Thanksgiving in July

Saturday was one of those really rare stunning New York summer days -- hot and sunny but not sticky or heavy. It's been notably cool for July anyway, but to get true summer that's not disgusting -- that's a thing of beauty around here.

I went into the city to see my friend Heather, with the idea of hitting up some galleries. But they were all closed -- odd for a Saturday, but we guessed everyone was off in the Hamptons. So we did what we would have done anyway, which was walk and talk -- she's someone I can talk to all day and never get tired. We hung out on the 23rd Street pier for a while, which has gotten a nice makeover since I was last over that way. Everyone was out taking the sun, with sailboats tacking across the Hudson and the water sparkling. I could have jumped in.
Then we walked over to Tenth Avenue and climbed up to The High Line, which I've wanted to see since it opened last month. It's a length of elevated freight rail tracks built in the 1930s and abandoned in 1980, reclaimed at the beginning of the '00s as park space and spruced up super nice. It's all concrete and wood and steel in perfect proportion, filled with indigenous, New York State prairie-type plantings, and all sorts of great detailing that fits in with the existing cityscape -- no small feat when you consider the whole crazy pentimento effect of New York City in the 21st century. There are some ridiculously cool sleek highrises towering above it, and crumbly roofs from the century before last with rusty watertowers alongside. My favorite thing was a long stone wall of tall multicolored mullioned windows -- I'm a sucker for colored glass and this was really classy.
After walking and talking and walking and talking, we headed up to the Bronx and had a big grilled feast, salmon and corn and black bean/mango salsa and salad.

And then Sunday night? We had our friends John and Margarita and their dogs over for a big grilled feast, chicken and burgers and corn and summer squash and salad.

That was a lot of feasting in one weekend, a lot of talking and drinking and passing food around the table and pretending we didn't see Mr. Bonkers stick his entire head in the salad bowl, looking for cucumbers. Forget Christmas in July -- this weekend was our Thanksgiving in July. I can go back to my hermit ways for a while, but it was nice doing some extended bread-breaking with friends.
Sunday was the fourth anniversary of Milo's death. I didn't dwell on it much during the day, but this morning around 4 I woke up with a little indigestion, a little of the dreaded Monday hangover, and lay in the dark thinking about him. I'll always miss my boy -- he was a shooting star and his time with me was far too short. You know how when you're a kid you get this vision of how you're going to be as an adult, this very personal archetype that you either ditch or hang on to or some variation thereof? I always wanted to be a cool artist lady in a beat-up pickup truck with a dog in the front seat. Not a mommy, not a businesswoman, not a nurse or a fireman. She was it. And though I lost track of her for a while -- my childrearing years weren't really conducive to keeping that particular vision alive -- I got her back. I got to be the cool artist lady in the beat-up pickup truck, even if I was really a slightly geeky publishing lady in a beat-up Blazer, and Milo was that dog. He was the key that turned in the lock and gave me a second chance to be what I wanted. He was my good dog, sitting in the front seat.

The thing is, though, if Milo were still alive there's a very good chance we would never have adopted Dorrie. And she's my good dog too. It's just one of those things that there's no way to really think about in a straight line.

So I woke her up and pulled her into my arms with her head on my shoulder, and snuggled with my good dog until it got light out and I figured I might as well just get up. Milo always liked being held that same way, and I guess wherever he is he must appreciate the fact that I'm still snuggling in bed with a white spotty dog. Whatever else you can say about me, I sure do pick good ones.

Summertime and The Russian Prize

Summer's finally come to New York. Look, I'm not complaining -- it's the middle of July, and this is the first really irritatingly hot and sticky day that hasn't cooled off after the sun went down. Cold pasta, cherries, and wine for dinner, and the fans all going full-blast. When I turned on the floor fan in the living room -- first time this year -- a huge dust bunny came skittering out and Francis went crazy. He chased it, then he stalked it, then pounced. It had to have been a hell of a disappointment. The tenure of the other two cats has pretty much assured that this house is rodent-free, so he never gets to catch anything.

So my guest blogger gig at Bookninja is over as of tonight, since George is back. It was a lot of fun, and I hope that everyone who followed me there will keep checking it out on a regular basis. It's a really good joint. My fellow bloggers were awesome too -- they put me to shame, honestly, with all their energy. I see they all kept up with their personal blogs just fine. But hey, we all do what we can do and anyway, I have a few tricks left up my sleeve. Stay tuned.

Earlier this evening I was reading various newsworthy items and got myself worked up into a whole bloggy lather with one of my usual rants, which is how I dearly wish to see the farthest corners of world literature spread around to all readerly consciousnesses -- seriously, it should be as accessible and unscary as world music has gotten, and available in Starbucks as well -- and I came upon Margarita Meklina's account at The Quarterly Conversation of her trip back to Russia after winning the Russkaya Premia literary prize.

It's a good story, dark and touching. The other finalists she mentions, though, just stopped me in my tracks. Not so much the creepy wanking Ossetian, but Boris Khazanov, hoping to be handed a literary prize from the same state that jailed him for six years in the 50s for anti-Soviet propaganda. How in the world could that feel? Literally, how in the world -- a Google search of his name turned up some Russian language books and a Boris Khazanov who lives in New Hampshire and gave money to Obama's campaign. The one I want is a German expat, whose speech focused on "language, which becomes frozen in immigration as though in a fridge."

Or Andrei Nazarov, whose family was killed in the Revolution and who said the award should go to Nabokov and Bunin, who never received such a prize from their own government. The backstorie seems as far from the American literary prize machine as you can get, and I'm hungry to know more. Nazarov shares his name with a pro hockey player, and while I realize it's fully possible to both play hockey and write -- hey, I can -- I doubt they're the same person.

So for all my grand ideas of world literature for the people and how it would make us better citizens of the universe, I end up only being as good as my search engine, and I end up feeling very solidly American. But Meklina's essay is a really wonderful window into a whole different room, and I appreciate that. It's a big internet, and I like it that way.

Did I mention that it's hot? The dog is hot, the cats are hot. We've gotten off easy so far, but I guess summer's here now.

Open Letter

Dear Teenagers of Kingsbridge,

First of all, we want to give you credit for having gotten hold of all those fireworks. Really, we think it's SO cool you were able to talk your Uncle Sonny into picking up that big bag of them when he was down in West Virginia last month, and we commend you for not having blown off any of your fingers. Seriously.

But can we give you some advice? They don't go bad. You can save whatever you have left over for next year, and they'll still be fine -- you don't HAVE to set them all off tonight. What if you can't get any next year? What if Uncle Sonny gets caught violating his parole and can't make it down to see that guy he knows? You'll be really, really glad to have a few laid away for the Fourth of July, 2010. Just hide them in the back of your sock drawer -- when your mom find them she'll be so happy they're not weed she'll forget she ever saw anything. Really. I'm a mom. I know.

To tide you over until then, check out the Museum of Firecracker Label Art. They're quite beautiful, and they won't scare the dog.

(via Coudal Partners' Museum of Online Museums)

Some Days

There are some days, Mondays in particular, when halfway down the hill from my house and headed toward the train I find myself in a state of real befuddlement. If I stop and think about it I understand perfectly well what's going on, but otherwise my forebrain, chugging along, remains perplexed: What the hell am I doing here? Why on earth am I leaving my lovely, sunny, comfortable house and the company of my sweet animals to go to work? Wasn't I just there a few days ago?

It's not like this is an unusual situation. I go to work pretty much every weekday of my life, barring a couple weeks of vacation scratched out of the year, and it's not as though I don't like my job. For the most part I do satisfying, interesting work and these days it's rarely unpleasant or boring, and my office is in a stunning library building on a beautiful college campus. My commute is reasonable. Corporate culture does not encourage staying past 5:00. I definitely count myself among the lucky.

But that doesn't always cut it. There are some days when a regular paycheck, health benefits, and the promise of intellectual engagement just aren't enough. When twice the paycheck wouldn't be enough. I'm a nester, and I've feathered myself a seriously nice one -- kind of bowerbird-like, full of shiny crap and odds and ends, but that's how I like it. Some mornings I feel like I'm prying myself out of there with a psychic crowbar.

There have been times in my history when my home life was so lousy it was a relief to get to the office, and I dragged my feet when it was time to leave. I've worked hard to change that, and successfully. But the backlash is that now, if I didn't have to leave my home in order to keep it, I probably wouldn't, ever. Or at least not often. It's the nicest place I know.

If working from home was ever an option I don't doubt I'd eventually end up with cabin fever, but I sure wouldn't mind finding out for myself.
Speaking of working from home, I'm going to be doing a bunch of that in addition to my day job, because thanks to all your love and support I've been voted one of Bookninja's guest bloggers for the first two weeks of July. The whole process reminded me a bit of running for Class President in fourth grade -- not so much the nature of the competition as that it was the only other time I've ever been up for any kind of mass election. And I remember my mom, when I came home glumly announcing that I had withdrawn from the race because nobody really liked me, saying in the way that all card-carrying moms do, "But honey, it's not a popularity contest." And I remember staring at her with incredulity that she could even think of pawning off such bullshit on me, because of COURSE it was a popularity contest. What else could it possibly be? Even though I was nine and still kind of wide-eyed about the world, I remember her credibility suffered for that one.

So this is my revenge on fourth grade. Everyone set your RSS feeds to Bookninja -- the guest blogging commences on July 2, but you should all be reading it now. Thanks for the love, guys.

[And upon careful cross-platform reading, I see one of my fellow guest bloggers, Sarah, has also invoked student council elections. I'm guessing there's a definite pathology at work amongst us all...]

Don't Cry for Me, Mappa Mundi

Oh goodness, it’s been a while. It really wasn’t my intention to extend my respectful moment of silence for Readerville quite this long, but there have been distractions. Among other things, I’ve been ahhhhh… hiking the Appalachian Trail of the blog world, ifyouknowwhatImean. It’s OK, Mappa Mundi knows about it. We’re cool.

And I actually do have a few things to say, but the middle of the workday isn’t an optimal time for anything involving deep thoughts, literary or otherwise (other than, “No, no, I really think you need a comma here. No, really. Seriously, look…”). However: I realize I’ve been pretty negligent in certain avenues of self-promotion, and need to ask all my faithful readers, if they haven’t already, to vote for me for Bookninja guest blogger. I was doing a good job of playing it cool and detached all week, but with this recent post George has done a good job of whipping me into a competitive frenzy (OK, not that hard to do). So vote for me! Today, if you don’t mind. Thank you, thank you, I love you.
And I'll be back later with some real stuff.

Still Looking Up

I loved Readerville. Unapologetically, no irony, no reserve of cool to draw on. When I first joined almost exactly six years ago I had friends who read copiously and passed books around, I was adventurous about picking things I'd never heard of off the library shelves, and I had piles of those beautiful little Common Reader catalogs dogeared and marked up with Sharpies. But finding a place where a bunch of smart, snarky people wanted to talk books and pretty much just roll around in them, that was like coming home.

I met a lot of excellent people there, many of them face to face -- really good friends who will be friends for life. I met the man I love and live with on Readerville. And while I suppose it's remotely possible our paths might have crossed otherwise, the chances of a girl from the Bronx and a boy from Texas meeting up randomly, no matter how much they both love reading and old movies and cooking with cast iron, would have been awfully slim otherwise. When I first started posting there I was working a deadly boring office manager job, and as I realized how comfortable I was immersed in a bookish world it also occurred to me that I could possibly scrape a living out of it (this being in the days when you could). And when I got laid off five years ago I decided it was now or never and took the plunge, found a cool job at entry-level wages, nearly starved, but never looked back. And when Karen offered me the gig blogging for Readerville, I thought about it for five minutes and then jumped in. As much work as it turned out to be, dutifully plowing through RSS feeds every night after dinner and through many a lunch hour, I loved it -- loved figuring out what the hell I was doing, working on the craft of it, and finding myself in the middle of a whole litblogging community I hadn't known about. A year ago I would have laughed my head off at the phrase "litblogging community." Now I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to keep the momentum going, because I like doing this.

I'm sure most people read my last blog post on Readerville Friday and rolled their eyes, thinking I was being awfully drama queeny. But I knew that Readerville was closing up shop and I meant it as a bit of an elegy, and also as a reminder -- to myself as much as anyone -- that there's always a next thing, so long as you keep looking up.

I'm posting it again here. Sorry if you've read it - indulge me, OK? It's the best goodbye I could muster to a place that meant a lot to me. Thanks, Karen, and everyone else there who made it feel like my favorite local watering hole -- overindulgence, bar fights, fixed pool games, generous pours, kisses, and all.

Anyone who's spent time in Readerville's Judging A Book thread knows that for the past few years one of the most common book cover tropes has been shoes -- big and little shoes, shoes next to feet, you name it. Shoes have become a standard Readerville snowclone, especially when talking about book design -- for a while there orange was the new shoes, and antique labels, and hand-drawn type.

Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me, back in 2005, was an early adapter. The first galley I got my hands on at this year's BEA was also his -- Await Your Reply, out in September from Ballantine. Looking at that expanse of clouds on the cover got me thinking, and then comparing galleys with fellow Book Expo visitors. So it's settled: This year, sky is the new shoes.

In the next six months alone we have Iain Banks' Transition, Kate Braestrup's Marriage, and Other Acts of Charity, Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, Amanda C. Gable's The Confederate General Rides North, Lauren Grodstein's A Friend of the Family, Ha Jin's A Good Fall, Naseem Rakha's The Crying Tree, and Richard Russo's That Old Cape Magic. All of them feature low horizons or no horizons, with skies blue or gray, cloudy or clear. Some have birds, some have folks.







But the message maintains: Look up, not down! Publishing, the country, the entire world is unsure and in flux; things are changing, and not always as we wish they would. There is the temptation to stop in our tracks and look stubbornly down to see if in fact the earth isn't shifting under our feet. But we as readers know that books are microcosms of the world, whether in sympathy or as fantasy or fact, and their covers have advice to offer us all, right there out in front. Enough with the shoe-gazing, enough self-absorption. It's time to move past the personal to the universal, to expand our horizons outward, to see what these times want from us. Nearly 100 years ago E.M. Forster advised us to Only Connect, and it's time, again, to remember.

The world is changing. Look up, up and out.

This Tall

So everyone has been saying to me in pointed fashion, "You're still going to blog, right?" And to one and all I reply, No. Never again. I'm through with this blogging thing forever.

Kidding. However, there is this issue now. For the entire month of May it was understood, sometimes implicitly and sometimes very explicitly, that I was blogging to meet my daily requirement, and if I didn't have anything in particular to say I was damn well going to say it anyway. But now if I put something up, it's because I have a point to make. It's like having a dinner party as opposed to cooking something on a Tuesday night after work so we don't go to bed hungry. Doing the blogathon absolved me of all fear of self-importance. It was like the opposite of irony. (Wait... what? Well, I knew what I meant when I typed it a second ago.)

So just to throw off that yoke of heaviness, I'd like to share something with you, my readers:
I bank at HSBC, and every HSBC branch in the city has this tape mounted to the side of every exit door, with heights from 4'-6" to 6'-6" calibrated on it. Presumably there is a security camera aimed straight at it so as to record any criminals on their way out. And for years and years now, without fail -- probably on the average of twice a month -- I have never walked out of an HSBC bank without saying to myself, "You must be THIS TALL to rob the bank." And, silently, laughing my fool head off for a moment.

So now you know just how deeply dorky I am. I hope you people are satisfied.