Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman

August 17, 2013 · 10:11 pm

Paint Misbehavin’

I saw art today in an exhibtion that was open, cheerful and free, and required nary a minute of waiting time.

Unlike plan A, which would have involved a junket into Manhattan, where the Park Avenue Tunnel had the decency to open itself to pedestrian traffic for a few brief hours for the first time in its history. Nice, I’m sure, but you gotta park, you gotta get there when the line opens at 7:30 a.m., then you gotta walk, and worst of all you have to stand there jammed up with other tourists, just waiting for the privilege of seeing an esoteric sound-art installation. I saw it in a picture, it was nice.

But why not take your art al fresco, by people who created it in situ. If you were me, you could perch comfortably on the back of a kneeling scooter en route.

Graffiti has been around for millennia — the Temple of Dendur at the Met has names chiseled into its stone — and for almost half a century it’s been showcased at a 2,000-square-foot building in Long Island City called 5 Pointz.

Some of the great names in graffiti have done some of their best work here, along with less experienced taggers. That’s the beauty of the art, of course. It’s absolutely democratic. The work we saw on the walls today at 5 Pointz will be rubbed out and painted over soon enough, generally in two to three weeks. That’s just the way it is. People have lots of opinions about work in aerosol paint, but that’s the bottom line.

Today we saw a disturbing blue bull by Chicago-born Estebana del Valle, who gave an interview to the 5 Pointz website in which he said that he first tagged a bench at his junior high, moved on to K Mart and bridges and now shows his art in galleries.

When asked what percentage of his time he devotes to art, he said 120 percent. The role of the artist in society, he said, is “to challenge and to contribute to the collective thought.” And I thought it was all about that splendiforous blue color.

We only managed a small slice of the 5 Pointz scene. As we headed down Crane Street, a crew of two was slapping up some new paint, in the center of which was the outline of a dog to be colored in later – the image, I was told, came from the internet and was some kind of “folk image” of a canine. To me it looked like Oliver had recently posed.

Up and down the street a dozen young men managed their supplies of spray cans and consulted drawings on scraps of paper.

Shiro, originally from Japan, now works out of New York. Some of her feisty supergirls, put up just this month, stole the show.

According to Shiro’s facebook bio, In addition to her accomplished career as an artist, she works as a nurse and witness a lot of suffering and drama. The experiences from the medical field changed her prospective on life and she wanna express her message through her artwork: “Love life and live it to the max! We exists RIGHT NOW, RIGHT HERE!” Maybe you would like to step into the studio of the coolest lady in the world?

These walls under the shadow of the 7 train are owned by landlord Jerry Wolkoff, who has allowed hundreds of street artists over the years to create art on, in and around his former warehouse but who has more recently announced that he is trying to convert his property into a high-rise residential tower and luxury shopping mall. The artist Meres, also known as Jonathan Cohen, who manages Five Pointz, has been plunged into a fight to save the graffiti mecca. Today, we saw tourists from all over the world, agog and clicking away at the spectacle before them.

And a photo shoot for an ad underway.

The model had designed all the clothes in the line, and her husband created the skateboard.

Even the lightpoles had been tagged.

Even the hydrants.

About half way down the street, pushing along on my knee scooter The Bloke, I discovered I felt nude. My cast, that is. It needed flair. And the crew of The Royal KingBee were happy to oblige.

KingBee interrupted the insect he was delineating to spray an elegant, signature K on my fiberglass in black. Keith, who had just come back from a beer run, did a red tag.

Memo, KingBee’s younger brother, explained the crew’s interest in the vanishing bee populations of North America.

I felt I was beginning to blend in. Nicely.

The longer I stayed at 5 Pointz, the longer I found I wanted to stay. And a scooter like mine was the perfect mechanism for getting around, seeing things faraway.

Or close up.

A lot of graffiti is self referential. Note these dangling spray cans.

That’s alright. If you’re healthy, a lot of living is self referential. Before today, I wasn’t going to let anyone write on my cast. When asked, I said I had no interest. I was going to keep it clean, unsoiled. Keep it neutral.

Ream added the final tag to my cast, one he said he’d passed down to his three-year-old son — Demon3. He told me he’d just had double bunion surgery, that they’d cut one bone and shaved another and that he was still in pain every day. And here he was, erecting some kind of kaleidoscopic Kandinsky on a wall in Queens, New York.

So for today, skip the art tunnel, or the art museum, or the symphony orchestra in a plush, cramped chair. Don’t wait on line.

Every time a graffiti artist gets out there with an aerosol can, they take a risk. Can they do it this time? Not that it’s forever, since another dude will come along in a couple weeks and put up their own brilliant version of reality. But still, go to 5 Pointz, see what they can do. Today.

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August 15, 2013 · 3:43 pm

I Am the Walrus

I’m about a foot shorter and slightly less blubbery, and my tusks have not come in, but my habit of lolling on the couch is pronounced.

I could be lying atop a Greenland ice floe. A tooth-walking seahorse (Odonus rosmarus) through and through, cast-footed variety. Basically sedentary. Shellfish savoring. Laughable? Don’t people sort of snicker at walruses?

My main function these days, when I’m resisting the urge to watch past episodes of Orange Is the New Black, is to absorb information. That and try to knit a mohair bandana with a pair of metal toothpicks, willing Oliver not to drag the tiny wound-up ball of pink fluff under the coffeetable.

(Not successful, and I nearly rebroke the bones in my foot retrieving it.)

Walruses show affection.

There’s more where that one came from, walrus fetishists.

Aside from walrus kiss-bombs, I sourced a few more of life’s interesting details today.

1. A California man named Jerry Gretzinger has spent 50 years drawing an enormous map of a world he invented. Hmnh, you say, don’t people do this every day? Well, maybe brainy 3^rd graders do something similar on a sheet of oaktag. But his is just so much more carefully delineated than others, did I mention 2,000 feet long, and he uses a weird deck of cards he pasted up to determine next steps he will take on the thing. Including which neighborhoods get what he calls “voided,” or just suddenly blasted out of existance.

There is a great mini doc about him, and you might want to bring home some colored pencils when you’re out today. (Note the envy in that: when you’re out today.) For more great stuff on do it yourself cartography (and moving gigantic maps) try Making Maps.

2. I never knew what was in O magazine – lists upon lists of Oprah’s fave books that were going to earn more than my books ever would? But today I checked out the September issue because we got a subscription in error. And it turned out the issue was all about hair. Here is something so inutterably weird I reread it a few times. A timeline of how glamorous hair extensions come to be. It begins with Hindu pilgrims shaving their heads at the temple Tirumala in Tiraputi, India. (I did a little further research. As many as 10,000 pilgrims get their hair shaved by 500 temple barbers every single day.) The hair is fumigated and wrapped in bundles in Bangladore, then shipped by private courier to Rome to be bleached and dyed. Six weeks later it goes to U.S. salons. After 3 to 6 months use the repurposed locks get tossed in the trash. Footnote from the same O: 90 percent of celebrities at the Academy Awards are wearing extensions – everyone except, according to one expert, children and women with pixie cuts. I guess men, too, go unextended. But who knows.

3. A lot of people consider the Hudson to be “my river.” Me too. That’s why I was surprised not to have known before that the actual start of the estuary, the southern terminus that is, is deemed by scientists to occur precisely at Manhattan’s Battery.

I knew it began down there in the Harbor someplace, but everything seemed pretty watery and diffuse to me. Now I realize that you have Hudson River Mile 0 at the Battery, the George Washington Bridge at HRM 12, the Tappan Zee at 28, Bear Mountain at 47, Beacon-Newburgh Bridge at 62, the Mid-Hudson Bridge at 75, the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge at 95, the Rip Van Winkle 114, and the Federal Dam at Troy, the head of tidewater, at 153. The tidal section of the Hudson constitutes a bit less than half the total distance – 315 miles – from Lake Tear of the Clouds to the Battery. I learned this scrap and so many other things from the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s weekly easy–to subscribe to e-newsletter, Hudson River Almanac. If you want to know how many hummingbirds appeared in someone’s yard this May, and how that compared with last year’s count, or the story of a kingfisher riding the back of a hawk, or that Atlantic blue crabs are known to rivermen as “Jimmys,”(mature males) “Sooks,” (mature females) and “Sallys (immature females), this is the place for you. I find I want to know these things.

It’s amazing what you’re ignorant of as a walrus.

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August 14, 2013 · 2:09 pm

Clerihew’s on First

Yet another GOODIE FROM GIL. Thank you Gil, for providing moral support and iced coffee while I sit around with my leg up and my brain a little dialed down.

In a recent interview (writes Gil Reavill) Woody Allen belched forth about his writing process in ways that struck a sympathetic note with me.

Here are a couple excerpts:

“What people who don’t write don’t understand is that they think you make up the line consciously — but you don’t. It proceeds from your unconscious.”

“The best you can do to get through life is distraction. Love works as a distraction. And work works as a distraction. You can distract yourself a billion different ways. But the key is to distract yourself.”

This comes close to what I’ve experienced about writing.

1) “You,” the ego-locked soul pushing the pen, is not really the author in any credible sense. Instead, it’s what used to be called the Muse, what Mr. Allen calls the unconscious. Sentences and phrases tend to leap out fully-formed and pre-created, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus.

The byline is the biggest fiction there is. The greatest authors ever—Homer, Tu Fu, Shakespeare—are ciphers as individuals, to the degree that some people insist they never existed or didn’t even write their works.

2) At best, what you create is nothing more important than a diversion for yourself and others, a distraction from boredom or a way to excuse oneself from facing the howling void of the universe. Forget Art with a capital “A.” Forget literatoor. In other words, don’t take yourself or your work too seriously.

Doggerel fits the bill quite nicely. I indulge in it often and most of it never sees the light of day (thank the Lord, you might respond). Limericks, parodies, couplets, one-offs—and clerihews.

Here’s Wiki on the rules of writing the clerihew:

“A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem’s subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and meter are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):

Sir Christopher Wren

Said, “I am going to dine with some men.

If anyone calls

Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”

A few years back I entered the clerihew contest of the literary society in the village where we lived. I wrote a whole slew of them. (A cleri-slew, says Jean.) One of them won second prize, a gift certificate to a local bookstore that I never cashed in. It was an honor just to be nominated. Plus it was the Muse’s doing, not mine. Blame her. See if you can guess which of these took the silver.

Meeting Charlotte Brontë

I would say, “Enchanté,

“Your hero’s charismatic

“But who’s that in the attic?”

Emily Brontë

Wrote less than Dante

One book to four

Proving less is moor

Brontë, Anne

Youngest of the clan

Wrote ‘til she had blisters

But she’s still not her sisters

Moving on from the Bronte clan…

Charles Dickens

At injustice sickens

His muse quickens

And the plot thickens

Ken Kesey

Makes us uneasy

When he gets on the bus

And leaves without us

Raymond Chandler

Had a wife but he banned her

From reading his books

About killers and crooks

Homer

Told of a sea roamer

The hero Ulysses

Who missed his wife’s kissies

The heretic Tyndale

Saw flames start to kindle

When he translated the Bible

And at the stake was held liable

Victor Hugo

Never drove a Yugo

He preferred a fiacre

In which he met his Maker

Leo Tolstoy

Was a good ol’ boy

Who fled from his wife

At the end of his life

George Eliot

To hear biographers tell it

Wrote as a man

But lived as Mary Ann

James Cain

Waited in vain

For his royalty checks

Now his postman’s an ex

Aeschylus

With comedy can thrill us

But an eagle did hurtle

And he was killed by a turtle

[Snopes.com discounts the tale, saying there is no confirmed factual information regarding the death of Aeschylus]

David Foster Wallace

Was not quite as tall as

The length of the rope

And the loss of his hope

Bentley, Ed Clerihew

Created a merry brew

Of rhymes for the very few

So no one would say “Cleri- who?”

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August 13, 2013 · 2:49 pm

The Mummy’s Bones

The Bloke smokes. The thing you need to know if you get a kneeling scooter is you have to embrace the experience, you have to enjoy it, you have to gliiiide. Even with a cup of iced Starbucks in one hand.

Like a kid. Like all the kids that look at you with envy when they see you and your device, The Bloke, come careening their way. I beat Gil in a race down the drug store aisles.

Gil says, Jean, don’t write about your foot again.

But I say, write what you know. And at this point my foot is pretty central to what I know.

I felt good because I came out of my first week of rehab with a completed book review for NPR – and the book was a hefty one, too: The Daughters of Mars, by Thomas Keneally. It makes it somewhat easier to handle an achy-breaky right foot when you’re reading about World War I soldiers getting their faces “shorn off.” Amputees were the new normal. Who am I to complain? I got a few stitches, that’s all.

But crutches suck. You see those college jocks swinging along on a pair after a football injury, going to History 329 or maybe a crowded party up a flight of frat-house stairs – how do they do that? It’s all I can do to limp across the living room or out to the car. It’s the young guys’ superior upper-body strength, I’m sure, but also the breezy ‘tude, and a strong desire to get back into the swim of beer pong.

Which brings me back to The Bloke. I was going to decline the Pig Mountain barbecue at the end of August, thinking I just couldn’t manage the street fair thing. But how can you turn down a pork-enshrining food fest in a town called Narrowsburg, New York, which started out as a punk rock show in a basement? Fourteen chefs and fourteen pigs. So what if I get some drinks slopped on The Bloke. He can handle a little rust.

This is one way to get through 6 weeks of life in a foot cast: gliiiide through it, sampling pork ribs and other delicacies along the way.

I’ve become a pudding fiend. A bowl of the stuff being the demarcation between early evening on the couch, foot up, and late evening on the couch, foot up.

I’ll tell you a secret about Kozy Shack. It’s no worse than any homemade pudding or gourmet restaurant mousse either, containing just milk, eggs, sugar and real vanilla. It has only one flaw. The chocolate does not have the delectable skin on it you get when it cools after you spoon it out of a hot pan. Yuck, says Gil.

Another avenue to wellness: idolize your doc, and realize you lucked into the Greatest Foot Surgeon in the World. The Greatest. There is something of the Stockholm Syndrome in this, probably, as Dr. Voellmicke is mine for the duration, so he better be good. But in truth, he has a sharp mind and a gentle touch. Not everyone could repair a fifth metatarsal with such delicacy.

We visited with Dr. Voellmicke so that I could get my sutures removed and my plaster cast exchanged for a streamlined fiberglass model. This sterling representative of his profession performs every bit of the work himself, including creating a fiberglass mold of wet strips the way you’d make a kids’ pinata.

I came up with a horror film trope. Bunions: The Movie. Or maybe The Bone Spur. Anyway, my feet have been a nightmare for a long time, and it was thrilling to see the monster bones I was living with transformed into the elegant lines that now lie beneath the mummy bandages, awaiting their closeup.

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August 12, 2013 · 10:45 am

Live From Lincoln Center

AND ONCE AGAIN, let me welcome guest post-er Gil Reavill, who took himself out of Cabinworld while I was in lockdown to visit Lincoln Center Out of Doors in Manhattan:

After days of rain (writes Gil) the 30^th Annual Roots of American Music, under the aegis of Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, kicked off the weekend with perfect weather.

A political rant festered in the warmth of the beautiful sunshine on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. All around the Lincoln Center cultural mecca, billionaires had festooned their names. Bloomberg sponsored the music festival, so that name was emblazoned on banners and signs. There was also Hearst Plaza, as well as David H. Koch Theater, home of the New York City Ballet and formerly the home of City Opera, used to be called the New York State Theater. If just plain folks do it, it’s called graffiti and prosecuted. But if big-money smears its name around on buildings, it’s called philanthropy and celebrated.

This is how the scam works. Conservatives agitate to eliminate arts funding (among other frivolities like roads and bridges). Under pressure from the billionaire-owned-and-operated Republican party, arts funding is duly cut to the bone. So when some noblesse oblige moneybag like David Koch comes along, a funding-parched venue like Lincoln Center (which was, after all, founded by Rockefeller money) can do nothing else but buckle. The populist-named New York State Theater becomes Koch Theater, and the arts become privatized.

David Koch and his brother Charles Koch lead the radical right-wing libertarian charge. They want to be free of government interference for their pollution-spewing enterprises. The day I willingly enter an edifice named after a corporate gangster like Koch is “when shrimps learn to whistle,” a phrase Nikita Khrushchev liked to use. If we adequately funded our public institutions, they wouldn’t have to lease themselves to big-money robber barons.

Then there was something called the “Modern Luxury Lounge sponsored by Celebrity Cruises,” an enormous covered and cordoned off seating area erected stage left at Damrosch Bandshell. American have slowly gotten accustomed to the idea that these sort of luxury skyboxes/VIP areas are always looking down on them whenever they venture into public spaces. But such zones are a clear violation of the egalitarian spirit. They’ve been tearing down stadiums all over the country just to erect replacements that feature more skyboxes, more segregated playgrounds for the rich. Just remember, folks, some pigs are more equal than others.

But on to the music.

In the smaller performance space on the north side of the Met, we caught the New Orleans band Hurray for the Riff Raff fronted by the wonderful Alynda Lee Segarra.

Her smooth, powerful alto is her own, but her phrasing reminded me a little of Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano. She writes and sings all the band’s songs herself. She killed with The Body Electric, a kind of answer song to the whole tradition of Omie Wise-style he-done-her-wrong murder ballads. How would a man feel, she asks in her lyrics, if a song like Omie Wise was about his own daughter? Beautifully strong stuff, worth tracking down.

The program transferred to the Damrosch Park bandshell on the south side of the Met. Kicking off the evening show was a rockabilly revue, featuring the real reason for showing up that night: James Burton, master of the telecaster, Elvis’s longtime guitarist for his live shows, who played with everybody else under the Sun Records sun, too.

Arkansas’s biggest singer (in the literal sense of the word: he’s 6’7″), Sleepy LaBeef performed the vocal duties and brought along his own band.

Burton did a definitive version of Mystery Train and showed why he was name-checked by almost every person on stage that night.

Jason Isbell of the Drive-by-Truckers did a full-throated middle set, featuring a song by Isbell’s fiddle player and wife, Amanda Shires, formerly of the Thrift Store Cowboys.

Isbell’s recent Southeaster and Shires’s brand-spanking new Down Fell the Doves form a one-two punch for the couple, both albums released within a couple months from each other.

Tough acts to follow. After all the roaring guitars from the all the multiple-personnel bands that crowded Lincoln Center all day, could a single performer with a single acoustic possibly hold the stage? Nick Lowe managed to make it look easy.

The man is simply one the best songwriters alive today. What’s really great about Lowe is how long he’s been out there—from way back in the day when he wrote “(What’s So Funny About) Peace Love and Understanding” for his late-60s band, Brinsley Schwarz. Half a century later, he just keeps going without losing a step, his vocals and songwriting still superb. Lowe’s performance at Damrosch was masterful. Just one guy (he’d probably say “bloke”) held the whole 2,000-plus audience mesmerized with feel-good pop tunes and killer lyrics. Lowe may be a dinosaur, but he’s the kind that eats younger bands for lunch.

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August 10, 2013 · 6:48 pm

A Hut of Candy Floss

Magical, feel good potions of the day: a tall iced coffee, a small pain smoother, a delicate skein of candy floss.

There’s a lot you don’t know about crutches before they come into your life. Like what good yarn-winders they make in a pinch.

This silk-angora begs to be knitted into a Barbie evening wrap.

I seem to be rendered all thumbs by the work on my toes.

Don’t you love it when you come across an actress just casually knitting in the movies?

Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s makes a famous attempt, looking fetching while botching her pattern.

Or Myrna Loy in the Thin Man movies. She makes knitting snazzy.

Sylvia Sidney appears in a fantastic shot on set, needles in hand.

That last comes from one of my favorite blogs, One More Stitch, whose author researches and recreates garments of the past.

All these glamour pusses make it look so easy.

When I feel like tossing my needles, I think about entering the knit world another way — through the example of this guy in France who soaked sweaters in milk and lime, threw them over a frame of branches and covered them with black soap and linseed oil. He padded the inside with earth and, for some reason, horse manure. He lives there now.

Hepburn would probably even look more cool knitting her sweater in this knit hut.

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August 9, 2013 · 4:30 pm

Escape From the Small Screen

Out of a doze, into a tavern. Burgers, seafood, beer. Prop up the cast on a chair, so much more comfortable that way. Cold beer, even nonalcoholic never tasted so good. After a dozen Breaking Bad reruns, the real world looks sharp, magnificent .

What’s that on your face, said my father to my husband.

It’s my project beard, said Gil. I’ll cut it when I finish my book.

Christmas isn’t for four months, said my dad, suggesting Gil could get a job as a mall Santa. He went back to calculating the check.

Just a touch more coffee, said my mother to the waitress. No, that’s too much.

Just drink what you want, said my father.

I’ll finish my cold, cold beer. Crunch a last potato chip. Swing my way home to the couch.

Did you know it rained today? Like sheets of rock candy, or maybe that’s from Breaking Bad.

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August 8, 2013 · 2:57 pm

Captive Reader

And another great guest post from Gil Reavill, who between brewing coffee, clearing away dishes and bearing down on his own book has managed to fill in literarily while I’m off my foot.

EVER SINCE JEAN shared a bookstore appearance with novelist Koethi Zan, author of The Never List, the theme of captive women seems like a bad tooth that we can’t help worrying.

The horrific tales of Ariel Castro, the Cleveland kidnapper, rapist and murderer, remain in the news long after his captives took back their hard-won freedom. Recently they leveled Castro’s home, part of a plea deal that spared the predator a death sentence.

I wrote about the phenomenon in my book Aftermath, Inc.

Ed Gein’s Wisconsin farmhouse, destroyed by fire. John Wayne Gacy’s house in Des Plains, Illinois, bulldozed flat, as was O.J. Simpson’s Rockingham estate. Jeffrey Dahmer’s Oxford apartment building, with its infamous apartment 213, demolished. These sites were, in the language of real estate experts, ‘stigmatized’ properties. You know you have transgressed in some basic, Decalogue-violating manner when authorities raze your house and sow your fields with salt.

The theme of captive women crops up with stinging regularity in literature. John Fowles’s great novel The Collector was the first treatment of the theme that I encountered, probably as a too-young adolescent.

In our household, stories of Cynthia Parker and other women taken by Indians have become familiar through research for Jean’s novel, Savage Girl. Captivity is such a popular leitmotif in romance novels that it must form an admitted element in female fantasy. But the difference between rape fantasies and rape, as psychologists reiterate, is that women are in control of their fantasies.

During her research for The Never List, Zan became exhaustively familiar with captive women cases the world over. She tracks the survivors and gives sobering accounts of their inability to adjust to life after captivity. Often such women become recluses, unable to face life after enslavement.

Of course, stories of a lot of these victims never make the news. It might come as a shock to some benighted souls that human slavery did not exactly vanish from the face of the earth with the end of the American Civil War. Read Nicholas Kristoff’s great call to arms, Half the Sky, or David Batstone’s Not for Sale for accounts of sexually enslaved females all over the world (including right here in River City).

So it was with a creeping sense of recognition that I delved into our friend Nelly Reifler’s captivating (ahem) debut novel, Elect H. Mouse State Judge, out this week from Faber and Faber.

H. Mouse is by turns entertaining and disturbing, with Reifler treading a razor’s edge between Wind in the Willows and, say, Chuck Palahnuik, William Vollmann or Andrew Vachss. The innocence here is false innocence, and the topical true-crime reality of captive women leaks through the fairy tale.

H. Mouse is that eminently familiar figure, a compromised politician. His daughters Susie and Margo are taken by a religious nut named Father Sunshine (one Reifler’s best creations). The title character reaches out to a couple of shady political fixers named Barbie and Ken—yes, the very same ragingly popular iconic couple toyed with by children since the doll’s introduction in 1959. Ever wonder how Barbie and Ken do the nasty? Reifler tells us (it involves the removal of limbs). Lawyers from Mattel, Inc. ought to be knocking on Reifler’s door any day now.

The figure of an unreliable narrator is a common one, but with H. Mouse I felt myself put into the position of an unreliable reader. I had the uncanny sense of humming along, enjoying the mice-and-foxes fable, then snapping awake to a nightmare. Reifler’s trap is baited with honey: the tone of faux sweetness is devilish, since one soon learns that it cannot last. Throughout these pages I suffered a quite enjoyable case of literary whiplash, something along the lines one feels with Animal Farm. (There’s a story kicking around, I can’t remember where I encountered it, about a student telling his professor that Orwell’s masterpiece was an excellent tale of the barnyard. The professor told the student to go back and read the novel again.)

Elect H. Mouse State Judge is short, bittersweet and has a kick like a mule. Not since Art Spiegelman’s Maus have rodents been harnessed to so great effect.

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August 7, 2013 · 7:03 pm

An ARC and a Boost

There’s type and then there’s type.

After another day of slogging off and onto the couch, I opened the mail. In among the junk, two gems, two volumes I’ve been waiting for. Two Advance Reading Copies of Savage Girl. Two ARCs. The novel will be out in March 2014. But it’s alive and breathing in its beautiful jacket even as we speak. This is the copy that will go out to early commenters and reviewers, bloggers and big mouths, so we want for it to be gorgeous.

And that type. That’s what pops. The image of the girl and the mansion resonate, but the type’s what brings it to life. The title announces itself in a virginal white whose lines also embody the savagery of the title, and the two words are embossed, smooth under your fingertips as I didn’t know they would be when I simply saw the cover proof. Now its typography renders the package dazzling.

Crack it open and you get the prologue, the first outlines of the mystery the narrator Hugo unfolds.

The type popped. Now I’m going to have some pizzazz, too. Gil and I picked up a scooter I’d reserved for rental at the drug store. It waited patiently at the Greek restaurant we like while we downed our sandwiches and skordalia.

Then it came home with us – and boy, do cars stop for pedestrians when they see a scooter.

It’s somewhat easier to get around than crutches and I’ll be freer to exit my couch and have adventures. I think I’ll call it the Bloke. Right now the Bloke is in the back of the Suburu, waiting for me.

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August 6, 2013 · 2:57 pm

A Haze of Summer Reading

Still embedded in the couch, where I’ll be for the foreseeable future, my leg held slightly less aloft, though… and with less pain in my foot.

The hours go by. The days. So do the pages of the book I’m reading, though the medicine makes me slightly less attentive to the thread of the plot than I’d ordinarily be.

A summer book. A stack of summer books. I recently came across a copy of the syllabus for my honors English class in high school. Forty years ago. The teacher, Chuck Aschmann, was some kind of a genius, and he brought out the genius in his pupils. Just page 1 of the reading list would be enough for more than a single college literature course.

By page 2… I don’t remember it being hard to read most of his selections, just sitting for hours in our sticky leather club chair and dreaming over these amazing books. Spending a lot of time in the humid heat of August, reading and dreaming and reading…

Dos Passos, Woolf, Conrad, James. Fielding, Sterne, Thackeray. Melville. Twain. Sophocles!

I was actually spoiled for college English after this, thought I knew all there was to know about fiction and spent my non-class-time hardly reading at all but scribbling diary entries, page-length prose poems and love letters.

In high school it didn’t take foot surgery to keep me on my rear end reading novels in summer.

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August 5, 2013 · 11:51 am

A Full-throated Yodel

Today, Gil Reavill guest-posts as I rest:

THAT SOUND YOU HEAR is the yodels echoing down from the Catskill Mountains. Author, provocateur, deejay, beer mystic and worldwide yodeling authority Bart Plantenga recently appeared for a full-throated presentation and book-signing at Woodstock, NY’s great indie bookstore, The Golden Notebook.

The event was held on a tourist-flocked sunny Saturday in Woodstock, aka the People’s Republic of Woodstock. The iconic Aquarian village looked to be thriving and was chock full of public art and cheeky signage.

The Golden Notebook is one of our all-time favorites as both a bookstore and a book: the venue is named after Doris Lessing’s nervous breakdown of a masterpiece.

A feminist touchstone of the Sixties, Notebook turned a lot of minds around and established the author as a leading light in the literature of the day. Margaret Drabble famously called it “inner space fiction.”

We summered in Woodstock once back in the day at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in the hills above town, staying in one of the tiny cabins. The founder of Byrdcliffe believed in the health benefits of bathing, so he furnished each cabin there with immense eight-foot-long clawfoot tubs. Water was delivered to the faucet by a spring-fed system which ran through hoses that snaked through the woods. Bob Dylan’s old place was just down the road, and we snuck in for a nighttime swim or two in his former grotto. That year the Byrdcliffe Playhouse was doing a stage adaptation of the film Casablanca, and during the show a spotlight rigged on the theater’s roof would strobe the darkness and a claxon would sound as Louis and his friends would search for “the usual suspects.”

With the publication of his second book on the subject, Yodel in Hi-Fi: From Kitsch Folk to Contemporary Electronica, our friend Bart has established himself as an unparalleled resource for musicologists, aficionados and just plain yodel-crazy folks. While he does not indulge in the art himself, Plantenga has exhaustively documented yodeling practices all over the globe.

He rounds up the usual suspects—Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia—but gives fascinating insights into unexpected yodeling traditions among the Pygmy people in Africa and the Hmong in Southeast Asia. Yodeling is a method of changing pitch from ordinary chest register to falsetto, long used as a communication method in mountainous countries where the echo is most pleasing to the ears. Of course it also appears as a vocal effect in many different kinds of music, most notably in country and western but also, as Plantenga shows, in classical, electronica, pop and pretty much every other style on the face of the earth. The great country music pioneer Jimmie Rogers rode to fame on the strength of his “blue yodel.”

Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan yodel entered into the modern pop culture in the middle of the last century, and the practice was played for laughs by comic Carol Burnett, who used to open her television show with a suitably loony example. Plantenga’s reach goes much deeper than these popular examples, unearthing gems such as Bollywood actor Kumar, a yodeling sub-genre of German video porn (!), and South Korean faux-Bavarian yodeling groups. Bart spoke about yodeling as an “outburst of joy,” citing the “total Oktoberfest insanity” of alcohol-fueled burghers who bust out in freestyle tavern yodel throwdowns. “I like anomalies that make people re-assess clichés,” he says, and in Yodel in Hi-Fi, he has unearthed dozens of them.

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August 3, 2013 · 12:12 pm

Day 1-In Which I Learn to Hobble

It was a success, the surgery, though I awoke from the anesthesia blubbering like a baby. It’s normal, said the orthopedic surgeon, come to check on me. A lot of people cry. Then it was hip, hop, on to the wheelchair, on to the crutches, off to my new full-time lair, my living room, my foot on pillows above the couch.

My snouted nursemaid wedged beside me.

My other nursemaids scurry to my orders. My computer, please! My muffin! My book! Put it close, I’ve got to get an NPR review done this week. Could you please turn that light off? Or on?

I have a good view of Maud’s metallic blue fighter fish, Brussels, making his small way around the bowl.

Somehow, thinking about the immediate future, though I never had much patience for that fish, I now feel kindly toward it. Brussels reminds me of myself in my own little living room bowl. Except I hobble, can’t float at all, when I want to go brush my teeth.

Trying to stretch myself outside this world, adventuring via pictures of the past to the motor adventure taken in 1918 by John Burroughs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

This brilliant crew took a 12-day car camping trip in Burroughs’ automobile when he was 81.

John Burroughs, less well known today than the others, was ragingly popular by that time in his life. Gil and I used to visit his country retreat, a tiny cabin called Slabsides that stood beside a celery marsh in West Park, New York.

Burroughs’ fans have kept it intact, so you can see it as he did. Being there always made me want to inhabit a cabin, and now mine is virtually like his.

… I was offered a tract of wild land, barely a mile from home, that contained a secluded nook and a few acres of level, fertile land shut off from the vain and noisy world by a wooded precipitous mountain… and built me a rustic house there, which I call ‘Slabsides’, because its outer walls are covered with slabs. I might have given it a prettier name, but not one more fit, of more in keeping with the mood that brought me thither … Life has a different flavor here. It is reduced to simpler terms; its complex equations all disappear.

Young college women used to travel in hordes by train to Slabsides to pay homage to the great man, a pioneer of nature writing who published some 25 volumes, of which a million and a half volumes were sold during his lifetime.

In 1918, a convoy of eight vehicles accompanying the brainy colleagues toured Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia, stopping to camp on farms, examine old industrial sites, take hikes along rivers, and measure farming implements for fun, documenting as they went.

Some shooting entertained Ford and Firestone.

At night around the campfire the two industrialists, the naturalist and the inventor wound down by chewing over Shakespeare, Thoreau, chemistry. Don’t you wish you could have been there? In a way, you can, because photos from the trip are stored at Harvard’s Widener Library, with a smaller portfolio at my favorite website, Slate’s The Vault.

Closer to home yet exotic in its own way, the wool I am sending away for to keep my hands busy during this nonambulatory period.

What is mohair, anyway, I wonder, as I fawn over the silk and mohair skein available from the chicest yarn store I know, Purl in Soho, New York City.

It’s from a line called Haiku made by a company called Alchemy. The shade is called Teardrop. Is that not irrisistable?

The yarn comes not from a sheep but a goat, the Angora, which emigrated from Tibet to Turkey in the 16^th century, and it’s one of the oldest textile materials in use. It’s made of keratin, like hair, wool, horns and skin. Mohair is warm in winter, while remaining cool in summer. It is flame resistant, crease resistant, and does not felt. The goats are mainly bred in South Africa now.

And it is of course beautifully luxurious. Makes your fingers sing. Should I choose this color instead? It’s for a slip of an elegant bandana, not the kind you’d wear around a Slabsides campfire. Evening Pink.

If Firestone and Ford and Edison were on their way over to roast weenies, maybe a scarf in this hue would be more refined: Blue Jay Way.

So many choices when your leg is up and all you’ve got to do is dream.

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August 2, 2013 · 6:19 am

Of Leeches and Fiberglass

Five hundred years ago I would be having leeches applied to my leg today. Now it’s just a thigh-high fiberglass cast. And I know my foot will get better. (Even with all those leeches, a person would probably never get out there again in the millet fields.)

Just so you know, I may not be posting as regularly in the next month or so, as I drift in a medicinal haze. We’ll see what adventures are to be had in my living room, aside from gorging on episodic tv and Poptarts. And guest bloggers are welcome, those with adventures to share, just leave me a comment and we’ll discuss.

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July 31, 2013 · 5:28 pm

Life’s a Beach

Visiting Jones Beach today was like being on a public strand circa the 1950s, the bright beach bags, chairs, umbrellas, suits (except the suits were skimpier, even on the less than skimpy subathers).

Families with their chairs drawn around in big circles. Teenagers jumping around, full of beans. Grandpas dozed. Mothers and daughters plunked themselves down just like me and Maud, who immediately tugged her towel into the perfect rectangle, the perfect protected zone for her to sun her bod.

The middleaged couple next to us seemed to be mooning over each other for the first hour we were there, then disappeared into a dome tent whose sides wobbled along to their muted boom box: I’ve Had the Time of My Life, sung by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes, the finale song from Dirty Dancing.

The hardest working man on Jones Beach came around in his Ray Bans and sweaty tee shirt, hoisting his cooler.

Ice cream, Chipwich, frozen fruit bar! he called out. “Is this a picture for the winter?” he asked me as I captured his likeness for my personal magazine. The strawberry FrozFruit was like a rock, like a sweet Antarctica iceberg, until it melted all at once in sticky swirls around my mother-daughter friendship rings.

The whoosh of the waves rolling in and out. Hypnotic. The sun that penetrated even under my floppy hat brim. Snooooooze. Flip through a magazine. Is anything really worth reading?

Music. Manna for a twenty-one year old.

I am beginning to wonder what effect Taylor Swift has had on her generation, a group of closet romantics.

Stay stay stay

I’ve been loving you for quite some time…

You took the time to memorize me my fears my hopes and dreams

I just like hanging out with you all the time

All those times that you didn’t leave it’s been occuring to me

I would like to hang out with you for my whole life

The cool soft grit of the sand as I paddle through it with my contented toes.

The waves? Too cold, except for an ankle bath. I like my fruit bar chilly, not my Atlantic Ocean. As long as the air is pure. As long as I come home with salt caked in my hair and sand dusting my ankles. Do you know what I like about Jones Beach? You lean back and close your eyes and listen to people laugh.

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July 30, 2013 · 4:00 pm

Feets Too Big

All the places I won’t walk.

I said I’m sorry to an earthworm. Out loud.

It was cut in half, lying on the asphalt. Commiserating with a worm is not something I would ordinarily do, but I could in some ways relate to the creature. I’ll be able to move, but slowly, on crutches, after my foot surgery in three days. My right foot is eventually going to be good as new.

My left foot will have to wait to get its imperfections mended. I didn’t know that a tailor’s bunion, the aberrant bump on the outside of the foot — the one that will no longer allow me to get into anything besides flip flops — was named for the way tailors traditionally sat. Cross-legged.

I guess it cramped the style of their little toe. Too bad they didn’t have Dr. Voellmicke, my orthopedic surgeon, to fix them up. I’ll be in a hard cast for six weeks. That little bone that leads up to your toe, the one you never think about, is virtually marrowless, which means it has very little of the good stuff inside it needs to heal properly. Then, while Dr. Voellmicke is at it, he’s going to fix the golf ball size knot of a bone spur that has decided it likes to surf my big toe knuckle. (That’s a mix of about five metaphors, if you’re counting.)

No real walking, no driving, a lot of hurry up and wait. “You can rent one of those little scooters at the drug store,” said the nurse. I don’t think so.

Today, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun popped into my mind. Maybe because my friend Jennifer and I were talking about the dark novels we read when we were adolescents that were probably too old for us, not to mention already a bit dated — Margerie Morningstar and The Group among them. Johnny, which Trumbo published in 1939, told the story of a soldier who has lost all his limbs in a war as well as all of his face (including his eyes, ears, teeth, and tongue).

I remember how incredibly disturbing was the point of view of the novel, from inside the cave of this tortured guy’s mind. He wasn’t a lump, as he appeared to those around him. Trumbo went on to become one of Hollywood’s best-paid screenwriters, and won two Oscars under pseudonyms even while being blacklisted. I never knew about any of that when I was growing up, just that Johnny Got His Gun was a great tour de force. (And that I was a little bit cool to be reading it.)

But as for me, feel sorry for my self as I might, I will hardly be a lump after Friday. I’ll just be a tiny bit inconvenienced, incommoded, and rendered relatively adventureless, by an elective surgery that’s going to fix a minor imperfection so I will be able to go hiking in the woods again, or dawdling down the street in New York City, or swimming in my cardio class… I should be thinking not of Trumbo but humming to Your Feet’s Too Big by Fats Waller.

Say up in Harlem at a table for two
There were four of us
Me, your big feet and you
From your ankles up, I’d say you sure are sweet
From there down; there’s just too much feet
Yes, your feets too big
Don’t want ya, ’cause ya feets too big
Can’t use ya, ’cause ya feets too big
I really hate ya, ’cause ya feets too big

What I am doing, aside from humming, until the day of my surgery… simple things. The things you don’t ordinarily think about. Simple pleasures. Ones I need two feet for.

Pogo-ing. Check.

Fixing up a coffee station in my new living room/bedroom — no stairs for me anytime soon.

Harvesting the garden.

Weeding the garden, with help from Maud.

Walking down the stairs to the kitchen, the steps I usually complain about, to make herbal iced tea with chamomile, mint and lavender from my garden.

Going to Jones Beach tomorrow, getting some sand between my soon to be fiber-glassed toes.

Hopefully Maud and I will relish it as Gil and I did last year.

Nails, both fingers and toes. Gossip included, with my good friend Betsy.

Make a reading list. Reread the Trumbo? A movie list. A music playlist. Seriously think about a knitting project.

Drive. I so take it for granted ordinarily. But when we walk by the Hudson at dusk, then drive with the windows down through the warm dark night, Bruce on the radio — It’s midnight in Manhattan, this is no time to get cute, it’s a mad dog’s promenade — an ice cream dripping, I already feel nostalgic about having two feet in hand.

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