5 April 2010
I added a drop-down “Favorite Posts” link in the navigation bar on the right. This is so that as I become increasingly famous and strangers begin to flock to my site they will know what to look at. The list of favorites is not definitive; I started looking through old posts and linking ones I like, but then I kind of got tired. Maybe I’ll think more about it another time. If you have a favorite post that you think should be on there, tell me, either in the comments or via e-mail.
Some of my early posts are pretty dumb. Then there’s a good stretch in the middle, and then the recent ones are more businessy and less interesting. That’s my recap of this blog.
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4 April 2010
I took all that winter plastic-wrap crap off the windows today. I cleared the winter weeds from the garden and turned the soil. I was sweaty and I smelled like DEET. When I was done I came inside and ate two apples and some cheese and listened to Neil Young.
I think it will be sunny forever now. Michelle has ordered some hierloom tomato and pepper and other seeds from a place called Tomato Bob’s, and I have ordered scarlet runner bean, lambs lettuce, pumpkin, wild strawberry, and more from Plimouth Plantation. Yes, they spell it that way. Oh, and tobacco. I ordered tobacco seeds. I can’t imagine I will grow any good tobacco but I am excited to see what happens.
There are all kinds of birds making crazy noises. Today I heard a woodpecker but could not find it. There are worms and beetles.
Right now I am drinking pear wine. We bottled it a year ago.
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31 March 2010
I’ll be reading with Joanna Howard at the Brown Bookstore in Providence, 4 pm, Wednesday, April 14. Joanna will surely read something wonderful; I will probably read something about children and/or blood.
I’ll also be reading at the University of Denver on Monday, May 10. Not sure where or when specifically, but save the date if you think you will be at loose ends in Denver.
There is less water around today, but still a great deal of water. Many roads are still flooded and many bridges are impassable. Most of my things are dry; there doesn’t seem to be any worse damage than a little mold here and there on the rugs. Also, the parsley that I planted outside last year, and which withdrew over the winter, appears today to have new strength.
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I changed the site a little. Does it look horrible? I feel like it looks a little bit horrible, like perhaps it was made by a flat-faced balding man on his Mac. Today there were was great flooding. This is a new and more extensive flooding than the flooding mentioned in my last post, which now seems like relatively minor flooding. Today bridges succumbed and pieces of road washed away. Many houses and at least one retail establishment in my vicinity were invaded by water to a depth of several feet. In my house there was only an inch or two of water, but that was enough. I sat here changing the site to take my mind off the water. There is still water on my floor, my feet are wet, and the bathroom smells like a wet sheep because I put a wool rug in there to dry. I am sitting on a couch with empty yogurt containers on its feet. The road I see under the streetlamp outside my window is underwater. It is raining again. Maybe I will change the site back soon.
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25 March 2010
There was some minor flooding in my house this week. Water seeped in through the walls, encountered the rug, saturated the rug. When I woke up I put my feet on the rug and noticed they were wet. Many things were wet. Nothing important. I took away the rug and mopped up the water. Foolishly, I emptied the bucket of mop-water into the bathtub, the drain of which immediately clogged, the water having been thick with filth. I went to the store and found a product called “Liquid-Plumr Power Jet,” which “releases a powerful jet of liquid that literally blows that clog out of your pipes.” It looked like a normal aerosol can with a funny kind of wide plastic head. I could feel a liquid sloshing around in there. The label did not specify what the liquid was, only that it would emerge in a “powerful jet.” I brought it home and pushed the funny kind of wide plastic head against my drain according to the instructions. There was an abrupt roar as though a smallish rocket had launched itself from the can; then nothing. I took the can away. It felt empty. A wisp of smoke curled up from the drain. The clog was gone.
The FAQ for this product says that it will not clear a tree root from your drain.
Things are very wet in southern Rhode Island right now. I mean the land is wet. Areas that I normally think of as fields are instead ponds. Today I drove past some sort of factory and noticed that its parking lot was underwater. Where did everyone park?
I also passed a place called The Fantastic Umbrella Factory, or maybe Small Axe, or maybe part of it was The Fantastic Umbrella Factory and another part was Small Axe — it was a secluded bushy complex by the side of the road, with signs out front saying both “The Fantastic Umbrella Factory” and “Small Axe.” I pulled over and walked in among the bushes. There were many old buildings connected by paths and trellises, and many hand-lettered signs about what was in and around the buildings; some of the signs were illegible, but there were definitely antique stores and gardens. All the gardens were dead and all the buildings were locked and there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Finally at the back of the complex I discovered an incense-smelling shop full of craft objects from Africa and Mexico. Later I also found a nursery.
“This place is weird,” I thought. There was a For Sale sign in front and some real estate fliers suggesting that you could buy the whole complex for $1.3 million. One of the (locked, dark) buildings said on it: “Temple of Honor.”
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18 March 2010
You may be familiar with the Free State Project: the idea is to get a lot of libertarian types to sign a pledge that, once they’ve gathered 20,000 people (i.e., once 20,000 have signed the pledge), they’ll all move to New Hampshire together and organize to elect a libertarian-type government at the state level. Their site says they’re currently at 10,026. I first became aware of them in 2004 I think — it was a bit of a revelation, since I’d always wondered why people didn’t do that kind of thing — but I don’t know how many people they had signed up then.
Here is my idea for the Love Street Project. In this project you also pledge to move to a certain place when enough people have signed up, except in this case I’m thinking a neighborhood instead of a state; then, after you’ve signed the pledge, you take a personality and romantic preference test. The administrator of the Project uses the results of this test to sort people into groups in which everyone is likely to fall in love with everyone else. Once a group has, say, a hundred people: boom, they all move to some neighborhood in Minneapolis or wherever. They don’t know exactly who the other members of the group are; they just know that many people in their neighborhood are their perfect love objects. The streets become extremely friendly.
Of course it might be hard to find suitable neighborhoods: they have to be ripe for gentrification, decent to live in but also deserted enough that a hundred people can suddenly move there. I think it can be done.
If you want to do a social experiment, you could completely ignore the results of the romantic preference test and just put people together with the expectation that they’re going to fall in love with all their neighbors, and stand back and see what happens.
If you want to make some money, you could keep the target neighborhoods secret until it comes time for people to actually move, and then buy up cheap property there before you announce them.
This is my idea. You can have it. Don’t say I never gave you anything.
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11 March 2010
I got my copies yesterday. It looks good. The cover is darker than I had thought; on the image they e-mailed me it looks a little sky-blue, a little fairy-blue, but in reality it is predominantly a dark gray-blue, quite menacing. And the lettering of the title has stronger hints of orange or pink than I’d thought, also menacing, also nice. It is actually a great cover. The book feels good, the binding looks good, the pages look good.
So. Distributors might not have it for a few days yet, retailers a few days more, but it definitely exists, you can order it from any of the usual book-ordering places. And you should order it. In particular you should go to your local independent bookstore, ask if they have it in stock, and then, when they say no (they will likely say no), act surprised — say it is the new big thing, the talk of discriminating readers everywhere, and you thought they’d be on top of the trend. Then order it from them. With luck maybe they will order some for the store too.
If you are a reviewer and you want a review copy, e-mail Latasha Watters at The University of Alabama Press: lwatters@uapress.ua.edu. And consider me grateful.
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4 March 2010
A story that I wrote will be published in issue 2 of Big Lucks. I wrote the first draft of this in 2003 — I know because it was the night after I saw The Triplets of Belleville — and I’ve added to it and revised it periodically since then, and finally now it’s in a pretty good state, but in all that time I haven’t been able to think of a decent title for it. Don’t think I haven’t tried. So this nice man named Mark at Big Lucks said we want this thing but can you change the title? (I had put some mediocre working title on it.) And I said if only I could. Then I sat there for a long time at night trying to think of a title. I made a list of words that seemed connected to the story, but none of them was any good.
Finally I decided on a method, a kind of ultimatum method. I went to my favorite anonymous message server. This is a place where you type in something that’s on your mind and hit enter, and then you get to see what the person before you wrote. You don’t know who the person was; the next person to use the site will get to see what you wrote, but you don’t know who that person will be either. My idea was to take the random anonymous message I would receive and use words from it to construct a title for this story. I typed in my message and hit enter. Here’s what I got (which I don’t mind sharing, since sharing doesn’t make it any less anonymous):
He Makes me mad.
He likes to push my buttons.
I like him less and less each day.
I wish we were still friends.
Well, it could be worse. On the other hand, it could be better. “Wish” stands out, but a little thought convinced me that no good title could possible include this word. “Push like Mad”? “Less Makes Less”? “Day Friends”?
Let’s face it, they are not great words to make a title out of, but at least fruitlessly rearranging them was more fun than fruitlessly rearranging words I had thought of myself. Eventually I decided it would be okay to combine two of the words into a single word, and came up with “Day like Pushbuttons.” Which isn’t bad. Doesn’t have anything to do with the content of the story, but has the right feel.
So my story tentatively entitled “Day like Pushbuttons” will appear in Big Lucks. It will be out in May I think.
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15 February 2010
Two things I wrote can now be read in issue 5 of The Bicycle Review. In the same issue are two things written by Thirii Myint, who was my student at Brown a few years ago, possibly while I was writing the very things that now share a web page with her things. It is a small world, this world of writing things.
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11 February 2010
Here’s another one I got at the library: The Hazards of Love, by the Decemberists, which was recommended by Emma about a year ago and which has been in my queue or whatever since then. This is a rock opera in which a woman goes into the forest and finds a wounded fawn, but the fawn turns out to be the (human) adopted son of the forest queen, who has only turned him temporarily into a fawn for safekeeping, and the girl becomes pregnant by the transmogrified fawn, and then the forest queen is angry, and then the girl is abducted by a rake.
I did not know any of this when I first put it on. I thought it was just a normal album. When I realized what was happening I became excited, and immediately after it finished I listened to it a second time with the liner notes in front of me to figure out the story. This second listen was a peak experience that I will forever remember fondly. Since then I’ve had no particular desire to listen to it again, though I’ve done so several times to be thorough.
Is it credible? Can we now go into a store and buy a recording of a fully realized fairy-tale indie-rock opera? Yes, we can; our civilization has produced such an object. Like an Esperanto translation of the Iliad, it fills what would otherwise be a cultural void.
Is it good? It’s pretty good. It has catchy bits and tragic bits, and I like the voice of the forest queen. It seems more like story than a collection of music, which is I think why I don’t care to listen to it again; stories (novels, movies) are things you might return to occasionally, but not things you put on repeat.
As I understand it the Decemberists are a popular band and this is a popular album. Not Beyoncé popular, but popular. So the album would seem to bring us another step closer to a world in which ordinary people spend a substantial part of the day thinking about fairies, and perhaps spell it “faeries,” and are not reluctant to listen to or even perform rock operas featuring these creatures. That’s a world that I’m curious to live in, although of course one has one’s reservations.
Here is a fact about fairy tales: people don’t often tell them anymore. You might read them to your children from books, but that’s different from telling them fresh as you remember them; and if you do tell one from memory it’s probably your memory of the version you read in a book, or that was read to you. That doesn’t mean fairy tales are over. It only means that the role played by fairy tale in The Hazards of Love may be different from the role played by fairy tale in Parsifal. What stories do people tell these days? I would like to listen to a rock opera about Watergate.
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