My Life and Thoughts

The reason for the cat moratorium is, I’m worried that if I keep going about my cat, and saying nothing about my life as a relatively obscure writer, people will assume that I have stopped writing, or even that I have run out of money. This would be a really incorrect assumption since in fact what I have stopped doing is getting published, and let me take this moment to assign blame where it is due, viz.: the mortgage crisis, the war in Georgia, the 2008 elections, and the Wall Street meltdown, all of which have been no joke for our nation’s more junior producers of literary and memoiristic fluff journalism.

“Someday, the world will be ready for the story of comedy traffic school.”

Personally I can tell you that nothing I wrote for the past 6 months is going to be published until after the elections—at which point, however, I am told that the presses will be flooded with interesting pieces about barrel-making and the feuding grandchildren of minor Symbolists. Therefore my message to you today, esteemed readers, is a message of change, and a message of hope. In America’s troubled times, you might not always see my footprints in the sand, but later you’ll see I was there, carrying somebody, or at least doing something, I think.

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Inspired by the example of a certain pobrecito anónimo, I’m writing my third blog entry in as many days!  This is about my latest adventure as a D-list writer. OK so a couple of months ago I was contacted by a very dear friend—an A-list writer of YA fiction, and an editor at the weekend edition of a well-known American newspaper—who asked if I might like to write something about my escapades in grad school, for a series of 2000-word “fun” pieces by “serious” writers, including, but not limited to, “Mamet on buying a house.”  Naturally this appealed to my spirit of challenge: as if I couldn’t make my experience in grad school sound at least as fun as David Mamet’s experience buying a house!  “You’re on, Mamet!” I thought, hitting the Send button.

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Remember how in an earlier post I said that the sad young literary men didn’t supply any recipes to the Muskogee Daily Phoenix, and only the resourceful young literary women came through?  Well, this was not entirely accurate.  The situation, it seems, is more complicated than I thought.

I recently received an email from Melony Carey, author of the combined book-review–recipe column in the abovementioned Phoenix (check out her latest: NASCAR-themed recipes to accompany a novel narrated by a dog belonging to a Formula One racer), to the effect that Guillermo Martínez, former grad student and current writer of math-themed mystery thrillers, had, in fact, contributed a recipe for “almond chicken baked on a bed of salt,” which had been blocked, for reasons yet unexplained, by the Norton anti-spam software.   

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I am really happy and honored to report that Vampire Weekend and I are featured in a joint profile in today’s issue of Sabah (Morning): the Istanbul publication recently determined by a Nielsen survey to be Turkey’s “most recognized newspaper brand.” (The most recognized brands overall were Arçelik, manufacturer of “wardrobe-style refrigerators” and other appliances; and Ülker, manufacturer of Cola Turka, and also of something called Badem Kraker (Almond Crackers), which as a child I used to feed to the swans in Ankara’s Swan Park. The thing that made a big impression on me at the time is that the almond crackers didn’t actually contain any almonds at all—rather, they were shaped like almonds. This was my first introduction to metaphor versus metonymy.

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Dear readers!  I’m sorry to have been slacking off on the blog these days.  I am extra ashamed because you know who hasn’t been slacking off is, my secret benefactor, the one who keeps mailing me volumes of poetry.  The latest arrival is Firefly under the Tongue, by Coral Bracho.  There is a foreword by translator Forrest Gander who, in Providence in 1994, gave a Dia de los Muertos dinner—”a disastrous event since for some inexplicable reason I decided to serve an ‘authentic’ Mexican meal”—attended by the writer Carlos Fuentes who, when conversation turned to Coral Bracho, proceeded to sketch Bracho’s portrait on a napkin, undissuaded by the fact that he had never met Bracho or even, apparently, seen her photograph.  What I find particularly remarkable about Fuentes’s Coral Imaginaria, is her resemblance to Disney’s Pochahontas, only with a Kahlo-esque unibrow. 

If you are curious about what Coral Bracho really looks like, you can see her picture (and bio) here. 

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