Went to the Ulster County Fair. Ate a corn dog, walked through the 4H poultry house.

New beloved writer: Sonia Rivera-Valdés. Beautiful stories.

And new question: what is acceptable risk? In any field? In any realm?

Tammy Faye as Ghandi

I Geniunely Love You

The mess and scandal of Jim and Tammy Faye had always left me wondering about her. How much can someone convince herself that what she witnesses her husband doing is right? However oblivious she might be to her own mechanications, it's hard not to notice a mate's actions--and, with the veil-lifting effect of time--judge them.

But Tammy Faye, having divorced Jim after 30 years of marriage, married another ex-con. She explained that her mother had always told her life wasn't fair. This can be interpreted in so many ways. In her world view--often obscured my clumping mascara applied liberally to that fake fringe--perhaps Jim didn't really do anything wrong. Nor Messner. Handed lemons, you make lemonade, extoll the media reports, as if that had anything to do with it. But seeing her on Larry King, 65 pounds, eyes done in the same mask, hair brittle and fritzed from chemo but still a reminder of her salonified style, she did seem to be--content. She said, directly to the camera (this is on the last day of her life) I'd like to say that I geniunely love you. And I genuinely care. And I want to see you in heaven someday. I want you to find peace, and I want you to find joy. So maybe it wasn't all an act after all.

Lantern slide of Waterfalls in Woodstock, NY, ca. 1904

Coffee and Paper

The Literary Gazette (its own glossy-covered tabloid section in the Hudson River Reporter) is not online. This is sad for 2 reasons: 1. RSOL is reviewed. Since I wrote the book I can't use adjectives like astute or sensitive or enlightening. But if you can find the LG, get it: there are adjective-deserving reviews scores of new books in it; it feels like the NYTimes Book Review around Christmastime and makes you want to buy them all.

You can find copies of the LG at The Golden Notebook in Woodstock, NY, another healthy independent bookstore that makes writers as well as readers feel welcome. (Whereas in certain stores, it's a bit like, Oh, you wrote this? Well, can you go away so we can make some money?)

This Saturday, July 21 at 5 p.m. the Golden Notebook is hosting a book party and signing for RLOS. Actually, the event itself is down Tinker Street at Joshua's Cafe upstairs. Thank goodness for all these upstairs sections or writers would never have anywhere to read.

Jessa Crispin of Bookslut

Pancakes and Sausage

A few more words about Chicago: The Book Cellar, which handled sales at the Bookslut reading, is one of those thriving, robust independent bookstores that just will not be overcome. Which makes a writer very happy.

Over dinner at the Hopleaf--a vast sandwich made with fig butter; giant paper cones of french fries--I asked Jessa if she also considered herself a writer. She shook her head, but with no rue or self-effacement. Just grace. Certainly she's a reader, a great reader, and she knows how to make one good party after another, whether in a beer-poster-clad upstairs room at the Hopleaf or Bookslut. She's a hostess for all of us, a sundress'd impressario. In that way she belongs on the same hearty category as Mike McGonigal: self-made, peripatetic, generous but with standards and boundaries. The other thing is that, like McGonigal, she gives off a slightly timeless vibe: a bit San Francisco 1950s, a bit Chianti in Greenwich Village, a bit rockabilly, a bit Christina's World. Makes me think we should all mix vintage into new, as it strikes our imaginations, is like brain candy, and certainly fits into the re-use edict of living in this heating world. She keeps it a bit cooler to be sure. Someone give her a giant grant.

Was Chicago

This week, Thursday is the new Monday like global warming is the new pollution. Which is like realizing that Tyranosaurus Rex has a far larger appetite than its lizard cousin, or a hurricane is the devil-cousin of a rainstorm. Listing is my new OS:

1. In no way should anyone, particularly he, think I was complaining in the preceding entry.

2. If I had anything to complain about it would be the fact that there were no bedside lamps in the B&B in Chicago.

3. Is a B&B a B&B just because you say it is? Is a healing garden a healing garden just because you say it is? What if it's really a courtyard with lawn furniture from Costco and a bin full of Home Depot flowers stuck into dirt? After a run down West Division street I went there to, um, heal; wound up staring at the plywood leaning against one wall, noticing the artificial coloring look of the courtyard tiles, felt anything but healed. Felt slightly heeled.

3a. My exacting mother, who could not stand sloppy service, who would rant for hours if served flavored coffee, has decided to possess me. Otherwise there is no reason to even mention any of this. She was always so astonished that someone would want to make coffee, the sacred drink, taste like raspberries.

+

=

3b. After all, the reading at the Hopleaf was amazing. The place was packed. The audience was marvelous. They listened to all of us. They drank lots of interesting kinds of beers and listened intently and laughed and got all the jokes.

4. And surely a steam shower is a B&B. Linens as frothy as a wedding cake are a B&B. But no dresser, no coffee for the coffeemaker, disfunctional keys to an obvious front door in a possibly sketchy neighborhood? Not a B&B.

4a. Mom?

5. And: All of this is completely irrelevant given that fact that in 100 years there may be no more apples and some very cranky, overheated cows in NY state. And 100-year floods every ten years or so. I was in one last June, when the creek on one side and the stream on the other (I lived in a house between them) decided to join up and have a party on the road (so it was, what road? it was, knee-deep in roiling muddy water on the road). The FEMA guy said, Yup, that was a 100-year event. Exactly how is something classified as a 100-year event, I asked. He said, By drastic-ness.

Mark Rothko, 1969

Is absolutely Chicago

The long walk from O'Hare to the Blue Line ended in a strange, subterranean, humid hall, kind of a mass transit cavern. It was clogged with tourists waving dollars at a woman designated to help by her municipal green CTA vest. I asked her: can you use coins? She said sure. She meant, to get a ticket to ride. I'd meant, can you use coins to ride. There are a dozen ways to miscommunicate at any given moment, which is certainyl something I writer about. Or try to.

Tonight's reading at the Hopleaf with Peter Ho Davies and Aaron Belz should be fun. Why? I admit that it will be fun for me partially because there is an entire page in TimeOutChicago about the book, and its writer. I knew Jonathan Messinger was going to make something of it when I objected to his calling the characters in RL&OS damaged. And he did, but in a journalist's never-miss-an-in way, half astute and half along for the happy ride. I cannot blame him--at all-- for not missing a beat. It's true that the connection he stitches (between my writing about women who've gone to extreme lengths with their bodies and women going to extreme lengths in their lives, but he writes it far more elegantly) is one I'd never make myself. But Jonathan, gracias. Merci. I see it. Even if the chronology isn't exact, I see it. I'd been writing some of these stories, in different forms, years before I was assigned to write My Body and What it's Been Through for some years back. But that's okay. I could have, at that point, begun to write about un-marred, unaffected women. But that has never interested me.

Adrenaline is a kind of caffeine, really. I drink it daily. Need it, really. The adrenaline of a narrator's voice speeding up in my head.

Who knows why a sensibility forms? I'd never thought of my characters as damaged, but I guess they are. They do drugs, they have boyfriends who use them and spend their money, they have incurable diseases, they do not always practice safe sex. But they make no excuses. And some have tremendous vocabularies. So I suppose they are redeemed by their brains and their spirits and their nerve. Or I hope they are. But it doesn't mean they don't do bad things. Rothko, having painted all these astounding wonders, killed himself after all. I would call that a form of damage. An enduring damage.

In Retrograde

The headlines have been dark. The supreme court may have just effectively reinstated segregation. A car was found filled with gas and nails in London. An 11-year-old girl was impregnated by a 19-year-old man. Um, can we say rape? The headline (cnn) doesn't, though the dek does. What exactly was the thinking on that one?





Don't eat Chinese shrimp, catfish, eel, basa, or dace. Dace. Don't eat Chinese dace. When a word is unfamiliar, it takes on such an abstract ring. But there's nothing abstract about malachite green.

Thunderstorm, 9:30 pm, and the aftermath, the next day.

Mary Greene of the Hudson River Reporter said this in an email: Just wanted you to know how much I enjoyed your book-- your writing knocked my socks off and I was amazed at how far you travel sometimes in a paragraph inside landscape and the psyche of your characters.

That's so what a writer wants to read. And that it comes from a magazine named after the mighty Hudson, which figures not so much in stories as in my mind, all the time. In stories, it would have to be the East River--Dad and I out there in 1974, leaning over the oddly curved railing, which curved toward) the churning gray water. He was in the merchant marine. And he was on something called a liberty ship. A term which can be taken in all sorts of ways.

But the Hudson. That's the river of Pete Seeger's Clearwater, of Cole and Cropsey and those painters who set their easels up along the cliffs and snacked on bacon and rusks and apples, of sloops carrying bluestone and oxen and fat in barrels and honey and maple syrup and tanned hides. Maybe not all at once, not all in the same ratty ship, but on the same long-winded, eloquent, muscular river.

Thank you Mary Greene. A marvelous thing to say. Marvelous.

In other news:
Time Out Chicago is doing a piece on the book for the Bookslut Reading on July 10. Also reading: Peter Ho Davies and Aaron Belz.

And more real news:
The thunderstorms that here, are just a lot of thunder and hot air--though my old dog, Sophie, would be quaking right now--are causing immense flash floods south of here, in Roscoe and Colchester N.Y. . My new dog, Lee, is unphased by such a broad challenge as thunder. But the dogs in Roscoe, not so unphased.

Everything That Rises Must Converge

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Overwhelmed by the number of soldiers returning from war with mental problems, the Army is planning to hire at least 25 percent more psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers.

A contract finalized this week but not yet announced calls for spending $33 million to add about 200 mental health professionals to help soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health needs, officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.

Another note to Harley

Harley is the pseudonym for a friend of mine who's a literary scholar of new fiction, last name Davidson he often jokes. He pointed out that the title story of Russian Lover seems to end in what he calls "very late-20th-century ambiguity." That is, it ends without the reader knowing if the girl writing all those letters to her ex-mother-in-law (now that's a whole lot of hyphens for someone who no longer wants anything to do with you, that girl might very well say) actually sends any of them. Does he every really pay her back for all the damage he caused her?

I'm supposed to tell him, but this is what happens with characters: if they don't say it, you want to somehow protect their privacy. So an invented girl has now decided to invent her own concealment, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Context is everything.
The word of the night was willowy. As in: Well, I'm not his type. He goes for those willowy, ethereal types.
Women aren't willowy, said my friend. Maybe they don't have a lot of meat on them, but they're not tangling their roots all in the sewer lines or breaking up the foundation as they grow. 
Don't be so sure, I said.

Carla Aurich, Tableland, 2005