if at first you don't succeed
4 Comments Published February 6th, 2008 in writing, spirituality

For some reason, I've always felt like you're allotted a small amount of prayer in your life. Of course you can pray for people you care about, and health, and practical things, but when it comes to stuff like 'Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?' you should keep a limit on how much stuff you ask God for. Other than practical things, I haven't asked God for much'mainly, because I have this fear of treating him like Santa or something. I definitely asked for a boy or two to like me, or for my finances to work out so I wouldn't have to leave New York right after getting here.

I never prayed about sports teams or clothes or bad things to happen to people I didn't like. As soon as I knew what prayer was, and what writing was, I prayed God would find it in his or her infinite wisdom to let me 'make it' as a writer. In Paris, I lit a candle at Notre Dame and asked God to let my story come to me, even though I wasn't a Catholic. When my father almost died I asked God to help him through it and promised that if he did I'd write about deafness despite saying I never would. And the candle burned. And my father lived.

I don't think that prayer is necessarily how one gets a book deal. Hard work and good writing and an agent who believes in you are how one gets book deals. But praying is a better way to pass the time than sitting and waiting for the phone to ring, or thinking of all the other times it hasn't worked out for you.

The first editor passed on my book today. And I wanted to write something, anything, anywhere, just to remember that I still knew how to do it, and that it still made me happy.
some of my favorite writing ever
0 Comments Published February 1st, 2008 in books

Nearly all those who I loved and did not understand when I was young are gone, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now I usually fish the big waters alone although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades into being with my soul and memories and the sound of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

-The last page of A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean
martin luther king day
0 Comments Published January 21st, 2008 in introspection

I'm always proud of Save the Assistants, but I'm particularly proud of this post.
dimensions
0 Comments Published January 17th, 2008 in new york, nostalgia

'Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb.' - John F. Kennedy

The entire time I was in Florence (which was less than a week), I was convinced the Duomo was made out of an intricately painted kind of cardboard. There was something about the building that made it look like an elaborate concoction of papier-mache. The day I finally saw it as a building was the day it rained and I nestled under it for cover. Rain on buildings is like tragedy on people: you see what they are really made of.

That was what I thought about yesterday, taking the 7 train from Queens to Manhattan. From the window I could see the whole Eastern shore of Manhattan (it is an island, for all we do to it). The Chrysler Building looked like a two-dimensional piece of intricately carved glass rather than a structure. I thought of sitting in my old living room on Hope Street watching the episode of Project Runway where Jay makes the dress inspired by the Chrysler Building, and about the art history class when I found out what Art Deco was, and, somehow, the Duomo.

The day it rained in Florence I was a mile away from my hostel without an umbrella or even a coat to hold over my head. But every building, house or business, I went past had an awning just wide enough to cover me. The streets were empty and I ran all the way toward the restored convent with its iron doors. I was dry when I got back to my room, and I curled up on the little bed next to the window and wrote a poem about how I wanted to move to New York.
excerpt
4 Comments Published January 13th, 2008 in writing, introspection

Sometimes you write a paragraph and look at it and think you may have just summed up everything important about you in a couple of sentences. It is simultaneously depressing and enlightening.

Sometimes I think that everyone is deaf. I walk down a crowded street and see people making gestures with their hands. Even a girl absently brushing hair out of her eyes is not immune. Soon enough I will figure out that their gestures are empty, but still I search everyone's hands for a familiar word. Maybe they all have their own sign language, one which I have not learned yet. Maybe everyone in the whole world is deaf but me.
unseasonably warm
0 Comments Published January 10th, 2008 in guys, friends, new york

Sometimes you have those New York days where no other descriptor fits but 'lovely.' It was sixty degrees today [and yes, I know, global warming, hell in a handbasket, etc, but I couldn't help but be charmed despite knowing it's a sign of the apocalypse] and after weeks of jeans I got to wear my new gray dress with the black tie around the middle. Peter and I went out for a good long gossipy/venty lunch and outside the office ran into Andy, who happened to be craving the very Vietnamese food we were on our way to get. After work Lily and I sat at the bar at Casa Mono, drinking Spanish wine and eating truffle potatoes and duck eggs and other such tapas delicacies. We planned the awesome humor piece we're going to read at a publishing salon this weekend. On the train I reread the chapter I'm working on and had this moment of hey, fuck, this is actually pretty good after all. I got out of the subway one stop early so that I could take a longer walk home. Paul got home late and we had a beer and snuggled. In the morning it was bright and so warm that I went without a coat for the first time in weeks.

There are days sometimes when it's all I can do not to throw open my arms and start running.
on the upswing
2 Comments Published January 2nd, 2008 in books

I'm reading a book that's quite good and that I'm enjoying tremendously. It is a novel, not short stories, but it is by a female author. The book is A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. It's about a Ukrainian immigrant family in England whose widowed father marries a new immigrant who the two adult daughters hate. The book is exactly what I needed after those three disastrous short story collections. It's smart and breezy and complex and I feel so much better already.
in which i criticize but do not name several female writers
4 Comments Published December 20th, 2007 in books

I hate not finishing books. I always explain to people that my extraordinarily lowbrow taste in television is balanced out by my somewhat highbrow taste in books, and so I feel guilty when a book goes unread. But I've read three books in a row I couldn't finish or barely got through. I hated them. They were all short-story collections by critically acclaimed female authors. The women have been published in magazines I like to read, like Harper's and The New Yorker. I feel like a bad feminist, not supporting fellow female writers. And yet pretending to like stuff I don't is quite antifeminist. These writers all have awards and cushy teaching gigs and fellowships, so I don't think they need my support anyway. I think I need to read some Aimee Bender or Yiyun Li and just clear my head already.
draw something
4 Comments Published December 15th, 2007 in new york

Yesterday I went up to the Bronx to teach sign language to a nursery school class. I got there early, and the teacher (Paul's mother's best friend) suggested I hang out with the students during their free play time. I sat down at the table with crayons. There was a doe-eyed articulate little girl named Hannah who clung to me immediately. She put paper down in front of me. 'Draw something.'

Joyce, who speaks Korean at home with her parents and rarely speaks in English, nodded her assent. She handed me a crayon.

'What should I draw?' I asked Hannah, but she was already drawing a ballgown. 'I'm going to be a fashion designer when I grow up,' she informed me.

I'm not much of an artist. My repetoire is basically stick figures. So I took Joyce's green crayon and began sketching New York City, crudely. Angular, jaunty Manhattan was an oval. Brooklyn and Queens were halves of an oblong circle sliced down the middle as if it were an embryo about to split into identical twins. Hannah had given up her drawing to watch me. I drew a star about where Williamsburg would be. 'I live there,' I told her. 'In Brooklyn.'

Hannah pointed to a part of the Bronx and I drew a star there for her. 'The Bronx!' she said. 'I live in the Bronx!'

Another voice chimed in. 'The Bronx, New York, America!' [I thought absently of my favorite line in Our Town, Rebecca's address as a citizen of the world.]

Soon they were all over me, drawing their own stars, for the Bronx and for a grandmother's house in Queens or a cousin on the Upper West Side. I thought of the sign for New York, a letter Y rushing back and forth across the palm, a Y trying to catch the last train home or a Y running down Fifth Avenue on a beautiful day in the spring.

'New York,' said Joyce.
the best books i read this year
1 Comment Published December 5th, 2007 in books, lists

This has been the most traveled year of my life. Dublin, Las Vegas, Montreal, London, San Francisco. Lots of cities means lots of airplanes and waiting rooms, which means lots of books. I've read some very good things this year. This is my list of the best of the lot, with notes when relevant. (Note: this only includes books I read for the first time this year, otherwise 'The Fifth Book of Peace' and 'England, England' would live on the list.)

Night in Tunisia, Neil Jordan
I Think of You, Adhaf Souief (thank you for the recommendation, City Lights Bookstore)
Number 9 Dream, David Mitchell
Animal Vegetable Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie (Stansted Airport and flight to Dublin)
Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson (a gift from Ashley, who has excellent taste)
Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy
Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinski
The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li (Natalie was reading this on the plane, which is how we met)
Working for the Man, Jeffrey Yamaguchi (the first book I ever blurbed'and it helps that it's hilarious)
The Beautiful Miscellaneous, Dominic Smith