Swimming Lessons in the form of four writers, the official broadleaf

Readings from Up Saugerties Way presents

Speak, Memory

Memoir + Fiction

with

     Julia Scully    

(Outside Passage: A Memoir of an Alaskan Childhood)

Martha Frankel

(Hats and Eyeglasses)

Charles Salzberg

(Swann's Last Song)

Mark Goldblatt

(Sloth)

Sunday  May 29th    

3:30 – 5:30 pm

Inquiring Mind 

Coffee Shop & Bookstore

65 Partition St, Saugerties,  NY

Sparrow at Inquiring Minds, April

I'd like to call us TJMax but she's not so keen on it but on we'll walk through the shallow waters

Since Christmastime or so I've been helping my friend Teresa Giordano with the reading series she started here a few years ago. Teresa is like an unwitting Gordon Lish, a great editor without even thinking about it, and one of those beacons of truth and direction who can recognize the difference between good fish and good fiction. And she's not even in this business. At her day job she makes television, big real sweeping global television, and she's tireless and she's probably can be scary to work for, sometimes. For three years she brought writers to the Inquiring Minds bookstore in Saugerties, a giant marvelous old Victorian town building with tin ceilings and creaky floors and rows and rows and stacks of books. She brought:

Gail Godwin. 
Tony Fletcher. 
Helen Benedict. 
Maggie Estep. 
Peter Aaron. 
Phillip Levine. 
Holly George Warren and Robert Burke Warren and Cornelius Eady and
Abigail Thomas and Martha Frankel and Alison Gaylin
and Me.
Nina Shengold, who once shattered the room with an amazing monologue.
Sparrow, who kept everyone laughing, laughing, not even necessarily saying anything, the anti-schtick, the silent, negative-space Henny Youngman of radical hippie minimalist poetry.
And so many others.

And bringing that many brainy presents into the fray can be wearing, and I sensed Teresa was getting worn out. So I raised my hand, since I didn't want it to stop. I am one of those writers who not only needs to read, I need to read to other people, and if I don't I kind of stop swimming quite so fast. Your ears are my water, I might say. And other writers say that kind of thing, perhaps not quite so tweaked or spliced into the whole clanging associative ether, but they say that. So we swim.

And I found this out: the act of helping to make these little oceans of words happen is another kind of swimming, and it's great.

Waking up with the friend

A little embarassingly the first place I heard this band was on television, on a commercial, in between heady skinny high school gorgeous tortuous want/love/blood/eat/don't segments from Vampire Diaries. K is addicted to it and I've noticed that Somerhalder guy since Lost, so, we watch. Natch it was that annoying car commercial. But then, admiring threepotatofour again, found this vid of Home, a better song, on their blog and realized who they were. A good thing, a not reprehensible thing, and kind of boho-playground-honky-tonk-parade-pop that, if let loose upon the throngs, might indeed be able to save the world a little. And of course the fact that there is great hair, and drama and all that stuff makes it even worthier, car commercial or not.

Home. Edwarde Sharp and the Magnetic Zeroes.

Sleeping with the enemy

We all do things that are wrong. I don't text while driving, only because I can barely text while I'm just texting. I recently texted someone's name into a message to myself so badly that only K, who is somehow wired to solve the scrabble game of how I speak at least half the time (after a long stint of writing or editing, usually, when the word circuitry has overheated), could figure out who it was. But I do write while I'm driving. I dictate entire scenes and pages of my book into the voice memo on the iphone, and I've taken to calling it iwrite. If it were that easy, I'd be done.

Other wrong things include kicking the wall of my studio in frustration because the studio is too small, and, despite my most fervent ethics and belief in the green of recy and re-buy and vintage, I am, occasionally, swayed into the groove of UO. They are reprehensible, I know. But we all wear American Apparel T's, right?

Super groovy summery stripey platform wedge shoes I can't stop lusting over

So these shoes. Can someone tell me: are they Prada meets Missoni meets Target knockoffs? By Deena & Ozzy? Who are Deena and Ozzy? Are they mythical boho young designer personas in the UO machine? Do they put on hats and wigs and glasses to become older versions of themselves for Anthro? And who cares? These are shoes I could really scare my father's doormen with. 5 quaint mason jars and a costume necklace, and they're mine. Well, in theory anyway.