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Tema, Johnny Weir's Japanese Chin

Having covered etsy on theweekings, 

and toured all its haunted do-goodnessisms and come up rather haunted myself,

I turned to its obvious counterpart: chickens. That's where the Olivebridge Pastoral came from: there's a family album growing on these Buff Orpingtons. And since the essay on life with chickens was published in theweeklings, Lucille the broody hen went broody again, and we now have 6 more chicks. This is all beyond human control, unless we want to try to "break" her of her broodiness by putting her in a wire crate with her belly exposed to the cold air. But with Lucille, that won't work: she is a dedicated broody hen. So she gets to have her brood. Photos will follow. For now, here's a generic yellow chick:

Having covered etsy, having covered chickens, the obvious next subject is possibly the remarkably heartfelt, insanely athletic, flamboyantly gorgeous endless double adjective of Johnny Weir's instagram. But there's a novel about to wolves to finish, and it howls whenever I leave it alone.

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.

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.

Etsy wolf item of the day


wolf switchplate (antiquarium)


and the view that works like a metaphor, more so.

Everyone's asking about you


Sarah over at GoodTwinBadTwin featured an amazing message written in some vintage notebooks. She's also the purveyor of MouseTrapVintage, and has great stuff, a great eye, all that. But these notebooks do something else. They are so heartfelt. What's written:

Everyone's asking / about you / and counting / the days / while you're ill / please / speed up / that happy / recovery and / hurry hurry

One doesn't know if the receiver of the message actually got better or not. That's the big question in my mind. And did more than one person write the message? The handwriting for most of the message is round and blue inked; the handwriting for hurry hurry is black and more slanted. Friends?

Just when I have decided there really is no connection between my obsession with vintage and my fervid workings in fiction, one appears. The notebooks, having been clearly used and touched, become more than little vintage objects. They're domestic artifacts; treasures of an intimate archeology — if only I knew more. I can roll my brain around that writer's habitrail for hours. And there was another connection today as well: a treasury by Alyssa of BrooklynRehab (another super shop on etsy) that did another wammy on me. And I'm sure I scare everyone away, since when I'm inspired, the prose just literally flies like shit off a fan, and the etsy-quette on treasuries is that you say something about them if you can. So I did. The words, they have a life of their own. I wrote something about mist and sepiatone. But that's a good thing, my friends, since it mean's the blood is flowing, which means I get the book done sooner, before the guillotine of I can't comes down. BrooklynRehab's treasury below:



And since the other news I follow, the fate of wolves in the world, is neither as inspiring or as rosy, and I seem to be perpetually throwing donations towards the wolf savers, as if I am actually helping, which perhaps I earnestly am. No offense to earnestness. And certainly no offense to wolves.

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.

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.