Tuesday's questions

1. when exactly did impact become a verb

2. when did I grow out of jackets like this

3. why does wearing shoes like this make the Mobil station man call me Mrs.

4. is Earl really going to impact the northeastern seaboard

5. will the mountains protect us or will water come right over top of it (as they say around here)

photo of Catskill peaks: peakbagger

rest in peace Corinne Day


a great fashion photographer who had the foresight to change everything just when it had to change.


life is too short.
[pix: libertylondongirl]


And in her honor I made an etsy treasury, a bit cheeky, a bit tawdry, a bit insider joke, a bit sweet.
You can find all the items here.

Etsy wolf item of the day


wolf switchplate (antiquarium)


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

Shades of gray, practical edition


1940s Smith-Corona clipper (sarahanntiques)


Hall pottery casserole (rollinghillsvintage)


Office set #2 (funretro)


wooden mail slot (to hide the manuscript) (luncheonettevintage)


oxygen gauge (newdominionblues)

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.

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.

River of Words

Photographer Jennifer May and writer Nina Shengold asked me to be in their book on Hudson Valley writers, River of Words. Jennifer and I had a great time doing the photos. And I get to be nestled in pages with Chinua Achebe and Frank McCourt and Susan Orlean and lots of other great. Now the book's coming out. Can't wait.

1940s waitress

Who was this man? He wore a red and gold argyle sweater as he downed another shot before grabbing his gym bag and heading to Gleason's. He loved vodka and boxing. His father had fought bareknuckled, but he preferred the decisive whomp of a leather glove on a jawbone. Once, a girl he was dating brought him a little triangular wooden tray and told him it was something called Swedish modern. She was maybe the type to head into trends a little to quick, he thought, but she was darling too. She worked the night shift at the luncheonette, serving the barflies trying to sober up before they headed home. She served the salesmen's wives, gabbing over pie and nursing a big lonely. She served him, that's how they'd met, and when he asked for a short stack she brought him a tall one, and when he asked for just a little more butter she brought him what seemed like a hundred pats. She was darling, truly. That's what she was.

My favorite murder mystery writer said something great on WAMC this morning. He said he writes because he loves to write. He doesn't write because there is a dark angel chattering obscenities in his ear if he doesn't make his page quota. He doesn't write because there is a gaping hole in his past that is only filled by words. He writes because he loves to write.

Like a lollipop over the air to hear that.

Fast forward a hundred and something weeks


To be honest, I had this blog for the sake of my book being out, because I wanted it to function as a kind of trumpet section, tootling fanfares for anyone who happened to notice. But since the book came out my life has changed, let's say, immeasurably. And being unable to measure just how amazing those changes have been, I just decided to let the trumpets toot until they got tired, and then fade out gently. And I imagined a little deserted yard filled with trumpets in varying stages of tarnish and decay, and noone to pick them up and point to the sky. But I couldn't maintain that idea. I felt terrible about it.

Meanwhile the changes kept changing and the book kept living and oddly enough, when I least expected it, there was that bleating sound again, the Vivaldi of hope curling all over the place with its little frippery of notes. So I decided what the hey.

Ever since the age of 4 I have been wearing sailor dresses and writing and that is not going to change. At the age of 10 I was given a gold horseshoe with a little bell ringing from it, and I hung it around my neck as I trotted around a ring on palomino morgan whose name I swore I'd never forget. But I can wear the bell again. And will.

Imagine if you lived here.




Or walked around in this.