Mark Saves the Night!

Mark held open the front door of our building for me. I was already heading to the stairs when I turned around to hear him say calmly, "I don't think you belong here." The kid, already inside, did a complete turn and walked out. Mark and I looked at each other, blinking, quiet, before Mark bolted the front door. Awareness clicks, and even if he wasn't going to rob us, he was probably going to rob someone, or at least try to. It turned out that Mark had already seen him, a ratty white kid in peacoat, skull cap, and huge sunglasses, walking toward us down 16th. Sunglasses in the dark? At some point, he must have turned and followed us; we probably had the look of people on their way home, unguarded. In any case, trouble averted: a little sense of menace like a struck match. But I'm still puzzled: I hadn't seen nor heard any of it coming. This kid was quiet.

Anyway, two pictures of our weekend in the Hamptons, which was happy despite the cold, sloppy wet. Mark reading at the wonderful Canio's Books in Sag Harbor. And our motel, the East Hampton House, at night.

Fantastic Glorious Mess

from The Colossus of New York: A City in 13 Parts
Colson Whitehead

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey's, or, That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mop-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it. Maybe you were in a cab leaving the airport when the skyline first roused itself into view. All your worldly possessions were in the trunk, and in your hand you held an address on a piece of paper. Look: there's the Empire State Building, over there are the Twin Towers. Somewhere in that fantastic glorious mess was the address on a piece of paper, your first home here. Maybe your parents dragged you here for a vacation when you were a kid and towed you up and down the gigantic avenues to shop for Christmas gifts. The only skyscrapers visible from the legs of your stroller were the legs of adults, but you got to know the ground pretty well and started to wonder why some sidewalks sparkle at certain angles and others don't. Maybe you came to visit your old buddy, the one who moved here last summer, and there was some mix-up as to where you were supposed to meet. You stepped out of Penn Station into the dizzying hustle of Eighth Avenue and fainted. Freeze it there: that instant is the first brick in your city.



Friday Night, November 28:
--Skaters at Rockefeller Center
--Bergdorf's Window #1
--Trees Outside Tavern on the Green
--Bergdorf's Window #2

Signaling

In a little while we're headed out to the Hamptons, where Mark is giving a reading at six tonight at Canio's in Sag Harbor. (If you're out there tonight, stop by. I think they're planning a little reception.) So, for now, two recentish stories set in the Hamptons--or at least an imaginative Hamptons sans Paltrows and Sir Pauls and Diddys.

Above, my pictures of Fresh Pond in Amagansett from this past August.

I. "Georgica" from Things You Should Know
A.M. Homes

She has been watching them for weeks, watching without realizing she was watching, watching mesmerized, not thinking they might mean something to her, they might be useful. Tall, thin, with smooth muscled chests, hips narrows, shoulders square: they are growing, thickening, pushing out. Agile and lithe, they carry themselves with the casualness of young men, with the grace that comes from attention, from being noticed. These are hardworking boys, summer-job boys, scholarship boys, clean-cut boys, good boys, local boys, stunningly boyish boys, boys of summer, boys who every morning raise the American flag and every evening lower it, folding it carefully, beautiful boys. Golden boys. Like toasted Wonder Bread; she imagines they are warm to the touch.

She checks to be sure the coast is clear and then crosses to the tall white wooden tower, a steeple at the church of the sea.

She climbs. This is where they perch, ever ready to pull someone from the riptide, where they stand slapping red flags through the air, signaling, where they blow the whistle, summoning swimmers back to the shore. "Ahoy there, you've gone too far."

II. "Beach Town" from The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Amy Hempel

The house next door was rented for the summer to a couple who swore at missed croquet shots. Their music at night was loud, and I liked it; it was not music I knew. Mornings, I picked up the empties they had lobbed across the hedge, Coronas with the limes wedged inside, and pitched them back over. We had not introduced ourselves these three months.

Between our houses a tall privet hedge is backed by white pine for privacy in winter. The day I heard the voice of a woman not the wife, I went out back to a spot more heavily planted but with a break I could just see through. Now it was the man who was talking, or trying to--he started to say things he could not seem to finish. I watched the woman do something memorable to him with her mouth. Then the man pulled her up from where she had been kneeling. He said, "Maybe you're just hungry. Maybe we should get you something to eat."

Amy Hempel Chronicles

So we headed up to Lincoln Plaza to see Milk, thinking it wouldn't be as crowded uptown, and of course the 8:10 was sold out, the 9:10 was sold out, the 10.... We crossed Broadway; Mark and I talking away; we're passing a deli; he's holding open the door for... Amy Hempel! Running into Amy Hempel is always a happy thing. But how do you explain it when you've just spent a whole hour hunting down three Amy Hempel stories for this Monday's class? Not only that, but typed out the opening of "Beach Town," one of the three stories in question, in a file, for the next blog post? Out there on the busy sidewalk the three of us talked about dogs, literary awards, Milk--who knew James Franco is an MFA student in fiction?--and East Hampton, where Mark and I are headed in the morning. Still, the day had been given its subject. Currents, patterns, mystery, and who can begin to know the half of it? We walked into the Central Park dark.

Tonight, instead of "Beach Town," another Amy Hempel story, this one in its entirety. "In the Animal Shelter" from The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel:

Every time you see a beautiful woman, someone is tired of her, so the men say. And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn't want--these women who must live like the high Sierra white pine, there since before the birth of Christ, fed somehow by the alpine world.

They reach out to the animals, day after day smoothing fur inside a cage, saying, "How is Mama's baby? Is Mama's baby lonesome?"

The women leave at the end of the day, stopping to ask an attendant, "Will they go to good homes?" And come back in a day or so, stooping to examine a one-eyed cat, asking, as though they intend to adopt, "How would I introduce a new cat to my dog?"

But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave, leaving behind the lovesome creatures who would never leave them, had they once given them their hearts.

Black Friday!

from Anywhere But Here
Mona Simpson

My mom had gone shopping, so she could offer us things to drink. She'd been in the Linville Nutrition Center and bought pomegranate juice and carrot juice and celery juice and three kinds of kefir. Daniel seemed used to that kind of thing. When she asked him, he said he wanted peach kefir.

My mother brought out bags of cranberries and brand new needles and threads. She told us she'd seen gorgeous strings of cranberries on a Christmas tree in a store window, prettier than popcorn, and so she thought we should make some. They were opening lots already, all over Westwood, the trees bundled together and stacked against walls.

We sat on the floor and started stringing. It was hard. The needles seemed thin and flimsy against the berries. We pricked our fingers and broke the cranberries and after a half hour, we each had only a short little stringful to show for it.


(Update: Reason to stay out of stores today. Worker dies in crush at Green Acres Shopping Center, Valley Stream, Long Island.)

Active, Green

The snake plant stands in its red clay pot, on the kitchen windowsill, adjusting itself to its new position: the light, the heat, the drop in humidity.

I'm thinking about the snake plant because, in years past, it came back to the city, traveling on the ferry in a heavy-duty shopping bag, much earlier in the season. We keep the heat off when we're not around, and snake plants can shrivel and burn when the temperature falls into the 40s. It just happens that Fire Island is near impossible to get to off season. Two ferries a day, one at 6:45 in the morning, another at 3:15, and I couldn't find a way to get out there with my schedule of the last month. So I was prepared for the worst. I'd actually pictured the worst: a brittle, dried out plant. Not even a plant anymore, but something else entirely: pale golden spears. I saw them break when pushed with the tip of a finger. It didn't help that the temperatures dropped to 23 on Long Island last weekend, with winds at 40 miles-an-hour. At least according to the forecast. The whole dilemma brought to mind something Joy Williams said earlier this year in Ecotone, where she admitted that she was open to the idea that plants have emotions and feel pain. And this was the snake plant I'd lugged around, wherever we went, for years! The snake plant that had spent the better part of the spring semester leaning toward the weak, winter light of Ithaca on top of a metal filing cabinet, in a rented house!

Well, the outcome of the story's pretty obvious. The snake plant lived. The snake plant is doing fine: active, green. And none too worse for wear. And that's my good omen for this Thanksgiving, 2008. I am thankful for the snake plant's persistence, stubbornness. And am already telling it it will never happen again.

For you, proud snake plant: a bit from Joy's great story, "The Yard Boy," which references a Spanish bayonet--perhaps a distant relative?

The rabbit's-foot-fern brightens at the yard boy's true annoyance. Its fuzzy long-haired rhizomes clutch its pot tightly. The space around it simmers, it bubbles. Each cell mobilizes its intent of skillful and creative action. It turns its leaves toward the Spanish bayonet. It straightens and sways. Straightens and sways. A moment passes. The message of retribution is received along the heated air. The yard boy sees the Spanish bayonet uproot itself and move out.

We Love Mike Albo! (Or: You Hiroshima Callahan)

I. from Junk Mail Poems

#6
This is incredible, craftspeople:
a tissue in a curlicue droop,
lustrous with a brunt tropasphere.

#7
A hot little shit fucking a teacup
offers healing and stress dissolving services.
He can manipulate the price
and provide baseball viruses.

#8
Are you ignoring me, Axiology,
killing your russian bitches.
Dear friend, this is a limited chance.

You hiroshima callahan.
Disguised in your real estate and geology,
your corporeal velours.

II. Today's Critical Shopper column in the New York Times: "West and Green: The Cost-of-Living-Stylishly Index"

III. The Underminer: Constantly Hugged Goats!



Mike Albo's website.

Thanksgiving Eve, Fire Island

Photos:
1) The Beach at Nautilus Walk
2) Houses along Ocean Walk
3) Empty Ferry Back to the Mainland
4) Out Ferry Window

Thanksgiving Eve Playlist. Some of the songs we packed to tonight.

Rebound

Mark got in from Houston sometime late last night, and we're off to the Fire Island house in a while to pick up some things to take back to the storage unit. Some time ago I mentioned that that house is up for sale, and we're just waiting on the closing date for a new summer place, an hour east.

We've spent so little time on Fire Island since the end of summer--odd considering how much I've loved the house, the woods, the birds, the beach. The deer wandering around like household pets, curious, eager to be spoken to, fed. The sound of breaking waves, from a block away, inside the living room. No cars. But at a certain point the hardcore summer weekend party culture killed it for us. What do you do when your two next door neighbors turn the outdoor speakers up at 2 PM, and keep it going till midnight, even when you've asked them politely, kindly, to turn it down over and over? And we thought we could work around it, past it.

So I've come to think of that house as the rebound relationship after our 15-year marriage to Provincetown. Fire Island is the boyfriend who's almost too handsome to look at straight on, but likely to simmer and sock you in the arm when you least expect it. I had a boyfriend like that once, but that's another story.

Anyway, a few pictures of the house taken by our good friend Luis Caicedo. These were done for Shelter magazine at some point early last year, though they never ran the piece. Rest assured, we don't live like this all the time.

A Few More NBA Accessories

Above: Mark, NBA finalist Patricia Smith, and me. The photo was taken at Cipriani by Patricia's husband Bruce DeSilva. (See Patricia's dazzling poem, "Voodoo VIII: Spiritual Cleansing and Blessing," a couple of posts back.)

Two entertaining links:

Click here for the NPR broadcast of the winning writers' readings from the finalists' event at the New School the night before.

Click here for the Book TV broadcast of the ceremony. The awards part of the evening starts a little past the halfway point.

Investigating it All

The Late, Eminent, and Beloved Mr. Arden, well featured in Fire to Fire. (Photo by Kathy Graber)


Yoko
by Thom Gunn

All today I lie in the bottom of the wardrobe
feeling low but sometimes getting up
to moodily lumber across rooms
and lap from the toilet bowl, it is so sultry
and then I hear the noise of firecrackers again
all New York is jaggedy with firecrackers today
and I go back to the wardrobe gloomy
trying to void my mind of them.
I am confused, I feel loose and unfitted.

At last deep in the stairwell I hear a tread,
it is him, my leader, my love.
I run to the door and listen to his approach.
Now I can smell him, what a good man he is,
I love it when he has the sweat of work on him,
as he enters I yodel with happiness,
I throw my body up against his,
I try to lick his lips,
I care about him more than anything.

After we eat we go for a walk to the piers.
I leap into the standing warmth, I plunge into
the combination of old and new smells.
Here on a garbage can at the bottom, so interesting,
what sister or brother I wonder left this message I sniff.
I too piss there, and go on.
Here a hydrant there a pole
here's a smell I left yesterday, well that's disappointing
but I piss there anyway, and go on.

I investigate so much that in the end
it is for form's sake only, only a drop comes out.

I investigate tar and rotten sandwiches, everything, and go on.

And here a dried old turd, so interesting
so old, so dry, yet so subtle and mellow.
I can place it finely, I really appreciate it,
a gold distant smell like packed autumn leaves in winter
reminding me how what is rich and fierce when excreted
becomes weathered and mild
but always interesting
and reminding me of what I have to do.

My leader looks on and expresses his approval.

I sniff it well and later I sniff the air well
a wind is meeting us after the close July day
rain is getting near too but first the wind.
Joy, joy,
being outside with you, active, investigating it all,
with bowels emptied, feeling your approval
and then running on, the big fleet Yoko,
my body in its excellent black coat never lets me down,
returning to you (as I always will, you know that)
and now
filling myself out with myself, no longer confused,
my panting pushing apart my black lips, but unmoving,
I stand with you braced against the wind.

The New World II (Happy Thanksgiving)

The New World I (Happy Thanksgiving)

A. "I Dream'd in a Dream" from Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman

I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the
whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love--it led the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.

B. "New World" from Selmasongs
Bjork

Threaded With Lightning and Hurt

Voodoo VIII: Spiritual Cleansing & Blessing
from Blood Dazzler
Patricia Smith

There's no deception like the world after rain.
Suddenly God is everywhere,
winking from dumpster rivers,
using the insistent perfume of plain water
to scrape funk from alleyways and men.
In the seconds after storm,
we sign on for brash little resurrections.
We lose those ten pesky pounds,
resolve to enthusiastically fuck dim spouses,
stop reaching across breakfast tables
to slap our children into silence.
We straighten framed blacklight squares
of The Last Supper, musing upon the wide
sad eyes of wept clarity and looming doom.
And we are comforted until the sun
blazes the stench forward, rebirthing rot
and workdays. Then His eyes are dry,
threaded with lightning and hurt,
and we are reminded, again,
just what He's capable of.

Vacation (And I'm Not Talking Belinda Carlisle)

Madison Smartt Bell's review of Deb Olen Unferth's Vacation in yesterday's New York Times Book Review was the kind of enthusiastically mixed assessment that made me much more interested in the book than if it were uniformly positive. Below, the opening three paragraphs of the title story of DOU's wonderful Minor Robberies, a collection of short short stories that came out last year.

from "Minor Robberies"
Deb Olen Unferth

One of the sisters says they were robbed three times in the first town. She wants to call it three times and believes she has the right to. When they left the hotel room, someone robbed it, she says, and when they left the hotel room again, someone robbed it again. And when they stood at the desk and waved their hands at faces blank as zeros, someone robbed the room a third time. And then they rode away through the countryside like bandits run out of town, although the bandits were behind them.

It makes no difference that all three took place in the same room, same hotel, from the same bag, and by the same person, presumably--a little boy, she believes, whose mother slid him through the window. Some things were different. Light. Time. Herself, for example.

It was once, says the other sister, the elder. In the first town, once.

A Country in His Closet

I spent an hour today digging up old reviews for a university that’s interested in hiring me as a visiting professor. It’s a mark of the Doty-Lisicky’s peripatetic life that those reviews could have been in one of five places, in three states:

1) a box in the Houston condo
2) a box in the attic of the Fire Island house.
3) a box in the storage unit in North Truro, Massachusetts, that contains a third of the furniture from the Provincetown house sold back in 05.
4) A box in the storage unit in the aptly named town of Bohemia, Long Island.
5) A box in the bottom of my closet in the Manhattan apartment.

Luckily, option #5 came through. But my closet, like most closets in Manhattan, holds a veritable country of clothing and papers. It goes through periods of meticulousness and confusion. Right now it’s confusion. My closet insists that entire regions of it remain out of reach in order to maintain order. But I needed that box, which meant that I had to take out every shoe, boot, container, etc. You get the picture. Maybe. Thank God no one else was around to see the disaster I'd made of the bedroom. It took me a good hour to put the whole thing back together again.

So I found the reviews. I don’t mean to blow my horn, but…not bad. I don’t think I’ve ever read a review without keeping one eye closed, as if in waiting for the snake to spring out and bite me on the mouth. And I’m certainly not in the habit of thinking about them, positive or not. So I’ve probably never approached a single review of mine with a clear head. But, for some reason, I could practically do that today, as if I were reading about a different writer, with whom I'd had some passing, friendly acquaintance.

How could I have missed this funny bit, from the October 1999 Flaunt? It’s part of a review that considered both Lawnboy and Jim Grimsley’s Comfort and Joy. (See, in particular, the last three sentences.)

… Any novel that opens with dual quotations from Hart Crane and Charles Ludlam is bound to defy all reasonable expectations, and Lawnboy certainly does. “Once a week,” the teenaged Evan narrates, “I went to William’s house, mowed the lawn, weeded the garden, and had sex.” Sex with William that is: fortysomething, divorced, and the first stop on Evan’s Holden Caulfield-esque journey to manhood. Paul Lisicky has a bright, narrative style... [etc. etc. etc. etc.] That aside, I’d love to push him onto a waterbed with Jim Grimsley and see what develops. Lawnboy will mow your lawn and trim your hedges. It gave this reviewer both Comfort and Joy.

Frozen Fountain

And it's really that cold in New York. Yesterday afternoon, Jackson Square Park: Eighth and Greenwich Avenues.



from "Goodbye to All That" in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting to a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, 'new faces.' He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on his back. 'New faces' he said finally, 'don't tell me about new faces.' It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he bad been promised 'new faces,' there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas tree glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

It would be a long while because, quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way. I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.

Two New York Dogs for Today

I) A French Bulldog eager to get into our building



from "Ediya: an Interview" in Without Saying
Richard Howard

We must never forget that none of us is
infallible—not even the youngest. Now
suppose you start your contraption, just to see ...
If something goes wrong this time, we could
always send out for tapes, whatever they are—
that poor boy seemed to think everyone had some,
didn't he? Now I'll just say a few words. [Now
I'll just say a few words.] Wonderful! Let's begin ...
Daisy, please stop that! She doesn't like machines,
and to be honest with you, neither do I ...
I side with Daisy—with all dogs, actually,
provided they're small enough to hold on my lap;
you know what I mean, there's a kind of profane
immortality to be achieved by moving
down the scale of such creatures—if that's down ...
(There, she'll be quiet now: no more protesting.)
Of course you're right, it is useful: recording
what's been spoken makes for a sort of judgment
on speech, anyone's speech. As we're reminded
each time the police are obliged to warn us:
Whatever you say may be used in evidence
against you. Has that ever happened to you?

II) A Yellow Lab considering a purchase at Three Lives Books



From Flush
Virginia Woolf

From such phrases, from the accent of praise or derision in which they were spoken, at the pillar-box or outside the public-house where the footmen were exchanging racing tips, Flush knew before the summer had passed that there is no equality among dogs: there are high dogs and low dogs. Which, then, was he? No sooner had Flush got home than he examined himself carefully in a looking-glass. Heaven be praised, he was a dog of birth and breeding! His head was smooth; his eyes were prominent but not gozzled; his feet were feathered; he was the equal of the best-bred cocker in Wimpole Street. He noted with approval the purple jar from which he drank--such are the privileges of rank; he bent his head quietly to have the chain fixed to his collar--such are its penalties. When about this time Miss Barrett observed him staring in the glass, she was mistaken. He was a philosopher, she thought, meditating the difference between appearance and reality. On the contrary, he was an aristocrat considering his points.

Some Fun (Way High & Way Low)

Above, a shot from the New York Social Diary. That’s Mark and me standing behind Joan Didion, Gita Mehta, and Sonny Mehta. A piece of my head in the New York Social Diary! Frankly, there’s no need to go on from here.

Outside the building as I type, Borders is setting up to record Mark for a 15-minute video. At any minute, they’re going to call him up on his cell, and he’s going to walk through the front door, like… Well, I was going to say Loretta Young, but I think I’m going to get in trouble for this.

(Update: I didn't get in trouble. Click here and you'll see what I mean.)

We came back from breakfast earlier to see heaps of trash blowing down the sidewalk in front of our building. The president of our co-op, who lives on the first floor, came to her window to thank us for picking it up. We told her about the camera crew on the way. “Really!” she said excitedly, scrunching up her shoulders. And now Mark and I are convinced she’s going to bound through the door herself, at the least appropriate interval.

I just walked to the window. He’s down there now. Is it just me, or are there more people than usual walking down the sidewalk on this frigid morning? A city of McGillicuddys.

Here are a few links that I thought you might enjoy:

Click here for a link to the piece in the New York Social Diary.

Click here for a description of awards night on the New Yorker blog. The reporter got her facts wrong, however. Mark and I married in Massachusetts, not Connecticut. I’d never be married in Connecticut!

Click here for a sweet video from Galleycat.

If you’re interested, C-Span’s Booknotes program is broadcasting the ceremony tomorrow night, Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 10 PM EST. It should be pretty interesting: fast, without filler. Both the presentation and acceptance speeches were all lovely.

One last thing: I forgot to mention that Mark borrowed one of my ear-flap hats for the video shoot. In exchange, I borrowed something else. A little bling. And he thinks I’m giving it back.

This is for you, Elizabeth.

Mothered into Art

Just in the door from a fantastic reading at Teachers and Writers Collaborative in Midtown, featuring Austin LaGrone, James Allen Hall, and Mark. I'd never heard our friend James read from a broad selection of his poetry before, and I'm still thrilling to the emotional depth, courage, and rigor of his work. As Mark and I said to him afterward, he not only makes us want to write, but to be braver in what we write.

Above:

1) Mark, Austin, James and the back of my head (photo by John Masterson)
2) Mark, James, and Jericho Brown, who was in town from San Diego for a week's worth of readings.

"Family Portrait" from NOW YOU'RE THE ENEMY
James Allen Hall

If I could turn the photograph, bring my mother's face
to the bright eye of myth, my unflinching lens,
you'd see she's mouthing the words: Take the picture already.

You'd see my father's lust, his loathing
molding her body into some four-legged
photogenic thing, whipped and adored.

You'd see my mother emerging from the ghost world
limb by limb, carrying on her bowed shoulders
Eros and his sadomasochistic twin.

In the dim violated light, she's marked
by a man who can't let any part of her go.
In the light my father makes in the dark,
I was mothered into art.

Competition vs. Camaraderie, Better Than Fine, Or: 2008 National Book Awards: Part IV

In the two days following Mark’s big award, I’ve been asked more than once, “What’s it like for you?” Or more likely, Mark’s been asked, “what’s it like for Paul?”

These questions are not exactly unrelated to “What’s it like to be in a relationship with another writer?” My typically affirmative answer never seems to satisfy the person who asks it. They want dirt. Or something a lot less extended, complicated. (Me and my examples.) Sometimes it’s hard to keep the frustration out of my eyes, the weird sensation that I have to fight away an old story being written onto me, us. Could it be true that so many see their relationships as being shaped by competition rather than camaraderie? Or are some simply saying what they think they’re supposed to say?

Here’s a passage from Tillie Olsen’s Silences that Mark put on his blog just a few days back. I ended up reading it to my class this past Monday, asking them to consider Olsen’s words as a possible politics for how we might approach our work.

Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals - not a prize-fight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or one good book less?

One of my students smiled afterward, suggesting Tillie Olsen wouldn’t have said that back in the days of Tell Me a Riddle when she was likely getting nominations for awards left and right. Fair enough: those words were written in response to decades of silence, writers block. They’re standing up against self-doubt, rage, frustration. Still, Tillie Olsen knew better than anyone that the real joys here are the joys of making. The work itself. Thinking, feeling, shaping. Awards are great when, and if, they come, but that’s all. Am I saying something familiar? Perhaps. But it doesn’t hurt to say it all over again.

This is probably the kernel of a longer essay about such matters, but rest assured that this blogger is, in the words of Fiona Apple, “better than fine.” Well, a lot more than that. He gets fan mail every week, is grateful for the affection and respect he receives from his fellow writers, students, and readers. More than enough to share in his partner’s joy and feel increased by it.

(Thank you, Lord Krishna! Borders is filming outside, rather than inside, the apartment tomorrow. On the sidewalk. Fuck housecleaning! I’m off to the gym.)

Odd Nouns Came Knocking: Donald Finkel

To poet Donald Finkel, who died this past Saturday of Alzheimer's Disease in St. Louis. Click here to read the New York Times obituary. And here for a brief autobiography.

“Burden”
Donald Finkel

Nouns were the first to slip away.
Was it because they were easier to forget,
or the most dispensable?
Funerals back then were milling
with nouns whose names he’d forgotten,
if he’d ever met them.
Evidently, somewhere out there
a swarm of improper nouns
had prospered and multiplied.
Odd nouns came knocking every day
looking for work, till the old bard
left off answering the door.
Verbs were beasts of another persuasion.
For a while some stayed behind,
pacing the halls or curled on the living room sofa.
But they had to be fed. Some nights
they sank their claws in his thigh
when they were hungry.
As the last syllable crept away,
he felt a peculiar lightness,
like the wisp that rises,
from a smoldering wick—
as if words were the burden
he’d been bearing, all his life.

Beneath the Empire State Building Tonight & Tina Chang's "Libretto"

"Libretto" from Half-Lit Houses
Tina Chang

An empire falls to a smoldering seed.
A voice fades from it. Pastries: little
purses of custard, red bean, a bit of mud.
The rotten city where smoke flowers
from her face, her lungs etched
in perfume. Shop signs: Chinese characters
contained in squares, the moon fixed
into a picture, strange glass she looks
into, angled little bones.

2008 National Book Awards: Part III

Just to let you know no one around here’s getting too big for his britches… we spent some hours today cleaning the apartment. I’m talking low-down-dirty, down-on-the-hands-and-knees cleaning. Borders is coming over this Saturday to shoot a video inside the apartment, and though we’d hoped to hire a housecleaner, our one possible point of contact—another poet who shall remain nameless here—has apparently driven all her former domestic employees into friendlier lines of work.

The two of us still aglow from the events of last night. I had a great time talking to any number of people—Frank Bidart, Joel Connaroe, A.M. Homes, Tony Hoagland, Marilynne Robinson, Ira Silverberg, Susan Wheeler, Marilyn Nelson, Robert Pinsky, Craig Morgan Teicher, Jayne Anne Phillips…. Any more and I would slug my own face for namedropping. Good spirit and love for books in the atmosphere.

And I got to shake Joan Didion’s hand!

And was offered a visiting position at an excellent graduate writing program, next fall, a very short commute away! Who would have expected that?

For those who care about such things, a picture of this blogger minutes before the car from HarperCollins came to pick us up last night.

And now back to that Swiffer.

We Wept (Or: 2008 National Book Awards: Part II)

Well.

Last night provided enough material for a dozen blog posts. How is it possible to contain one spectacular evening?

It doesn’t help that we went to bed after two, woke up at eight to ringing phone, and had too many glasses of red wine.

First, Mark’s citation:

Elegant, plainspoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty’s poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for their world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis. In this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master.

Damn!

We teared up this morning when we looked at the long list of National Book Award winners in poetry over the years. Twentieth-century American literature, and beyond.

I guess that could be the subject of this post: We wept. And the winner of the National Book Award in Poetry is… We wept. Well, I wouldn’t have predicted having to grab and cover the top part of my head with my hand. I missed his long walk to the stage. I composed myself enough to smile, heard Mark speak his thanks to editor and agent, heard enough even to catch my name in the air (to cheers and applause from the HarperCollins and Greywolf tables). Mark back to our side of the room, where Terry Karten, his editor, sprang out of her seat. I wish I’d had a video of the two of them standing together. Their hugs and smiles and moving hands.

Tears between us when we sat down again. Mark holding onto my hand. And the loveliest congratulations from all around.

There’s much more to say about the elegant space at Cipriani, the horribly crowded afterparty at Socialista, the two of us eating in a corner, at the one cozy table at Cafeteria at 1:30 AM. But for now I keep thinking of the car we took to the afterparty with Nam Le and—who was that funny, sexy woman in the front seat? Nam was coughing away, but somehow the coughing made him seem glamorous rather than sick. And the driver sped us around the lower tip of Manhattan. The lights of Brooklyn and Jersey City across the water, the towers right and left. And who gave a damn if the driver got lost along the way?

Click here for the NPR report, and Salvatore Scibona's description of Cipriani.

There's a National Book Award Winner in the House!

Interlude

On the way to the bank just now, I spotted the telltale movie lights aimed at a crowd on the north side of West 15th. (Stars! Pictures for my blog!) I came back from the bank only to see the lights shut down and a crowd of extras surging down the sidewalk, running toward and past me. Where we are going? a woman cried. I don’t know, someone else yelled, laughing. Policemen were running too, but who knew whether they were actors, or actual NYC cops. The extras clumped on the south side of the street, presumably to be ferried to the next location. It occurred to me that I could have stepped on line, joined the cast of the movie, and no one would have noticed a thing. But what about Mark? The big night ahead downtown? Passersby walked their dogs. Beside the lined-up extras a delivery man unloaded lemons from a truck, stacked them beside the back door of the West Side Market. I held up my cellphone but all the shots were boring. And no wonder people still raise a fuss about truth in nonfiction.

2008 National Book Awards: Part I

A long time waking up this cold morning, which might have something to do with the big night behind us, the much bigger night ahead. I’ve been to several National Book Awards ceremonies in the past. I’ve always had a great time, always enjoyed the fizz and hoo-ha of it. One year we sat with Steve Martin who glowed pinkly and kindly across the table. Another year I saw Edie Falco, whom I almost talked to but didn’t. Just about everyone in publishing is there. And it’s always high spirited and fun, everyone in tuxes and gowns, people happy to make contact. And all at once I’m remembering my old pal Lucy Grealy at the reception not too many years back, and the two of us throwing our arms around each other, as if to say, how the hell did we ever end up in this life?

Obviously, the situation’s a lot different when your beloved is a finalist. At the reception last night it occurred to me that we were doing that old thing couples do: if X is stressed out, Y isn’t. Only one at a time. X bearing the stress for Y? Not as simple as that, as the roles could shift at any minute. To illustrate, I nearly tripped into the reception while Mark breezed forward into the room. Not two seconds later I choked on a not-entirely-dissolved Altoid as I shook hands with Famous Critic. I ran into a friend of mine and he told me that he and his girlfriend are prone to the same thing, even as they laugh about it and know it’s lunacy. It occurred to me that my theory might be the hidden story behind "Heaven for Paul,” Mark’s poem about our near plane crash over Ohio. Why else was I the calm recipient of saintly vision while Mark nearly lost it?

Anyway, we both forgot about all that upon seeing our dear friends Michael and Luis, who looked exceedingly dapper and handsome. My two editors were there, Jon Rabinowitz and Fiona McCrae, and many hugs were exchanged.

I think I have to second Mark’s view that the poets were the stars of the reading, though I am no impartial observer. Frank Bidart, Reginald Gibbons, Richard Howard, and Patricia Smith gave impeccably poised readings, human and nuanced. And Mark probably gave the best reading of “House of Beauty” I’ve ever heard.

But I don’t mean to slight any of the prose writers. I’d venture to say fiction finalist Salvatore Scibona is no less a poet than any of the names mentioned above. I’ve been a fan of Salvatore’s work for at least ten years now, and it's wonderful to see his novel The End getting its do. Here’s a short excerpt.

He was five feet one inch tall in street shoes, bearlike in his round and jowly face, hulking in his chest and shoulders, nearly just as stout around the middle, but hollow in the hips, and lacking a proper can to sit on (though he was hardly ever known to sit), and wee at the ankles, and girlish at his tiny feet, a man in the shape of a lightbulb. He was faintly green-skinned, psoriatic about the elbows and the backs of knees, his shaven cheeks untouched by scars of any sort, faithful to a fault to his daily labors, grudgeless against the wicked world, thankful for it, even; a baker of breads with and without seeds, modest cakes, seasonal frosted treats; supplier to all neighborhoods and occasional passers-through; a reader of the p.m. papers, as all of his vocation are, born on the feast of Saint Lucy, 1895; a prideful Ohioan; a sucker of caramel candies when cigarettes he forbade himself from eight o’clock to two; possessor of a broad and seamless brow and a head of sleek black undulant hair, the eyes goonish, unnaturally pale and blue, set deep in the skull in swollen rain-clouded pouches, the eyes of one poisoned with lead, who had not in all his days addressed a piece of speech to more than two persons at once; a looker-right-through-you if he pleased, as old cats look, accustomed to suffering the company of others but always in need of privacy; the baker of Elephant Park; an unambitious businessman; a soul liberated from worry by luck and self-conquest; a weakhearted sparer of the rod with his boys; a measured drinker of spirits who prayed daily for the salvation of his sons and wife; a smoker nevertheless immune to colds and grippes; an ignorer of the weather; a lover of streaks, content and merciful; an unremarkable Christian.

Mark with Medal

I took this admittedly blurred shot in the lobby after the National Book Award Finalists reading tonight at the New School. I'd hoped to get more pictures but it wasn't that kind of event. I didn't want to be a cheeseball.

More in the morning.

Election Night Reprise: Chelsea

This short video is courtesy of novelist and art critic Linda Yablonsky, who lives nearby. This is exactly how it felt! And I'm there all over again.

I Am Tired of Metaphor

Paul Guest posted this wonderful poem on his blog the other day. I couldn't resist passing it along.

EROS POETICA
Paul Guest

Always bad form to say, to announce, this is
a poem, though I’m not sure why, as if
the few of us here with me in these lines
might have ever thought it anything
else: a letter or guide to constructing
something improbable, without discernible
parts, like love. Here I am, waiting
on the night to press up against
the world as though all my stillness
were penitence. Or practice
for your arrival, for your body,
the sum of all your cells, the billions
which you are. This is a poem
but a poem is also your hair
in the night, barely different, one from the other,
your hair in the composed night
above the bed. Bad form or
manners or rhetoric or what,
I don’t know, to say so
plainly some simple thing
like the sun dropping
past the rim of sight
is red because of particulate in the air.
Or the moon burns all
night because of stolen
light, that the tides stir
at the beck of a burning
parlor trick. But all this is true
and soundly unromantic
and has hardly any place
in the stuff of poems,
except that in thinking of you
all else fails the test
of artifice. No longer is there
any use in pretending
one thing is another.
I am tired of metaphor.
I want you, whether your soul
and mine are some elusive
shade or highest function
of biology, whether your heart
is the fist-sized knot
of muscle thudding away
beneath your ribs
and the modesty of your breasts,
or the fragile vase
in which you have carried
all your life, here to me,
from a river which even now is shining,
speaking to stone your name
over and again,
the only poem it knows or needs.

Storm Stories

I. Galveston, November 15, 2008
Shop Window: BEWARE OF OWNER, HAVE GUN


II. from "Waterwalkers" in Corpus Christi
Bret Anthony Johnston

As Hurricane Alicia drifted north-northwest up the Gulf Coast from Veracruz, Mexico, Sonny Atwill stood outside McCoy's Lumber hanging NO PLYWOOD signs in the windows. A gray, blurring rain blew over the parking lot, diffusing the headlights of cars waiting for empty spaces. Horns blared and bleated. In addition to the plywood being gone, the store was low on batteries, masking tape, flashlights, kerosene lanterns, bottled water, sandbags and propane. Originally the Hurricane Center had predicted that Baffin Bay, Texas, would bear the brunt, but revised reports had it heading for Corpus Christi, making landfall that evening. Sonny believed the storm would veer south, go in around Laredo; he'd projected its course with a grease pencil on his laminated hurricane map.

III. "Like a Hurricane" by Neil Young


IV. from "Shopgirls" in Moon Deluxe
Frederick Barthelme

"Once, there was a hurricane coming," she says, not talking directly to you but rather into the room and to herself, "my father required that we make all the preparations, and we checked the flashlights, counted the candles, drew clean water in the tubs and sinks, bought bottled water to drink, taped the huge gray windows in our house with gray duct tape, and nailed plywood over the smaller windows. He carefully plotted the storm's course on a chart he cut out of the newspaper. The storm moved very slowly. My father called the weather service often, cursing and slamming the phone down when he got a busy signal. When the storm finally got into the Gulf it stopped dead in its tracks for twenty hours, whirling itself into a two-hundred-mile-an-hour frenzy, and as the storm got larger and more powerful my father spent his time sitting silently by the radio, his head slightly bent, a coffee cup balanced on the arm of his chair. He wouldn't talk to any of us. He hushed us angrily when we tried to talk to one another. He was intent on the storm, and he sat up all night listening for new bulletins, marking and calculating on the crumpled chart in his lap. The radio spewed instructions about what to do in case of fire, what to do in case of flood, and also history--the great and dangerous hurricanes of the century. We were prepared, and as far as I knew the real danger to us was minimal; nevertheless a silence spread over our house like nothing I'd ever seen before...."

One Angry Dude!

I'm feeling bereft tonight that I don't have another protest to go to. Two in four days, one in New York, one in Houston. Well, maybe I just need to get my little butt out the door with sign in hand!

One of my friends said a funny thing about the pictures of Mark and me at Saturday's rally. You need to look angrier, she joked. And I totally agreed. I'd actually practiced making a livid face and giving the finger to some imaginary Focus on the Family member, but once Mark pointed the lens at me, well...

There's something difficult, actually, about keeping up the rage when you're talking about marriage. Sample chant: What do we want? GAY MARRIAGE! When do we want it? NOW! Say that three times and try not to smile. There was plenty of laughter and good spirit at both the New York and Houston protests last week, and I actually don't think any of that undermines the cause.

Maybe what I'm missing tonight is standing alongside my kind, not in some bar or at the gym, but out there on the street together. That kindness.

But just to prove I'm capable of looking mean when the need arises...

Run for your lives!

A Bit with Ms. Hempel (And I Don't Mean Amy)

Two passages from Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's Ms. Hempel Chronicles, parts of which I read with huge delight on the plane yesterday. FYI: Ms. Hempel, the central character, teaches in a middle school.

I.

Jonathan Hamish was not at the talent show; he wouldn't be caught dead. He was the toughest, craziest kid in the eighth grade. He would have been expelled already if his mother hadn't been the French teacher, with dark rings beneath her beautiful eyes and fluffy hair pinned up with a pencil. Ms. Hempel knew a lot about Jonathan even before he became one of her students; his unpredictable violence, his cruelty to the weak and maladjusted. "You can see it in his eyes," said Mr. Radovich, the sixth-grade math teacher. "He's not the same as other bad kids." Jonathan's eyes were pale blue, with the same charcoal smudges beneath them: he had difficulty sleeping at night and would gallop up and down the apartment hallways, slapping his palms against the walls. His father played the romantic leads in Noel Coward comedies and was gay. According to his mother, Jonathan was terrified lest anyone should know; he played four different sports and said faggot regularly. But he loved his father and would run up to him proudly, and shyly, whenever Mr. Hamish found time to sit in the bleachers and watch his games.

II.

For the new seventh-grade curriculum, Ms. Hempel picked a book that had many swear words in it. She felt an attraction to swear words, just as she did to cable television, for both had been forbidden in her youth. Her father had considered swear words objectionable on the grounds of their very ordinariness. "Everyone uses the same old expletives over and over again," he said. "And you are not everyone." He grasped her cranium gently in one hand and squeezed, as if testing a cantaloupe at the farmers market. "Utterly unordinary," he declared.

But to Ms. Hempel, swear words were beautiful precisely because they were ordinary, just as gum snapping and hair flipping were beautiful. She once longed to become a gum-snapping, foulmouthed person, a person who could describe every single thing as fucking and not even realize she was doing it.

In this, she never succeeded. When she read This Boy's Life, when she saw shit and fuck on the page, she quietly thrilled. Then she ordered copies for the seventh grade.

Bedtime Poem

from "The Passion" in Gone
Fanny Howe

III. Once on a summer night
in a humid tunnel

sex was scheduled

but no baby faces
looking up the time

pure lust
like a tulip

budding between our chests

--and it was fun!
--and I would do it again!

Ghosty

I'm still trying to figure out why yesterday's visit to Galveston was so--stirring? melancholy? I honestly can't think of an adequate term tonight. I'd been looking forward to visiting the frequent getaway of our Houston years; I just didn't expect to see it in such a blasted state.

I assumed the most visible storm damage would have been along the seawall. Some of that was definitely true: the Balinese room gone; the bridge to the Flagship Hotel--think of it, a multistory hotel built on a pier, out over the Gulf--gone. But the worst of it was blocks inland, along the bayfront, in the historic area known as the Strand. That zone took on eleven feet of water and silt, and it just about killed every business for the time being, from shoe outlet to sushi bar to antique store. And towering over it all, a cruise ship in port, from which a loudspeaker warned passengers to return to the ship soon. Not that we saw anyone around to hear it. Reggae music--both complacent and little desperate, maybe some of both--chunked away from one of the decks, as if to remind people that it was okay to be on vacation beside a ruin.

Ghost town, war zone, Twilight Zone episode: it's hard not to rely on those tired tropes. The truth is, Galveston's always struck me as a place that's never quite gotten over that tragedy of a hundred years back. That's what gives the city its great soul. That's what makes it entirely itself, even as aspects of it remind me of a dozen other places: New Orleans, Atlantic City, Ocean City, Coney Island, Wildwood, Key West, Nags Head, Biloxi, Carolina Beach, Virginia Beach, Myrtle Beach, Daytona Beach. As if the wound at its center traumatized it and gave it several different personalities at once.

On the plane ride back to New York today, it occurred to me that I might already be eulogizing our time in Texas. A little over ten years ago, Mark and I and our two dogs and two cats moved into one of the houses around the Menil Museum. We taught, made friends, got to appreciate a part of the world that had initially baffled us. Our relationship with the place changed some once we bought a Manhattan apartment. I began teaching in New York; Mark commuted back and forth. A huge output of energy, often grueling, frustrating. Long separations, which were never really very much fun, though we pretended to ourselves--and to anyone else who asked--that it was okay. Endurance. Well, the good news is that Mark is finishing up his final weeks at the University of Houston. Come next fall, he starts a new position at Rutgers in New Brunswick, a fifty-minute train ride from Manhattan, so for the first time in years our work and home lives will be concentrated. From here, that seems like an impossible gift.

How is this relevant to Galveston? Well, looking out over that ghosty downtown, I couldn't help thinking about all the energy that had gone into making those shops run. And time. Time's indifference to what we do, how we do it. Our visit was like visiting a beloved city, one hundred years in the future, only to find out that the language we'd spoken was no longer in use.

(Above: the Balinese Room in its glory days.)

An Afternoon in Galveston

I. Four Photos: The Mermaid Pier, The House of Spirits, New Urbanism in Ruins, Mangels





II. "Galveston" by Glen Campbell


III. "Flee" from Colosseum
Katie Ford

When the transistor said killing wind
I felt myself a small noise

a call sign stubbed out
but still live where light
cut through the floorboards

and don’t you think I dreamed the light a sign

didn’t I want to cross
the water of green beads breaking
where one saw the other last

where the roof was torn
and the dome cried out
that the tearing was wide and far

and this is not just a lesson
of how to paint an X upon a house
how to mark one dead in the attic
two on the floor

didn’t I wish
but didn’t I flee

when the cries fell through
the surface of light
and the light stayed light
as if to say nothing or

what do you expect me to do

I am not human

I gave you each other
so save each other.

Prop 8 Protest, Houston, November 15, 2008