The wolf

His name is Orion, at Mission Wolf. You can help sponsor him, which is a mere but necessary drop in the karma bucket if you ask me. Read more here.

Been away writing

PEI Lighthouse by Raceytay

3-ring binders, Make Your Nest

Kodak Brownie camera, luncheonettevintage

rotary dial phone, Calloocallay

1950s shot glasses, luncheonettevintage

College diner sneakers, luncheonettevintage

Rosehip soap by Rockytop

jadite plate

Crescent Beach postcard, Oregon, the old barn door

Truth is, I've been writing right here. At the kitchen table. Truth is, that's where it works the best. But my brain's been at the beach. That's the only way. At night, dogs milling around me, we all take a walk and watch the evening pushing the field grass towards the fence that divides us from the old meadow. The sun starts going down. I hear water.

Obsessed with the color of smoke and the color of blood.

My dog got injured last week. It was Martin Luther King Day. Not going to go into the hows and whys. And he's fine, and I'm fine, and we're all fine, all 11 of us not counting the chickens, which would make 22 of us, not counting the pigeons, which would make 154 or so of us, depending on what babies have hatched and are now swaddled under the down of pigeon parents.

So maybe it's the color of pigeons, or the average color of pigeons, and the color of blood. My dog, Slam, the black one, got a rip in his leg that was a bona fide rip. No more details for the squeamish out there, and I guess for me, because I keep seeing that sight: the red state within the black fur, really. It was shaped like the state of ohio. I did not take a picture. But I am living with a whole slideshow, can't erase it. And thus, somehow, am obsessed on a kind of neuronical level with the colors red and black and gray and silver and red. And dark red.

In the book right now, there are mechanations on the main gal's part of clean up the cabin. The bathroom towels are to be cleaned, only the wolf steals them while she's got her back turned. The wolf being the house wolf, whose name is Hamish, after the ham sandwiches he preferred, at first, to anything else. Ham is a kind of pinkish reddish color and this wolf is an ashy to fog color of grey and silver. And the towels, I have written, are salmon pink. I can't get away from it. To get my mind off things and into things I make treasuries, like all the other happy obsessives on etsy (we're a happy, obsessive, global slumber party, aren't we). And lately they are all red and grey. For samplings, keep going.

victorian wolf skull engraving, slinkymalkinicat

In the meantime

what is that, that word, meantime. mean as in between time and time? mean as in the middle of time? in the middle of the time that was passing anyway? and is it spent meanly, as in thinly, as in hungrily and not eatingly enough?

in the meantime while Rena was running away from the hollow and getting in the truck to head northwards and run into the deer, a wolf was eating its way through a chain link fence. the night she waylaid Hal McGellan, who stopped his truck, loaded up the wounded but not dead dear, and took her to the safety of a hotel run by his cousins, he was supposed to be going to find that wolf. but in the meantime, the wolf found its way into the woods. a few miles into the woods from the highway, actually. in the meantime.

This is just something that happened, in the meantime, in the book, as it is unfolding. A world unfurling like an Azuma fan, those brilliant tissue paper colors opening, opening further, further still. there is so much to cover. so many in the meantimes. the dots are a physics problem, 4 dimensions, maybe 5, to connect.

Balls in the air. 6 burners going. gangbusters. Insomnia would be my friend, were I in the mood to dance all night with all the happenstances. Mr. Meantime, meet Rena, the ultimate meantimer.

Vintage weekend afterburn

Timber wolves by Frederick Remington, vintagesuburbia

 There was a lot going on this weekend that had nothing to do with vintage. It was supposed to be that way. There was grocery shopping. There was writing. The landscape in my novel suddenly had to change. Or so I thought it should. I wanted to turn the bowl-shaped valley that the wolves live in into a hollow, or a clove, something that seemed more jagged and less tyrolean. That set off all sorts of revision-hell alarm bells. Consistency rebricked across all those pages could be the death knell, so after toying with it, I temporarily gave up.

1960s rat pack tuxedo, fabgabs

There was work. I interviewed a haberdasher for an upcoming article. I love interviewing haberdashers. He said, "Men no longer want a big silhouette. They want that slender, throwback, lean and mean fit." He said, "Black is the new black."

Colette in a suit, being brilliant back then

And I had to finish editing a kind of magnificent, far-reaching text by someone who is clearly, and I say this with no irony, brilliant. And clearly, in a slightly wild-haired way that somehow reminds me of Colette, of his own mind. And I had to query him, in English, through a few intermediaries, and hope the answers would somehow sieve out of German and back into English in a way that I could then blend them, a la Smitten Kitchen, deftly back into the batter, so to speak. And it worked, in the end, into a smooth, kind of peppery mix.

1970s-1980s pumps, and not the ones that smell that I talk about below. These ones don't smell at all. The ones that smell I wouldn't photograph. Somehow it might show up in the image, like a yellowish haze. These pumps are an unscented size 7.

As I write this I am sitting with a pair of old pumps on my lap that smell like stinky old shoes. I have been inhaling shoe stink somewhat unconsciously, until the last few moments, when it got — profound.

Just 5 of the pulp stack, a small fraction of the lurid cache. Coming soon to the luncheonette.

And just to the left of the laptop, towering behind the screen in a kind of tawdry jumble of type and color, is a stack of pulp mysteries and crime novels from the 1950s with names like Night at the Mocking Widow and Dardenelles Derelict. I'm going to sell them in the luncheonette for a friend. We had a blast going through the titles, the covers, the luridness of it all. And next to them is a stack of vintage cookbooks I am obsessed with, which have instructions like, place in a quick oven and bake, and be sure to save the drippings in a can for later: a thrifty kitchen is a practical kitchen!

Not from the back of a cookbook, no. You're right.

The point is that a weekend that was supposed to be very much not about vintage became a weekend in which vintage held me in thrall, in all its enigmatic impossibility, its time warp, its fragility, its other-time-ness. It called to me as I worked, cooked, ran. It created conundrums and commotion. It busted a little hole through the real-time sky.

At a barn sale one town over, I found an old 1950s lace cocktail gown, strapless, with peach-colored lace so delicate it threatens to fall apart at a lady's exhale, and dove grey trim around the bodice that has an unsettlingly mottled look over one side. It is, of course, tiny, and yet the chest is made for someone on the Jane Russell side. And on Beulah it does nothing, just hangs there limp like it's about to play bass at a Hole show in 1996. 

This is a beautiful dress, but it's beautiful more like bleached out Edward Gorey than like the hell-cat curvaliciousness of a thriving retro frock. In other words, it looks anemic. It makes Beulah look like a Greek statue in drag.

I have to figure out what to feed it to bring back its bloom. How to treat it. How to write about it. How to photograph it so it doesn't look like a dress stuck on doll parts, because on Beulah it looks, just, sad. So this is perhaps the crossroads dress that will finally make me forsake Beulah, in all her flea-bitten rickety wonder, for a more sleek, vanilla-linen-covered dress form that doesn't maw apart at the ribs or crack open at one rear hip panel. A Wolf? A Baumann? Would that I were so lucky.

Beulah was built about a hundred years ago and does not entirely resemble so much as confound the contours of a woman's body. She is probably more like the Victorian, bustled, chest-forward, corseted ideal of a body. With a hole in its skin and that smell, like pie. Better, I suppose, than the shoes, which I'm about to de-scent using my secret recipe, gleaned from an old cookbook, actually, written for clueless young brides.

Happy Sunday.

New writing, old church

Today is another delicious writer's marathon, the COTA readings at the Walloon Church in New Paltz. Twenty minute meals of poets and fiction writers and writers of other ilks, boom boom boom, part of a whole art-filled day: dance, installations, sculpture, music. I'm reading at 1:40, one of the eager jets taking off from this literary runway.  Planning on reading Galletas, just because I hardly ever do, and it does that 20 minute thing with room to spare — possibly for a scene from the new book. Always look forward, someone once told me. And keep it neat.

What really gets me going is reading in this old church, on this very very old street, I mean back to the 1680s kind of street. Old French Huguenot and Dutch gravestones tilt and hunker and shrug at each other in the graveyard right outside. New Paltz was founded by the French Huguenots, and Huguenot Street has some kind of honor as the oldest continuously settled neighborhood in the country. That's hundreds and hundreds of years of tricycles, bread, money, old cabbage leaves, cars and horses and worn down boots, winters, falls, rain, heat.

Graveyard, Walloon Church, New Paltz

Ulster county has lots of traces of old Dutch around. The buffet at Eng's Chinese Restaurant in Kingston is called the Smorgasbord, and everyone, including three year old tow headed boys, knows how to say it. The Pine Hill Bakery has Dutch shoes decorating the corners, and one nailed to a tree, higher up than anyone could reach. The old French culture, les Walloons, the protestants — is right here too, but often overlooked. But New Paltz is named for a village in Germany that sheltered the Huguenots. It's not Dutch. The name DuBois, not the Blanche kind but the Louis kind — traces right back to one of the first French families. New Rochelle, down south a good ways, is Huguenot. Staten Island's south shore. History is a 9,000 layer cake, baked during endless arguments, conflicts, migrations — so often about the divine. Divine providence as persecution, as run away and settle, as make a deal with the Esopus and build a hut, build another. Hate to ship to water to shore and logs to stones to arts festivals. My mother hated organized religion, bless her atheist modernist soul. But without it, we wouldn't necessarily be here.

Olive

Town of Olive before the reservoir, showing towns and land now submerged (in blue) and land now owned by New York City (in green), from town of Olive archives.

Yesterday was Olive Day, a yearly fete at Davis Park for the whole giant little village that seems to be the official town of Olive (population 4,579 as of 2000). I was an author guest at the Olive Free Library booth, brought my books and basked in the questions, eyeing the table of vintage cookbooks for later (bought 5). The library ladies are sharp, hospitable, enterprising, and in a book club — and Russian Lover is one of their picks. Another book club, based nearby and held, lordy, at a B&B I've always wanted to escape to, is reading it too. Can't wait to sit with both. Promise me you olive gals won't hold back.

Part of the fare at the library table on Olive day. What you can't see: apples to the left, baked goods to the left of them, books all around.

At Olive Day the sheriff was holding court,  food booths included alligator and chicken (mixed together, I wondered, before or after being dispatched), and there were handcrafts and try-this's. It was 9/11. Kids ran around and got their faces painted. Sheep nosed for treats from their little exhibition paddock. EMTs sat at their HowToBeSafe table —some, no doubt, recalling the day and its aftermath not that many years back. A fellow chortled into a bullhorn about getting down and dirty in the upcoming egg toss. A tiny brown pony in a tiny western saddle got led around with a succession of kids, its head bobbing quickly as it fought the urge to trot.

Not the toolbox at Olive Day, but a green one I loved.

It was festive and somber at the same time, which made it kind of dreamy. I get into a heightened state when doing a reading or appearance, so the whole scene was bright brights and dark darks. There were those odds and ends that enhance the carny, grubby feel so often crusted under the edge of the cake dish, like a cloudy looking woman with ash colored hair who'd laid out a scatter of objects on a tarp on the ground. I picked up a rusty green toolbox (love toolboxes). This one had a sticker on it that had been torn off, leaving a fuzzy scar. I opened the lid and found rust, cobwebs, a dank smell. So the box was uncharmingly wrecked. The woman, the seller, perked up and rose from her lawn chair when I opened the lid — it signified interest. But she wanted a lot for it. Without thinking, in fiction not vintage mode (etiquette out the window), I said, No. That much? Really? Said it too abruptly to temper it. She was offended, and so overreached to justify: The box is a military antique. The green is U.S. military green. They are the only ones allowed to use that green.
Like UPS brown? I played.
No, she said.

None of what she said was true. It was so not true that I somehow wanted to help her save some kind of face. I wondered if she was trying to connect with the vaguely patriotic (not so vague for some) tone of the day by selling military-looking things.

The box was olive colored. I offered, well you've got an Olive green box. That's right for Olive day. She saw no connection there and frowned. It's true, it was a terrible effort. She dropped me for the tweens riffling through her pile of string bracelets, dollars in their hands. I went back to wandering. There is something about being the guest writer that turns me aimless when otherwise I'd be mission-ready, hunting for vintage, trying all the food, shuffling around in jeans and boots.

There were a lot of American flags. There was an art exhibit. There were rows and rows of cherry 1950s cars I couldn't quite get to. There were fresh apples two for fifty, barbecue ladled into giant white buns, a sportsman booth with dozens of pelts strung up along the edge of the tent, many with heads and paws attached, and a murky tank of some kind of fish. There was a timber wolf pelt, which threw me back into my book for about three minutes, sent me scribbling some notes before I headed for the coffee stand.

And two currents ran under the whole thing. One was 9/11, which some people chose to bring up in conversation between hot dogs and pieces of home-baked pie. The other, literally, involved water, the currents of it, running from the Esopus into the giant reservoir that sits like a hole in this part of Ulster County, being snared into tunnels and aqueducts and sent southwards to the city, away from here. In the Olive town offices on the other side of the parking lot, there are framed photos and documents dating back to when much of Olive was first emptied of whole towns and townspeople and then razed to make the reservoir and give NYC fresh water. Thousands were displaced. People tell stories about families watching their homesteads and farms burn to the ground, about a man who jumped out of a hayloft as the barn was torched beneath him, and then ran right back into the barn. It didn't happen that long ago. It happened to grandparents, great grandparents. And if Olive has a bit of an underdog feeling this might partially be why.

Giles general store, pre reservoir days, town of Olive archives. 

Building the reservoir, town of olive archives

I often run along the road over part of the reservoir, a road known around here as the lemon squeeze. It used to be the main way home. But they closed it after 9/11, for security reasons they said, and locals had to drive the long way home and once again felt like the city owned their lives. I run above the waters of the reservoir and the phantoms of hamlets.

Shokan village, under water, town of Olive archives.

To the right, as you head out, there's a long swath of lawn-struck hillside and woods crouched along the base of it, turkeys lacing the edge as they hunt for food. To the left is the reservoir. Lack of rain has exposed bare bars of land in the water. People stand at the edge, looking for foundations exposed. There's talk of a church steeple visible somewhere, but I'm told that's a myth. The city was, mostly, effective. Still, you find this.

Old foundation exposed by low water levels, Ashokan. Taken by K. Barbariantz, 2008.

Back at the library booth the ladies were still energized and people were buying those vintage cookbooks and children's books in bulk, and the donations were coming in, and the raffle tickets were flying out. I bought my vintage cookbooks, two apples, said thank you, headed home.

Life with dogs

I have a goal of 4 pages a day in order to finish the novel by the end of October. Okay, say mid November. The year begins today and ends on Thanksgiving, in my mind. Lately I've met the goal by hammering out 4 pages of triplespaced-narrow-margined-throw-in-another-line-break text. Text with stretch marks. But since I'm crashing headlong into my birthday I'm determined to meet the daily quota.

So this morning I was trying to write a scene in which the wolf, the old male patriarchal geriatric wolf, is trying to deal with the endless presence of the woman, the young, curly-haired, not-entirely-close-to-nature woman who has nevertheless cast her lot in with a bunch of close-to-nature types. I'm giving a lot away here, kind of, so sorry. But the scene has not been going well. It has run aground a number of times. The wolf and the woman really don't have a way to communicate. This is not a mystical rocky mountain high fantasy I'm writing here, it's a skewed tale that presumes very little. That's what I seem to do. But the scene has no been going well.

And this morning what bashed the fragile wisp that is fiction writing's delicate eggshell head into the distracto wall was one of our dogs. Canis germanus fangus biggus distractus. Specifically, the male patriarchal dog. The father of litters that includes amazing working dogs who have successfully done all sorts of Rin Tin Tin-like things.

Papa is a big hero dog in own right and has accomplished many titles and numbers and certificates and honors, and has giant saucer eyes that would, if they could, speak volumes.

This morning as he lay on the kitchen floor he decided volumes had to be spoken.  He tried, over and over again, to get my attention — dramatically jumping to his feet and whining if I did so much as shift in my chair.  When the writing is not happening I tend to shift a lot. So there was a lot of canine activity happening as well. We fed on each other in that strange reciprocal feedback loop called getting nothing done because we're getting nothing done. Eventually his whine successfully pitched his needs in my direction, right into my brain, at peak velocity, where it ran around, chasing my words into the dark corners to huddle and wait.

This is entirely natural. It is as natural as the way I abuse metaphors daily. He is a working dog. He has ideas and drive. I am a working writer. I have ideas and drive. What was driving me this morning, and not fast enough, was the idea of a wolf trying to deal with a human. The wolf, in this story, came first in the cabin they live in. How does this wolf assert its territory? He pisses on things. He was taking aim at her down coat (specifically L.L. Bean ripstop navy blue nylon, a leftover from her early college days) when the whining turned to barking. It turned out, of course, that Papa needed to go out and take a piss. So who, I wonder, looks the dumbest here?

I have yet to get back to that scene. The time is now. arrivedoggi.

Waiting to Go Becomes Going Becomes Gone


People who've gotten in touch lately: the amazing artist J.D. King, whose illustrations you've seen a lot more than you may know -- and whose work spawned the whole genre of retro-linear abstracto-geek, and Linda from Glimmer Train, my original favorite literary magazine. Long ago they published "Hope" and got me started. Thing was, I nearly didn't send it. Then I didn't think clearly enough to delineate it as meant for their fiction contest. And then she called me, to straighten it all out. That's what makes them a cut above as you might say in copywriting. They really care. But it doesn't stop them from publishing great stuff.

Then they used an illustration that was uncanny because the woman in the illustration looked exactly like my grandmother, who had only recently passed away. So there. They are with us, always. My mother is watching me right now, from her painting. I'll show you.


And the SPORK weekly fiction column is starting back up: the doctors in Tucson have reconnected the crying monster and got him up on his booted feet again. And there is The Lifted Brow, a magazine in Australia doing this issue on geography -- and they are a magazine with a lot of great ideas, like the furious horses month, a story a day by Christopher Currie. For the geography issue, you:
1. Pick a country.
2. Send us fiction or nonfiction, a song, or a comic based on that country. The relationship of your piece to the country you pick can be as real, fake, or loose as you want.countries of destination,

and I have this idea, because I am genetically nomadic.
And there is the novel, which refuses to get off the highway and is committed, gritted teeth and leaky radiator and all, to making the trip. Yesterday was the annual pilgrimage to Sonoma County to meet the students at the Hutchins School and explain how to write. Explain. How. To. Write. Explain? How? To? Write? You can't. But we had a great two hours. They wrote, in an awful room, about the awful room. They did everything right. I applaud them. More to come on all the breaking news, Mordechai. I am gone back into this good world, purple-washed dog with yellow legs you can only see up close.

ran turned away.
what? he said. did I do something wrong?
he's staring at me, she said. she was referring to Old Big Guy, who was laying on his pile of clothes, his giant shovel-head resting on the edge of the bed, yellow eyes shining as they went at it.
what, never had sex with a 140 pound wolf staring at you?

Because most of the time in the cabin there were at least 2 if not 3 of the wolves, usually because Big Old Guy was there, and he had taken a fancy to one of the females, or a rank young male was injured trying to climb up the ladder, or they'd found yet another, wounded or hurt, or just too weak to be outside.