Away in Vermont

I am sitting at a very old, very beautiful dining room table in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont half-listening to a story on NPR about butterflies. Someone has figured out a way to tag and track butterflies, the same way they tag eagles or sharks, but I didn’t hear all the details of the story—the how the do the tagging, and what the tag physically is—because I am working on some new writing projects which I came here to hopefully finish, and those are taking most of my attention. Some of the butterflies which were tagged in Vermont ended up at the Connecticut shore. Some of them ended up in Mexico, where they usually go for the winter months. To me this made the butterflies sound like retirees.

Moments ago, the 21 year-old son of the friends that I am staying with came into the kitchen to tell his father, my host whose dinner table I am sitting at, what kind of noises that his car is making. “Angry grinding noises,” he says, and then he makes the noise for all of us—a loud, angry grinding sound which makes all of us laugh. This is a perfect moment, and it rivals the joy of feeding the forty chickens in the backyard, which I did this morning. “I’m not good at laundry,” the kid says, when he is asked to help. “I am good at my own, but I always mess up if I have to do someone else’s.”

My novel will be released on Tuesday. So I am here for a few days of brain rest and rejuvenation before that experience begins. I have no idea what to expect, but I am expecting to feel a lot, to have a lot of reactions. And I want to be in the kind of mental place where I can take it all in. I was reading an article in Vanity Fair about Angelina Jolie by Rich Cohen who wrote: “I noticed everything…as you notice everything in a video game: because who knows what you’ll need, what will mean your advancement, what will be your demise.” I realize when I read this that this is why I have come to Vermont: to ready my brain like September is a video game. I’m doing a lot of events.

On the way up here, I stopped to get gas at the same exit where I was in March of 2009 when my agent called to tell me that someone was about to make an offer on the novel. I figured it was a lucky place, so I bought four scratch-off lottery tickets. The lady who sold them to me asked me which kind I wanted, and she pointed to the big acrylic case where all the rolls of tickets were held. “Red?” she asked. “These red ones are the most popular.” This is when I became suspicious of her motives, perhaps wrongly-so, because I went against her recommendation and bought the blue kind—Sparkling Diamonds—and ended up not winning. Four dollars, goodbye. Oh well. I still win: my novel comes out on Tuesday.

Garden Update!

I was relieved when my friend June said to me: "It's not really about anything other than growing." I was complaining that my shishito plant was only yielding one or two peppers every three weeks or so, which, to give you an idea, when I cook them for part of dinner, I usually start with a pound or so. June clarified that the act of gardening is often less about the physical reaping than the excitement of just watching something do what it does.

Thus, the morning glories have finally started blooming all over the railing. I like them, despite how they take over everything and at one point began shooting out into the cucumber and I had to intervene lest we have our whole garden taken over. It's true, they don't have much dignity, but they are beautiful.

The green peppers are finally growing--there are these two on the plant, and a few more starting. Actually, I think these will be red or yellow peppers once they are mature. That's the shishito behind it.

Finally there is the "Mideast Prolific Cucumber" plant, which spun itself all over the concrete and hung down the back of the railing into the yard, covered in flowers, but for many weeks made no attempt at a cucumber. Then I went to water and low-and-behold! There is a single huge cucumber hiding under a leaf. Look how it's just resting on the dirt! Who knows what mysteries the garden holds!

Death of the Poet

You said you'd done 200 push ups, and then
we looked at each other.
I said: "Your arms look like it."
You said: "Do they?"
Then we said nothing for a while.
I thought you were comfortable with silences.
Then I realized that you didn't have
anything to say.

If I have to write one more poem about the distance
between you and me
--the singular me and the royal you--
then I'm going to die a slow,
mournful, ugly, selfish death,
writhing in cowardly pitifulness,
like something out of a Paul Verhoeven
movie, but not the popular ones.
The ones they don't show anywhere at midnight.

A Happy Expectation

Things are good. I am finally starting to get excited about Yield being out in the world. That might sound crazy to those of you who are not me--and, um, I guess that's all of you. A box of finished books arrived the other day, and I stacked all of them up on the kitchen table. I looked at them, I held them in my hands. The transformation into a physical object is the real magic--I now know what a sculptor feels when the stone at last reveals itself to be a lady, or a beast, or a flower. I think what I mean by "finally getting excited" is "finally feeling content." There are a lot of fears that come with publishing--and I think I've somehow figured out how to work my way around those fears, how to process through them, and now I just have a kind of happy expectation.

My friend Andrew brought me a plum tree from the orchard where he works. Kip planted in the backyard, digging through the dirt there, which, we discovered is mostly clay and stones. It's beautiful, just standing there. It seems like it's waiting for something. Or perhaps I have projected this sense of anticipation on it...in any case, as a gesture of gratitude, I took Andrew a copy of the book. And right there in the market, he started reading it. I watched him pick it up every now and then, dipping into it between customers, like a person can do when you work the kind of retail that we do. That, I really loved.

In addition to all the events I previously mentioned, there are a few more in the works--one more New York City date, and some others that need some ironing out. Stay tuned. I can't wait to share all of it with all of you.

Sold for $20

Back in the early spring, a photographer from Getty Images came through the Greenmarket and gave a bunch of us twenty dollars* each for taking our picture. Here's what emerged from that brief session--me and David looking slightly uncomfortable, but twenty bucks richer:


Here's how Getty categorized our picture:
People, Casual Clothing, Confidence, Happiness, Freshness, Table, Jar, Abundance, Retail, Vertical, Looking At Camera, Waist Up, Outdoors, 20-24 Years, 30-34 Years, Front View, Stubble, Cheerful, Caucasian Ethnicity, Standing, Smiling, USA, Day, New York State, New York City, Adult, Young Adult, Mid Adult, Syrup, Large Group of Objects, Two People, Young Men, Mid Adult Men, Only Men, Portrait, Photography, Farmer's Market, Adults Only.

*It's certain that I am violating the model's release that I signed by posting this picture here--or at least I am violating the Getty Image Bank's rules about who can post what without payment. But I loved the categories too much not to post it, and were I to go through the motions, and I priced this vaguely via the site, it would cost me about $600.00. So....

September Readings

If you are in or near the NYC area, please come out to hear me read, and get your copy of YIELD signed, at any of the following events:

Tuesday, Sept 7 - 7pm
Barnes & Noble, 82nd and Broadway
Reading/Signing

Tuesday, Sept 14 - 7pm-9pm
Sugarland, 221 North 9th Street, Williamsburg
Book Party with Open Bar/Reading

Thursday, Sept 16 - 8pm
Happy Ending Lounge, 302 Broome Street
part of In The Flesh Series

Wednesday, Sept 29 - 7:30pm
Bar on A, 170 Avenue A
part of Guerrilla Lit Series

Tuesday, Oct 5 - 6:00pm
Dixon Place Lounge, 161A Chrystie Street
with Sam J. Miller

Fridge Poems, Vol. 5

Someone gave me--maybe it was my mother--a set of magnetic poetry pieces, which spent almost 10 years stuck to one side of my fridge. In the first few years I spent living in my apartment, people made poems with the tiny words, but eventually, it became uninteresting, or too difficult, or some other reason. No new poems were made, but the old ones stuck. When I moved, I tossed the tiny pieces, but saved the poems that my friends had written via my digital camera. The pics are bad, but the poems are real. This is volume 5 of 5.

A Moment of Stuckness

For dinner tonight I made pesto from Greenmarket basil, as well as some basil that I picked from our container garden on the back porch. I kept dumping things into the food processor that I was trying to get rid of. First, it was a quarter cup of cashews, to go with the normal basil, lemon juice, and walnuts since I didn't have pine nuts. Then it was a cup or so of steamed broccoli, which was leftover from last night's dinner, then it was some frozen peas that I felt like needed to go somewhere (read: my belly.) It was a diehard Italian's nightmare, certainly.

Now Kip is upstairs watching The Golden Girls on WE, and I'm downstairs typing this and spending time with The Bean, who, as you might have previously read, isn't ready to join the other two cats in co-habitation just yet. She seems perfectly happy down here, though she does sound what we call the "Love Alarm," which is a kind of happy-sounding, somewhat-impatient sounding series of chirps and meows, which we can hear all the way through the apartment. The other day, we decided to let the three of them re-meet each other, and expecting the worst, were surprised when she hissed dramatically, and the boys were scared shitless and went running back upstairs to their part of the apartment. You just never know.

The days and nights seem slower since we moved in together, somehow. This is a good thing, not a complaint. I just want to get back into the motion of writing, which has eluded me for the last several months. First I was packing and sorting and throwing away, then I was unpacking and re-sorting and still throwing away, and now I am basically settled, but can't seem to find the steam again. The new novel is in that early stage of becoming material, but still too early to be anything substantial. In other words, I can see all the flaws, but can't do anything about them yet because I'm still working through it. Rather, the book it still deciding what it is. This is kind of a nightmare place for me to be. I feel both trapped by it, and far away from it. I try to start new sections, pick up at a new place each time, but that has just left me feeling even more fractured and unhappy with it. This is always the case at some point. Just because it's a familiar feeling doesn't mean it's not unpleasant. Ugh.

Fridge Poems, Vol. 4

Someone gave me--maybe it was my mother--a set of magnetic poetry pieces, which spent almost 10 years stuck to one side of my fridge. In the first few years I spent living in my apartment, people made poems with the tiny words, but eventually, it became uninteresting, or too difficult, or some other reason. No new poems were made, but the old ones stuck. When I moved, I tossed the tiny pieces, but saved the poems that my friends had written via my digital camera. The pics are bad, but the poems are real. This is volume 4 of 5.

Shows / Peppers / Hearse

--On Sunday we went to see Billy Elliot, which was, I regret to say, mostly stale and without focus. I think the original production was probably outstanding--the direction is the only thing that saved it from being a completely worthless evening. There are some fantastic visuals and, thankfully, the action never seems to slow. But the show has to compete with the film version, which is arguably flawless in its emotional pitch, and its ability to hang on to a moment. There were no moments in this show, only people doing what they do eight times a week.

--Alternately, we saw the utterly engrossing and fantastic revival of La Cage aux Folles on Tuesday, with Kelsey Grammer, and the incomparable (and now Tony Award-winning) Douglas Hodge. How refreshing, how inspiring, how fulfilling to see something so grand and real and hilarious! This show is full of moments. The gags come freely and lightly, with a kind of joy about them that I haven't seen on Broadway in a long while. (I'm remembering the first few performances of Spamalot, where the audience was just so crazy excited about what they were seeing.) This show felt like that. If you are nearby, or far away, go right now to see it. It's spectacular.

--Our shishito pepper plant made one giant pepper. We were shocked! Remember a while ago when I was talking about how I didn't really see plants. I didn't really get the miracle of them? Here is the miracle of growing things. You leave for work and when you come home there is a shishito pepper waiting to be plucked off, tickled with olive oil, blistered in your great-grandmother's cast iron, dusted with sea salt, and savored. Look, I shouted to nobody, a miracle! I showed Kip, "Look!" "Where did that come from?" he said.

--Here is a really new, really beautiful song by Ani Difranco.