My Life and Thoughts

Recently, while listening to Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year,” I noticed something strange. As Sinatra listeners will remember, seventeen is a very good year for small-town girls and soft summer nights, while twenty-one is a very good year for city girls who lived up the stairs… but after that, there isn’t another good year until thirty-five (for blue-blooded girls of independent means)! What happened to the rest of the twenties?

Believe me, dear readers, nobody is readier than myself to view artistic content as the byproduct of formal constraints; and it is inarguably a nice rhyme: “Their chauffeurs would drive/ When I was thirty-five.” On the other hand… its niceness is not really such as to merit waiting 14-years.  What’s wrong with “We’d sip sparkling wine/ When I was twenty-nine”? Or: “Their butlers would wait/ When I was twenty-eight”? 

No, truly I believe that ”It was a very good year” finds its appropriate context only within the contemporary discourse of squandering one’s twenties. (I nominate “Squandering Their Twenties” for Stuff White People Like #116.) How familiar is the story imparted by the autocrat of the Rat Pack: the brief period of sex and excitement at twenty-one, followed by the long empty years of graduate school!  

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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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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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Leipzig was so great! Marco and I were really happy to meet the novelist Kevin Vennemann (our German translator), to whom I had mentioned an abbreviated version of the Krautgarden Loft banana incident, and who subsequently suggested that we meet for a pre-reading dinner in Auerbachs Keller, the basement tavern where Mephistopheles took Faust, and where the sixteenth-century prototypical Dr. Faustus supposedly once transported himself from the basement up to street level, by riding on a diabolically possessed wine barrel. “Terrible place,” Vennemann wrote, “but very… hearty food [original ellipses] made for tourists and probably the best way to keep you from starving once again. They might be serving a lot of kraut as well.”

To be totally honest, my caloric intake isn’t actually anything out of the ordinary, but I was of course delighted to have acquired the reputation of an insatiable devourer of hearty tourist food. Verily my friends, it is better to be feared than loved!

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Because of my abiding interest in our nation’s youth, I was really happy to meet Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and his girlfriend Sara last month in San Francisco.

Here is a picture where you can see how charming they looked, with their scarves, and also their entrance stickers from the Asian Art Museum. That is a Polo logo on Koenig’s sweater, BTW… but before you go starting the hateration machine on him I just want you to stop for a minute and ask yourself: WIKDI?

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