I have a thousand reasons why I’ve been away for so long, each one more elaborate than the other.

Let’s just say it’s been several months of change, good and bad. But I’m ready to start again, and what better way to start than with a new publication!

You can now purchase a Post-Card of my short-short, A Thousand Marilyns, from Post-Card Press! They are a fairly new lit journal that makes wonderful postcards of short-short fiction and poetry.

My piece is based on a true person, which I’m hoping at some point to turn into something bigger. Novel, bio/memoir, who knows?

In any case, I hope you’ll buy the post card and support this lovely new press! Purchase it here, heck get a subscription; you’ll get one postcard of poetry or fiction each month! And, they make great fun gifts to send to someone (remember that thing called snail mail?).

More blog posts to come, I promise!

I have just one more day of giving final exams– next Wednesday– and then my summer begins.

Summer, for me, equals:

finishing current draft of novel (updates to come)

reading (my book list to come)

movies (what’s a summer without movies?)

making stuff (did I mention I’m going to take a class on how to use your sewing machine?)

travel (maybe?)

work– oops, nope! no work/teaching for me this summer! (good or bad thing?)

Here’s a good thing: poem, Summer Trips, by Jonathan Greene

Summer Trips

As a child sequestered in
the back seat on a long journey,
exiled in one’s own world,
a refuge. Deep sleep naps.
Ice-cream stand oases after
a long stretch of highway.

A whole year of work
brings us this week at the beach.
The Devil’s bargain parents made,
a contract that renews every time,
weary after the nine-to-fives,
they unlock the front door.

“Summer Trips” by Jonathan Greene, from Distillations and Siphonings. (c) Broadstone Books, 2010. From The Writer’s Almanac.

My dad called me and left this message:

Hey Bobby. Just called to wish you a happy birthday. Gosh, how old are you now? Let’s see, you were born in 69. 1969, 79, 89, 99, 2009, 2011. Are you 42 years old? Wow. Gosh you’re older than I am. Sorry I missed you. Talk to you later. Love you. Dad.
On my birthday I bought a belt for myself at American Apparel and it turns out it’s a womens belt (though some would call it Unisex). Sigh.

But had a fun night. Turf club then out with the gang at Whistle Stop bar.

In other news:

I met and had dinner with writer Dorothy Allison last week! She was part of our college’s Literary Arts Festival and she was pretty damn awesome. Funny as hell and oh my, the story she read– 45 minutes long– moving, scary, sharp. She’s such a master of dialogue. I was completely consumed by the reading– wholly taken out of the dingy theater with it’s avocado walls and bright red seats. She is without a doubt one of the great writers of our generation.

Recently bought a new book for my pulp-film-novel collection.

It’s hardly pulpy but it is a movie-tie-in. And it satisfies my June Allyson fetish. For now.

I’ve been wanting to post more about my recent fascination with Zines and about how I’d like to produce some in the near future.

Here’s a cool Zine I found online a couple of months ago and then it took me a while to order it and now it’s finally come!

The publisher is Elk Zine and they have such terrific zines, and films.

This one is by writer and photographer Vince Aletti (he was one of the first critics to write about Disco music) and has a gorgeous photo of Rebel Without a Cause actor Sal Mineo on the cover and inside it’s made up of beefcake photos mostly only of guys from the shoulders up, which I find is kind of charming.

There’s a cool write-up about it at Book Du Jour with more photos.

Ah Sal Mineo. I imagine that so many young gay men who saw Rebel Without a Cause in the theater must have felt such a connection and recognition with him.

How the heart aches when Plato (Sal Mineo) says to Jim (James Dean):

If only you could’a been my dad. We could have breakfast in the morning.

Finished Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. I loved the information about Egypt and Cleo and Mark Antony, but I was missing dialogue (the book is serious nonfiction). Still, Schiff impressed me with her knowledge and Cleo impressed me with her sheer tenacity.

My office at home is looking like one of those NYC apartments where the reclusive tenant saves every newspaper, magazine, letter,  leaflet and flyer. I’m too embarrassed to post a picture of it.

I cut the tip of my middle finger off and it hurt. Ok, it wasn’t really the tip, more like the corner of the tip. But it still hurt. For a couple of days I had to wear one of those splint-thingies so that I wouldn’t bump it on anything, but it definitely made it seem pretty drastic (but if you know me, you know how melodramatic I get with just the sniffles). And then I had to learn how to type without using that finger, which a couple of days ago I finally mastered. But now the finger is healing better and I can pretty much use it, only I have to re-learn how to type with it. Arghh!

While I was in the Emergency room Ted brought me Nicole Krauss’ Great House to read. I absolutely loved The History of Love and have been wanting to read this. It doesn’t disappoint. I read about 50 pages in, but I’m also reading another book so I may have to put the Great House aside until then.

Speaking of books…though I’m not finding, or rather making, the time to write as much as I should (I think that I somehow didn’t get the gene for discipline…), the little bits, spurts of writing that I’m doing I’m pretty pleased with. I’m loving working on two characters that I’d only been sketching out, or had only been on the periphery so far– the young female English High School Teacher with the secret stash of lipsticks in her desk drawer at school and the Shivwit Indian boy, Limpie, whose POV is told entirely through an essay he’s writing. It’s funny how developing these characters more and letting them lead me on this journey has sparked such new energy in me.

Ted‘s out of town for a week visiting his mom and then our new niece, and the cats, Betsy and Jack, are so neurotic (i’m fine though, thanks for asking)! They are completely underfoot. Betsy sits with me while watching TV, her head resting in my lap.

On another note, I’m obsessed with this website Instructables–have you seen it?– from which you can learn how to do anything from how to tie a tie, how to kiss, to other more craft-oriented tips such as  book-making, how to knit, make mosaics, origami, and my recent obsession: how to make linocuts.

I really really would love to have a letterpress machine, but this linocut thing looks a bit simpler (and less expensive). See the samples of what you can do below.

Many of the how-to’s have step-by-step photos and videos. Check them out, search for how to make or do just about anything.

Watched the last episode of TCM’s Moguls and Moviestars– the epic documentary series about the rise and fall of the movie studio system. It was completely fascinating. I couldn’t help but feel for the movie stars and studio heads when the studios started crumbling around them; not to mention the footage of the old studio land that was sold off.

Went to a fantastic reading Friday night at The Ink Spot. James Meetze (in the picture) read from his book of poems DAYGLO of which Rae Armantrout says “James Meetze is, in some sense, a ‘landscape poet,’ except his landscape includes ‘FA-18 Hornets’ that ‘boom above the freeway / as eucalyptus leaves rustle.’ He has a feel for his hometown, which is also mine. In fact, San Diego, with its ahistorical ‘Dayglo’ pastels, best glimpsed in passing from a freeway, is where we all live now, somehow, or soon will.”

Ryan Murphy (a friend from grad school!) says “Dayglo is a conscious artifact…”

Indeed, his poems took me back to my days growing up here. The beaches, the sunsets, the valleys and malls. But also they look at Southern California, and San Diego especially, through the eyes of someone who left here and then came back. They speak about beauty and warmth, of Eucalyptus trees, freeways and fluorescent lights, but also separation, isolation, regret, disappointment.

I’m particularly taken with the first two lines of the poem “To Make You Surfer”:

In all the movies about California youth,

we are made to believe in gold everywhere.

It was called “Escape Artist: The Case for Joan Crawford” and was written by David Denby. I like how the subtitle in the table of contents said: The Joan Crawford Problem. The piece is mostly a review of Donald Spoto’s new book about Crawford, but it’s also a nifty, convenient way for Denby to wax harshly (ok, and with some sympathy) on the broad-shouldered mega-star. He also discusses Faye Dunaway (mostly how “Mommie Dearest” did her in).

I read this while riding the elliptical at the gym (yes, back to the gym). There is this huge photo of Joan from “Mildred Pierce” (I first typed this as Milderd…mildewed?) and I have to admit I looked around to my left and right while doing my cardio to see if anyone could see what I was reading. Then I remembered: oh yeah, I go to a gay gym… or an almost gay gym, so it was probably not noticed at all.

Anyway, the only reason I’m writing about this is for one line. Well, there were lots of good lines from Denby in the piece, and it was actually pretty fascinating reading, lots of good tidbits, like the fact that she was born Lucille Le Sueur in San Antonio, Texas.  But I really loved this description of Joan, especially the last line:

[When she was 18] What prompted the two men to pull her out of a line of dancers? She was only five feet three, she had freckles, a mop of reddish hair, and broad, square shoulders, and she was a little heavy (a hundred and forty pounds) for her size. But they must have seen– they probably couldn’t have missed–an insatiable hunger. If you look at pictures of her at any age, the whites of her eyes show not just above the irises but below them, too. Her eyes are so wide open that she seems to be devouring the future.

Gotta love it.

I thought that Ricky Gervais started sort of slow but then he picked up momentum with some REALLY harsh zingers, one-liners. There’s speculation that these one-liners might have gotten him into trouble, though I doubt it. But boy were there some uncomfortably funny moments.

Speaking of one-liners, there are some terrific zingers in the book Cleopatra, by Stacy Schiff, which i’m not reading as fast as I was before–i’m only halfway through the 300 page book. I love the book, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes the information in it (of which there is A LOT) is overwhelming. Still, love this line  which begins the section on Mark Antony (the picture is of James Purefoy, who played MA in the miniseries Rome):

Sometimes it indeed seemed as if there were only ten women in Rome. And in Cicero’s view, Mark Antony had slept with every one of them.

Here’s another, this time actually a quote from Cicero himself, but it’s not as salacious as the previous (in fact it’s quite nice):

“…for as reason is the glory of man, so the lamp of reason is eloquence.”

Stacy Schiff is so smart. She packs the books with this information but she also makes these people and these places so very real–with these wonderful quips. About graffiti, which she explains has been around since before Cleopatra’s time (BC!), she writes:

Even in Cleopatra’s day there was such a thing as ancient history; somehow the world was older then, thick with legend, swathed in superstition. At her side Caesar could have marveled at twenty-eight centuries of architecture. Already visitors had burgled– and scrawled graffiti over– the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.*

*The most common graffito: “I saw, and I was amazed.”

Cleo was apparently not a light packer when she traveled:

She traveled too both as an institution and an individual, with physicians and philosophers, eunuchs, advisers, seamstresses, cooks, and with a full staff for Caesarion [her son]. With her went sumptuous gifts: jars of Nile water, shimmering fabrics, cinnamon, tapestries, alabaster pots of fragrance, gold beakers, mosaics, leopards.

Leopards! (Remember that car game? I’m going on a picnic and I’m taking…)

And, her sister, Arsinoe, was a bitch!

In her [Cleo's] exile [aka her travels with the leopards], Arsinoe, Cleopatra’s younger sister, persisted in her designs on the throne. Reprisong her coup of four years earlier, Arsinoe marshalled enough support in Ephesus to have herself proclaimed queen of Egypt.

I love these little tidbits!

Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl– with the 1959 George Stevens movie tie-in (the book features actress Millie Perkins on the cover). My other vintage paperbacks are here. And here. And here. (click on the link on the sidebar for vintage books to see others of mine).

I would still love to one day find a vintage/antique paperback book display like the one in the picture.

I love the movie– you know, massive tidal wave flips over a cruise ship and survivors, including Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, and Pamela Sue Martin, have to climb their way to the top, er, now bottom of the ship.

Great Fun!

In any case, I’m hoping 2011 will bring a full-time teaching job for me; a substantial draft of my book; much creative inspiration; new friends and stronger ties to current friends; travel; bigger things for the writing community in San Diego; even greater love, closeness and appreciation for my wonderful husband, Ted; a vintage letterpress (anyone know where I can get one?); more visits with family; more reading for pleasure (so many books, so little time); more time spent in NYC; patience and understanding; health and prosperity; peace.

Below are some of my favorite photos and memories from the year (especially the bloody Justin Bieber that I made with a faux-wood stamp! and Hermia, my cat, 1991-2010).

I was obsessed with Egypt as a kid. This was during the King Tut craze of the mid-70s. It was King Tut mania! And then there was the Agatha Christie movie, Death on the Nile (still a favorite for the batty performance by Angela Lansbury and the blue-eyed charm of Simon MacCorkindale). I wanted so badly to go to Egypt and see the pyramids and ride a camel. Maybe one of these days.

And, I’ve always loved the musical number, Cleopatterer, performed by June Allyson and Ray McDonald in the MGM Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (itself a number from the Kern musical Leave it to Jane).  The sounds a bit off, but click the picture to watch it. June at her husky-voiced best.