But last night at BAM, Kevin Spacey played Richard and they took no license with the details. This was Richard III in every word and deed. Sam Mendes directed, and the production was breathtaking. But first, that opening scene — “Now is the winter of our discontent.” The entire play, Spacey kept his right leg turned and twisted and it must have been physical hell. In the opening scene, he’s sitting in a big chair, saying his speech, and then he begins unfolding, somehow — arms equally akimbo as that twisted leg, coming up and out of him. I got a wave of chills and thought “he looks exactly like a malevolent spider,” completely unaware that throughout the play they’d be referring to him as a spider. His performance was evil, and twisted, and chilling, and cunning, and also very funny. Very funny. Some of the humor came from an occasional delivery of a line, or a facial expression, but it also came from the words themselves.  Shakespeare was a hilarious writer.

The multiple murders and executions were done in a stunning way, too. Each time someone was murdered, Queen Margaret, who had cursed Richard and most everyone else, appeared upstage and clacked a couple of sticks (maybe they were meant to be bones), then she walked over to one of the dozens of doors that lined both sides of the stage, and drew a giant X on one of them, which would also have a spotlight on it. The murderer would lean forward and close the eyes of the one he was killing, and a screeching metallic sound filled the theater at the same time, followed by a darkening of the theater and a huge bang on a giant drum. It was extremely effective. When Richard III crowns himself late in the play, he’s standing in the middle of that gauntlet of doors, each with a big black X on it. It was just so well done.

And a thing I always love about the theater — the audience and actors bring it into being together. It’s so obviously being created by hand, in front of us; the audience witnesses actors carrying tables and chairs onto and off the stage, sets are being moved, we even see the sets from above, if we (like me) sit in the nosebleed section. But we bring it all into being together, and it becomes so real, realer than in a movie, in some way. In one scene, Hastings’ head is brought to Richard in a box; the audience only sees the box, and Richard takes the lid off but we don’t see what’s inside — we just know it’s Hastings’ head in that box. When Richard suddenly jabs his cane into the box…into Hastings’ severed head…the whole audience gasped. We were shocked and appalled, jamming a cane into the stump of a severed head. [except, of course, it wasn't.]

The scene that was so brilliantly produced and directed and made the whole thing relevant in this moment was when Richard had finally killed everyone who stood in his way, and he was ready to crown himself king. He and two advisors leave the stage with candles in hand and monks’ robes draped over their arms, and Buckingham steps to a microphone to exhort the crowd to join him in pleading with good Richard to become their king. Suddenly a giant screen at the back of the stage turns on and it’s as if we’re witnessing something private going on in a back room….it’s Richard, kneeling at an altar between two monks, and he’s praying. He has his little prayer book in hand, and the candles are burning. He turns around, “what? Oh, no, not now, I’m just praying.” Buckingham pleads, Richard says no, no, I’m not fit to be king, oh no, leave me to my prayers. The monks lean their heads into the shot — we’re praying right now — Buckingham pleads, Richard says no, no, finally ah, if you insist, I never wanted this, please don’t make me, now let me go back to my prayers please. It’s a brilliant piece of staging, and I guess politics and hypocrisy have been bedfellows for centuries.

The only bad thing about the long play was that the chairs are incredibly uncomfortable, up in the balcony, and the play was nearly 4 hours long. They’re tall straightbacked chairs, so tall you can’t put your feet on the floor. You have to rest them on this little footrest. The seats are very hard, the backs very straight, and my back was killing me by the time it ended but I didn’t care. Every detail of the performance was just amazing, and if you live here and can get a ticket, GET ONE IMMEDIATELY. If you can afford a ticket downstairs rather than in the balcony, it’s probably more comfortable.

Then, after the play ended, Will met me — my Will, Will #2 of this tale. We rode the subway together back into Manhattan, chattering the whole time, and went to his favorite little dosa joint. Oh my, Hampton Chutney, you won my heart. Mine was filled with spinach and sauteed red onions and goat cheese, with a roasted tomato chutney on the side, and it was just wonderful, though not as wonderful as the view across the table, of my dear son. We enjoyed our dinner and then went to McNally Jackson and poked through the shelves and tables, making each other laugh and talking about the various books that caught our interest. I love talking with him; he’s smart, and hilarious, and he feels like home to me. My time with him was too short, but then it always is.

I bought a couple of books — one about writing, and one this funny little book of “curious lists.” You as the book’s owner are meant to fill them in, so I thought I’d toss them out and see what you guys can help me come up with. Help me with this one, from p78:

“Impolite ways to request more salt.”

I have one in mind, but if something comes to you, leave it in the comments!

BLOG: For some weird reason, my blog has suddenly become a destination for people from all over the world, I have no idea what that’s about:

visitors in the last 24 hours

The searches that bring people to my blog are varied; ~50% are about knitting, and the rest are about such a mish-mash I wonder what the searchers think when they get to my blog and see that perhaps I used one word in their search somewhere in my whole site.  Anyway, it’s new, this global deal. I have a reliable cluster of visitors from the UK and from Paris, and then usually just a random one here and there. Late last week I had a flurry from Africa, which was particularly startling because I never have African visitors and I’ve wondered why.

KNITTING: I finally finished the body of Marnie’s sweater and have started a sleeve, which is going pretty quickly:

whee! starting sleeve #1

I think today I’m going to go ahead and soak and block the body of the sweater, so I can seam the shoulders and do the turtleneck. I worry about hitting a slump with the second sleeve, so I want to have something else to do, and I also want to see it so close to finished that it pulls me forward. It’s been such a mild winter I really hope she gets to wear it.

READING: If you’re the same kind of nerd as me, you might like the book I read yesterday (Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, by Mark Garvey). It’s a loving look at The Elements of Style, at E. B. White and Harold Ross and The New Yorker, and the world of people who are passionate about this little book including a host of famous writers who talk about their relationship with the little book. It’s a quick read (about as quick as The Elements of Style, for that matter), and you may — like me — read it with a silly grin on your face. Since I didn’t go online yesterday, I read that book, I read this week’s issue of The New York Review of Books, I pulled everything off my bookshelves and reorganized (and found of bunch of surprises, wowie), I cleaned the bathroom top to bottom, I did some shopping, and I spent a lot of time keeping my husband company. We watched Thirteen Days, that 2000 movie about the Cuban missile crisis — much more his kind of movie than mine, and I was only 3 when it happened. But when the spy planes flew low over the Cuban stockpiles, my heart raced and that surprised me.

HELP: A friend here in Manhattan is heading up a project called Legal Aid Society Trafficking Victims Legal Defense & Advocacy Project (she’s a lawyer for Legal Aid). Victims of sex trafficking are removed from their circumstances and hidden away in safety; she has organized a number of small knitting groups for them and is seeking donations of yarn and needles. Many of these women are from other countries, but some are US citizens. Their larger needs are more urgent, of course, but the knitting efforts are designed to help their spirits, and we know how well this works. The women have nothing and the woman at Legal Aid who is organizing this for them has no specific wish list. Just think about what any new knitter might need/want — yarn, needles/hooks, a nice project bag maybe, notions, anything at all. Others are organizing clothing and coat drives for the women, so we’re the lucky ones who get to give them this kind of joy. If you have any interest in helping, just let me know and I’ll give you the mailing address for the woman at Legal Aid. I posted a note in a couple of Ravelry forums and several knitters are sending boxes, but [unfortunately] there’s a steady stream of women so the need doesn’t stop.

Have a wonderful Sunday, whatever you’re up to! I’m looking forward to spending a few hours with a certain humpbacked wicked king.

Over the years, my subscribing habits have reflected ongoing passions. A few years ago, when I was a very-involved food blogger, I rabidly consumed other food blogs; now, if I don’t have much time, I just mark everything as read in the food blog folder and don’t bother. Now, if I don’t have much time, I limit my reading to the personal blogs, followed by the knitting blogs, followed by the reading blogs. Actually, it depends on my mood, the specific order, but I generally try to make time to at least scan through those categories.

Today I thought I’d share the reading sites with you, in case you find something of interest. In some cases the site offers criticism, in other cases it provides longform reading. At any rate, these are sites I really love for one reason or another, and share them gladly:

A.V. Club — this site is run by the people behind The Onion, but there’s nothing fake or jokey about it. I particularly love the tv and film criticism (here’s a post about the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad), which is always thoughtful, even if I don’t always [necessarily] agree.

Big Think — this site focuses on a range of topics including arts and culture, belief, ethics, history, identity, life and death, and a bunch of others. It’s not my favorite site in the list, but there are gems now and then, like this interview with Joy Hirsch, a neuroscientist who talks about the mysteries of her own brain, and making it as a lady scientist (my words, not hers!).

Brain Pickings — I mentioned this site at the end of last year as my favorite (new to me) website. The posts are always interesting, and the blogger seems to have an endless supply of ideas and topics to explore. I’m very eager to read this post recommending 9 books on reading and writing. In addition to great information, I love the site design, which is fresh and clean.

Gangrey — the site’s subtitle is “prolonging the slow death of newspapers,” which makes me smile. Each post presents a newspaper article the blogger appreciates for one reason or another; s/he provides the link and a small bit of context, so it’s really a curated set of links but I often really enjoy the pieces and might not have found them, otherwise. For instance, this piece titled Salt is “a tale of Texas justice and mysterious salt poisoning.” Well, I want to read that one!

McNalley Jackson Bookmongers — this is a book shop’s tumblr, so the posts are very brief….often just a literary quote, or a link to a post from another site, but I enjoy it often enough to keep it in my list.

Melville House — the Moby Lives site, if you know it by that name. I can’t wait to check out the books on the Man Asia Prize shortlist. The site offers literary criticism, insider-publishing posts, interviews with authors, everything you might expect from a smart publisher.

Pageviews — the books blog on the NY Daily News website. The Daily News isn’t a hotbed of intellectual rigor, but this blog is consistently thoughtful and takes on interesting books and writers.

This Recording — very new to me, so I don’t know much about the site except that I tend to love it. You can just follow the posts on books if you like, but the posts on tv and film have been quite good, so I just follow the whole site.

The New York Review of Ideas – a digital magazine of NYU’s graduate ‘Journalism of Ideas’ class of 2011. Another new-to-me site, but I’ve enjoyed it so far.

To Be Shelved – with the subtitle “judging books by their covers since 2010″, this blog is written by a woman who really loves books, and who works in news design. I bookmarked this post she wrote last November about John Updike, and just haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

Longreads — along with Brain Pickings, my favorite site in this collection. With word counts greater than 1,500 words, these are the articles you want to read when you have a bit of time. It’s another curated collection of writing found around the web, and I count on this site to collect stuff I want to read. They never let me down.

Obit Magazine — bear with me on this one. It’s about death, yeah, so it’s really about life, of course. There are book reviews and a blog, and I consistently enjoy the pieces that grab my attention.

If I’m in a rush, I just focus my attention on Brain Pickings and Longreads and let the rest go, but they’re all worth a look!

***

Just a couple more things to share and then I’ve got to get busy; this Gandhi manuscript isn’t going to edit itself!

it snowed our last night in Atlantic City, making the sad, worn-out place seem even sadder and worner-outer.

the lobby of Caesar's -- a little something for everyone! Fake Roman ruins, a Chinese New Year tree of lanterns, and a giant snowflake hanging just off to the left. They're taking no chances.

for Veera Välimäki's new shawl, Color Affection, I just received these three skeins from The Plucky Knitter (MC Fingering -- top to bottom: elegant elephant, Sammy Samerson, and flannel). Too much knitting, too little time, man!

And on that note, I say ta-ta! (for now, of course)

• a brief essay by a man who believes that Walt Whitman saved his life. Whitman saves mine now and then, and this essay resonated with me.
• this uber-collection of the best long reads on the internet this year, curated by a whole bunch of smart and interesting people
• I’m fascinated by and intensely drawn to David Foster Wallace and read nearly everything by and about him I can find. This piece is loosely about the marginalia found in his collection of self-help books.
• This beautiful piece is another about David Foster Wallace, his new book, and his legacy.
• I read this over and over: 30 things to stop doing to yourself. Some are brilliant, especially (for me) #s 12 and 24.
• This gorgeous illustrated view of what happens in a second is pure delight.
• I’m kind of a sucker for lists of people’s favorite books; if someone lists one of my favorites (especially an oddball favorite of mine, or especially if they say something specific and wonderful about it), then I trust the other books on their list. This piece pulls together the faves of a dozen or so writers and editors, and includes often-funny commentary about why the books are their favorites. One writer said Another Bullshit Night in Suck City will “knock you on your ass” — and yes, dear reader, it will; another said this about Nabokov’s Pale Fire:  ”You know what? Fuck Lolita. I take that back, don’t fuck Lolita, she’s too young, plus I loved that book. I loved this one more, though. The poem makes me disintegrate with feelings.”

Whatever you’re doing this week, I hope you’re winding down the year in style. Yesterday I had lunch with a friend from poetry group; tonight I’m going to a knitting group; tomorrow is lunch with the daughter who just returned from Israel; Thursday evening is dinner with friends; in between is lots of work, some knitting (ready to do the sleeves on my Audrey sweater, which is gorgeous!), some eating, and some movie-watching. Happy strange week, y’all!

lovely gorgeous NYC

What a treat to wake up this morning and not have to turn on the AC immediately. It’s amazing how glorious 77 degrees can feel. Before I dress and figure out how to spend this day of my life, a few things you might enjoy, as I did:

• “Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.”  — Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot (he was such a smart guy, that FD)
• a collection of great-sounding books, compiled by a yoga teacher; I want to read all of them
• a fun post by Harold Bloom, about the Book of Jonah
• Like me? Like Cheever? Then like this interview with him in the Paris Review.
• Exemplary mirror peptalks of one form or another. Including funny.

Much to do in town today – lots of free music. I may go back to Riverside Park for the Saturday night concert, or perhaps over to Central Park for a dance performance by the Force of Nature Dance Theater (I adored them at the solstice concert last December). We’ll see. Pretty day, no rain, 90 degrees, a day in a life. Spend yours well too!

But anyway, it turns out that I do love my Kindle. I read a lot more, which I partly attribute to the ease of reading on a very crowded subway, the ability to take hundreds of books on a trip, etc. I underline passages, place notes in margins, fold down pages, all the things I’d do with a much-loved book. But my Kindle books can never do this:

my dad's copy of this book, his favorite

his annotations, in his hand

this says so much about my dad

“I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all.” His favorite passage from that book, based on the way he annotated it. That really defines my dad, though he probably didn’t realize the centrality of it in his life, in the way that we can all be blind to our own stuff.

Monday was his birthday; he’d have been 72, which is unimaginable. He died in 1982, on his mother’s birthday, at the age of 44. I was 23, and 5 months pregnant with Katie. The story is too complicated and ugly to talk about here, but his birthday is usually painful and difficult for me, and I halfway suspect it’s behind my 3-day migrainey headache.

In his will, he left me $1 — that’s like leaving a penny tip. You do that so people can’t claim to have been accidentally forgotten and sue the estate. Not that he had an ‘estate’ anyway. So I got my $1 check, and I grabbed this book, and a little wooden ship he built as a very little boy. That’s what I have of my dad (besides his height, his hands, and his long upper lip).

It’s getting increasingly hard to read this copy of Sirens of Titan, since it’s crumbling and the pages have separated from the binding. I have a nice clean copy in my Kindle, and read it now and then because I love the story, and he loved the story and felt such understanding from it. I resonate much less to his favorite line than he did, but every time I read it, it feels like he’s standing next to me. Every year, though, I pull out this copy from behind the front row of books on that shelf, and page through it, looking at his notes.

But you know what I mean, right? Other people’s notes in books tell you a lot about them. My own notes in my own books tell me a lot about myself, especially those books I read over and over and over. I try to use a different colored pen to annotate a book each time through, so I can see the shifts. Ah — the blue one, that’s the time I read it when I was really struggling, I remember that darkness. My Kindle copies can’t carry those reminders in the same way.

PROMISE: knitting content to return soon!

I think that was horribly written. We’ll just have to deal because I’m in a rush, lots of work today and 3 appointments throughout the day that eat into my work time.

Anyway. Last night on the train I had my Kindle and just turned to the menu, looking for something to read. I haven’t yet digested the recommendations you guys gave me, nor have I bought anything to read, so I picked one of the samples. AND OH MY HEAVENS do I love it. I finished the sample and when I transferred at Times Square, I hung out in the open air long enough to put my Kindle online and buy the whole book.

click to see the book on amazon

This one – I vaguely remember hearing about it and I even more vaguely remember reading reviews of it which probably explains my downloading the sample (here’s a review I probably read).

I haven’t read enough to comment on the story itself, or the themes, or the writer’s ability to sustain me through to the end, or his ability to do much of anything other than truly delight me, but I can comment on that. O how he delights me. He’s really great at capturing the truth of moments, and he has a voice that I love. I’m starting over with the book and will come back and give you a sense of the flavor of the book.

And finally, since I mentioned Vonnegut yesterday (maybe just in the comments? Can’t remember…) I found this on A.V. Club earlier this morning and it just made me so happy, I put it here for my own re-reading: 15 Things Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has or Ever Will

1. “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’”
2. “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
3. “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.”
4. “There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
5. “She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is doing.”
6. “Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.’”
7. “There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.”
8. “Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her.”
9. “That is my principal objection to life, I think: It’s too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes.”
10. “Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
11. “All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental.”
12. “Why don’t you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don’t you take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooon?”
13. “So it goes.”
14. “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”
15. “We must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

And FINALLY, to close this post that was intended to be a quickie, do you know Karl Pilkington? Of course you do, if you know Ricky Gervais. (If you don’t, watch any of these YouTube clips, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about getting sucked in and losing an awful lot of time.) Karl was in Mexico, wandering around in a desert, and he came upon a big stand of cactus, leading him to comment on how ugly they are. Then he came upon a stand of cactus in full bloom, to which he said:

Ah, that’s like sticking lipstick on a fat woman in leggings. You’ve gotta do more than that.

Happy Wednesday, y’all!

Phases – there was the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys phase in early elementary school. There was the French author phase in mid- to late-elementary school. There was the “I only like to read non-fiction” phase, the Desi author phase, the “how did I miss THESE books?” phase. The Vonnegut phase, which is more like a cycle, as I return to it every several years. When I get to a place where I cannot read, a dip into Vonnegut sets me right again. (speaking of, a friend pointed me to this mini-lecture by KV, which I loved and place here so I can find it again.)

This morning I read Karie’s newest post on book lists, and she gave one of her own, books she considers the cornerstones of her life. Now that is an organizing principle I can get behind. (Public lists: the BBC’s Big Read, Lifetime Reading Plan, Bloom’s Western Canon, Borges’ picks, NPR’s book pages, NYRB, NYTBooks, Overbooked, Modern Library, NBCC, FiveBooks.) My reading time is severely constricted these days, so choosing a new book is a bigger deal than it used to be, and I love to happen upon someone’s reading list.

But reading lists, unless they’re based on some quantitative metric like sales, are really idiosyncratic reflections, aren’t they? And don’t we paint a picture of the reader and feel like we know something important about them? It’s like seeing someone’s iPod playlist (ah, he really likes Garth Brooks, don’t know that we have a lot in common), or their Netflix queue (Third Man and The Big Lebowski? I want to know more!). We see these lists of preferences and extrapolate a sense of that person, and that’s what matters. When I see someone’s list, if there’s an odd collection of things and sufficient overlap with my own, I’ll trust that person and want to try the other things they mention. So Karie loves The Wasteland and Leaves of Grass and A Room of One’s Own and The Master and Margarita? Then I’d better try Havoc, the first book on her list.

I just finished reading The Finkler Question, this year’s Man Booker Prize winner (meh) and Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which is about David Foster Wallace and even though it’s really not much more than a transcript of conversation with him, it punched me and made me newly sad that he’s gone. But I haven’t been deeply absorbed and thrown back by anything I’ve read in the last couple of years. I’ve read some books for my book club that I did enjoy (Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill, and Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro), and I listened to a reading of The Seventh Man by Haruki Murakami that hit me so hard it got into my dreams and haunts me still.

Off the top of my head and in no particular order (though influenced by Karie, I want to assemble my own list of cornerstone books), these are books I’ve really loved and read over and over, and always want to read again:

• Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
• Moby Dick (Herman Melville)
• Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
• The Inferno (Dante)
• Hamlet (Shakespeare)
• The Stranger (Camus)
• The Tin Drum (Gunter Grass)
• Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
• Grendel (John Gardner)
• The Woman Warrior (Maxine Hong Kingston)

Nothing very obscure, I’m afraid, or unique, but they all have had a big impact on me, and I have taken them into my sense of self in some important way. I could list other nonfiction, and lots of poets, but these are works of fiction that I’ve really loved.

If you’ve loved any of these, perhaps you have a recommendation of something new to read? Or even if you haven’t, perhaps you have a recommendation?

When the first Kindle came out, I was curious, but like so many book lovers I love the bookness of books – the smell, the touch, the thingness of it, the heft, the look, the everything. I have a favorite publisher (Vintage): my favorite because they publish authors and titles that have meant a lot to me, and I really love their designs, both interior and cover. Their books are instantly recognizable (even to the touch) and beautiful.

Still, I bought a Kindle immediately, partly because I’m an early adopter of all things gadget, and partly because I live in Manhattan and don’t have very much room. I’ve spent a large fortune moving my huge library of books all around the country, but since I moved here I had to prune. I didn’t think I could let go of any single book, but I did. Then I had to prune again. And again. And again. One book coming in means one needs to leave. So the Kindle seemed like an ideal option; plus, I can have LOTS of books at my fingertips when I travel. Little did I know it would completely transform my reading……as in, I read even more! It’s fantastic. I love my Kindle. Love it love it love it, wouldn’t go back. I still buy books, but I’m much more selective, and buy a hardback if it’s really special in some way.

Anyway. Now that I’m self-employed, and underemployed at this point, book purchases are definitely a luxury. Definitely. Often I want a knitting pattern that’s only published in a book, but there aren’t enough patterns I’d want to knit to justify the purchase – and that’s especially true now, as I watch my pennies. Then it hit me: GET A LIBRARY CARD!

The last library card I had was a small card made of very heavy cardstock with rounded corners, and a metal plate in the center with my number on it. My name was typed on an old-fashioned hammer typewriter in something like Courier. I can still feel it in my hand, I nearly wore the thing out. Want to see what they look like now?

Library Card: the regular and keychain editions!

There’s a branch of the library 2 blocks from my apartment. I can go online and request books from the entire NYPL system and they get sent to my branch, which then emails me. Easy breezy. I like the electronic swipey thing, but I miss that old metal plate.

Each neighborhood in Manhattan has its own reputation; mine, the Upper West Side, is the literary neighborhood, the cultural part of town, etc. I love that! And since I live a couple of blocks from Columbia University, we also have all that intellectual stuff. Within 2 blocks of my apartment are 3 independent bookstores, can you imagine that? Columbia U has a Barnes & Noble, so that’s right there too.

Book Culture - a great GREAT independent bookstore, and nice description of my neighborhood!

The Bank Street Bookstore for kids, parents, & teachers

So shop independent when you can, yo.

It’s an absolutely letter-perfect day here. Very sunny, bright blue skies, little puffy white clouds, 70 degrees and very low humidity, and that certain feeling in the air….I’m sure you know what I mean. It’s a lovely day to be alive.

my street

So happy Friday, y’all! I’ve got an editing job for a Canadian guy who has written a book for young boys (the story is based on his childhood in New Zealand in the 1960s, so it’s fun for me to read too!), and I’m going to make a big batch of oatmeal cookies, but I won’t eat a single one since I’m on a diet. And you know how good the house smells when cookies are baking…….

knitting in croatia

If you met me, you’d see a tall 53-year old woman with a big smile and bad posture. You’d hear my deep Texas accent, which people up here in NYC describe as a “cute southern accent.” (oh.no.it’s.not!) You’d also hear about the people I love, my husband and kids: my husband goes unnamed here to respect his privacy, but he’s there in everything I do; my oldest daughter Katie and her husband Trey, who live in Austin; my 2nd daughter Marnie and her husband Tom, who live in Chicago; my son Will, who lives here in Manhattan and who is a dashing man about town; and my stepdaughter Anna, who is a college junior at a fancy school far away. You’d hear about social psychology, since I have a PhD in the subject and until very recently, acquired books in social psychology for a famous university press, the one that published the very first book. Now, I am a writer and editorial consultant.

Obviously, you’d have to listen to me prattle on and on about knitting, and other handwork. My Aunt Meecie taught me to crochet when I was 5 or so, and I specialized in skein-long chains of acrylic yarn. I took up embroidering pillowcases in kindergarten, and generally made shit throughout my growing-up years. I took up knitting when I was 23, followed by spinning and weaving, quilting, bobbin-lace making, sewing and smocking. And woodworking. I’ve never met a type of handwork I didn’t love. Yet.

And now, me by the bullets:

• I’ve been to 612 cities in 20 countries (that number is constantly getting bigger).
• I’m 5’10″ (that number is consistently getting smaller).
• I have 2 graduate degrees (that number won’t be changing, though I do periodically toy with the idea of going back for a 2nd PhD [philosophy] or taking creative writing classes).
• I’ve moved 80 times. I’m done now.
• I have more than 15 tattoos (changing? perhaps).
• (I love parenthetical comments; also, semi-colons.)
• I love Cap’n Crunch and Pop-Tarts.
• I am a social psychologist. Before I started college, I thought it was just like 13th grade or something. My family did not have any education.
• Inside, I’m poor white trash. Outside, I’m fancy. Kinda.
• I am a photographer.
• I love odd-ball instruments like the accordion, banjo, and bagpipes.
• I’m pretty cool if you get to know me.
• I’ve suffered. A lot.
• Places I’ve lived: [texas] Graham, Tyler, Kilgore, Abilene, Austin (back and forth lotsa times), San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Richardson, Irving, Wichita Falls; [connecticut] New Britain; [virginia] Fredericksburg; [alabama] Huntsville; [arkansas] Fayetteville; [new jersey] Ramsey; [new york] Rochester, Manhattan.
• Cinnamon toast makes me happy.
• I started college at age 36, and grad school at age 40. NOT EASY, when you have 3 little kids.
• I didn’t get out of Texas until I was 29 years old. (Mexico doesn’t count, when you’re a Texan.)
• I am a baker.
• Learning new things makes me happy.
• I have an intriguing relationship with light.
• I used to think of book ideas and find people to write them.
• I am a jealous person, and it makes me suffer terribly. I wish I could not be jealous. Ideas?
• I love clouds and big skies, they make me feel like I can breathe.
• My favorite places in the world are Manhattan, Santa Fe, New Orleans, Paris, Hanoi, Cusco, Arequipa, Vancouver, Luang Prabang, Phnom Penh, and San Francisco. That list is not in order of favoriteness.
• Annie Lennox is my favorite singer and songwriter, and so is Lyle Lovett.
• I love live theater and modern art.
• Singing and dancing make me so happy I cry.
• I love to sing, but only do it privately these days. I used to be that girl with a guitar in a bar.
• I’m an 8th generation Texan. You read that right. My kids are 9th. My grandkids (some of them, anyway) will be 10th.
• I have a sweet tooth. Duh, given the food faves above. I love Easter because of Peeps. (PEEPS!)
• I am writing a memoir of my father.