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.

Last year Jennifer May, the photographer, dragged me out to the deserted train cars on route 28 for a photo shoot. she's got that powerfully comforting power of a photographer who can Get You To Do What She Wants about her. Vital for a photographer. And I began to move in and out of the old cars, forgetting about the mess they were and thinking about how they might have been in my father's time. He loves trains. And he loves photography. And it's a bit uncanny, now, thinking about it. I haven't even shown him the photograph yet.

Bad daughter.

Jennifer and the writer and playright and major prime mover up here, Nina Shengold assembled photos and portraits of a whole bunch of writers up here for a book, forthcoming. River of Words. It is a powerfully comforting title. They are both comfortingly powerful women. Glad I got on that train.

Maggie is writing a novel set in 19th century NYC, among the girl gangsters. She read from the second chapter, which was marvelous. Peter Aaron read a story from his ultracynic days and a great piece, a really powerful piece about the Bad Brains. Tony Fletcher read from his fantastic book on music in NYC, 1927-1997, and then a hilarious and too spot-on scene from his novel, Hedonism. The 80s art scene, the anchorage, an on the make art dealer. I read chapter 1 from the new book. It went over well. And it ends terrifically for reading a loud, with the words Thank You.

Thank you.

I am reading on November 29th with Maggie Estep, Peter Aaron, and Tony Fletcher at Inquiring Minds, Saugerties, 4-6 pm. Call it Attack of the East Village Warriors.

It has to do with rolling typography.

Yes. Rolling typography.

Nicole Bobek, US figure skating champion, 1995
Nicole Bobek, meth perp, 2009


A plastic tub of dried cranberries sits on a cake plate. The cranberries are from Dix Hills, NY. Tke cake plate is from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn in the 1940s. And so the world turns. The whole Michael Jackson thing. The site of a giant person in stripes laying flowers at a memorial. And Nicole Bobek. An Olympic figure skater caught up in a meth ring in Hudson, NJ. That makes sense to me. Extremes beget extremes.

My goal this year has been to avoid those extremes. To avoid the panic of the soul at the sound of an amazing song, that fight or flight impulse it always dredges up. And then I hear something like Panic Switch (Silversun Pickups) and there it is again. Circle of 5ths, circle of fate?