BibliOdyssey: Discover Now!

I know, I know, I mentioned this site before but I am on their email list and I find myself anticipating their sendings with delight. Go there now and sign yourself up for weekly beauty and discovery.

www.bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

BibliOdyssey Labor Day.

I am enraptured by a web site that I found, BibliOdyssey, via one of the Mennonite threads that I follow.

Not that the site has any affiliation with the Mennonite church; it's "curated" by a modest someone in Australia.

If you enjoy the site as much as I do, sign up for their newsletter and be amazed on a regular basis.

And please share it around! PKs curatorial work should be recognized for the joy that it is.

Happy Labor Day, one and all!

Hit the Floor and Crawl to Daddy!

My friend Sean does something absolutely magical every day at www.FilledWithChocolatePudding. Yesterday it was Sammy Davis Jr. and the Church of the Month Club. Brilliance, dear Sean. Thank you.

Unforgettable Rhythm.

I used to run a lot, anywhere from 40 to 60 miles a week. It was something I was good at and eventually my university paid me, the track team named me captain, the athletic sorority voted me president, and I won third place in the state of Pennsylvania in the 10k. But that was a long time ago, a time when I watched my diet, did sit ups and push ups before and got in two monitored and planned runs a day. Then I moved to California and fell in with the wrong crowd. I gave up running and surfing and climbing. I took drugs and smoked weed and listened to subversive music and started to smoke cigarettes. For a long time I smoked a lot of cigarettes a day. It was inexplicable to me; I hated the smell, the taste, the habit of it, the sluggishness and lethargy. I was addicted and didn't know how to quit.

Now I'm clean again. After more than a dozen years. I ran two miles today with my "pink and fluffy" lungs and while it wasn't award winningly fast or all that smooth (my legs feel like wooden poles, my neck was stiff, my 40 year old body just isn't the same as my 21 year old body) it was a rejoining with a rhythm I once knew very well, once rode like an animal over miles of road.

Runners are strange people. It's easy to laugh at their efforts of discipline, their good luck charms, their great exertion and dedication. But after all these years, I know that, while we may forget so many other sensations, like the taste of licorice or the smell of a flooded creek or what it's like to have hands so cold they ache, we never forget a rhythm. Few things comfort me like the pounding of my shoe soles to an 8 minute mile pace. (I'll have to save the 7 minute and the 6 minute for other days.)

RIP

Isaac Hayes died today. May he rest in peace. In a gold chain vest.

Chapter Two has a Soundtrack.

There's a glass shop two doors down from my apartment on cobblestoned Coffey Street. Phil, the owner of the shop, waved me out of my Uhaul the day I moved in with a flapping arm that could have meant, "go away". I was backing onto the sidewalk when he caught me and I was afraid that he didn't like my plan to get as close to the front door as possible. I wound my window down in time to hear him yell in a raspy Brooklyn voice, "Come on, get out of the truck." I obeyed and he immediately crawled in, his knees up around his ears, and proceeded to back the boxy vehicle into place. We've been pals ever since.

This week Phil and his guys are cleaning out the shop. They bring sheets of glass to the roll-up doorway at the front of the building, ancient windshields glazed with dust, perfectly square panes with a faint line crack or a pock, and with a hammer, smash them to pieces. At first, I didn't know what was going on. From my desk, in the hum of my fan, the shattering panes sound like a great splash, a run on of a hard "k" at the back of the tongue to the "sh" in the teeth and puckered lips, simultaneous and startling.

Like punctuation, the shattering splashes mark the lonely plodding of my book. I'm working at what I think will be chapter two; its about my father's decline and death three years ago, a process that began in August and stretched until just after Thanksgiving, a process that washed me over, numbing all sense of self.

This week, Phil's reminded me of what it felt like to oversee that dying and death: the great splash of a hard "k" in impact and trauma, the hushing "sh" of grief and memory.

Giving to My Street.

In this city I have always been a gentrifier, the young(ish) white person moving into ethnically diverse neighborhoods to take advantage of the lower rent. From Williamsburg to Fort Green to Bushwick and now Red Hook, I've chosen to live in places where caution when walking home at 2 a.m. and locking your windows is strongly advised. I've had more problems in some places than others.

In Williamsburg a homeless person (I suppose) took to shitting on my front stoop - I actually called the cops when I got tired of it and asked if they could take the evidence with them; in Fort Green my bicycle was stolen out of the second floor hallway of my building; in Bushwick the kids on the block removed the light bulbs from the rear lights of my truck, screwing the plastic covers back on when they were finished. My garden tools slowly disappeared from the back yard and once I nearly escaped getting hit by a full paint can that was lobbed off the roof of the four story building as I was bent below, pulling weeds.

Here in Red Hook, someone found the need to steal my truck antennae and the following week scratch "shoo whoo" into the paint of my passenger door.

Ah city life. And then there is the challenge of how to deal with requests for loans. Daniel, a local Vietnam Vet who lives in a parked van in a nearby vacant lot, helped me move all my stuff from a Uhaul to my second floor apartment in February for $20, heavy boxes of books and records included. I was certain I was funding his alcoholism but was thankful for the help. He's safe enough a neighbor, always saying hi when I see him and never pestering me for money. Except for the $5 I gave him for dinner in March. He asked for the money saying he would get paid the next day and would return it to me. He knew that I knew that he wouldn't pay it back but I played along. It takes courage to ask for money.

Tonight as I was sitting here checking my email, I heard a knock on the door. One of the women in the section 8 housing across the street waved to me through my peep hole. I see her on the street nearly every day and we usually exchange a few words about the weather. I pulled on a dress and opened the door to her; as she stepped over the threshold I backed up to avoid her pushing into me, assuming that for some reason she wanted to see my apartment, then she closed the door behind her.

"Very nice," she said giving my kitchen a cursory survey. "I no see you on fire escape today. It rains." I replied that yes, I have not been sitting on the fire escape today because of the rain.

"You loan me $20" she said. It was a statement and not a question. "My daughter give me tomorrow and I give to you." I paused for a beat, noticing the smell of alcohol on her breath. Why the closed door? Why me when we have never even exchanged names?

"$20?" I repeated, including the question mark. What could I say? I reached for my wallet two steps away and pulled out a twenty for her.

I remembered the time when Matthias and I had just moved into a new apartment in the Naval Yard area and had a few months there where money was so thin, I was eating dollar hot dogs on my lunch break from a temp job in Jersey City. I only had a dollar most days, counting up dimes and nickels each morning. I would have liked a $20 bill right then.

Because I know I'm gentrifying, I always try to get to know my neighbors so that they don't think I'm just some white person moving in to drive up the rent. I want them to know me and I want to know them. Great relationships have grown out of my living on the edges. And there's a great sense of "in this together" that comes from knowing your neighbors. There are times when my neighbors' just being neighborly has meant so much. Like when my neighbor, Charlie, reminds me to move my truck because of street cleaning and saves me a $60 ticket. Neighbors have let me into the building when I took out the trash without my key. The UPS guy once delivered my package to me in the deli on the corner so I could wait for my sandwich to be made. This is what neighbors do, take care of each other.

It is embarrassing and degrading to be broke in this country. And it is hell in this city where so many seem to drip wealth and every corner offers the candy of some new desirable.

I know that this could go one of two ways: Either the woman from across the street will be good to her word and bring back the money tomorrow, as promised. Or she will now avoid me - and maybe dislike me - for that $20. Regardless, I am of course wary of becoming the Coffey Street ATM. This will probably be the last time I loan money - I'll be prepared next time.

The other aspect of this is that she invaded my space. I don't know if that should bother me or not. I don't know how she got into the building and when she shoved the bill into the front pocket of her jeans and opened the door to leave, I felt invaded or taken advantage of. Outside my door stood little Nellie, the daughter of Charlie and Nellie who live upstairs. They're a boisterous family who yell from the street to the open window on the fourth floor to get into the building. They're sweet and friendly but loud as hell - and they know everything that's going on on the block. I suspect that she knew Nellie was in the hallway and asking me for money took some guts; she didn't want the whole building to know what she was doing.

When Charlie came home this evening, I told him what happened and asked him what he thought. He's the one who told me Daniel would be good help with moving and he and his family have been great neighbors, helping me find my way around the neighborhood when I first moved in. He's a big burly guy who drives a tow truck, one of the tough family men you find around here who says to his wife when he drops her off outside, "I love you too, now get outta the truck."

"That's not right," he said. "You'll get the money back but it's just not nice that she got into the building and asked you." Well, that's what I thought. And I was happy to hear that I'll probably get the $20 back.

And then there's my guilt, my white guilt. I'm spending a year working on this book and working only part time because I can. I am privileged and I know it. I want to complain about the woman across the street making assumptions about me because I'm white, but because I am white, she is justified in those assumptions. My error would be to treat her differently than I would the white girl downstairs or to forget my privilege. Maybe I should look at her asking me for money as a sign that this is my street too.

The Dead Season.

The city is iron hot and just as steamy as July rolls on. My cobblestone street here in Red Hook, a near-peninsula along the west coast of Brooklyn with hazy views of the Statue of Liberty, is quiet but for the rumble and hiss of the air conditioners in windows above and below me. Sometimes I hear the gate across the street open and close as children wander over to buy homemade icies.

This is the first summer in three that I've been able to bare my arms and legs and as July's noon sun flattens out shadows, I'm feeling a little too exposed, blanched and wilted. Last summer I was in hot, dry Africa where women are not squeamish about baring their breasts but won't expose anything below the waist but the ankle. The summer before I was in Egypt, where women still dare to show their faces but little else.

Because I'm working from home, I have kept the habits I established over the year and a half of travels: one shirt and one pair of paints, washed when dirty and hung to dry overnight. Some days I don't even dress, sitting around in my nightie until I decide to make the walk to the deli half a block away, if only for a cold drink or just to say I got out of the house. But those days are the bad days and I'm trying to have good, productive days. If only this heat would go away.

Fall, when everything is dying and rotting, is a season of color and cool. Trees dress up in red and yellow, preparing for a wild party at which they will eventually dance around and then get naked. Fall drags you out from the oasis glaze of the hot months to rejoice in crisp smells and cool temperatures. It is a time to make plans, get to work and to write out lists of goals.

The traditional "dead season", winter, is not dead at all. The holidays come around and we sing and wear fancy clothes and see our families. If we're lucky, snow dresses everything up in white, we don our big coats and move quickly to stay warm.

Spring is, well, spring. All wound up and about to pop. And then it pops and birds come back and trees get all yellow-green and we all fall in love.

But summer, when nothing moves, is a great pause. A dead season that keeps you from enthusiasm, from making decisions of consequence, from moving under the great weight of heat and humidity. Colors and constitutions bleach, flatten out in white, relentless sun. It is the pause when all things are put off and nothing seems urgent. Which means that nothing seems to matter at all.

This week, a dead week of 98 degrees, my love killed me. I'm poached like an egg, immovable, talking to the fan and writing overwrought paragraphs. I want the summer to be over now, I want to pull on long-sleeved shirts and long pants and go for a walk, then close the windows against an evening chill and make a pot of tea. I want to crawl into cool sheets at night that tell me I exist by warming to me. I want to make lists and care about them, to watch the trees get dressed in bright colors and to hear the kids run back to school.

But its only the middle of July and the dead season will surely drag on for too many more weeks. All I can do is let it drag on.

Sex is Very, Very Bad.

Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon writes about Dagmar Herzog's new book, Sex in Crisis, complete with a Ted Haggard bragging video and comments that cover the role of a good Christian woman.

Male headship, anorexia, sex education, its all in there. Read the comments, you prudes. Our backward ways are escalating our teenage pregnancy rates beyond those of any other developed country.

I look forward to the day when we throw away all this purity shit. Would have saved me a lot of grief during my teens and twenties.

First Fireflies.

There is a vacant lot across from my apartment and from my desk I have an unobstructed view of it. For the entire morning two guys were chopping at the weeds, wading in up to their chests, one with a sputtering weed whacker and the other with a swinging machete. Seeing the second one was like seeing an animation of New York Times photo today of men beating opposition party members in Zimbabwe (unfortunately the photo didn't make it onto the website).

I watched their progress from my window, the machete swinger holding his own against the gas-guzzler. When they finished cutting their way through the weeds, they moved out onto the sidewalk. I winced at the machete blade on concrete for an entire hour as the second man, raising his safari hat to periodically wipe at his sweat, beat against volunteer weeds in the cracks.

Now my street is quiet and the sun has gone down and I see the first two fireflies I have seen this year, floating above the whacked weeds like dandelion seeds, slowly blinking their lights like distant light houses.

Bettina Johae's Edges.

Bettina Johae is a friend trained in both architecture and visual design. Her latest project, Borough Edges, one in the making for a number of years, is currently on exhibition at the New York Public Library in the group show "Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City".

Bettina, mostly on bicycle, traced the edges of New York's five boroughs with her camera in tow. The amazing results, a chronicle of edges, can be viewed here. The website introduction offers a beautiful demonstration of her diligence: red dots quickly fill in the edges of Brooklyn, Staten Island, Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx indicating where each of her photos was taken.

Want to see more? Bettina is offering tours of the different boroughs on bicycle. For more information, email her at be@bettinajohae.com.

Poetry, Politics and Travel.

I've refrained from putting tags on the posts that comprise these first few weeks at blogging, primarily because I didn't know what would shake out. But after a little time and an easy scan, I find that most of the entries here fall into four categories: poetry, politics, books and travel. I don't know if that's an accurate assessment of me as a person but I do know that these topics now engage most of my thought.

I will start tagging entries accordingly: poetry; politics; books; travel; and other, for the occasional stray into other territory. I hope this helps those of you - and I find that there are more of you than I had expected! - who are interested in one particular. I will also go back through my meager existing entries and do the tagging.

What links these issues? I guess that would be me. I am the thread.

Thanks for coming to visit.

You and You.

If you're anywhere near Woodstock on Saturday, April 12, stop in to see Cornelia Hediger's work at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, 59 Tinker Street. The opening and artist's talk are from 5 to 7 pm.

Jazz for Joy.

Oh I'm blue. It's a week of bottom feeding and heel dragging. One of those weeks that makes you doubt sincerity, that makes all your endeavors seem frivolous, that makes every hour of waiting for one single email feel like seven. Who would want to leave the house?

But I did, and dragged my sad sweet ass down to the Village Vanguard to see Joshua Redman play a set on Wednesday night at 11 pm. It was balmy and rainy here in the city (what? am I Lear?) and as I clipped around ruddy streets in the Village I was accosted by a man on a bicycle.

Neurotic and gay (he told me so three times) and locked out of his home, he asked for cab fare. His props from an offway play were left in the hallway, he told me, from a production in which he was the costumer. He told me I had lovely skin and that I was the first person to give him an ear. So I gave him the bucks and my email address as he requested for promises that he would return the loan.

Outside the Vanguard, discontent was already brewing at 10 pm. Too many lines and the put-upon line keeper was not about to clarify. I pushed into the dropping tunnel and found myself perfectly seated.

And then, ah, the joy! For a generous hour and a half I laughed and grinned at the beauty, the sincerity of the trio. Joshua Redman was strangely vulnerable as he watched the audience, nervous and showy in the most unabashed way. His movements were free, his music, less so. His eyes never. He watched all and saw the expressions and the shifting and he adjusted their selections accordingly. Brian Blade was never aware of the audience, he grimaced and squinted and loved his drums, loved them like you think love should be.

When the set was over they disappeared. I didn't get the chance to ask Brian Blade if he ever received the bench he bought from me in California and I shipped to New York for him some ten years ago. I don't care. I floated out onto the wet streets and walked around the Village until I found a taxi.

Will you take me to Red Hook? I asked him. Of course he said. And he did. He did! Joshua Redman was there to give me a good show and he did. He did! The moon came up, the rain came down, promises were made and kept and for just a few hours, I remembered what sincerity was.

Love thy Neighbor.

This afternoon I was sitting here doing my thing and the neighbor decided to crank his stereo; it was blaring loud and vibrating my desk. I took a deep breath, and after some time walked to the deli for a cup of tea. On my way back, I knocked on his door. Of course the music was too loud for him to hear me so I knocked on his back door too. Finally, he came around to the front and opened with a big swing.

I took one look at him: young, in a wife beater, baseball hat on backwards, jeans low and dragging. He kicked the dog back into his apartment. "Dude," I said with my palms in the air. "What?! It isn't even that loud," he said, of course aware of why I was knocking. "I'm sorry," I said, "but it's killing me." He snorted and rolled his eyes and shut the door on me without another word.

I could hear it from the street, really from down the street. The whole building heard it. What I really wanted to say was, "and what a stupid little shit you are for blasting Nirvana, Nirvana?! For god's sake." I was so bothered that this kid didn't have enough decency to talk to me like a human being. And closed the door on me like that.

Then I realized, he was treating me like I was his Mom. It was as if I had told him to clean his room. I went into the bathroom and took a good, long look at myself in the mirror. Yup, 40 this year. Then I did a very Mom thing: I cooked up a delicious hot pot of homemade soup. I filled a container with the steaming stuff and hanged it on his door - he had gone out during the cooking - with a napkin and the following note:

Hi there,
Here's some homemade soup; I just boiled it up this evening. It seems appropriate to bring you soup because that's what Moms do - and today you talked to me like I was your Mom. But really I'm just your friendly neighbor, living on the other side of a very thin wall, trying to write a book. Thank you for turning the music down and if in the future I am ever making too much noise for you, I hope you will let me know.
Thank you, Ann 2R

It's really good soup and unless he's a little put off by the witch-like "boiled it up" I hope he will eat it and like it.

William F. Buckley Jr.'s Fax Number

On Wednesday, William F. Buckley Jr., the wordy and witty champion of conservatism and the founder and editor of National Review for more than 50 years died at the age of 82. I have a story that includes him, albeit once or twice removed.

When I was living in California I owned a used furniture store for a while. Because I served free coffee I became acquainted with an eclectic and nutty mix of locals who would come in and find me a captive audience. One regular, who never bought a damn thing, was a 50-something man with a beard and a parrot on his shoulder. He always had a streak of parrot shit down his back which prevented me from taking his endless and entertaining stories about well-known people very seriously.

After some weeks of regular visits, he decided that the person I should be working for was William F. Buckley Jr. I'm not certain how he made this determination; my political views have been way left of center ever since I discovered sex (which was much later than most of my peers but well before the end of my college career). But alas, my politics are really another story.
The man with the parrot strongly urged me to send a letter to William F. Buckley Jr. and as he made his departure, scratched the necessary number on a scrap of paper, from memory. "That's his fax number. Tell him I sent you."

Of course I was working hard at being a good shop keeper and had little interest in sucking up to a man like William F. Buckley Jr. for a job. Every time the man with the parrot paid a visit to my shop, he would ask me if I had faxed his friend yet and every week I would go on about how much I appreciated the reference but had been far too busy to make use of it.

Some weeks later I got a call from the man with the parrot: he was in Santa Barbara and had a present for me. Would I keep the shop open until he made the 30 minute drive? I reluctantly agreed to wait. Eventually he came swinging through the door with his parrot on his shoulder and an object wrapped in newspaper. He did the unwrapping for me and revealed an old steel bladed butcher knife. At this point I was getting the creeps. Then he proceeded to show me how to use the knife should someone try to rob me or hurt me some evening while I was in the shop alone. He told me he was worried about my safety. "Go for the gut," he said, making a forward stab like some champion fencer, the parrot flapping his wings to keep balance. "It's soft and you can do a lot of damage without hitting any bones."

He instructed me to keep the knife on the shelf just below the register where it would be handy. I thanked him for his thoughtful gift, hoping that my real feelings were well masked.

Eventually I closed the store in California, first going to Alaska for a few months, then down to L.A. for a while, and eventually on to New York. All the years I've lived alone I've kept the butcher knife by my bed, both as an odd nightstand accessory and for a false sense of security. I don't know if I would be brave enough to use it should I have to. Once after September 11, I took it home with me to Pennsylvania on the train so that my Dad could sharpen it for me. Dad got a good laugh out of me carrying a 10 inch butcher knife in my purse on Amtrak.

While I still have the butcher knife, I've long since lost the scrap of paper with William F. Buckley Jr.'s fax number scratched on it. I've also lost my chance to see if it worked.