Bread and Bread

In spite of my New Year’s resolution to the contrary, I’m really good at finding things to be anxious about. If I don’t have any real problems, I’ll make some up. I know, it’s a fabulous way to live. Here’s my latest concern: Right now, I’m reading (well listening-to-on-CD-in-my-car) When She Was Good by Philip Roth. It’s my first Philip Roth, but AK told me he’s gotten more experimental over the years. Even though I checked out this CD collection for its shiny newness (my diva of a car stereo won’t play anything the slightest bit scratched), apparently it was originally published in 1967. And I love it. But wait, you say, weren’t you worried about something here? I’m getting to that. I’m worried because this is like the fourth in a string of 1950s and ‘60s novels I’ve read and loved over the past couple of years: Franny and Zooey , Revolutionary Road , Giovanni’s Room (well, I didn’t love that one, but I loved the style). I used to feel bad for never reading anything pre-1975, bu...

As of 24 hours ago, I was in a blissed-out state, thanks to an intensive hour and a half of yoga, which took place at a community center in Hermosa Beach and benefited the L.A. Mission . My soul was cleansed. My body was sweaty but cleansed. Things I didn’t know had been hurting no longer were. And I got free pizza and a discounted yoga mat. Such is the nature of benefits that are well corporately sponsored. (Though I wondered if all the paper and plastic that comprised my various freebies sort of karmically counteracted my donation to the mission. But I don’t mean to sound cynical—the nonprofit geek in me noted that the event bore every mark of fundraiser awesomeness.) AK, my sister and I stood behind a row of well-toned asses in Lululemon pants. Never had I seen such big, ripped biceps on so many straight girls. I tried on various attitudes: envy? Lust? Hatred of yuppie scum? Happiness that I was engaging in an activity that didn’t require me to squint at a computer screen? I decide...

I love collaborations between writers and visual artists. I’ve had fun doing a few myself, and I just discovered Electric Literature ’s Single Sentence Animations (thanks, Jamie!). Here’s the deal: Animators take one sentence of a writer’s work and dream up a little video about it. You don’t even have to have the attention span it takes to read a short story! And the video below features boobs! So, filmmakers of the world, who wants to make a video of one of my sentences? They’re available in both R- and G-rated versions.

Although AK and I did couple-ish Valentine stuff on Friday, we spent V-Day proper with our sisters (‘cause we love them too) at Mortified . After hearing people read their diary accounts of teen romance, we concluded: Whether you were a virgin or a whore, a hot cheerleader or a closeted gay boy, the dumper or the dumpee—you were lame. Few thoughts are more comforting. We also dug the opening musical act, Garfunkel & Oates , whose song “Pregnant Women are Smug”* I’m posting here for your enjoyment: *Of course, none of the pregnant and recently pregnant women I know are smug. Seriously! My friends are a well-mannered bunch who ask about my book tour even while in the act of nursing a little one. But I do think that as a group—much like roving mall-packs of teenagers and gays at pride parades—pregnant women can be crazier than the sum of their parts. In all cases, it’s probably fair to blame hormones.

For Valentine’s Day, AK gave me The Captain’s Verses , a book of love poems by Pablo Neruda (in addition to the Glee soundtrack, which is also a fine work of poetry). This morning, I was sitting in bed reading student work for the class I’m teaching (so, yeah, that’s where I’ve been lately) when she leaned over and said, “Can I read you a poem? It’s called ‘Poverty.’” “Can it wait a few minutes?” I said, because that’s the kind of romantic I am. “I’m trying to work so that we can fend off actual poverty.” A few minutes later, she read: Ah you don’t want to, you’re scared of poverty, you don’t want to go to the market with worn-out shoes and come back with the same old dress. My love, we are not fond, as the rich would like us to be, of misery. We shall extract it like an evil tooth that up to now has bitten the heart of man. But I don’t want you to fear it. If through my fault it comes to your dwelling, if poverty drives away your golden shoes, let it not drive away your laughter whic...

So what if I’m posting this in early mid-February? Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison: Note to self: Don't ever check out audio books from the library that were published more than two years ago. They'll be so scratched up that you only hear about seventy percent of the text. The weird thing about this particular book--which I suspect might be a very good book--is that no matter how much I missed, the story still seemed to be in the same place when I picked up again, like a soap opera. The story itself--of a racist white senator of mysterious origins, raised by a black preacher to more or less be a black preacher himself--is undeniably interesting, tapping into all the big American questions. The storytelling is innovative and poetic, consisting largely of dialogue and virtual sermons. There's probably a lot to say about Ellison's choices in this regard. But I'm not the one to say it. I just sort of floated along and was glad to be done with it. A Gate at the S...

Last night, as my new MacBook welcomed me to its world of shiny things and arty graphics, I felt deeply grateful for friendly electronics, which I believe Apple invented circa 1985. (I remember going to a neighbor’s house and thinking how cute it was that her parents’ Apple said, “Thinking…” as it struggled to, like, add two numbers, whereas our PC maintained a black-and-amber poker face.) I’d been nervous about the mechanics of setting up my laptop, and here it was, the laptop itself, letting me know everything would be okay. It was so gratifying that I found myself wondering if I could be convinced to exchange all my real friends for robot friends. Probably, I thought. If I met the right robot. But while the laptop set-up process was, as promised, a lovely, minimally laborious, zooming journey through electronic space, transferring my documents and downloading stuff was somewhat more plodding. By this morning, I was in tears because it took me forty minutes to log into the web page ...

The theme of Bay Area Trip #2 was The Babies Are Coming. Arguably, this is the theme of one’s thirties, but it was especially so in NorCal this past week, where we spent much time playing Blokus with the jaw- droppingly well-behaved children of AK’s high school friend Laura, and playing blink-and-coo with the new baby of Erin and Erin. Other stuff happened too, like a fun and well-attended reading at Diesel , a brightly lit Rockridge bookstore that gives you hope for the future of books. There were reunions with kid-free friends as well, an art gallery visit and some very good Burmese food. And for some reason I ate a candy bar almost every night I was in town. In N Out: quality we tasted on the drive up the 5, and again on the way home. Nan Yang in Oakland: quality you can taste a bit more definitively. Laura with poodle Ella, also incredibly well-behaved, of course. Tai is taking piano lessons. Shortly before we left, he composed a melancholy and beautiful song about travel an...

Texts between me and AK: Me: The queer theorist was at the gym again! i’m starting to feel like i should hand her* my manuscript or something. AK: You should ask somebody else if they see her. Maybe she’s an angel. On that note, I’m off to San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland and San Mateo, where I’ll get to do worky stuff, visit the friendly neighborhood dyke bar , hang out with our favorite healthy-living family of four , give a reading with Terry ( Diesel Bookstore, Jan. 31, 3 p.m. —see you there?) and get to meet the Erins’ new baby(!). Back in early Feb! *Still unsure of QT’s preferred pronoun. But she was in the women’s locker room, so at least in the eyes of 24 Hour Fitness , she’s a woman. I’m not sure we should grant such identity-defining power to an institution that cannot even name itself accurately—some locations close as early as 8 p.m.—but then again, maybe no one understands better than 24 Hour Fitness how inadequate all language ultimately is.

Concerts have recently been something of a bone of contention between AK and I. It would go like this: She’d troll blogs and mailing lists and find a show she’d want to see. I’d agree to go with her because 1) in my mind I’m a fun-loving gal, 2) I probably dragged her to a so-so poetry reading recently and 3) she has a very cute, convincing face. But come the morning of the show (which would inevitably be on, like, a Tuesday because that’s when the cool kids go out), I’d stubbornly wake up at seven and write as usual. Then, after work, I’d race to get to the show and stand through it bleary-eyed, counting the songs, grumbling about my lower back problems. AK would scowl at me and the world I symbolized: the world that Never Felt Like Going Out. I can’t report that we’ve solved this problem, but we’ve come to a tentative yet healthy compromise, which involves me giving her an iPod Nano for her birthday (I know, it sounds like a guilt Nano, but it wasn’t) so she could invest more deeply ...

The first of two January Bay Area trips happened this past weekend (the second is for my reading at Diesel in Oakland, Jan. 31, 3 p.m. —mark your iPhone or whatever). On Saturday, my college friend Nerissa got married. I teared up predictably the minute the church doors opened onto the aisle. There’s something about seeing someone you’ve known well and for a long time cut and pasted into a big, archetypal ceremony. It’s strange and beautiful, realizing for the first time that archetypal ceremonies might actually apply to your life. (Or not, as I’m pretty sure St. Gabriel Catholic church isn’t doing too many gay weddings these days, but you know what I mean. It was still lovely.) There’s also something beautiful about taking off your heels after a long day and watching Almost Famous in your pajamas, which is what we did with Jenessa and her boyfriend John when we got back to their place in Oakland. We started the trip in a similar high-low mode, imagining ourselves in emeralds the siz...

I was celebrating the fact that my elderly laptop had finally booted up when a famous queer theorist walked into the coffee shop with her girlfriend and her girlfriend's kids. They sat down next to me, and QT started reading Harry Potter out loud to the kids. I know you shouldn't write in coffee shops if you want complete silence, but I kind of wished they would relocate to the play area. Since I couldn't concentrate on my short story, I was forced to eavesdrop. Queer Theorist: Which of Harry's teachers is your favorite? Stepdaughter: Miss [um, I don't know most of the Harry Potter characters, so let's call her Miss Tumbleweed] Tumbleweed. QT [who goes by a man's name these days, but I'm not sure what pronoun s/he prefers]: It's Mr. Tumbleweed. Mr. Tumbleweed is a man. Anyhow, I like Ms. McGonagall . She's strict, but she knows her stuff. I think the best teachers are like that, don't you? [Kids give her a blank look that suggests this is...

Thank goodness Kellie read the fine print on Nerissa’s wedding website and emailed me: Black tie optional? I was going to wear something from H&M! I do have a fancy qi pao from China in my bag that would not be super comfortable but definitely fancy. But the slit is dangerously high, like perhaps inappropriately high. I do not own a qi pao , fancy or otherwise, nor anything that is both nice enough to wear to a black tie optional wedding and warm enough for San Francisco in January. Which means my options are: A) Dress it down a notch and hope dress codes are for boys. I mean, suits and tuxes are well-defined things. Dresses are open to interpretation. Right? B) Wear all my fanciest, warmest things and make the formal grade from a technical standpoint, but look sort of mismatched because my nicest warm coat is pink and my nicest dress is red and my nicest shoes are just a little bondage-y. C) Shop the minute our plane touches down. You can take BART from SFO and get spit out ...

I’m between drafts of the so-called circus novel right now, and I’ve been working on a couple of short stories. It’s weird. I hadn’t attempted a short story as more than an exercise in a long time, and I was halfway convinced that my writerly identity no longer included the ability to write anything less than 200 pages. Even when I read short stories by other people, they seemed kind of sneaky and pretentious. Like they were trying to be a flashy, fabulous first date but couldn’t sustain a relationship. But then along came two invitations to submit stories (I know! I love feeling loved like that), and suddenly I had a mission, which is all it’s taken to get back into short-form fiction. One story is about Prop. 8 and the Santa Clarita Valley and coyotes. One is about a harp and a mysterious mother-in-law. Now I’m a little bit scared: What if I abandon novels? Novels are who I am . But when Jamie put poetry aside for ballet for a few months, I was like, Go with it! Listen to your muse...

This morning my dad had our family cat, Eliot, put to sleep after it became clear that his kidney problems were going to get him sooner rather than later. I was sad that my dad told me this after the fact, because the Kleins have been together for all other pet euthanasia. Eliot was the last pet who knew my mom—they spent many hours napping together when she was sick—and Eliot’s absence feels like one more way she’s not in the world. I think about that sometimes: how the décor of my dad’s house is looking worn and dated, how it’s easy to forget that when my mom put that stuff up, it was new and creative. I want to remember her as new and creative. I also want to give Eliot his moment: This isn’t all about my mom and vague feelings of familial distance. I’m going to miss Eliot himself, a slight orange tabby my dad referred to as “you useless cat,” usually while scratching him lovingly on the head. When we adopted Eliot my sophomore year of college, he was a year-and-a-half-old cat named...

You’re probably sick of lists and reviews by now, even though the latter is allegedly what this blog is mostly about. Lucky for you, I didn’t read much in December. I did a lot of…what did I do? Eat? But reading while eating is one of my favorite activities, so the presence of food doesn’t explain the lack of literature. Shop? Probably shop. Ugh. I am all shopped out and am now enjoying the ascetic feeling I associate with January: light eating, minimal spending, indulgence of my puritan work ethic, and a clean, fresh blanket of snow over the place where the Christmas lights used to be. No, there is no actual snow, but if I were to create one of those inspiration collage thingies that designers use, snow would be on it. And now, my two-book roundup: Tomorrow They Will Kiss by Eduardo Santiago: Like the heroines of the telenovelas they love, the characters in this book (three women from the same gossipy village in Cuba, now working in a New Jersey doll factory) are painted with somewh...

The problem with not being a real movie critic--one who gets free passes to movies before they come out--is that you end up seeing a lot of 2009 movies in 2010, when it's too late to put them on your best-of-2009 list, which, of course, everyone reads as gospel. So I'm not sure if this is number six or what, but I saw An Education on New Year's Day, and it was smart and moving and refreshing. I knew almost nothing about it going in--in the back of my mind, I sort of thought it was some kind of Jane Austen-y adaptation, which I wasn't all that excited about, but it was what was playing at the right time near AK's parents' house in Orange County. What it is actually about is a 16-year-old British prep school girl who, in 1963, takes up with a dashing older man who even manages to woo her uber -strict, working-class parents. What it is actually, actually about is coming to terms with the unglamorous side of adulthood and the even less glamorous options available...

I’ve never been big on predicting the Oscars, an exercise which seems more like political analysis than art criticism. And while I read lots of contemporary literature, I rarely read books in the year they’re published—that means paying for hardbacks, since the library queue for new books is always long. So my “best of” lists are the lists of a semi-hermit, culturally speaking. At least, they’re more a reflection of where I am (thinking about babies and circuses, loving realism despite my hunger for whimsical slippage) than where the culture is. But hey, whose aren’t? So without further ado, here’s where I was in 2009. Where were you? My ten favorite books of 2009: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham The Final Confession of Mabel Stark by Robert Hough Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun by Wafaa Bilal The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi...

So, my 2010 New Year’s resolution is to be less anxious. I know you’re supposed to make concrete resolutions (AK resolved to track all the books she reads on Goodreads ), but this feels like a resolution whose time has come. To get a tiny bit more specific: I resolve not to conflate worry ( oh-my-god-I-might-have-cancer ) with preparation (hey-why-don’t-I-make-a-doctor’s-appointment). It’s still 2009, but I got to practice not freaking out when AK’s car overheated on the way home from San Luis Obispo , where we spent an otherwise fun post-Christmas weekend. Of course we were on one of the few really desolate stretches of the 101. When it became clear we weren’t going to make it to a gas station, we turned onto a dirt road that led to something called the El Camino Winery. I put on my best not-freaking-out voice, which never fools AK. We contemplated our options, and AK called AAA. My friend Jody once found himself in Guatemala without a place to stay. He curled up by the side of the ro...

Since my sister bought a house, I think she has been slowly turning into Martha Stewart. It started years ago with themed gift wrapping, but now she’s hosting family dinners at her place, whereas I’m still mostly of the mindset that the grownups should take care of that shit. It’s my job to show up and eat. So last night I showed up and ate at my sister’s house, along with my dad, his girlfriend Susan, my pseudo-grandma and pseudo-uncle (we’re very Rent when it comes to valuing chosen family as greater than or equal to biological, but with less performance art and more complaining about The Kids Today). My uncle ’s favorite topics are television and food, so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when a conversation that was ever so briefly about feminism and the forms that countercultural movements have taken throughout history quickly turned into a conversation about how 1) Mae West was so ahead of her time and 2) my uncle ate some amaaaazing brie with toasted pine nuts and butte...