A Big Storm Knocked It Over

Like Fire wasn't the only thing that got its germination at BEA last May. I also, if you remember, picked up a bunch of seed packets—seed packets were popular giveaways in 2009—including these sunflower seeds from, appropriately enough, Columbia University Press.

I did in fact plant them on the weird elevated platform in front of my house, and not only did they grow but they grew HUGE. Every day for the past few weeks I meant to go out and take photos. Seriously, every day. They were monstrous and cheerful—you could see them from a block away. During the last two weeks of September I was vetting new tenants for the downstairs rental unit, and I always got a kick out of telling people who wanted to come see the place "It's the house with the sunflowers."

And then last Wednesday we had a big old windstorm. Tree limbs went down, chunks of the city lost power, and I came home to find my giant sunflowers broken, every one of them, hanging down with their faces to the sidewalk. I wasn't brokenhearted, though. They probably wouldn't have lasted another month, I had found a nice tenant for the apartment, and really—if that's the worst thing that happens to me all week, I'll take it.

The next evening I came home and even from the bottom of the hill I could see they were all gone. We live across the street from the neighborhood community center, and I figured some bored kids messing around after school must have pulled them out. But once inside I saw that Jeff had gotten home early and cut the survivors down to fit in a jar.
So that's it, summer's over. The cats are quite taken with the sunflowers, and every time I look at them (the flowers, that is) I think of Van Gogh. I turned the heat on last week. And off we sail into fall, and whatever the winter holds. Life is good.

Like Fire

When Readerville closed up shop last June, right away I started thinking about putting together my own literary blog. It had been a great roller coaster ride -- staying on top of every shred of book and publishing news, scrolling through my endless feeds and waiting for that excellent click that happened when I came upon an item I knew I'd have something to say about. Writing every day was good for me, having the opportunity to follow my opinions where they led and whittle them down to something articulate. Mostly it was fun.

So I dug deep into my inner Andy Hardy and spent the summer tinkering in that virtual barn out back. And finally -- Hey Kids! -- I'm putting up my own show.
Like Fire is a collaborative effort with some fellow Readerville alumni which will hopefully go on to amuse and delight and inform all our friends and fans. Another litblog, yes, but hopefully full enough of content and opinion to have its own flavor. We also take submissions, so if you have something related to books or the industry, please send it along to likefire.mail@gmail.com.

I won't abandon Mappa Mundi, though, I promise. I'm way too fond of it -- and where else am I going to post all those pet photos?

Treasure

I had lunch with Pat, my one and only work friend, yesterday. This week marks three years I've been at the workplace, and that's all I'm going to say about that right now. If I've learned only one thing there -- and I have to wonder sometimes if this might not in fact be the case -- it's that you don't sit up front in Tom's during the first week of school unless you want to eat your sandwich with someone's mom and dad mugging on the other side of the window while their embarrassed kid takes pictures. It's like the most famous landmark in New York City for a week, and the folks are lined up three deep to get their photo snapped on the sidewalk.
Pat and I had a nice lunch as far in the back as we could get seats, and then dawdled along in the sun, looking at books for sale on the street. Right off I gravitated to a hardcover copy of Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings -- I'd seen it on the guy's table before and thought it was something I'd like, but never picked it up. I find I'm a little more adventurous when I'm browsing with someone else, though, especially if we're trying to kill some time. So I opened it and there, on the flyleaf, was this:
"How much?" I asked.

"Four dollars," he said.

I had a pang of guilt. It didn't last long. In 25+ years of buying secondhand books, I've never found any buried treasure, not once. This felt like the universe patting me indulgently on the back of the hand -- "That's nice, dear" -- but right around now I could use a little babying from the powers that be.

I Googled the signature when I got back to the office and yes, it's hers. The book's not a first -- more like a tenth -- and while it might have netted the guy a bit more than $4 it wouldn't have made him rich. On the other hand, it made me very rich indeed. On a day that was hard in need of a ray of sunshine, a $4 copy of One Writer's Beginnings with Eudora Welty's handwriting in the front -- "Jackson, Missippi / March 23, 1984" -- was just fine.

September

Wow, I really went the whole month of August without blogging once? That's pretty flimsy. I've got some other projects up my sleeve and a lot going on but still, not to the exclusion of everything else in life. I've just been going through a little radio silence phase, I guess, and apologies to everyone I owe email. Let's just think of it as a fallow period, a bit of mental crop rotation so the soil of my psyche can replenish. Or some such compost-worthy shit.

More later. Bed calls ever earlier. But to tide you over, here's a nice picture of three of the four cute furry animals who live here getting cozy on the world's skankiest dog bed.

Thanksgiving in July

Saturday was one of those really rare stunning New York summer days -- hot and sunny but not sticky or heavy. It's been notably cool for July anyway, but to get true summer that's not disgusting -- that's a thing of beauty around here.

I went into the city to see my friend Heather, with the idea of hitting up some galleries. But they were all closed -- odd for a Saturday, but we guessed everyone was off in the Hamptons. So we did what we would have done anyway, which was walk and talk -- she's someone I can talk to all day and never get tired. We hung out on the 23rd Street pier for a while, which has gotten a nice makeover since I was last over that way. Everyone was out taking the sun, with sailboats tacking across the Hudson and the water sparkling. I could have jumped in.
Then we walked over to Tenth Avenue and climbed up to The High Line, which I've wanted to see since it opened last month. It's a length of elevated freight rail tracks built in the 1930s and abandoned in 1980, reclaimed at the beginning of the '00s as park space and spruced up super nice. It's all concrete and wood and steel in perfect proportion, filled with indigenous, New York State prairie-type plantings, and all sorts of great detailing that fits in with the existing cityscape -- no small feat when you consider the whole crazy pentimento effect of New York City in the 21st century. There are some ridiculously cool sleek highrises towering above it, and crumbly roofs from the century before last with rusty watertowers alongside. My favorite thing was a long stone wall of tall multicolored mullioned windows -- I'm a sucker for colored glass and this was really classy.
After walking and talking and walking and talking, we headed up to the Bronx and had a big grilled feast, salmon and corn and black bean/mango salsa and salad.

And then Sunday night? We had our friends John and Margarita and their dogs over for a big grilled feast, chicken and burgers and corn and summer squash and salad.

That was a lot of feasting in one weekend, a lot of talking and drinking and passing food around the table and pretending we didn't see Mr. Bonkers stick his entire head in the salad bowl, looking for cucumbers. Forget Christmas in July -- this weekend was our Thanksgiving in July. I can go back to my hermit ways for a while, but it was nice doing some extended bread-breaking with friends.
Sunday was the fourth anniversary of Milo's death. I didn't dwell on it much during the day, but this morning around 4 I woke up with a little indigestion, a little of the dreaded Monday hangover, and lay in the dark thinking about him. I'll always miss my boy -- he was a shooting star and his time with me was far too short. You know how when you're a kid you get this vision of how you're going to be as an adult, this very personal archetype that you either ditch or hang on to or some variation thereof? I always wanted to be a cool artist lady in a beat-up pickup truck with a dog in the front seat. Not a mommy, not a businesswoman, not a nurse or a fireman. She was it. And though I lost track of her for a while -- my childrearing years weren't really conducive to keeping that particular vision alive -- I got her back. I got to be the cool artist lady in the beat-up pickup truck, even if I was really a slightly geeky publishing lady in a beat-up Blazer, and Milo was that dog. He was the key that turned in the lock and gave me a second chance to be what I wanted. He was my good dog, sitting in the front seat.

The thing is, though, if Milo were still alive there's a very good chance we would never have adopted Dorrie. And she's my good dog too. It's just one of those things that there's no way to really think about in a straight line.

So I woke her up and pulled her into my arms with her head on my shoulder, and snuggled with my good dog until it got light out and I figured I might as well just get up. Milo always liked being held that same way, and I guess wherever he is he must appreciate the fact that I'm still snuggling in bed with a white spotty dog. Whatever else you can say about me, I sure do pick good ones.

Summertime and The Russian Prize

Summer's finally come to New York. Look, I'm not complaining -- it's the middle of July, and this is the first really irritatingly hot and sticky day that hasn't cooled off after the sun went down. Cold pasta, cherries, and wine for dinner, and the fans all going full-blast. When I turned on the floor fan in the living room -- first time this year -- a huge dust bunny came skittering out and Francis went crazy. He chased it, then he stalked it, then pounced. It had to have been a hell of a disappointment. The tenure of the other two cats has pretty much assured that this house is rodent-free, so he never gets to catch anything.

So my guest blogger gig at Bookninja is over as of tonight, since George is back. It was a lot of fun, and I hope that everyone who followed me there will keep checking it out on a regular basis. It's a really good joint. My fellow bloggers were awesome too -- they put me to shame, honestly, with all their energy. I see they all kept up with their personal blogs just fine. But hey, we all do what we can do and anyway, I have a few tricks left up my sleeve. Stay tuned.

Earlier this evening I was reading various newsworthy items and got myself worked up into a whole bloggy lather with one of my usual rants, which is how I dearly wish to see the farthest corners of world literature spread around to all readerly consciousnesses -- seriously, it should be as accessible and unscary as world music has gotten, and available in Starbucks as well -- and I came upon Margarita Meklina's account at The Quarterly Conversation of her trip back to Russia after winning the Russkaya Premia literary prize.

It's a good story, dark and touching. The other finalists she mentions, though, just stopped me in my tracks. Not so much the creepy wanking Ossetian, but Boris Khazanov, hoping to be handed a literary prize from the same state that jailed him for six years in the 50s for anti-Soviet propaganda. How in the world could that feel? Literally, how in the world -- a Google search of his name turned up some Russian language books and a Boris Khazanov who lives in New Hampshire and gave money to Obama's campaign. The one I want is a German expat, whose speech focused on "language, which becomes frozen in immigration as though in a fridge."

Or Andrei Nazarov, whose family was killed in the Revolution and who said the award should go to Nabokov and Bunin, who never received such a prize from their own government. The backstorie seems as far from the American literary prize machine as you can get, and I'm hungry to know more. Nazarov shares his name with a pro hockey player, and while I realize it's fully possible to both play hockey and write -- hey, I can -- I doubt they're the same person.

So for all my grand ideas of world literature for the people and how it would make us better citizens of the universe, I end up only being as good as my search engine, and I end up feeling very solidly American. But Meklina's essay is a really wonderful window into a whole different room, and I appreciate that. It's a big internet, and I like it that way.

Did I mention that it's hot? The dog is hot, the cats are hot. We've gotten off easy so far, but I guess summer's here now.

Open Letter

Dear Teenagers of Kingsbridge,

First of all, we want to give you credit for having gotten hold of all those fireworks. Really, we think it's SO cool you were able to talk your Uncle Sonny into picking up that big bag of them when he was down in West Virginia last month, and we commend you for not having blown off any of your fingers. Seriously.

But can we give you some advice? They don't go bad. You can save whatever you have left over for next year, and they'll still be fine -- you don't HAVE to set them all off tonight. What if you can't get any next year? What if Uncle Sonny gets caught violating his parole and can't make it down to see that guy he knows? You'll be really, really glad to have a few laid away for the Fourth of July, 2010. Just hide them in the back of your sock drawer -- when your mom find them she'll be so happy they're not weed she'll forget she ever saw anything. Really. I'm a mom. I know.

To tide you over until then, check out the Museum of Firecracker Label Art. They're quite beautiful, and they won't scare the dog.

(via Coudal Partners' Museum of Online Museums)