temporary home

I am safely ensconced in the Hudson Valley.

I've missed the Catskills.

never enough time

Everything is madness right now! I'd really like to post about:

• The thesis readings. What amazing peers I have, and how lucky I am to take these writers away with me as friends.
• So much family! Spontaneous visits from my aunt and uncle for whom "in St. Louis" means "in the neighborhood," and planned visits from the immediate family. Hooray for moral support and breakfasts out.
  
• Sherman Alexie's reading, which seriously lived up to all expectations. What a perfomer. The dinner aftwards was revealing in many ways that I won't go into. He asked us all what song we wanted played at our funeral; you get mad cred if you can guess what I said. He also kindly recorded his poem from IR's 25th anniversary edition. Bounce over to the IR blog for more on that.
• Blackberry coffee cake.
  
• This beautiful book, The Back of the Line, that showed up in my mailbox today thanks to the inimitable Jeff Parker.
• Motorcyle accidents.
• Small bits of good news that I don't feel like posting about but you can ask me about if you want.
  
• The fact that I'm leaving in 4 days. Seriously.
  

three years later

It's my thesis reading! Tomorrow night! Are you in Bloomington? Do you want to come hear me read?

Come to the Faculty Club at the Indiana Memorial Union! I promise my fiction isn't this full of exclamation points!

Saturday, April 21, 7:00 pm
Tracy Truels, Megan Savage, Carissa DiGiovanni, Monique Harris
(followed by reception at Tutto Bene)

Thank you Nikki Giovanni.

reading between projects

So, it's that time in the semester when I have very little time for anything other than wrapping up the major projects. Maybe you're in the same place? Here are three little reading tidbits for when you need a procrastination break:

• Chloe Hillard in The Village Voice has an interesting article about AGs, or Aggressives, a subculture comprised of predominately African American or Latina lesbians. I saw Daniel Peddle's documentary in last year's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on the same subject. I have mixed feelings on this issue: on the one hand, it's reassuring to see coverage of the diversity in the gay and lesbian community, but on the other hand, the rampant sexism that seems to be perpetuated in the community (this was stressed more in Hillard's article than in Peddle's documentary) in terms of attitudes toward femmes is profoundly disturbing. Also, while the documentary focuses on the women's limited career choices based on their often impoverished circumstances, the article skews toward the career-stalling choices some of the women from "better off" backgrounds make in order to maintain their appearances/lifestyles. Sample em both and weigh in.

• Having looked at a thousand houses with my parents over the course of my life (we moved a lot), I've often wondered about the appeal of the split-level ranch. Here's a fun little article on the subject. Turns out, wood paneling was once revolutionary.

• There's a new fiction editor at Esquire, and he's making his mark with fun pieces like The Napkin Project. This is an institutionalization of the age-old game in which you write a story on a napkin (if you're Laurel or me, you do this collaboratively while waiting for concerts to start). It's is a good one to sample over the course of several days. Check out, in particular, David Means, Daniel Alarcon and Julianna Baggott. Thanks for the tip, AD.
  

travels

So the Ledig House Residency has worked out after all. I've got my plane tickets, and I'll be heading to NY on Sunday, April 29th. I'll be in the scenic Hudson Valley until the 14th. After that, I'm heading down to the city, hopefully in time to make Mary Austin Speaker's reading with Jessica Baran and Bob Hicok. I'll be in the city until the 17th, if anyone wants to come out to play.

get yourself read to

Pop over to the Indiana Review Blog to listen to Tyrone Jaeger's eerie Civil War-era prose poem/short short, "Specter," on our new feature where IR authors read their work, the bluecast. IR is featuring 3 of Jaeger's pieces in our upcoming summer issue, 29.1. If you didn't get the official tiny teaser chapbook at AWP, consider this teaser #2.

kurt vonnegut 1922-2007

Hey, Kurt Vonnegut. I hope you are somewhere where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. I'm sorry for saying I should see you read because you were probably going to die soon. And I'm sorry that now I'll never get the chance. Thanks for this funny interview with Kilgore and for everything else.

rock 'n' roll days

Last weekend was Boxcar Books' annual Rock 'n' Roll Prom benefit for the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project. The theme was "Under the Sea" - lots of plastic shells and a decadent papier mache mermaid. I wore the most wonderfully hideous dress you can imagine - let's just say, picture the most decadent dress Melanie Griffith wore in Working Girl and add lace, ruffles, rhinestones and cleavage. Mostly we took polaroids, but hopefully I'll have pictures to post soon. Sadly, I missed most of the Pixies cover band. The ersatz "Iggie Pop" was very intense, but he wasn't Iggie Pop. He looked like he should be shooting up on stage, and his big move of night was to show us his wares. The highlight was definitely the "Sweet '80s and '90s Covers by Secretly Canadian's Best." My friend Sarah's husband and the rest of the band dressed up as the kids from The Breakfast Club, including drag versions of Molly Ringwald and a brilliant Ally Sheedy. Emilio Estevez was pretty compelling - earnest and also, "fit" as they say in Bend It Like Beckham - and he sang a mean "Eye of the Tiger."

In other Rock 'n' Roll news, my friend Matt's band Murder By Death is on perpetual tour - Europe now, but soon the US again - and they are also kickass. If they're playing near you, you should go see them. They put on a whiskey drinkin', bottom of the ocean scourin', old west saloon fightin' good time. Here are some of their sounds and moving pictures.

hip action

A few years ago I injured my hip literally "clowning around" with a friend of mine, a former Ringling Bros. performer. He had bright red curls and an imposing physique - a red nose looked startlingly incongrous on him. These past few days, the hip's been all twingy. I chalk it up to the storms. Like any good New Englander, I get the weather in my bones.

Laurel and Seamus came to visit for their birthdays

We saw these:

We ate peppers stuffed with stars. Sometime, I will show you a photograph of those.

They showed me this wonderfully funny animation sequence. And their interpretation of it (note my old kitchen):


We talked about Wittgenstein. Kind of a lot.

We saw Louise Gluck (insert oumlaut) read and she talked about wanting to hear the sound of a poet's mind on the page. I like that thought. I also really liked the first and second sequences of poems she read, the first of which involved horses (voodoo, Laurel says) and a burning field. The second of which involved girlhood and marriage. She proved not as crotchety as we expected.

We ate chocolate-dipped ice cream from the Chocolate Moose.

Laurel and I locked ourselves in the bathroom and sang the Billy Bee song. Everyone else was playing music we didn't know, you see, and singing beautifully and loudly and we didn't want to disturb em.

We had amazing Turkish food (mint in soup!) and I got to hear a story about an exciting but treacherous protest in Paris. Laurel has lots of photos of it on flickr.

We played speed Scrabble.

We ate (yes, we ate a lot) the aforementioned birthday Dutch Baby.

We read Eyeheart Everything aloud. Like this only without the robot and in Bloomington: