this one's important

I recommend this book to you.

uncharitablesque

Well this is the sort of thing I would have previously sent to my father. So now you get to play proxy: just enjoy the answers from the fine folks over at the Chicago Manual of Style Online. I'd like to get them and the desk jockeys who write the headlines at The Atlantic together for a cruel proofing tea party.

Hyphens, En Dashes, Em Dashes

Q. In a scholarly book about popular culture, the author has used several -esque word endings, usually hyphenated. According to CMOS instructions for the similar constructions of -wide, -like, and -borne, I would be inclined to remove the hyphen. But the result is unsavory. Also, in the case of open compounds, should the -esque ending acquire an en dash? See the following: Tarantinoesque, Skeeteresque, Gandalfesque, Billy Idolesque, Sid Vicious–like, John Paul–esque, The Parallax View–esque.

A. Unsavory indeed. (Your list should appear on the book jacket—who wouldn’t want to know what the pope is doing in the middle of all the carnage?) The rule is that unless the usage is self-consciously playful, you may have two -esques per book (no hyphens), but only if they are at least a hundred pages apart. If they involve en dashes, however, you get none.

post

Now that my father has died, I reside however briefly in that clichéd place, shocked that the world has not stopped, that strangers continue to smile and celebrate, that my dog barks at birds, that people mean well and have faith.

I have never once felt old, but I am struck with a realization that I feel older by immeasurable measure than the same people I encountered just a week ago. We share in my mind a more significant humanity, one that exists somewhere deep and dangerous, yet I have so much less to say to anyone. Small things: the Week in Review feels laughably irrelevant this time around. The nod from a neighbor who recently gave me peaches means everything. My dog's bark stops my heart. And then the miracle: it starts beating again.

High Windows

by Philip Larkin

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives--
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

going home, and cannot wait to get to that kitchen table

Love Like Salt

by Lisel Mueller

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.

three cheers

for changing it up (and for double negatives).

stella gets her groove on

So okay fine, my dog Stella has a dance teacher. Ridiculous. Yes, yes. I know. But here we are, at the point where I need to pick out a song for her, so let's just accept my bourgeoisie indulgence and move on, people. I really am trying to find something that suits her personality. A three-year-old pit bull who zero-to-sixties pretty well, covering incredible ground in short spurts, but also snores and toots more than most other activities. Sometimes I think that's gritty Koko Taylor blues, then I think Presley at his most innocent, other times I just surrender to her dipstick pop dodo ways and think maybe Taylor Swift's radical reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet may just have the dancer it deserves in my pea-brained tank.

So I dunno. Jailhouse Rock? Or maybe Jamiroquai? Dan Band? Sinatra. Stevie Nicks. Kings of Leon. AC/DC. GNR! Oh well I am just not sure how to decide. I find myself watching to see what she really responds to, but that's generally unrewarding since she comes scampering into the room when Barry Manilow comes on. Yeah, that was a surprise to me too. My little anvil-headed cinder-block pit bull sways to "Mandy." I try to be supportive. I really do. But I'm just not sure I can go there with her, seeing as I have to be out there on the dancefloor with her. And anyway, well it sent me back, for no apparent reason but the tangential glory of the web, to a few videos that I just love.

Weapon of Choice

Oh So Quiet

Single Ladies

i heart hot tubs

Dear Albany Sauna staff,

I honor the safety-first motto just as dutifully as any other "early years" Burning Man attendee. And your commitment to my health and well being, as evidenced by the hose on the wall (in case of fire, I'd have guessed I'd be okay in a hot tub, but you're ahead of me), the no-slip strips on the stairs, the help-me-get-up handles everywhere, well it is all sincerely appreciated. But given this:
I question the need for this:
Otherwise, bravo for a no-fuss, Poconos-resort-nobody-puts-baby-in-the-corner, golden-era-of-American-lodge-life spa experience. And the copper pipe that waterfalls into the hot tub? A+ inspiration right there.

a rarity

Here, I'll say it. I want this dress. As in, would spend a stupid amount of money to get it. I want it. I should have it. The world owes it to me, and what's more, the thing was built for me. In fact, Katie here is probably my size. So give it over, girl. Don't make me come down to Santa Monica to get it.



That's your June post of vanity and materialism. You're welcome. (Oh and Kate, I'll take the shoes too, honey. Thanks.)

lingua blanca

We watched Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World tonight. D called the filmed sites "little geek villages in the middle of the tundra." Which they were. But the people were striking for more than their nerdy ramblings on neutrinos and seal milk proteins: these were wild people, struggling to preserve some sort of wisdom, articulate, unusual, fierce, so clear in the eyes, so unbelievably alive in the environment.

So again, it seems Herzog has widened his lens to show something bigger--hilarious humans, a bizarre sampling, who seem to thrive in these "outposts of Antarctica, the kind of people you might expect would gravitate to the edge of existence--the curious, the oddball, the wanderers who've run out of other places to explore." Of course the awesome landscapes are humbling, reminders of how infinitesimal we are and how perilous the situation is for our species.

In the midst of all the interviews with these "professional dreamers," these squirrely nutjobs who can't stop wandering and wondering, who end up locked in close quarters deep in the antarctic, Herzog offers this up. And since I heard it and replayed it four or five times, I can now think of nothing else. “In our efforts to preserve endangered species, we seem to overlook something equally important. To me, it is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where treehuggers and whalehuggers in their weirdness are acceptable while no one embraces the last speakers of a language.” Chilling, one might say.

a life transformed

Shepard, Judy. The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed. August 2009. Hudson Street Press. 288p. ISBN: 978-1-59463-057-6. $25.95.

for Library Journal

Ten years after Matthew Shepard was beaten for being gay and left for dead, his mother Judy has revisited the tragedy in this brave and sobering memoir. As a mother and an unassuming thought leader, Shepard writes with elegant humility. Tracing the ordinary parenting choices she and her husband made for Matthew and his brother Logan, Shepard reevaluates her family's path in an earnest bid to share her life experience with those "who live in places where I'm not invited to speak." Her accounts of their challenging family dynamics are so everyday, in fact, that the narrative inflicts emotional whiplash once the ground begins to blur by and the grisly murder comes up so fast.
Shepard wrestles with her early preconceptions, but is careful to avoid any martyrdom of her reckless wild child. The Meaning of Matthew is all the more remarkable for the understated and deliberate tone taken as Shepard wades in deep to do the unthinkable--to suggest how the world has changed since she survived the violent death of her own child. Highly recommended for all libraries. Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA

a movie recommendation is in here somewhere

My first memory from graduate school is a repellent one. You’d think I’d have remembered that this is the way it goes for me. Allergic to beginner’s mind, I never feel quite right at the start of things. I tend to be surveying the walls for cracks. Not only must I practice things ten-thousand times more than the next to get the shot, strike the chord, tap the vein, but I don't always appreciate what's in front of me until it's long since gone.
     The forces of the universe, so extravagantly generous with me in all other ways, are sadistic witches when it comes to my initiation rites. I suspect my karmic terms must specify the ability to thrive despite a high threshold of adversity and a hefty factor of failure. But I am nothing if not relentless.
     Since March, I've been hammering away at two stories and have taken the last couple days off to drift around in those imaginary landscapes and see what might happen. This immersion sent me back to my arrival on the Bennington College campus, how eager I was, much like my comrades, to suck that place dry of everything it had to offer. And I did, after a stumbling start. I arrived mid-day in mid-June. I unpacked, immediately went for a run all around the neighborhood, showered, and still red-faced and a little sweaty, shot out to the campus social, striking up a conversation with the first woman I saw. I asked about a cup of coffee; she offered a heady riposte about our shared Colridegean susceptibilities—this before we’d even managed names, let alone specializations or states of origin. My spirit shrank. I shuddered at the vision: two years ahead of me, each month bloated full with dull, pretentious allusions from bespectacled, near-transparent library trolls. And well, yes, there was some of that.
     But on the whole, I softened from the mercenary I was upon arrival, and my experience of Bennington College improved along a steady trajectory, even as the life I had around it spun into sloppy, sad disarray. And that education, I realize, continues. I have since spent the greater part of the intervening four years revisiting those maudlin wine-soaked years to get back to the root of all I’ve learned from the four mentors with whom I worked—Martha Cooley, Amy Hempel, Askold Melnyczuk, and Sven Birkerts.
     And I’ve begun to write again, in earnest. And though you may rightly consider graduate school something of a failure if I say I have yet to write a short story, you’d be wrong. Remember the students who were always staying late in the art room to finish the kiln project? The ones who just couldn’t hand in the Blue Book when the bell rang? Likely the same students caught staring out windows, or perhaps even at walls, lost in teenage reverie? I did that then and I remain the same today. I am that student, sometimes slow-witted, yes, but also slow to call out and deliberate to absorb it all before drawing conclusions. Even my pulse and temperature are slower and lower (respectively) than the average person's. It is this late-blooming quality that makes this moment a pleasant one for me.
     In drafting a relatively new story, I came today to understand several small functions of my own writing, the ways that my structures align and depart from Baxter, Ford, Moore, Gordon, Russo, Wolff, Woolf. And the way I want to work with those intricacies—something as simple as the echo of a spoken word.
     Now that I've finished these luxurious few days of reading and writing, I am awash in that exultant exhaustion that comes from so few things in life—a far run, honest conversation, you know the rest. With all the windows open to the sultry California night, I sit with my dog at my feet and watch the movie War Dance. And I weep and I weep and I weep. This movie is one that should be required in all schools, along with Born Into Brothels or Darwin's Nightmare. You owe it to yourself to watch it. These children have seen the very worst humanity has to offer, yet they bring unflinching beauty to the screen. They wake up early and give life everything they've got. They are breathtaking. I mean that literally.
     I turn back to my notes after the movie and it all comes flooding back to me again--the same feelings I had when I received the acceptance call from Writing Seminars founder Liam Rector, how I was instantly filled with that headstrong, heartsick feeling that absofuckinglutely anything is possible. And I mean anything in all senses of the word—yes, the euphoria of goals realized, but also Conrad-variety brutality, deadening addictions, sudden saviors, the warmth of close and reliable friends, unexpected kindness, moments that we can take to hear our own breathing, any of it, all of it. So knowing all that's out there, remembering that, well good God, I just have to say how lucky we are to be alive.
     Specifically, how lucky I am to still be alive at thirty-five, past my own dark days. Alive before friends and family, in this incredible home, in a safe city, with salt-of-the-earth neighbors, a yard like a garden with butterflies and hummingbirds everywhere, shallots and garlic growing, fish in the pond, food in the fridge, a room and deck and a gourmet kitchen, all of it my own, all of it familiar. And I look at my colleagues—with their best-selling books out, on reading circuits, sitting on panels, so busy and entangled in the web of literary life. And I don't deny them any of it. I'm so happy for them, for you, for all this we've got. But I have to say that having had the chance to sit and bask like this fat cat back here in the Bay Area sun, to take it all in, just watch at my lazy pace, to feel my mind saturate with sensation and concepts, filling my journals with models and devices and characters and settings, I am suddenly aware for the first time in a long time of my rich and lucky library, all these little treasures, each sorted into its drawer in my Silverstein cabinet. This kind of privacy to grow and wonder is an exceptional luxury; likewise time. And sure, I may be a hardened and shameless tea drinker, as they say, but Jesus, looking at my life against his, well I couldn’t be less like Coleridge if I tried.

oh, ben

The title The Divinity of Dogs is a bit highfalutin for this video that ends with Ben Stein offering up a cute smile, like you'd get from the kid forced to sit through the cheese course in his starchy, too-tight suit. Ben! I just want to pinch your cheeks for this one. Pinch, pinch, pinch, you jowly little animal lover.

intermediate's mind

After reviewing the options--agility (no), flyball (no), rally (no)--LB and I began our new freestyle dance class with our dogs Mac and Stella today. To use the word humbling is to sound downright boastful about it. This class was nothing short of torment. I cried. No, really, I did.

I have had my girl since August of this year, not long. But prior to that, I'd run my boxer Shea through obedience and his sister Ruby through an advanced dog-dog manners class. I moved on myself to work with countless dogs of all different temperaments (plenty of them naughty, raucous, insolent) for a few years with BAD RAP, first at the East Bay SPCA and then Oakland Animal Services, where I volunteer today. Point is, a lot of dogs, a lot of challenges.


At the time I enrolled Stella in this freestyle class, she already knew sit, down, stay, leave it, drop it, come--all the essentials. She had earned her Canine Good Citizen certification from the American Kennel Club and made a routine of charming people into asking if they might adopt her away from me with disarming regularity. She and I had established what I thought was a common language, both physical and verbal, and we had trained in some form every single day since she'd come to me like a little wiggly dream. But all of this, every shred of work, every moment of accomplishment, has been based at least in minor measure on compulsion. I'm not sure how I didn't realize it. That is, until the time came when I could not use the prong collar.


She's a very strong girl, a little tank of muscle and spunk. It's just what I have used to manage all that energy with all the bully dogs I work. I never looked at my use of it as a dependence. I still consider a prong a fine tool, with its place in the scheme of things, but what if I don't have one at the ready and still need my little devil to behave? No can do, Kennedy. That's what I learned today. I came face to face with the limits of my technique and at first it was desperately discouraging. I didn't really see the lead-up building this week: Stella got poked by a foxtail that managed to work its way into her neck. A painful sore resulted, right where the prong would have gone. But I was not going to back out of class. We had committed to it, there would have been no refund, and most importantly, I felt she needed the socialization and education. So on we went. No problem, I thought; we work together. I (laughably now) didn't think twice about taking the class without a prong after working her exclusively with it on.

To say that she pulled on the leash is much like saying a shooting star moves through the sky or that a forest fire is warm. Every time I bash into the "step up" segment of the learning plateaus, I find myself stunned and hurt yet again that I am not, in fact, the supreme master expert I'd deluded myself into thinking I was. Stella yanked on the leash, panted like a choo-choo, and I stood there, sweating, inching mentally toward quitting. We were instructed to walk this way, turn, shake, do a bunch of fun little moves. For me, this amounted to widen your stance to keep the dog from steamrolling her way to the head of the pack. It was not aggression. It was 100 percent uncorked ebbulience. Stella was, as the kids say, off the hook. She was overwhelmed by the blissful notion that all these dogs and people had come together to thrill her with their presence.

I say all this not to trash my dog. By the end of the class, she was following me rather beautifully, gazing into my eyes in that hopeful way that just breaks a dog handler's heart with its sheer hope and goodness. There's nothing like that bond. But it required a very real walk of fire, the humiliation of knowing that my dog looked wild at the outset. And good god, I'm sure my capabilities were called into question.

So here we are. It was not the glorious, head-of-the-class start I'd hoped for. Stella was a bit of a nutter. But we'll practice in the morning, at lunch, after work, before bed. Any treat Stella gets will only follow a heel. Want dinner? Walk with me. Oh is breakfast late? You must be very hungry. Do not break your look into my eyes. You want me to pet you? Stay right here until I tell you otherwise. Sit, down. Come. Come, walk with me, prove your skills, use your wee Stella brain.

It's time for us to improve our communication. Stella has shown she's willing to work with me. She aced the Canine Good Citizen test without my ever even teaching her a proper, airtight loose-leash walk. I'm glad we got by, but we can do better. She can do this, no problem. So the unknown here is me.

But I think the impossible fits me well enough. The only real way around it is through it. Practice, practice, practice goes the old line. We'll get there.

thoughts on driving, if you please

The more I live, the more ritualized my private days become. Driving to work every day, I scout for modded-out Hondas and find myself parallel to them on the freeway just to see what happens when our eyes meet. Around the holidays I contemplate getting a tree. And then I do not. I eat a terrific amount of chocolate come April, and in May I book several races in order to combat my attendant fears of imminent death. August, of course, I extend birthday festivities well beyond what is appropriate.

While Valentine's Day means gifts and heady declarations for most, it signals three small milestones in a life's routine: (1) the anniversary of my now long-standing sobriety, (2) the memorial of losing my dog Shea when he was just four years old, and (3) the approximate threshold marking when I might reasonably expect to spy used copies of the last year's Best American Short Stories on the shelves at Pegasus or Moe's. For novels and nonfiction, I am happy to spend my money and see the royalties land in the authors' pockets. Not sure what it is about volumes with multiple contributors, but I buy these second-hand without guilt.

I'd searched for a while. And I'd even started to extrapolate (as if my shopping experience somehow scaled to represent the global literary marketplace) that perhaps it was a new day for the short story—these damn local readers were holding onto their volume of America's best. Was it that good? Hell, I figured, even this year's Pulitzer-winning book was a story cycle. Well last week, I finally snagged this year's Best American Short Stories, a copy apparently unread--crisp cover corners, static among pages, all the heavenly heft of untouched invention. Perhaps it was given as a gift, but neglected and coldly sold.

And it did indeed feature a gem, "May We Be Forgiven" by A. M. Homes. While more rangy authors (Ben Fountain III comes to mind) retain a certain authority on my list for their willingness to fling characters far afield and see what happens, there's still nothing like the old-fashioned descendents of Carver, authors who need nothing by way of window dressing and foreign artifact to lay bare the luxurious torment of a private universe. The implosion of the story's precarious domestic balance involves just the sort of plain sawdusty craft I adore. Mean, brutal, and brave. And when it shatters that part of you that you didn't even know was vulnerable, then comes the condemnatory moral crack--this is about you. At some level, stories ought to indict with a satisfying resonance, prick our ears to our own barely audible hauntings down in that lowest human register.

Now those close to me know that I do not suffer erotica well. It's a tawdry, tacky, sticky mess of embarrassing fumble-rumblings, all uninspired extroversion, a wincing exercise in what must end up future authorial regret. But I'd suggest anyone interested in writing (or having or thinking about) sex read this story. Not that it's erotica. It's not, per se. But the sexual indulgence is lively because it is unsparingly polluted with spirit-splitting betrayal and shame. If you are to write sex, good to obey the axiom it's best to arrive at pleasure by way of pain.

Read and you'll see what I mean. When I came to the end of the story, the last bit of figurative dialogue lopped the top off the thing. And I found there--exultantly--the faintest penciled-in exclamation point. I've since gone through this book page by page, searching for other evidence of the reader so moved. There is not a single other mark but the requisite $8.50 price scrawled on the half-title page.

As an editor who wrangles often with authors who lavish these poor marks throughout a work like nuts on a laden sundae, I am loathe to celebrate the exclamation point. But I savored this singular expression. Restraint and passion all in one. A single response that, as you likely expect, reminds me of the easy, sweet poem by Billy Collins called Marginalia.

My lunch break tick-tocking away, I could hardly leave the closing page. I just sat there staring at it. The sun was out. It was warm enough to melt me, but the wind blew just this side of brisk. I drove back to work in the spring weather, charged enough to accept dangerous wagers. A girl pulled up in her showy little Honda at the two-lane on-ramp. I hurtled alongside her, the sun on my arms as I blew euphorically right past the exit to work. It's all enough to make one take the exclamatory leap, now isn't it? Forgive us indeed. We are terribly wrong and reckless. Now let's do it all again!

leaves of grass

You guys, it's spring. I have been distracted. But I'm back. Blog depot will reopen. Shortly.

new lease on life

If you're interested in ESPN's coverage of the Vick dogs' new lives, you can watch it tonight at 7pm.

teams tiger, fast kitty, and game face

In case you've wondered where I've been, it's been nothing but big wheels day in, day out. You know how training can be. Full-on, people. Can't wait.

a life with purpose

Volunteering time with or donating to HRC, NCLR, or Equality California can save a life. Not to mention make yours more meaningful.

victory gardens count as work

Even for office workers, Fridays are not only for office work--especially after Thursday presentations go so well and the future of our book projects looks bright. It's with that spirit then that my neighbor and I exchanged emails today, lusting over our spring garden visions and flinging links of seed packets and plot maps over the web-fence to each other with breathless speed. This weekend, she and I will split up the unthinkable bounty of chard and kale we've got going, let the onions and cousins (shallots, garlic) continue their plot for world domination in their back bed, and, though both have worked wonders to retain the moisture from the blessed rain, cut back the grass and clover creeping over everything.

And then. And then with unabashed glee, I placed our modest order of the season, the one that makes me clap and swirl just at the thought--two precious packets of heirloom tomato seeds: a pineapple variety that hails from Kentucky, as well as the new Black Ruffle, a sexy, curvy cross between heirlooms Black Krim and Zapotec Pink Pleated. I love planting tomatoes more than anything else in the gardening world. They grow so furiously, their leaves reward anyone who brushes by with such an intoxicating springy smell, and the taste of them alone!--I love the need to prop them up and support them as they plump up with their photosynthetic ambitions. I confess it's all also steeped with a sepia-tinged, sentimental set of memories, how my old dog Shea used to sneak out into the backyard to pluck them off the vine, fling them over his head all around the yard, and leave the poor eclipsed prospects, all decimated and half-chewed, for the wild critters to clean up after him.

I can still see the view from my old kitchen window, only the tops of the tomato plants visible from behind a fence covered in ivy--how those tops would shake and shiver, telltale signs little man was crouched just on the far side of the fence, craning his neck forward to pluck a little snack, fresh from the vine. Could you blame him? So yeah, I love tomato time. It makes me deep with the happy, friends.

So happy it's one of those "all I can talk about" instances. I bored my poor coworkers at the company social yesterday, chomping the broccoli and carrots fanned out in standard form on the crudité tray and yammering about gardens and the inevitable icon that accompanies the conversational thread, Alice Waters, who had just appeared on 60 Minutes.

She'd long been challenging the White House to make something of the sprawling grounds just outside their every window. And in Michelle Obama, it appeared, Waters finally had found a sympathetic audience. We round-robined our conjecture--would Barack Obama end up pulling weeds for a photo-op? We thought not. Well as we talked about it, an article was being published to the contrary. Michelle Obama has plans for her husband and kids: weeding! And I figure, hey, if Michelle Obama can spare time in her Thursday to map a garden plot and Barack can take on the oxalis, well then my Friday emails must count as a valid day's work too.

plum tree petals all over my car

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter;
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.

—Zen master Wu-men