Jeanette Winterson just wrote a very funny column in The Times (UK) about buying The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For at her local bookshop, The Borzoi, in Stow-On-The-Wold. That’s an actual place, not made up for effect. I just googled it. It’s in Gloucestershire, which is sort of interesting since I’m in the middle of reading The Tailor of Gloucester. You might think a person could get through the Tailor of Gloucester in ten minutes or so, but I’m on my third night now. It has great soporific powers.
Winterson also talks about being identified as the “homosexual authoress” in her small village. “I suppose I should be writing racy novels in a tweed skirt and brogues, but then everybody else around here wears those.” This calls to mind my own experience of lesbian rustication here in New England, where everyone dresses like a butch dyke, even the gay men, which is sometimes confusing.
But I digress. I think this is Winterson’s influence, as you will see if you read her piece.
Whew! Thanks for all the menopausal remedies. I’m gonna go chug some Barlean’s flax seed oil, insert a hormone pellet in my, my, …you know, my noun, then massage some neutral Kiwi shoe polish into my scalp.
Look, I just got the latest issue of Granta. This is a very fancy schmancy literary journal, to which I have contributed a short graphic essay.
See my name on the cover? Right there with Siri Hustvedt and Ali Smith and Jonathan Lethem? There’s also a clever story inside by the wonderful and terrifyingly prolific Emma Donoghue.
Meanwhile, Holly decided we should move the birdfeeders closer to the house. Dr. Winnicott thinks this was a splendid idea. Click the below picture, it’s a video. I still haven’t figured out how to make my videos show up with that handsome, graphically lucid and self-explanatory “play” arrow on ‘em, which would make this entire sentence, as well as the last one, unnecessary.
I just bought these rawhide bootlaces, and they make such a beautiful little object wrapped up in their Kiwi bi-directional label band, I’m loathe to undo it. See the tiny little kiwi? Such an elegant, unpretentious logo, and so deeply familiar. I guess it’s emblazoned in my brain from childhood, when I had to polish my hideous red corrective shoes with Kiwi shoe polish–some kind of clear version, since they didn’t make any that was the exact hideous red color of my shoes. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been getting emails about Portland’s women’s bookstore, In Other Words. They need a pile of money by the end of the year in order to survive. Go to their website to buy some holiday gifts or make a donation, okay? It sounds like people are really pitching in, like they did for the fictional Madwimmin Books.
It’s a cold world. Thank god this cord of wood got delivered today.
As I read the comments on the last post, I see that my protracted absence has alarmed some readers. No, the ice storm didn’t knock my power out. I’ve just been too scattered to blog. I went to Pennsylvania to visit my family last week, which always warps time in a disconcerting way. Then on the way home to Vermont, my girlfriend Holly and I had to drive through the ice storm. Click this picture to see how harrowing it was. Read the rest of this entry »
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For just got this amazing rave in the NY Times.
Lemme tell you whippersnappers. I can remember when the Times wouldn’t even print the word “dyke.” In fact, somewhere in my vast archives I have a tiny clipping from 1983 or so…maybe even later…containing the first instance of the Times using the word “gay,” as opposed to “homosexual.”
If you live in Northern Vermont, come to one of my readings/signings for Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. I’ll be at Bear Pond in Montpelier tonight, and at the Flying Pig in Shelburne tomorrow. Thanks to the redoubtable Cathy Resmer for posting about it on the blog of our local alt weekly Seven Days.
