quoteworthy

"Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up. We love you so."

— Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are

coney island

I visited ole Coney on her off season with Mark and my dad. I used a Polaroid and my digital. My favorite is No. 1 and the happy accident of that car driving by.

quoteworthy

"I think "taste" is a social concept and not an artistic one. I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are to ourselves."

-John Updike

quoteworthy

"Keep looking at the bandaged place. That's where the light enters you."

Rumi

a gift

These are images from a southern recipe card pack gifted to me by Miss Sara Kaye Larson who is currently residing in Memphis. The recipes shown are fried green tomatoes, peach cobbler, and sweet potatoes with marshmallows. I relish how they are both beautiful and disgusting in turn which is pretty much the norm for southern cooking.

montgomery gets a compliment

1. Cross Garden - Prattville, Alabama
2. Cross Garden - Prattville, Alabama
3. Martin Luther King, Jr March - Downtown Montgomery
4. MLK, Jr. March - Downtown Montgomery
5. F. Scott Fitzgerald House Memorial
6. F. Scott Fitzgerald House - Front View (there's a side patio and back porch, etc)
7. Dexter Avenue Church
8. Historical Placard


BECAUSE Montgomery, Alabama just doesn't get compliments I have to share one. I gave Jimmy George Francis some tips of things to see in my hometown and this is his day one report:

Jimmy George Francis: Montgomery, Alabama is currently the GREATEST PLACE ON EARTH!!! I either hit the jackpot or everyone here is as friendly/fun/intelligent/hospitable/awesome as you! I hung out at F Scott Fitzgerald's old house last night and drank beer on the back porch! I also went to Tomatinos!...

You can see in the link that follows F.Scott Fitzgerald's house where he married Zelda Sayre. My mom dressed me up for summer tea and biscuit parties until I was ten. It's also a simple but no less lovely museum. There is a great quote by Zelda about the street when they lived there, "Every place has its hours...So in Jeffersonville (Montgomery) there existed then, and I suppose now, a time and quality that appertains to nowhere else. It began about half past six on an early summer night, with the flicker and sputter of the corner street lights going on, and it lasted until the quiet incandescent globes were black inside with moths and beetles and the children were called into bed from the dusty streets."

This is a link to the museum: http://www.fitzgeraldmuseum.net/index.htm

Tomatino's has great pizza and sits across from The Capri, the one remaining revival style theater.

Yes, My hometown was the cradle of the civil rights movement and you can't slap its wrist enough. That's more than fair. In relation to the civil right's movement, you can see Dexter Ave and attend the Martin Luther King, Jr. March (a no-music, stomp only procession to the Capitol in honor of MLK). Those are my favorites but of course there are museums and markers for the legendary Rosa Parks as well. Outside of that topic, we have a baseball team whose mascot is a biscuit (for the opening season game they shoot biscuits out of a cannon), insane folk artists who paint old refrigerator's, the Hank Williams Museum, and so many ghost stories you will require a steady influx of whiskey and ginger.

through the lens

These are assorted photographs from a show at The Palace of The Governor's. I was not supposed to be using my camera and there it is in the second photo.

new mexico history museum

The New Mexico History Museum opened a few months ago and it is enough on its own to draw one to Santa Fe. Of course, there is a timeline of the growth of New Mexico which was triggered by the Gold Rush and Tiffany's using the state as their source of turquoise. There is assorted memorabilia and photographs of local mines. The most memorable thing I learned was that, in a state of war, villagers were given a knotted rope and told to untie a knot every day. When they reached the last knot it was time to revolt. This may seem silly to some as essentially you could just count the knots, but I was fascinated by the care and process of preparation.
New Mexico was the stomping grounds for many an outlaw most notably Billy The Kid and so, there is quite a bit about him though only one photograph which seems appropriate for a good outlaw.
At one point, New Mexico housed an elusive atomic bomb test site and those living near it were forced into secrecy. Some quotes from them are featured in the gallery you may access below.
Some other treasures included D.H. Lawrence' satchel and its contents, antique cameras and typewriters, and lastly Pancho Villa's death mask. it seems absurd, disgusting even, that a villain's face would be cast. It is amazing though to see his expression when he died. They also have some of his weapons and photographs.

These photos are terrible because I was sneaking them. It was so not allowed but worth it.

You can view all of the photos I took including the contents of D.H. Lawrence's satchel here:

nm history museum

santa fe opera

Larry Levis - A Damn Grand Poet

Prepare yourself for one of my favorite poems I'm working on my syllabus and felt the need to share it with you good folk.

My Story in a Late Style of Fire

Whenever I listen to Billie Holiday, I am reminded
That I, too, was once banished from New York City.
Not because of drugs or because I was interesting enough
For any wan, overworked patrolman to worry about—
His expression usually a great, gauzy spiderweb of bewilderment
Over his face—I was banished from New York City by a woman.
Sometimes, after we had stopped laughing, I would look
At her and see a cold note of sorrow or puzzlement go
Over her face as if someone else were there, behind it,
Not laughing at all. We were, I think, “in love.” No, I’m sure.
If my house burned down tomorrow morning, if I, my wife
And son stood looking on at the flames, and if, then
Someone stepped out of the crowd of bystanders
And said to me: “Didn’t you once know. . . ?” No. But if
One of the flames, rising up in the scherzo of fire, turned
All the windows blank with light, and if that flame could speak,
And if it said to me: “You loved her, didn’t you?” I’d answer,
Hands in my pockets, “Yes.” And then I’d let fire and misfortune
Overwhelm my life. Sometimes, remembering those days,
I watch a warm, dry wind bothering a whole line of elms
And maples along a street in this neighborhood until
They’re all moving at once, until I feel just like them,
Trembling and in unison. None of this matters now,
But I never felt alone all that year, and if I had sorrows,
I also had laughter, the affliction of angels abd children.
Which can set a whole house on fire if you’d let it. And even then
You might still laugh to see all of your belongings set you free
In one long choiring of flames that sang only to you—
Either because no one else could hear them, or because
No one else wanted to. And, mostly, because they know.
They know such music cannot last, and that it would
Tear them apart if they listened. In those days,
I was, in fact, already married, just as I am now,
Although to another woman. And that day I could have stayed
In New York. I had friends there. I could have strayed
Up Lexington Avenue, or down to Third, and caught a faint
Glistening of the sea between the buildings. But all I wanted
Was to hold her all morning, until her body was, again,
A bright field, or until we both reached some thicket
As if at the end of a lane, or at the end of all desire,
And where we could, therefore, be alone again, and make
Some dignity out of loneliness. As, mostly, people cannot do.
Billie Holiday, whose life was shorter and more humiliating
Than my own, would have understood all this, if only
Because even in her late addiction and her bloodstream’s
Hallelujahs, she, too, sang often of some affair, or someone
Gone, and therefore permanent. And sometimes she sang for
Nothing, even then, and it isn’t anyone’s business, if she did.
That morning, when she asked me to leave, wearing only
The apricot tinted, fraying chemise, I wanted to stay.
But I also wanted to go, to lose her suddenly, almost
For no reason, and certainly without any explanation.
I remember looking down at a pair of singular tracks
Made in a light snow the night before, at how they were
Gradually effacing themselves beneath the tires
Of the morning traffic, and thinking that my only other choice
Was fire, ashes, abandonment, solitude. All of which happened
Anyway, and soon after, and by divorce. I know this isn’t much.
But I wanted to explain this life to you, even if
I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.
You have to think of me what you think of me. I had
To live my life, even its late, florid style. Before
You judge this, think of her. Then think of fire,
Its laughter, the music of splintering beams and glass,
The flames reaching through the second story of a house
Almost as if to—mistakenly—rescue someone who
Left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us.
Its desolation. And its eventual, brief triumph.

-Larry Levis

pollock "the deep"

degas "danceurs blues"

eggleston and the south

The book I'm writing begins in the 1960's South and so I have been collecting photographs and ads from Life's hanging around Salvation Army's, etc. for inspiration. Artistically, I keep coming back to William Eggleston. He brought respect to the color form and hails from Mississippi though he lives in Memphis now from what I gather. The photos he takes are so moving because they feel like so much of my childhood. When I think of growing up in a small town, I think of the subjects of Eggleston's photos: boys who gathered grocery store carts, the sprawl of overgrown fields, and perfectly coiffed old women. I lived in Alabama for seventeen years but hustled Christmas visits haven't given me an image of what it's like now, what still remains. I do notice a new strip mall every time I go home and that all but one Dairy Queen has gone out of business. It took about ten years, but I am deeply missing it. There is an anthology of the best Southern stories which comes out annually and in the 2008 edition ZZ Packer says in her introduction, "the sit-ins, the marches, the hope of better days…began in the South. Every other region can jam its fingers in its ears and shake its head and tunelessly chant 'Not in My Backyard,' but not so in the South. The South is the backyard. And as backward as we've been portrayed—or as backward as we've sometimes portrayed ourselves, slipping behind a curtain of innocent and naïve agrarianism, rural somnolence, and sleepy everlasting vowels—the truth is that every awful and beautiful thing that has happened in America happened in the South first."

david sedaris at last

Above is the signature and drawing of a well-fed lion that David Sedaris penned prior to the reading. He said, "Can I ask you a personal question...Do you enjoy being a cancer?" I said," No, I'm a leo." Perhaps he thought I was wearing a birthday dress? I wasn't naked. We talked about how I am teaching for the first time this year, art school (we both went), and I was careful not to mention Amy as he told others ahead of me that, "She was dead." She's not, he just likes his own attention and the Amy questions were getting exorbitant after all. Never mind that I totally want to be friends with her and have seen Strangers With Candy over and over. I held my tongue.

Being as he is a good man, Sedaris opted for his paperback release of "When You Are Engulfed In Flames" to do an independent bookseller tour only. I am grateful as he has been sold out at every event that has sprouted up in LA or NY. I had the honor of letting him crack me up so that I ache in the abs today at Collected Works a local bookstore in Santa Fe. Mark and I arrived hours early and had prime seating but by his reading time others were standing outside the door hoping to squeeze in or hear an anecdote or two. He read excerpts from his diary, and a piece he wrote about book tours which was commissioned for The New Yorker.

You may read it here BUT you must log in to read his story otherwise it's their pitch of it:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_sedaris

quoteworthy

If you've never read the short stories of Lorrie Moore, I suggest you do with haste. I'm putting together my teaching syllabus and have been re-reading her work for consideration and most definite inclusion.

Her work is full of humor, heartbreak, and quiet brilliance as in this quote:

"When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet. Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet."

-From the short story "How To Be An Other Woman"

Attn: Readers on the short story chain! You will be getting this story soon!

writing comments

Hey Folks,

For those of you wondering what my writing workshop experience is like, my dear pal Tanya Rey (also in the program) sent some of the funniest comments on her manuscripts to "the list" publication on the Dave Eggars produced McSweeny's.

Look for the heading "COMMENTS WRITTEN BY ACTUAL STUDENTS EXTRACTED FROM WORKSHOPPED MANUSCRIPTS AT A
MAJOR UNIVERSITY."BY TANYA REY

You can read it here: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2009/6/5rey.html

No, not all manuscript responses are of the smart variety and gladly. Humor is always appreciated amongst us fiction folk!

Enjoy these and as I revise over the summer I shall report back and share some funnies on my own manuscripts!

inside the mexican suitcase

Here is another amazing forward from Sara Kaya Larson that I've been meaning to post:

The "Mexican Suitcase" is in fact a long sealed case of negatives by Robert Capa and others of the Spanish Civil War dating before 1939 when he fled with the film to America.

To view the slide show in its entirety go here:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/04/29/arts/20090429_SUITCASE_SLIDESHOW_index.html