Starting November 6, wooden snowflakes painted by 200 children’s book illustrators (including several I’m happy to have worked with) will be auctioned online for cancer research. If you bid on a cool snowflake like this one or this one or this one or otherwise spread the word, kindly let me know so that I can add you to my mental list of beautiful people.
Check out this article by Laura Kipnis on the politics of fat in Slate. I’ve been a fan of her stuff ever since I read a chapter she’d written about fat in her book Bound and Gagged.
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Costume/year: Hippie,1983
Consisted of: Bellbottom jeans; peasant blouse; hoop earrings, beads. Overall effect of jewelry more “Claire’s Boutique” than “head shop,” but we tried.
Advantages: Subversive feeling of getting to wear highly unfashionable clothing to school in seventh grade without suffering dire social consequences.
Limitations: At school, the only people who understood costume were teachers.
Unexpected benefit: Extra candy from nostalgic thirtysomethings while trick-or-treating. Relatively early experience with 60s-styled posturing allowed me to resist dumb-assed Grateful Dead revival in high school.
Costume/year: Sylvia Plath (post-mortem), 1992
Consisted of: Housedress; bathrobe; blue lipstick; crumpled drafts of poems in pockets; suicide note pinned to front; can of Easy-Off oven cleaner.
Advantages: Total English major snob value; also, way comfortable.
Limitations: You really can only say “Daddy, Daddy you bastard, I’m through,” so many times before it gets old.
Unexpected benefit: Even drunken frat boys knew better than to mess with a chick carrying a can of Easy-Off.
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Look! (Yes, there’s going to be a book of these.)
Everybody into the Pool by Beth Lisick
I bought this at the most recent Bookslut reading because I’d heard good things about it. Plus her reading was really fucking funny.
This Thursday’s Chicago reading: will be a benefit for Literacy Works and not some other organization, despite what you may have read on a couple of events listings somewhere. Literacy Works does all kinds of fantastically swell stuff like train ESL teachers and volunteer tutors to help adults learn to read, and while presumably the other organization is devoted to good things as well and not, say, into playing cruel literacy-related tricks such as hiding rubber cockroaches in books, tearing out the final pages of mystery novels, and recommending House of Leaves, they are nonetheless not the same organization as Literacy Works, on whose behalf I am reading on Thursday. So come to Hyde Park! And bring ten dollars! Or more!
(It’s hard not to be nervous about the attendance. For most readings, having a lousy turnout simply means that I’m pathetic. When it comes to this reading, a lousy turnout means that PEOPLE WILL BE DENIED THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE THROUGH READING, and that I’m pathetic. So do what you can.)
Last Thursday’s New Jersey reading: was fine, except for all the apocalyptic rain. From my rental car along the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey looked very, er… smeary, though I’m sure it’s way nicer when it’s dry. This state has lovely radio stations, which are great to listen to while you’re trying to find a place to turn around on the highway.
My cold: is much better, thank you. You needn’t have worried at all.
The Beeping Thingy ceased its daily beeping two days after I wrote about it and I KNEW THAT WOULD HAPPEN. I still have no idea what the hell it was.
We did, however, catch a squirrel in my office building today, after the thing came down through the ceiling this weekend and ate some of the office M&M’s. Working for a children’s book publisher means you are always surrounded by enchanted animals. And by “enchanted” I mean “awesomely freaked out on sugar.”
Bootsy the Fish: Still alive after a year and three months. Sort of. He seems to have swim bladder disorder. (Look it up.) From what I’ve read this won’t kill him, but it’s killing me to see him lying listlessly at the bottom of the tank like a junkie, flopping his semi-useless fins around like a thalidomide baby Smurf. I mean, you can’t have a fish “put down,” can you? Something dignified and fast. A tiny harpoon I can shoot into him, maybe.
Weight Watchers: Oh, you shouldn’t ask right now. I’m only mentioning it because I know you want to know, which is my own damn fault for telling you I was doing it again in the first place. You get where I’m going with this? Yeah? There you go. (And this may not be up for discussion, inasmuch as I can control that.)
But never mind that. Most everything else is good.
being name-checked in the lead story at Salon (okay, just page 4, and wow, thanks, Steve Almond) the night before you leave for a trip on which you’d resolutely decided not to bring your laptop for a change, effectively keeping you from following the various blogospheric reactions and responses and snickering and shitflicking that could ensue as a result of the article (though you don’t imagine any of it will be aimed at you (but if it was, though, you’d prefer to know (which just goes to show how much of a freak you are (which is pretty damn freaky)))). I mean it KILLS YOU to not bring the thing but you know it’s the right thing, philospophically and everything. So despite the temptation to keep logging on to see what everyone has to say about Almond’s article, my honest labor of self-reflection will not involve lugging my iBook and all its cords and attachments through airport security. Not this time, at least.
(But I can check my email, right? If there’s an internet cafe somewhere?)
See you in NJ tonight…
I like reading Miss Snark’s agent blog, because she writes aboout slogging through manuscript submissions, and since I do that for a living too, I feel very productive reading her every morning, even when I’m actually not slogging through submissions and editing half a dozen picture books and two novels in varying stages of production at that particular moment. (Though for the most part I have been doing those things, which is why you haven’t read much here lately.) And I especially like Miss Snark when she addresses some wee itchy little tiny dustmite of a detail about writing or publishing or submissions etiquette that has always bothered me. Like business cards, and whether writers should give them to editors and agents, and vice versa. No, really, this preoccupies me way too much. Cards are swell and cards are dumb. And what the hell kind of opinion is that? Oh, I’LL TELL YOU.
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and/or preventative meaures, since I’m flying out to read in New Jersey next week (Thursday the 13th here! At 7:00 pm!) and would rather not be sick, and also because I’m a big paranoid baby who hates any kind of physical discomfort:
Heating ginger ale in the microwave and drinking it with a little lemon juice and honey, and maybe–later–whiskey.
Every three hours or so, dropping one of those effervescent tablet thingies “into a small amount of plain water,” per the package instructions, and drinking that, too.
Trusting the warm ginger ale more, somehow.
Having Indian Tasty Bites for dinner (or, rather, since it’s just the one package, a single Tasty BITE, even though actually eating one requires lots of tasty biting), because they’re (it’s?) nice and spicy and thus my sinuses are happy.
Drinking tea when I’m not drinking goofy fizzy things.
Imagining that when I pee (which is often) I am flushing out the toxins, even though deep down I doubt toxins have much to do with my cold.
Going to bed early instead of writing a decent blog entry.
I fell into some kind of internet wormhole where time appeared to elapse at a normal rate in my daily life while I worked at my job and bought a car, and watched America’s Next Top Model (my heart beats KIM KIM KIM and CORYN CORYN CORYN and maybe just a little bit for LISA, though she could stand to be medicated a little, okay, a LOT), and counted Weight Watcher points, and then didn’t count Weight Watcher points and pretended it was “core,” and drank beer, and caught up with friends, and danced. The usual. But on the internet, time lost all meaning, and it seems I was sleeping for weeks and weeks in my airtight cyberspace pod. Then again, maybe I needed the rest.
Apparently summer’s over. For months there’s been a Dove Girl in an ad on the side of a bus shelter in my neighborhood, and tonight, when I drove by, I wondered if she was cold now, in her underwear like that.
