like, and if I say it in a way that you also feel it, understand it, can visualize it, what difference does it make?

Us v. Them

What happens now is, apparently, you begin to separate the people who know from the people who don't. For example, I'm standing in line at the bank today and I realize that the people in front of me, and all the nice ladies behind the counter, have no idea that what I'm thinking about at that moment is Meg Meg Meg, all the time, without stopping.

Obviously, everyone in the line at the bank today is suffering through their own lives as well -- maybe divorces, or cancers, or drug additions, or what have you. And I suppose what hit me hard today is just how alone you are when something like this happens. People tell you to lean on your family and talk to your friends. But what it all comes down to is what you do with the mechanics of your own mind.

And I can stand in rooms and in fields hugging people who knew her, and who know best what I'm going through. But all we can do is look each other in the eye, and wish one another the best of luck.

Some Things She Left Behind

Imagine all the things you leave half-done in your house if you're planning on coming right back. I cleaned out a big pot of something Meg was in the middle of eating when I got to her apartment on Friday afternoon. Something with squash and millet. She hadn't even unpacked her bag from when she was visiting me in New York.

On Saturday night, all of us standing around the bonfire with our hands out, like at communion, Meg's sister Laura walked around the circle and gave each of us some of Meg's ashes. I brushed my finger around in them for a moment, feeling the smoothness and the tiny bits of bone. I wanted to taste them, but I didn't. Then we all leaned in close to the fire, with glowing orange faces, and tossed her in.

My friend Alessandra drove her van up to Northampton and so we were able to fit Meg's writing desk into the back of it, which I'm now using as my dining room table. We also brought back a rocking chair she had painted hot pink, which Becky took, and a box of other small items that I took for myself (her pale green Remington ten forty typewriter, a book or two, a screen printing stencil that reads 'Leevil' she made for me, more little things,) and for some other people, things I'm sending soon in the mail: scarves, small boxes, trinkets.

The Day After

Things begin to congeal. The energy lessens, and what used to amount to nothing--a strangers accidental touch on the subway, imagery (a bike, a piece of clothing), the approaching winter--becomes charged with meaning, with an immeasurable sense of what is possible at those moments, in the random (but are they random?) crossing of trajectories (and how I know so much about the crossing of trajectories now,) but also what seems impossible. Everything. Sometimes everything. Other times I forget.

She was all around me in the ether today. Meg and I rarely left voice messages for each other, but rather we would leave about 15-20 seconds of a Sade song, a particular lyric: "I want to cook you a soup that warms your soul," or my favorite, "There is a woman in Somalia..." And today, when I got on the plane to return to NYC, a woman sat down next to me and began listening to Sade on her iPod. Then, I got in a taxi, and guess what was playing on the radio? Yes.

Jennifer Miller told me a story today about a pigeon that landed on her windowsill and seemed sure on finding its way inside her loft. She ignored it for a time, but it was persistent, and so she let it inside, where it walked around the apartment for a short while, and then left.

I Love You Meg

A Humble Request

If I should ever write a screenplay, in which there are scenes where the characters make phone calls, please remind me not to write them as such: "Hello, Delta Airlines? Yes, I'd like to change my flight to New York." Or "Hello Szechuan Garden? I'd like to place an order for delivery."

A Novel Commentary

I have been thinking lately of the book as a form -- meaning as a singular form for conveying an idea -- in the way that painting or film is a form, a delivery vehicle. Specifically, I have been thinking about the techniques writers use to discourage, hide, or sometimes illuminate the machinations of the novel -- as opposed to the way they do this in film.

For example, most DVDs these days come with an audio commentary by the actors, directors or writers, and often, if the film is of a certain genre, or appeals to a certain audience, the art directors, animators and costume designers are also given a commentary track. The whole purpose of this is to allow a window into the way the film was created, to show what is fake and what is genuine, to expose the Wizard behind the curtain.

But our purpose in books -- at least as far as I can tell -- is to remove all trace of the handiwork. It should appear to the reader as if it was never cut in fourteen pieces and splayed out across the floor, was never filled with four question marks in a row (my way of saying fix this,) or sometimes even FIX THIS, all caps, when I'm not completely sure what the problem is, and it's just too frustrating to work on at that moment.

What interests me lately is the possibility of providing an audio commentary for novels. The writer giving a kind of play-by-play of the book's creation -- how images appeared or were drawn out, which characters asserted themselves first whenever he sat down to work, what lines of dialogue were stolen from strangers on street corners.

But here's the problem I can't figure out: Would that defeat the privacy that a novel allows? We appreciate knowing the camera tricks if the images are on a screen. But would we feel cheated, feel betrayed, if someone talked us through a book, because the camerawork, the art direction, the costume design is all in our own imagination?

New Favorite

My new favorite record is the Kronos Quartet's recording of Steve Reich's Triple Quartet. And on the same record is "Electric Guitar Phase," "Music for a Large Ensemble" and "Tokyo/Vermont Counterpoint."

Steve Reich has always drawn me into myself, the droning combination of the modern and the ancient pressed together to make a sound which comes from nowhere and everywhere, a tumbling momentum, a patience with tempo and patterns. In these times when I'm trying to get more inside myself I listen to Reich over and over, and the textures become deeper, almost like valleys you can walk through if you listen close enough.

Take "Electric Guitar Phase," which at first sounds like a crush of tones. But once you really get to know the piece, and you can count it, hear each thread, each sad, sawwing instrument, you can hear the way it works, you can walk it like space. The doors open up -- like when Keanu finally sees the Matrix; like when Jodie Foster sees the whole picture in the last ten minutes of Silence of the Lambs.

From the Department of Are You Fucking Kidding Me?

The Completely Bare spa, which runs two offices in Manhattan as well as one in Scarsdale, offers a service that they call "Bikini Grafitti." That's where they make your "area" completely bare and then use an airbrush to "paint his name, his number, your lucky number, or your favorite designer logo." Bikini Graffiti lasts approximatley 2-5 days. (Read: depending on how much you bathe.)

Can you imagine the horror which might strike my girlfriends' suitors upon discovering "Versace" painted onto the "area?"

Good ideas: Dior, Chanel, Hermes.
Bad ideas: Anna Sui, Tommy Hilfiger, H&M.

Nominations & Baby Arrivals

One of the acts in this year's Circus Amok show has the audience nominating people to the United States Supreme Court. Names that come up repeatedly are Oprah (of course,) Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and Jennifer Miller (it's her show, don't forget.) At the Park Slope, Brooklyn show yesterday someone nominated Ani Difranco. Only in Park Slope, I thought.

At a surprise baby shower I went to on Friday night my friend Wendy was surrounded by stacks of gifts and her three year-old adopted son, Tolya, from the Ukraine. Tolya said: "Why do we need so many clothes for the baby?" Wendy replied: "Because the baby doesn't have any clothes yet." Tolya, looking horrified, exclaimed: "It comes naked!?!"

The Age of Data

Someone in Elk River, Minnesota visited by blog for one minute and thirty four seconds yesterday after having performed a search on MSN for "where do I put my hands on the piano." A link to me was returned because of this post, in which we talk about hands in the comments, and of course, the name of my blog popped up from the word 'piano.' And on August 31, someone in Niles, Illinois visited the same post -- this time for only 7 seconds -- after having performed a Google search for "short stubby fingers."

I think of those TV shows you see where the boats dump hoards of teeming fish onto the deck. Even though they're casting for mackerel, they catch everything else along with it.

Were these people confused by my post? Annoyed at the proliferation of amateur information-farmers, who fill up search results with musings on the culture? Or was seven seconds all this person in Niles needed to learn everything he cared to about short stubby fingers?

What Finishing a Novel Feels Like

Imagine that someone has given you the power to create human beings. So you go about your work diligently, quietly, privately, for as long as it takes to get it right. And, of course, you want your fellow human beings to be as real as possible, as absolutely true as possible, because you're going to be living with them for quite some time. You're going to love them and hate them and worry about them and help them make decisions. And so you build them with flaws, with charms and senses of humor, with personalities that don't necessarily suit your own. You build them knowing forgiveness because you sometimes betray them. The idea isn't to build a better human being, but just to build some who will accompany you, flaws and all, through the next part of your life. And, of course, beautifully flawed is the only way you know human beings to exist anyway.

Now imagine the same someone requires that you devise a machine to kill the people that you've created. And the only rule is that it has to do justice to them according to the laws you chose when you made them. The smart and cocky ones go one way, the quiet-types go another. And so this machine has lots of tiny moving parts, which click and grind against each other, ripping your people up into tiny pieces and maybe even incinerating those pieces so that all that's left when they come out the other end is a charred black smoke which rises away from you and disappears.

Some Recommendations from the Labor Day Weekend

The "O Magnum Mysterium" CD by Grex Vocalis
Power Surge at Coney Island
Mario's winter squash and pasta bake
Mario (in general)
Shopping for wristwatches at Bloomingdale's
Random Supreme Court nominations: Oprah, Barak Obama, etc.
Transporter 2

Not So Good Morning

The New York Times waiting on the floor in front of my office door showed a picture of a woman standing on an overpass, a dead body floating by underneath.

I heard someone on the train this morning talking up Hinduism, talking about how the world periodically experiences something called Kali Yuga, which is a necessary state of purifiction through destruction. They were trying to make some sense of this tragedy, of course, trying to spin it into something positive. But all it made me think about was how that only proves that people have been creating mythologies to explain the randomness of the world since we began this long, strange journey.

And seeing the pictures in the paper, the anarchy, the rapes and the gunfire, I can't help thinking: would it have been any different if it had been Peoria? Or Beverly Hills?

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."

Body Parts

In a movie I watched today, one of the main characters, a young single woman, was wearing a tiny gold chain with a diamond stud pendant, which rested just inside the place in her neck right where your trachea meets your breast bone, like the indentation you would make if you pressed the edge of a spoon into a stick of soft butter. There it is, I thought: the most beautiful part of a woman.

Welcome.

My first reaction to blogging was "why would you assume that everything you think about is fit to print?"

Then I remembered: I'm a writer. I traffic in the public presentation of ideas, right? ("Public presentation of ideas" being taken in the broadest terms of how small I am in the universe, of course.) And lately, I have come to realize that my first novel, in addition to my fledgling second, could be read as a conglomeration of "everything I think about" imposed on a narrative. I often see the books this way myself.

In the last few months, I have been forced to think a lot about my relationship with my writing, and I discovered that my resistance had (really) more to do with a self-imposed division of what is meant only for me and what is to be read by others. A fake sacredness that I invented.

And I'm over it.

Thus, the work can be "the work." And thus, the work can suit the purpose, be it here, as viewed by me (and maybe two people plus my mother, if I'm lucky) or committed to actual paper and available at your favorite independent bookstore (if I'm luckier.) Whichever is most appropriate.

The name of my blog is taken from Joan Didion, who said: "Grammar is a piano I play by ear." It is the way I have always worked, groping inside the language for the right words, or the words that are sufficient, which is as much as I think any writer can hope for. And Joan's idea seemed appropriate for the technology, especially my introduction to it: exploring a new way of working, reading and writing.

So, welcome. Here we go.

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PS - All of the above, plus my friend Witold created a brilliant yoga practice blog and though I fear I won't ever be able to top him (no gay jokes, please) I figuredI could at least get with it. If 2005 is going to be the year of the iPod and the cell phone...well, have you ever known me to do anything half-assed?