updated 52 books in 52 weeks: 

1. Zoe Wicomb/Playing in the Light

2. Amitav Ghosh/The Shadow Lines

3. Alison Bechdel/Fun Home: a Family Traigcomic

4. Judith Butler/Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life & Death

5. Leslie Marmon Silko/Ceremony

6. Giorgio Agamben/The Open

7. Thomas Pynchon/The Crying of Lot 49

8. Ralph Ellison/Invisible Man

9. Jack Kerouac/On the Road

10. Ann Cvetkovich/An Archive of Feelings

11. Maurice Blanchot/The Instant of My Death; Derrida/Demeure: Fiction & Testimony

12. The Essential Acker: Selected Writings of Kathy Acker

13. Linda Williams: Screening Sex

14. Anne Carson/Autobiography of Red

15. Gopinath/ Impossible Desires

16. Agamben/Homo Sacer

17. Woolf/Women & Writing

18. In a Queer Time & Place

19. Popular Culture: a reader

20. Toni Morrison/Beloved

21. Sherman Alexie/Reservation Blues (2nd/3rd? read)

22. Winterson/Written on the Body (2nd read)

23. Neil Gaiman/The Graveyard Book

24. Bill Bryson/Notes from a Small Island

25. Watchmen (reread)

26. Philip Roth/The Human Stain

27. Maryse Conde/I, Tituba

28. Breslaw/Titube, Reluctant Witch of Salem

29. Jakobsen & Pelligrini/Love the Sin

30. Kerber/No Constitutional Right to be Ladies

31. Harriet Jacobs/Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

32. Hartman/Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in 19th C. America

33. Johnson/The oxherding tale

34. Ida B. Wells/Southern Horros & Other Writings

35. Bederman/Manliness & Civilization

36. R. Zamora Linmark/Rolling the Rrrrs

37. Alice Echols/Daring to be Bad

38. Lisa Duggan & Nan Hunter/Sex Wars

39. Grewal/Transnational Feminisms

40. Freud/Beyond the Pleasure Principle

41. Derrida/On Cosmopolitanism & Forgiveness

42. La Capra/Writing History, writing Trauma

43. Joseph Conrad/Under western Eyes (2nd read)

44. Jean Rhys/Voyage in the Dark

45. George Lamming/The Emigrants

46. Zoe Wicomb/David's Story

47. J.M. Coetzee/Disgrace

48. Ngugi wa Thiong'o/Petals of blood

49. Caruth/Unclaimed Experience

50. Woolf/to the Lighthouse (reread)

51. Sophocles/Antigone

52. Bronte/Wuthering Heights

more...

53. Jaime Hernandez/Dicks & Deedees

54. Munoz/Disidentifications: Queers of Color & the Performance of Politics

53. Evenson/Last Days

54. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature 

55. Maggie Estep/Alice Fantastic

56. Vizenor/Narrative Chance

57. Orwell/Keep the Aspidistra Flying

58. FM Ford/The Good Soldier

59. Waugh/A Handful of dust

60. Fowles/The Collector

61. Spark/The Prime of miss Jean Brodie

62. Ian McEwan/Saturday (2nd read)

63. Lessing/Memoirs of a Survivor

64. Greene/Brighton Rock

65. Joe Meno/The Great Perhaps

66. Sherman Alexie/War Dances

67. Krupat/ The Voice in the Maargin

68. Owens/Mixedblood Messages: Litearture. Film. Family. Place

69. Towards a Native american Critical Theory

I've been sick for 3 wks now. So much fun. Still managed to make it to the party for the Brooklyn Writers' Space Anthology, "the Reader," last night at BookCourt.  Not a fan of bklyn ever but this store was pretty cool. Only problem? takes 30 mins on the F train to get there. Still - it's a cool store, nice people & the anthology looks great. There are only 200 of them so get one while you can.  Also made it to see Sherman Alexie @ B&N which was cool but would've been better if he'd been on his own. Stood in the rain to watch the Halloween Parade - not as good as other years but Terra Incognito was supercool.  Also went to see Emmanuel Ax with the NYPhil. He's stunning but the program setup wasn't too great. Never follow Beethoven with pop music - even good Bernstein pop.  so much more but it's Friday & like I said, I've been sick for 3 wks now. coughing up a lung even. 

Things I learned this weekend: 

It's easier to defrost the fridge if I use a hammer. and screwdriver. 

there are people WAY geekier than me in the world. and they were sitting behind me at the LOTR "Live" show on Saturday.

it's not good to sit in the front row if seeing a play "live" in HD. 

the chairs at the Skirball Center @ NYU are really comfy & red & plush

some lit critics need to take a deep breath, or a vacation, or a valium...

things that annoyed me this weekend:

too many photos of people's children

the trains. all 18 lines being under construction at the same time. not good planning.

my neighbors smoking. 

the veggie burger made of wet glue I had at random restaurant pre-Radio City.

things I enjoyed this weekend: 

SLEEP. although I did not get enough of it. sadly.

hearing live music & seeing LOTR on a really really big screen.

seeing some Brit Shakespeare...even if it was only on a movie screen.

raspberries. as always.

why is it that so much of what's on tv these days is what one of my prof's called "torture porn"? I mean - do we really need to see the full details of ever crime made up by bored screenwriters for every crime show? I guess I could just shut of the tv or watch any of the insanely bad sitcoms but no, I'd rather just complain...been busy this month so far (how is already october??)...just read part of an article in the times about a Veteran's Writing Workshop.  This one has famous types teaching writing to returning vets. It's nice they got coverage but would've been nicer still if they'd expanded their coverage to include the work IAVA is doing & the work NYWC is doing. But then, we're not celebrities. oh well...other stuff keeping me busy this month? when to see Emmanuel Ax at the Philharmonic (nice follow up to seeing the film "In Search of Beethoven") and saw "All's Well the Ends Well" - National Theatre "live" in HD at NYU (that was okay - not fabulous) and also saw LOTR with full live orchestral/choir accompaniment. It was pretty awesome although over priced.  Still plugging away on the thesis - despite the MIA status of my thesis advisor. There's so much criticism that I still need to plow through although I've at least started to write the thing. Hope to have a first full draft by the end of the month.  Finishing up Joe Meno's latest - took me forever to get to it & only averaging about 1 chapter a day.  I did get the new Sherman Alexie "War Dances" & read that right away. It's got some very strong writing (especially some of the poetry) but read "light" to me somehow.  Maybe I've just been bogged down in too much criticism/theory & that makes everything else seem a lighter read.  Also re-reading "Indian Killer" and "Reservation Blues" (both for purposes of the thesis).  Trying to read Louise Erdrich's "the Bingo Palace" but not getting far & re-reading some David Treuer.  As for the thesis statement itself? not completely sure anymore on that but at least I know what doesn't work. which is moving in the right direction, no? It's hard to move it away from just writing about Alexie - so few of the other so-called "Native" writers work with the ideas I'm interested in & so many of them have had so much written about their work.  I guess that's true of Alexie's work too although much of what I've read seems really to be missing the point.  Anyway, exhausted & being incoherent. time for some bad tv & then off to read some more joe meno. I'll finish it yet. 

from NYWC workshop. "what I save" 10 minutes.

I save books and the stories, the poems they contain. I save the images they've given me of storms and disaster of heartbreak and birth of war and the morning light through the mist at dawn. I save the smell of spruce and the way juniper always makes me sneeze, the creak of the leather of a horse's saddle. I save the kick of the horse's hoof and the hardness of the mountain trail where I first fell. I save the terror of my first kiss and the pleasure of my first time. I save the brown, the blue, the green eyes - angry and cold or smiling. I save their shoulders and the rhythm of their hearts beating against my ear in the long stretches between sleep and morning. I save shoes I can no longer wear and running in them on midnight streets. I save handwritten phone numbers, directions, maps and borrowed kisses.  I save all the nights I could not sleep and all the mornings I slept in. The sound of pine needles falling on tent roofs, the smell and warmth of an old flannel sleeping bag. I save the smell of libraries and old books and the sneezes they bring. I save the smell of bookstores (I don't mean the coffee) and the smell of new books. I save papercuts and limes in seltzer, paths to the summit and superhighways. I save all the hours down in the depths of the Canyon and all the hours back up. I save the stars at night big as my hand and the shooting stars in Maine and Vermont.  I save Mars big as a quarter and the rain on the roof of the observatory in Flagstaff. I save their smiles and laughter and the shaper pain when each of them died. I save foreign coins and pennies. I save paperclips and manuscripts. I save water damaged photographs and playbills chewed on by the cat. I save the last time and the first and all the days in between. I save the wail of sirens on 2nd Avenue and the smell and the falling ash. I save the taste of a cold beer after a long hike. I save berries picked from bushes along the trail. I save their sweetness.

(c) 2009

another one from NYWC workshop. "I am from..." 5 minutes.

I am from rain and cold ocean from dark fir and sweet cedar. I am from alps and clear skin. I am from wagons winding westward. I am from houses built from stone and the trees of the forest. I am from bankers and bakers. I am from pirates and impatient women. I am from the first white settlement and rain washed streets. I am from bread and chocolate for lunch. I am from hobnail boots and damask drawing rooms. I am from lace factories and laundries, from board rooms and summit camps. I am from wind and water, from dark stolen earth and hard kept mountains. 

(c) 2009

another one from NYWC workshop: "whisper" 10 minutes.

robert rarely spoke above a whisper. he had heard too many loud noises in his life to want to add anything to the general blare. besides, everything worth saying had already been said and put down in books. he wasn't the kind of man who thought his opinions so important that others needed to hear them and he didn't much like having conversations anyway. he'd worked all his life in a factory making radios - he was in quality control and he'd learned to love nothing better than silence. the soft hiss of eggs frying at breakfast. the soft hiss of the radio when it went off the air. the soft hiss of rain against hot pavement. the soft hiss of a whisper, of words of voices barely raised barely speaking barely being heard. 

(c) 2009 

another long weird day after a batch of those this month. Things I've done since last I posted: climbed to the Crown of the Statue of Liberty (talk about confronting my vertigo), visited the "Dutch village" (a/k/a place for Dutch people to hawk their wares) at Bowling Green & got hit on by some guy dressed up as Rembrandt, went to an engagement party in Brighton Beach - 1 hr on the subway each way/no food to eat/no beer/but a friend I've known forever was hosting so...saw some highly motivated Russians dancing, went to a party in Elmhurst & had really odd food/watched you tube on a big screen tv & tried to figure out why people like hookahs & how they live with no a.c., then somewhere in there? went to see Jude Law in Hamlet. stunning. went to see "9" which was much less than stunning. somewhere in there I also read at the Whitman "song of myself" marathon reading on the foredeck of the Peking at South Street Seaport. had a fabulous dinner with the always good company MES @ the Usq Rosa Mexicano - why get anything there other than the guacamole? I successfully missed the brooklyn book festival and managed to see Nick Cave's reading at B&N Usq (thanks to JH for the prime seat). also dutifully attended the launch party for the new issue of NYU's journal Anamesa. A launch party with no readings...hmmm...and then, to cap off the glorious weirdness of the past few weeks: went to Ren Faire at Sterling Forest near Tuxedo, NY.  Went last year & it was fun but this year, the weather was glorious, the entertainment was just the right tone, the jousting was FABULOUS and I really didn't want it to ever end. tonight I went to the lamest reading ever perhaps - Craig Ferguson at (again) B&N Usq. He spoke for about 5 mins and then proceeded to answer questions. ridiculous sychophantic questions. He's a comic genius, of course. But what a terrible way to run a reading.  coming up: Aida @ the Met. Medieval Fest @ Fort Tryon. All's Well that End's Well "live" in HD from the NT, London. LOTR @ Radio City with live orchestral accompaniment. not to mention all those movies & other things.  must get some sleep at some point too. 

updated 52 books in 52 weeks: 

1. Zoe Wicomb/Playing in the Light

2. Amitav Ghosh/The Shadow Lines

3. Alison Bechdel/Fun Home: a Family Traigcomic

4. Judith Butler/Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life & Death

5. Leslie Marmon Silko/Ceremony

6. Giorgio Agamben/The Open

7. Thomas Pynchon/The Crying of Lot 49

8. Ralph Ellison/Invisible Man

9. Jack Kerouac/On the Road

10. Ann Cvetkovich/An Archive of Feelings

11. Maurice Blanchot/The Instant of My Death; Derrida/Demeure: Fiction & Testimony

12. The Essential Acker: Selected Writings of Kathy Acker

13. Linda Williams: Screening Sex

14. Anne Carson/Autobiography of Red

15. Gopinath/ Impossible Desires

16. Agamben/Homo Sacer

17. Woolf/Women & Writing

18. In a Queer Time & Place

19. Popular Culture: a reader

20. Toni Morrison/Beloved

21. Sherman Alexie/Reservation Blues (2nd/3rd? read)

22. Winterson/Written on the Body (2nd read)

23. Neil Gaiman/The Graveyard Book

24. Bill Bryson/Notes from a Small Island

25. Watchmen (reread)

26. Philip Roth/The Human Stain

27. Maryse Conde/I, Tituba

28. Breslaw/Titube, Reluctant Witch of Salem

29. Jakobsen & Pelligrini/Love the Sin

30. Kerber/No Constitutional Right to be Ladies

31. Harriet Jacobs/Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

32. Hartman/Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in 19th C. America

33. Johnson/The oxherding tale

34. Ida B. Wells/Southern Horros & Other Writings

35. Bederman/Manliness & Civilization

36. R. Zamora Linmark/Rolling the Rrrrs

37. Alice Echols/Daring to be Bad

38. Lisa Duggan & Nan Hunter/Sex Wars

39. Grewal/Transnational Feminisms

40. Freud/Beyond the Pleasure Principle

41. Derrida/On Cosmopolitanism & Forgiveness

42. La Capra/Writing History, writing Trauma

43. Joseph Conrad/Under western Eyes (2nd read)

44. Jean Rhys/Voyage in the Dark

45. George Lamming/The Emigrants

46. Zoe Wicomb/David's Story

47. J.M. Coetzee/Disgrace

48. Ngugi wa Thiong'o/Petals of blood

49. Caruth/Unclaimed Experience

50. Woolf/to the Lighthouse (reread)

51. Sophocles/Antigone

52. Bronte/Wuthering Heights

more...

53. Jaime Hernandez/Dicks & Deedees

54. Munoz/Disidentifications: Queers of Color & the Performance of Politics

53. Evenson/Last Days

54. The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature 

55. Maggie Estep/Alice Fantastic

56. Vizenor/Narrative Chance

57. Orwell/Keep the Aspidistra Flying

58. FM Ford/The Good Soldier

59. Waugh/A Handful of dust

60. Fowles/The Collector

61. Spark/The Prime of miss Jean Brodie

62. Ian McEwan/Saturday (2nd read)

63. Lessing/Memoirs of a Survivor

64. Greene/Brighton Rock

things I learned this weekend: 

Mako sharks can swim 35 mph = fast a cheetah but not fast as a peregrine falcon. 

prior to 1492, Native pops in North America are est. at up to 18 million. By 1900 this # was 237,000.  

D9 was not as bad as the backlash says it is. It is not, however, as good as the hype says either. The aliens = supercool.

things that annoyed me this weekend:

random people announcing their relationships/sex lives on Twitter. really? how old are you?

the weather. will it just f'ing POUR already & get it over with? 

the beaches being closed. the one weekend I actually had time to GO to the beach.

my knee has gone out on me again. and again. and again. I'd like a new one please?

things I enjoyed this weekend: 

SLEEP. finally I have time and ability to sleep all the way through the night & then some. 

going to the movies = good company + good air conditioning

my kitty being in a highly social mood & not eating any spines of any books.

having time to watch Geek TV (Nature, Discovery Channel, etc.)

Brian Evenson's "Last Days" 

teaching. as always. 

and did I mention, SLEEP...

watching a very old episode of Waking the Dead mainly because there's f'all on TV as per usual. Eating some Maine blueberries & wishing I was back there. It was my first trip to Maine & it's absolutely gorgeous there. Not at all like the PNW beyond the rough similarities of big trees and rugged/rocky coastline.  We stayed in Bar Harbor at an okay hotel w/a nice balcony & lousy service. It was a good location though & we got to use the local free bus service (great idea - Sedona should try this!) to get around.  We did lots of touristy things like a 3 hour Nat'l Parks bus tour w/a highly entertaining driver/guide named George. He drove like a wildman all along the very steep & winding Park Loop Road but told us great stories all the way.  We stopped at a few places for 15 minutes each: Thunder Hole (which was very unimpressive), Cadillac Mountain Summit, and the Jordan Pond House.  We'd been to Cadillac Mountain that morning at 4:30 (ouch!) to catch the sunrise but it was nice to see it during the day & Roger showed us wild Maine  mountain cranberries - SO good. And of course, the ever present wild blueberries. We did a Whale Watch tour which was worth the overcrowding, the annoying girl who ruined most of my photos, and the incredibly high ticket price.  We went 20 miles out to sea and we saw both puffins AND humpback whales. They came right up to the boat. We hiked the Beachcroft Trail, then swam & got sunburned at Sand Beach & then hiked the Ocean Trail out to Otter Cliffs.  I took hundreds of photos & most of them turned out okay though, of course, not the photos of the humpbacks. I could've spent many more days hiking around the lovely trails in Acadia but sadly, I have to pay rent.  Bar Harbor itself was okay - packed with tourists & very little in the way of decent vegetarian food.  There is LOTS of good local beer and the service in most places was good.  Testa's was a big exception with perhaps some of the WORST service I've ever had: a waitress who kept disappearing & had a MAJOR attitude when I finally gave up and asked for our food & our check.  The Thirsty Whale was great as was a small Irish place we went to. My guidebook listed a place called "Eden" but we found out from locals that it was closed :( and so we went to the local Thai place which was pretty awful -perhaps the worst pad thai I've ever had.  We ate at the local "fancy" organic place, Burning Tree and that was okay but they were really trying too hard with combining flavors. The advertised "vegetarian options" consisted of veggies (mostly peppers) on skewers or an overblown miso/tofu soup with lots of bok choy.  The service was great as was the setting - the food not what I'd hoped for but certainly better than the Thai place. The best part of the trip? sitting on the hotel balcony watching the sailboats anchored outside and the sun on the water. or the sunrise from Cadillac Mountain. or diving into the freezing cold ocean on Sand Beach. or...anyway, hope to get back to Maine again soon though likely I won't for quite some time. 

This is the time of year when I want to move to Alaska or Iceland or Siberia - somewhere cold, somewhere without humidity and traffic and overcrowded subways full of people who dno't bathe and most of all, without sushi. There is nothing worse than the smell of the piles of garbage in front of the four sushi restaurants in a one block radius from my apartment. No, it doesn't smell like the ocean or the canneries of my childhood and no, it doesn't remind me of the fish stall at the Pike Place Market or the waterfront in Baltimore or Newport or Astoria.  And no, there's nothing good about that smell or about the fact that they've opened another sushi place down the street making it five now and, of course, this one's also a sake bar which means even more drunk sushi eaters throwing up on my block. Sometimes it seems like I'm back in New Orleans in the middle of Mardi Gras but really, it's just the East Village in August. I dream of quiet streets without rotting garbage. I dream of sunkissed trees rising up to jagged mountains. I dream of clean air and no traffic, of no crowds of people who don't have the good sense to cover their bodies when going outside.  I dream of a yard with a chair or a hammock and hours of uninterrupted reading; the only sounds: a dog barking chasing butterflies, the warm purr of my cat asleep on my belly, the creak of the hammock, wind in the trees, an airplane far off on the horizon.  Maybe there's a river at the edge of the yard, maybe the hard goes gradually down into rock then sand then ocean. Being so close to the ocean makes me think of storms so let's make it a river instead, but a river could flood so let's make the river at the bottom of a steep hill and the hard on top of the hill safe from harm, the hammock swinging gently but well-secured between two sturdy trees. And the book is not something I have to read but something I want to read and full of interesting plot twists and compelling characters and perfectly formed sentences. 

(c) 8/8/2009

from this morning's class. 

10 mins. using words of only ONE syllable.

It was a cold dawn. He stood at the top of the hill and stared at the lake.  A duck dove for food over and over. The trees still held some dark, some night. A loud crack (a gun? an axe? a branch?) came from the far side of the lake. He thought of fresh cut wood, of an old gun he'd had, of a tree branch on a roof.  There was a shout - a man's voice - loud, sharp, then gone. The mist on the lake stood in clumps then it was gone - just like that. The sun rose to sit on the tops of the trees - hot, bright but still the trees held their dark, held their cold.  A yawn, a stretch and then he dove straight down to the dark, the cold of the lake.  He swam, he dove, he swam and came up on the far side.  He saw no man, no gun, no axe, no branch. There was sun, trees, the lake, that was all. 

(c) 2009

It's amazing to me that: a) Petland didn't fire this b*tch and b) Facebook didn't censor her for posting this. 

To quote one of my favorite singers: "People just ain't no good." 

Apparently, there is a Gateway to Hell in Brooklyn. No surprise there - reference my post in re: Red Hook and Lovecraft.  Brooklyn: Where Evil Dwells.

Watching Madagascar forests being leveled by mining companies. People never f**king learn do they? That's it, I'm going to go live in a cave. And it won't be in Brooklyn.

Eddie Izzard is running way too many marathons in support of Comic Relief.  You can support him/donate here: http://www.comicrelief.com/donate/eddie

Here are some cool/creepy pieces of art featuring children, clowns, other lovely things: http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Strange-and-creepy/231948

Film Forum has a "Brit Noir" fest running right now.  Some of these are all time favorite movies of mine (the Third Man for one).  

This is very sad.  I always liked his work: Willy DeVille, Mink Deville singer/songwriter dead at 58.  

Today's press conference in re: the plane/copter crash in the Hudson proved once again why Bloomberg needs some media training (of course, I'd love it if he'd just step down but that's never going to happen: "Mayor for Life"?)...He showed up 40 (?) minutes late, snapped at anyone who asked him a question he didn't want to answer & without any preamble, announced there were no survivors only hours after the accident. 

Watching "the loneliest animals" on PBS' Nature.  It's incredibly depressing - all about animals who are going extinct.  Wow human beings sure suck. Except of course conservationists. 

I cannot believe that people would kill an animal threatened with extinction.  Sure, I get it - they need the money/need to feed their families/etc. but I for one, just can't stomach the arrogance supporting that belief that humans are superior to animals.  Because you know? we just aren't. Not in any way.  

wrote this on Saturday in my class @ the Vet Center: 

prompt: write as many nouns as you can think of in 5 mins. then using one or more of those nouns, write for 15 mins. 

Nouns (w/some adjectives added): air conditioner in the hallway/a book with a broken spine/grapefruit soda/a high cliff/an old boyfriend/a sharp wind/a very noisy raven/a limping dog/a dusty road/a melting block of ice/a bruise/a ladybug/a beached whale/pink shorts/old smelly sneakers/a wooden tennis raquet/a library/a broken window/a horse/an empty house/a fairy tale/a bank of threatening clouds/a long summer day/an abandoned well/a man who used to be handsome/green eyes/an overgrown orchard/a blue workshirt/muddy boots/an old radio/a fire escape...

This morning on the way out of the apartment I stubbed my toe on an old air conditioner blocking the hallway.  It didn't bleed but hurt enough to have me limping down all five flights of stairs from my apartment to the street.  On the ground floor I noticed an odd smell - odder than the usual smells of forty people and their various animals living in close quarters in the middle of another breathless NYC summer. I'd left my animal - a cat - with a friend for the weekend - to assuage some of my guilt at leaving town for some fresh air when she (the cat, not the friend) never got any. It was seven a.m. and already sweltering. I decided to ignore the smell and the broken window in the salon on the ground floor and catch a cab to Grand Central. The subway would be cheaper but I would pay fifteen dollars to not have to wait in that viscous stifling air - the blast furnace of the Second Avenue station.  Grand Central was relatively empty and I thought of the late night trips I'd made through there - returning from teaching in the suburbs and the early mornings I'd stood there pack and hiking sticks in hand, ready to climb that weekend's mountain. But not today.  Today I was off to visit an old boyfriend - a man who had once been handsome and now was just sad. On the train I sat across from a woman in pink shorts wearing old smelly sneakers and looking like nothing more than a beached whale.  I turned away from her and concentrated on the bright scenery flashing by.  I got to the small station, hailed a cab and was soon standing in front of an empty house. A sharp wind came off the high cliffs to the north of the house.  There was no sound other than a loud raven objecting to my presence.  I pushed my way in the front door: nothing but dust and spiders.  I walked through the house and found a book with a broken spine, a wooden tennis racquet with no strings, an old radio that did not work and a blue workshirt covered in grease stains. In the back was an overgrown orchard and a memory of green eyes. I sat on an old lawnchair and watched the gathering clouds all day - a storm rising over the river. I would wait until the rain came. 

(c) 2009

Trying to write a paper on V. Woolf but just can't seem to get started. It's my last paper (aside from my MA Thesis) for the Masters Program I'm currently in. It should be easy enough to get started - I've already written a 5 page propectus (sort of) and I've done the research and I've read & reread the book.  So what's the problem? I just want to sit here in the a.c. watching bad TV. My brain does not like to work during August. It never has. This was part of the reason I started out on this whole going to graduate school thing - so I could have a job where I don't have to work during the summer (aside from research/writing of course).  But it hasn't turned out that way so far & in this economy, not sure that it will. I also haven't produced those 2 children yet (Trevor and Ruby I believe were the names I'd planned on).  Nor have I "settle down."  Not sure if I ever will at this point. I think I'd just rather watch bad TV. There is so very much of it. 

when I was very young I used to live in fear of the large drains in the center of public restrooms. Not because I was afraid of rats or cockroaches (I'd never seen either other than grain rats in a horse barn & muskrats at the lake) but because I'd read HP Lovecraft & was convinced that fish people would come out of the drains and get me while I was least able to run or defend myself. When I was a little bit older, I moved to Brooklyn & learned that there was really a place called Red Hook.  I've been there once. I will not go there after dark for any reason. I've read Lovecraft & I know what lives there.  Today while visiting the restroom at work I thought I saw some movement in the large drain in the center of the tile floor. Despite many years in NYC & a great deal of close experience with things that slither & move in terrifying ways, my first thought was not "rat!" or "roach!" but...Red Hook. Fish people. HP Lovecraft.