NewYorker

June 11, 2010

Back from NYC. Wonderful wonderful.

Two weddings (in one night…) but no funerals thankfully.

We did get to meet up with some of our favorite people: Aaron Hamburger and Anthony (by the way, Aaron’s new cooking blog , Aaron’s Sweet Spot, is fantastic!), Lee Houk and Kip (Lee’s book comes out in August! Yee haw!), and Alex Chee and Dustin– it was a creative and literary round table not unlike Dorothy Parker and her crew (a little less vicious, though, and i’m not sure who would be Ms. Parker?). I miss these guys!

Other highlights:

Had dinner at Moustache (see picture above left–the best Pitzas ever).

Ted’s family and friends

Seeing David and Mark, Matthew, Liz and Jason, Michelle and Jake, Micheal F, Steve C, and Frank and Audrey (congrats!).

There’s some NYC pics on my Flickr in the right sidebar—–>

Ted and I sat at the W. Village Piers and read on a glorious Monday afternoon. Finished the book I was reading– A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher (whom I’ll be working with at Fishtrap in July). Didn’t want it to end. Didn’t want to leave these characters and places. I found that Karen Fisher’s website has journal entries– a journal she kept while writing the novel and it gives such insight into the characters though even more important to me is insight into her writing and thinking process while working on the book. Wow.

Now I’m reading this year’s Pulitzer winner, Tinkers, by Paul Harding. It’s a quiet book, with lovely sentences and a dream-like quality and these really intricate, beautiful, intriguing bits about the interworkings/mechanics of clocks.

And speaking of New York– have you been catching up on your NewYorkers? I have.

Several months ago I was drooling over Marisa Silver’s new story “Temporary” (her collection has just come out and was reviewed in the NYTimes this past weekend). Lordy she captures the city of Los Angeles like no other current writer out there.

I also loved Ben Loory’s story The TV, from back in April. So much so that I facebook-stalked him and told him so. He was actually very gracious. The story is absolutely hypnotic and strange; I read it in the bathtub (TMI?). His story collection had just sold that week or somewhere near there– can’t wait to read it.

And just yesterday I read (while on the treadmill, in fact)  Jeffrey Eugenides’ new story, “Extreme Solitude,” from last week’s NYer. I’ll read anything by Jeffrey. Lordy, I love his humor:

Looking back, Madeleine realized that her college love life had fallen short of expectations. Her freshman roommate, Jennifer Boomgaard, had rushed off to Health Services the first week of school to be fitted for a diaphragm. Unaccustomed to sharing a room with anybody, much less a stranger, Madeleine felt that Jennifer was a little too quick with her intimacies. She didn’t want to be shown Jennifer’s diaphragm, which reminded her of an uncooked ravioli, and she certainly didn’t want to feel the spermicidal jelly that Jennifer offered to squirt into her palm. Madeleine was frankly shocked when Jennifer started going to parties with the diaphragm already in place, when she wore it to the Harvard-Brown game, and when she left it one morning on top of their miniature fridge. That winter, when the Reverend Desmond Tutu came to campus for an anti-apartheid rally, Madeleine asked Jennifer on their way to see the great cleric, “Did you put your diaphragm in?” They lived the next four months in a twenty-by-fifteen room without speaking to each other.