Evany wrote a very kind post about my book and her love/hate relationship with blogging, which she’s been doing for eleven(!) years. She says:

“…Suddenly it occurs to me, rather unpleasantly, that on the scale of one to cool, I’ve always thought that people who are passionate about what they do (excluding, of course, Burning Man) are 8,000 times cooler than the crabby people who scoff them. And in this situation, I’m totally the scoffer! And I don’t want to be the scoffer.”

Enjoyable simile from a recent New Yorker:

“For lesser artists, this harmonically confident album would be a coup. But in the case of the Dixie Chicks it’s disappointing, like watching Muhammad Ali hurt a man’s feelings.”

In this month’s Esquire, Tom Hanks talks about gaining weight for Cast Away and then losing sixty pounds for the scenes where he’s supposed to be starving:

“Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?”

Russell Banks grew up in, “a blue-collar world … where the idea of being a writer was like the idea of being a butterfly.”

(via Writer’s Almanac)

From this week’s New Yorker Magazine, the poem “Sixtieth Birthday Dinner” by Michael Ryan:

If in the men’s room of our favorite restaurant
while blissfully pissing riserva spumante
I punch the wall because I am so old,
I promise not to punch too carelessly.

Our friend Franco cooks all night and day
to transform blood and bones to osso buco.
He shouldn’t have to clean them off his wall
or worry that a customer gone cuckoo

has mashed his knuckles like a slugger
whose steroid dosage needs a little tweaking.
My life with you has been beyond beyond
and there’s nothing beyond it I’m seeking.

I just don’t want to leave it, and I am
with every silken bite of tiramisu.
I wouldn’t mind being dead
if I could still be with you.

By Douglas Goetsch

You nature poets think you’ve got it, hostaged

somewhere in Vermont or Oregon,

so it blooms and withers only for you,

so all you have to do is name it: primrose

and now you’re writing poetry, and now

you ship it off to us, to smell and envy.

But we are made of newspaper and smoke

and we dunk your roses in vats of blue.

Birds don’t call, our pigeons play it close

to the vest. When the moon is full

we hear it in the sirens. The Pleiades

you could probably buy downtown. Gravity

is the receiver on the hook. Mortality

we smell on certain people as they pass.

(via Writer’s Almanac)

Excerpt from an old Writer’s Almanac:

Short story writer Katherine Mansfield became one of the wildest bohemians in New Zealand. She had affairs with men and women, lived with Aborigines, and published scandalous stories. She moved back to London and lived in the bohemian scene there. At one point, she married a man she barely knew, and left him before the wedding night was over because she couldn’t stand the pink bedspread.

She said, Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare fiddle?