Bread and Bread

Calderwood: heated floors and charming bugs. Last night I started reading 2500 Random Things About Me Too , a compilation/explosion of lists from that Facebook meme that went around a few years ago, by my former CalArts professor Matias Viegener. You might think that would make for a terrible book, especially if you’ve seen how blogs and Tumblrs and other internet phenomena have been turned into disappointing books that get sold at Urban Outfitters. But you’d be wrong. I’ll have more to say about Matias’s book—which is as warm and friendly as it is skeptical of narrative—when I’m finished, but for now I just want to blog about (full) Day 1 at MacDowell in random-list form. 1. Lunch arrived in a picnic basket with “Calderwood,” the name of my cottage/studio, painted on the lid. 2. It was tuna salad with capers and faro. Faro! It tastes like peasant food in the best way. 3. I think that when people get stuck, they reach for food, both literally and literarily. Mangoe...

1. some stories i’ve told myself A handful of years ago, after applying for and being rejected by several of those lovely grants that give chunks of money to women artists, I decided maybe I just wasn’t One Of Those Writers. I had a book out, so I suspected I was a good writer, but Those Writers, the ones who got awards and grants and fellowships, had some kind of additional pedigree I couldn’t quite formulate, let alone access. Maybe my MFA wasn’t from the right school, or my writing was too queer, or not queer enough. People might like my work, but that wasn’t the same as saying, We the well-funded want to put our money on you. We think there should to be more YOU in the world. It was like, if I could get myself to the party, I might be admitted, but no car service was going to send a limo for me. And then I got a grant—from the Center for Cultural Innovation , to work on the circus novel. I got the letter the same week I learned I was pregnant with twins, and I thought,...

One time in college, my roommates admitted to each other that they’d thought (separately) about killing someone. They’d fantasized about how to do it, wondered if they could get away with it. I was surprised. It’s not that I worried Stephanie or Nina would kill me in my sleep (even though I wasn’t tidiest roommate). But I’d never thought about killing someone. Instead, I’d always imagined getting accused of a crime I didn’t commit. I could easily picture the cops nudging me toward a confession. When I thought about it, did I really remember everything that had happened last Saturday night? No, I would concede tearfully, I did not. Empathy is a weird thing (Colin’s great article in the Used Furniture Review started me thinking about it). In general, I’m a fan. It’s why I write fiction. It’s more or less the meaning of life, I guess. But too much and you’re totally dysfunctional. If a surgeon really empathized with her patients, she wouldn’t be able to operate. Parents have to...

Here are some things that happened last weekend. 1. My car died. In a CVS parking lot two blocks from my mechanic. I hiked up the hill and talked to Jeff. “You have Triple-A?” he asked, not unkindly. “Call Triple-A.” I trudged back down the hill and waited by my dirty car until the tow truck came. I got a jump and drove back to my mechanic. 2. Because of #1, we got a late start on our drive up north for Meehan and Sally’s wedding. 3. Meehan and Sally got married. 4. But we missed it, because first AK got sick. We pulled off the 101 thinking maybe we’d use the bathroom at Starbucks in Soledad, California. There was an urgent care next door, so we used that instead. The doctor thought she was having a bad reaction to an antibiotic. 5. Oh, but between #2 and #3, I ran over a squirrel on an off-ramp. I know I probably kill a dozen polar bears a day just by consuming products that come in plastic packaging, but I still burst into tears. Later Jody tried to make me feel ...

1. dr. frankenwhatever, just hand me a cigarette When I was in college, I accompanied some friends to Rocky Horror at the Nuart . They were aging punk rockers, meaning they were twenty and had been going Fugazi shows since they were twelve and were sort of over it all. They still wore twenty-hole Doc Martens, but there was no way they were going to make the effort to dye their hair green and shape it into a mohawk again. Once upon a time, they’d been Rocky Horror cast members. My friend Jenessa’s boyfriend Bill had played Dr. Frankenfurter perhaps for years. Now they watched a few minutes of the movie and spent the rest of the time smoking in the lobby and making snarky (unscripted, unrelated to Rocky ) observations. I suppose they weren’t actually smoking in the lobby. Even in 1998, I’m pretty sure smoking in movie theaters was illegal. But they were all but smoking.  It's just a jump to the left, and a step to the lobby. I was bummed out because I’d never seen...

I'd spend more time like this if our couch were long enough to lay down on. I broke my No Movies About People In My Demographic rule this weekend to watch Hello I Must Be Going , because the trailer assured me that Melanie Lynskey’s character, Amy, would be sufficiently bummed out as to not stress me out. (Can I just say how refreshing it is that a character allegedly born in 1977 is named Amy? Not Lily or Ruby or Madison, or another name given to humans born circa 2007 and movie characters born in 2012. AK and I have a thing about how trans guys tend to rename themselves, like, Brayden, even when they’re thirty years old. If your female name was Jennifer, your male name should probably be Dave or Brian, not Owen. That is, if you’re going for realism. If you just want a name you like and you don’t mind turning around every time the parents at your hipster coffee shop call their two-year-olds, carry on, Brayden/Owen.) Where was I? Hello I Must Be Going and realism, righ...

Ollie takes ownership of the cube. Ahem. Hi. Well, gosh, I feel kind of bashful. When you’re internet-quiet for four months, you feel like the next thing you say should be really important , even if that was never the aim of this blog. But all of a sudden this is turning into that worst-of-all-creative-writing-products, the I Don’t Know What To Write A Poem About poem. Or its blogosphere equivalent, the Sorry I Haven’t Posted blog. I’m not sorry. I’m…rested? I actually have about a thousand things to do this week, so that doesn’t feel like the right word, even if it’s true in the mental sense. I took some time off partly because I felt like my blog was alternately disingenuous or TMI-ish, or maybe both at the same time. This morning I was wondering how to create a voice that is both authentic and not overly revealing. It would have to be some sort of experimental narrative that is always doubling back on itself and calling attention to its own tricks. And that would be no fun...

Who needs perfect teeth when you have a bedazzled face? I started this blog almost exactly seven years ago. I’m sure I have at least seven more years worth of posts in me about movies, books, babies, Taco Bell radio commercials and other pressing matters. But I think it’s time for a hiatus—probably somewhere in the network sitcom range, not the HBO range, length-wise. I’ve been thinking about living my life in public—something I started doing accidentally as a result of being a writer, an all-too-willing Facebook addict and someone who generally can’t shut up. As much as this blog is not a diary (my actual diary sounds like the most boring therapy session in the world), constantly documenting my life in any capacity has created a weird obsession with presentation. It’s like I visit my blog or my Facebook page to find out what I’m like. The places I need to visit are church, my friends’ houses, my therapist’s office. Maybe some poetic mountain or freeway underpass (depending wh...

Let's all go to the lobby! Let's all check our eeeeemail! Last night I read with some fabulous gay men at a reading hosted by Artillery Magazine (“the only art magazine that’s fun to read”), which provided free wine for the hour before we took the mic. I have decided this is a key component of a successful reading. Those folks laaaaughed (in a good way) when I read from my Untitled YA Adoption Scam Novel.* The reading was in the groovy Cactus Lounge at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood. When my dad arrived—and god bless my dad for unblinkingly attending readings where it’s not uncommon for someone to start his (really great) poem with the word “Semen”—we had this conversation: Me: Did you have any trouble finding the place? Dad: No, no. It’s kind of run-down, though. At first I thought it was abandoned. Me: This is a really nice hotel. I could never afford to stay here. I mean, I don’t know if it’s at the top of the trendy hotel list anymore, but— ...

Is that a magnet in your shirt or are you just happy to see me? My car is such a tease. It’s doing this thing where sometimes it doesn’t start, but it won’t replicate the problem for my mechanic. This morning I tried to explain what Jeff had said to me to my car-expert dad: “It could be that the starter is making the distributor break, or the distributor is making the starter break. But until we figure out which, I can’t replace either.” My dad proceeded to tell me that what I’d described was physically impossible. Things get lost in the Car-to-Jeff’s Chinese-to-English-to-Cheryl-to-Dad translation. But the problem hasn’t cost me any money yet, and walking the mile and a half to and from the shop was strangely uplifting in the lovely Saturday weather. I prefer to save my getting-upset cards for existential matters. And then, oh, do I play them. I made Michelada beer cocktails for book club and they were SO GOOD. I got uppity with anyone who disagreed with my love for Man ...

If you’re like me and make the daily mistake of listening to commercial radio , perhaps you’ve heard the Taco Bell commercial for their new Locos Tacos . Believe it or not, I’m not here to question the edibility of a taco made out of Doritos. We all grew up eating those finger-dying orange chips, so filling them with meat (or “meat”) and other “food” isn’t really a big leap. They probably taste pretty decent, in a 49-cents sort of way. I am a little concerned with the name: We should call them Tacos Locos if we want to stay true to the Spanish language and Mexican culture, which, as we know, Taco Bell is devoted to doing. If we want to acknowledge the inherent and sometimes positive hybridization that happens when two cultures merge (hello, banh mi sandwiches!), we should call them Loco Tacos. In English, the adjective comes first and is never pluralized. Locos Tacos is a fair but awkward linguistic compromise, in my opinion. Make mine without the inside part. Or the outside ...

I'm sure they're very nice people. 1. the gay 1950s Today I read this interview with Sarah Schulman (thanks, Raquel, for posting). Executive summary: AIDS killed radical urban queers and left literal vacancies to be occupied by gentrifiers, namely the children of the middle-class whites who hightailed it to the suburbs in the 1950s. She argues that we’re now living in a “Gay 1950s,” wherein gays—no longer forced into radicalization by oppression—just want to get married, own a home and raise 2.5 children, despite the visible failure of capitalism and the family as institutions. Got all that? I love me some Sarah Schulman. I have ever since I discovered her book about how Jonathan Larson stole her ideas and made them into Rent. (For the record, I don’t think he did. They were both writing about the East Village in the ‘80s, and there was going to be some overlap, you know? However, I don’t think it’s a total coincidence that a literary novel by an activist lesb...

Cowboys, Republicans and prepsters, oh my! Another whirlwind work trip, this time to San Francisco. I was in a better mood, and it didn’t hurt that I got to see a couple of old friends, the kind who are endowed with magical powers in both the healing and philosophical arts. Jamie and I also saw Kay Ryan read, which worked its own kind of magic. She’s a quirky lady: charming and sort of adorable in a way you wouldn’t associate with a middle-aged butch woman, but stopping short of schticky. A lot of her poems rhyme—subtly and impressively—and she would stop in the middle and say something like, “Now, did you catch that rhyme?” or “Can you believe I rhymed ‘why we’ with ‘Hawaii’? Isn’t that just terrible?” or “Do you all know what the word ‘greensward’ means?” (It means “turf that is green with growing grass.” It appeared in a poem about Easter Island and the delicious audacity of artists.) It takes guts to engage with your audience that way. In my mind, I have a silent ...

Sometimes I love traveling on my own for work. I can be as anal as I want to be about lining my toiletries up next to the hotel sink. There’s time to write, get inspired and watch lots of Khloe and Lamar on cable (I kind of like those two kids). Tucson is a particularly great town, with a wide-open, sun-bleached vibe. But my heart wasn’t in it this trip, and I just felt kind of lonely and contemplative, but not in a here’s-a-great-idea-for-my-novel kind of way. One night I ate dinner at my hotel. It wasn’t one of those nice hotels that prides itself on having a top-quality restaurant on the ground floor either. More like a sports bar with so-so fish and water that came in a disposable plastic cup. For a few minutes, that sad little cup seemed to symbolize my entire life. But I more or less dusted myself off, and the great thing about my hotel was that they were having a German Shepherd show there. It was noisy, and when it rained the whole courtyard smelled like wet dog, but i...

Well, Easter happened, so I like to think that spring has begun in earnest and I will now be all the things I didn’t get around to being during the past year. If Jesus can be reborn, why not me? Wait, that’s terrible logic. Jesus does all sorts of things I can’t do, like heal the sick and not include passive aggressive footnotes in his blog. But maybe I will at least manage to get ready for bikini season or something. Here’s what I read in March, which seems like a long time ago now. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard: A lovely extended prose poem on writing in the vein of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird , though it actually predates the other book. Bird by Bird offers more practical advice, which either makes it more useful or more audacious, depending on your take (mine is mostly the former). At times Dillard's rustic metaphors almost made me cry--see her description of a sphinx moth fighting fate: "It gained height and lost, gained and lost, and always lost more t...

People keep getting pregnant. This is not news. It’s probably also not news that one of Facebook’s main functions is to make members feel like pathetic puddles of nothing-much in a sea of award-winning, best-selling mothers of adorable babies who sleep through the night. Nevertheless, yesterday’s ultrasound picture with its witty, self-deprecating caption did its thing to me. It probably didn’t help that this is Squeakies Death Anniversary Week, and the week I turned 35, meaning that if I was pregnant, I would officially be an “older mother.” (Adopting only slightly hushes one’s biological clock. I would still like to not die when my kids are in college, you know?) But beneath the flurry of outraged texts and emails I sent to people who are tired of getting texts and emails on this particular topic, there was a tiny glimmer of something. I think it was the Option To Not Be Sad And Full Of Hate. It was hard to see, because it was underneath the woodpile of sadness and hate t...