Dirty One

Here's the Band of Thebes' List of the Best LGBT Books of 2011. As a contributor, I get to say a few words about Michael Graves' excellent first book, the story collection Dirty One.



For just a few minutes this morning, The Drake throws its shape on some buildings a few blocks away.

This Post Needs a Good Title

I haven't looked at this--I hardly ever look at videos of myself--but the Sunday Salon just put up a snippet of my reading from last April (as well as readings from Ben Hale, Emma Straub, Jess Row, Justin Taylor, Kathy Fish, Elizabeth Eslami, and others). I'm not even sure what I read, but my guess is that it's the opening pages from The Narrow Door. Or maybe something else? You can let me know.

Sunday Salon Readings

Lucky

Maybe it was because my ten-day sinus infection was just about out of my system, or maybe it was that the end of the semester was days away. I was feeling lucky, so I took the train to Atlantic City. Not because I cared at all about gambling, but because I wanted to see, hear, and smell the sea. (Wouldn't it be better to do my school prep on the train, in motion, instead of inside the four walls of my apartment?) So these photos come from my two hours on the boardwalk last Sunday. I did end up leaning into a slot machine on my way back to the station, and just when I felt vaguely bored and sick from distant cigarette smoke and annoyed with myself for losing close to 40 bucks, which could have gone toward a shirt or shoes or bills or food, some electronic bells went off, and I ended up winning 75, thus leaving the rundown town with an extra 35 in my pocket.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

They Call You An Animal

Though I've already posted these links on Twitter and Facebook, they're too good to pass up here. The entirety of Kate Bush's wondrous 50 Words for Snow, which might just be her best album yet. (Listen to it soon, as I can't imagine it's going to be up for long). And a video segment of "Wild Man," the song that's getting the most play.

And Now for My Good News...

My memoir THE NARROW DOOR--my book about friendship and my late friend Denise--is coming out from Graywolf Press in 2014.

Two Reviews

Two reviews this week:

Lovely words on Myfanwy Collins' blog about The Burning House.

And a mention in a piece about the new Wag's Revue, which features "Palace of Empty Rooms," an except from my memoir The Narrow Door.

And stay tuned for some very good news, which I'll post in a little bit.

Replica (And Not)

Here I am on Plant Talk, the New York Botanical Garden blog. Some thoughts on the Swiss Mountain Pine--and otherness. Below that, "Flair," the piece I was asked to write last spring. You can look for it on a placard by the tree in question. It will be up in the Garden for the foreseeable.

Replica (And Not)

The sandy soil, the boggy ponds: whenever I feel an inexplicable sense of geographic safety (say, in parts of Cape Cod, coastal North Carolina, or Florida), I understand soon enough that I’m looking at a replica of my childhood backyard–or at least the woods and marshes nearby.

And yet I once wanted to be elsewhere. Or at least I wanted my plants and trees to be elsewhere. I wanted them to grow in unexpected shapes, leaves large as shovels. I wanted them to be a little scary, a little closer to life as I knew it, which felt to me both beautiful and a little brutal. (Don’t children always know that consciousness is darker than their parents remember?) On childhood trips to Florida or California, my eye went first to the plants. The plants in warmer climates weren’t bound to restraint or to the pressures of some unnameable force, the codes always changing, impossible to decipher. Their oranges could be brighter; their trunks could be thicker, their vines could grow and twist until they made a mess of themselves, until you had no idea that the plant had once been a beautiful thing.

The Swiss mountain pine, the plant that stirred my attention, struck me as one of those exotics when I first saw it last spring. Only later did I realize that the plant was something else. I’d pictured it growing on the hot slopes of Greece, the foothills of the Catalinas north of Tucson. In actuality, the Swiss mountain pine is a giant version of the sweet, benign mugo pines that my parents had planted decades ago, around the paper birches and cedar diadaras in their Southern New Jersey yard. As much as I liked our mugo pines, ours were no wider than basketballs. Here something familiar had gone large, stark, and mysterious, and maybe that was why my spine straightened when I first saw its crooked branches. Two contradictions fused: my childhood home, and my incessant longing for other.

*****

Flair (On the Swiss Mountain Pine)

Usually the trees of our region do not make statements of themselves. Usually they’re a sprawl of thick green, never one, never singular. Austerity is a part of this tree's flair.  It stops you in your walking.  You want to touch its cones and needles, though you wouldn't dare.  This tree makes you wish there were more trees like this around, trees that take you somewhere, trees that shake you out of yourself, trees that conjure up animals. You never wanted comfort or obliteration, though you’ve been led to think you should want those things. You want to smell the resin. You want to be pulled into the work of comparison, so you are not just looking at the tree, but looking at yourself too, whether you know it or not. The nouns start flying: a chandelier, a menorah, a torch, some antlers, a sea fan.

Elisa's Interview

This interview went live on Elisa Rolle's website on October 31st.