stuart and diane's place

stuart likes to have some new shirts on hand for special occasions

 

diane saves everything, like a length of old linen lace and a lone plate

wooden hangers from the 1920s hang in their closet, unburdened

diane still has her mother's childhood sunday dress

on the second floor landing, an old pint milk jar sits on a chenille rug

diane commandeered stuart's old toolbox for her own collection

at night they both dream of oregon, a trip to the coast they'd like to take.

Tintypes.

Bandana, she likes.

1950s tuside in the shop

Incredibly soft cotton, probably washed a thousand times, but probably carefully, as it came from a lady who could ride a Palomino like the wind but had her judicious moments. She was known for her ability to chill butter with just a look. Worked on husbands too.

Actually it came from my friend G, source of some of the most remarkable things to come through the kitchen in a good while.

what i've been up to (caffeine edition)

1940s stove top coffee maker, in the shop.

1950s restaurant ware, in the shop.

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.

astonished
by yesterday's reading, the first real Rock City Readings event. Teresa turned to me, somewhere between all the brilliance popping throughout the Kleinert, and said, I think we made the right decision.

We wanted to bring writers to town, but not just bring them. Fete them. Have people hear them. And yesterday was just. Yes, bowls of fruit and bottles of wine (bottles, not boxes) gleamed in the back while the writers read. Yes, all the chairs were full and we were discreetly tiptoeing other chairs off the sideroom stacks. Yes, I nearly handled assembling all parts of the P.A. myself. Nearly.

Yes, Samantha Hunt. Yes Paul LaFarge. Yes Anna Moschovakis. Yes the marvelous Nelly Reifler. What a way to kick it all off.

the necessaries

iphone, krispy creme mug with iced coffee in it, antique spool of twine. sure about the necessity of the first two. but there are days, aren't there, where you just have to have some old twine around.

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.

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.

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.

1. amazon has my books again.

2. I still can see no tangible relationship between the fiction I write and the vintage I sell.

3. The show Mad Men bought the gym bag for season 4. So who's it for?

4. Married.

5. Happy. A friend asked me if, now that I was finally happy, as she put it, I had writer's block. I told her, and this is true, that the only thing that gives me writer's block is not drinking coffee.

6. Time for another glass.

One dog was there because his owner went to jail. One dog was there because his owner was too worried she couldn't take good care of him. One dog was there because his owner kept him in jail. This is fiction.

One wolf lived on the porch because she couldn't see the steps anymore to climb down. She lived inside a plastic igloo an heiress had donated. One wolf liked to sleep between the refrigerator and the wall, which they thought was because the vibrations of the old compressor were like the sound of other wolves sleeping. One wolf, the biggest wolf of all, lived on the mound of clothes next to the bed, which prevented them from ever doing all the laundry. But there was always too much laundry to ever be all done. This is fiction too.

Sometimes I think the connection we have between us all is fiction. We make it up. Sometimes we're so good at the story we forget it's a story. Then something happens, breaks the skin apart, and we see what's underneath. Not fiction, then.