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ferro-grumley awards

May 7th, 2009

Here I am blogging not from the woods, but from Manhattan. With my good old friend Sarah Van Arsdale. We’re on our way to the Ferro-Grumley fiction award ceremony. The Essential DTWOF is a finalist! Wish me luck!

Moosewood

May 4th, 2009

Blogging from the woods! Was looking for for the elusive shad tree to show you its blossoms, but couldn’t find any. So here’s an Acer Pennsylvanicum Hol found.

iBlog, youBlog, he/she/itBlogs

May 4th, 2009

I finally have the blog set up so I can post to it from my iPhone. Now you can look forward to curt, misspelled, and even more irrelevant and solipaostic–I mean solipsiatic &$@”? SOLIPSISTIC posts than I already make, starting with this one.

Sarah Waters is in the country

April 30th, 2009

Remember how I was losing sleep over her new book last month?

Now she’s on tour with it. Go see her in NYC tonight, or Cambridge tomorrow. Or check this schedule. Then read the book. Then let’s talk.

rodent composting, iowa

April 27th, 2009

Here’s a little movie I made the other day. I had smelled something terrible the previous night, which I traced to a skiboot on my basement stairs. Tucked inside it was a dead chipmunk. I dumped the sad little thing into the weeds, but Holly suggested that a much more respectful and practical solution would be to compost it. So I did. Warning–contains footage of cute dead rodent.

Also, I just got a phone call from my friend Ruth. She was at the gym this morning, watching CNN. They were showing footage from a Christian Broadcast Network report on the gay marriages happening in Iowa today. For a second, she saw me and my ex Amy Rubin on the screen, getting married on the steps of City Hall in San Francisco five years ago. The Christian Broadcast Network? What were they doing at my wedding? It reminded me of this panel from a cartoon I once did about lesbian-specific phobias.

Since the chipmunk incident, I have put a collar with three bells on the cat. So far this has stemmed the tide of wildlife that had been flowing into the house.

torture memos set to music

April 20th, 2009

From today’s Times:

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to the video below. It’s kind of disturbing–both the content itself, and the notion of making a song about it. But you know how when you read stuff in the paper or hear it on the news, it can be awful and painful but you’ve kind of built up a resistance to hearing awful stuff on the news, so you remain somewhat detached? Because this is such a different mode of delivering the information, I think it’s harder to do that.

headbangin’ with the fam

April 17th, 2009

I’m visiting my mom in PA, and this afternoon after going to the post office, getting groceries, and procuring a patio set at Target, we swung by a heavy metal concert. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring in 2’22”

April 16th, 2009

Yesterday I had to drive 10 hours from Vermont to Western PA, where I’m doing a school visit at Clarion University. It’s always miraculous traveling south at this time of year because you can watch the grass getting greener and the trees unfurling as you go. Here’s my trip, from the Green Mountains, to the Adirondacks, to the Catskills, then at dusk I plunge off the edge of New York down into the Delaware River Valley, Pennsylvania and the Poconos. Around Scranton the sun set and I had to stop taking pictures.

Ariel Schrag, Eric Orner

April 11th, 2009

Two of my favorite cartoonists have new work out.

Ariel Schrag has just released Likewise, the final volume of her epic graphic memoir about her high school years. Here’s a review in Time Out New York.

And Eric Orner, creator of The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green, is posting a cartoon diary of time he recently spent living in Jerusalem. Here’s the first installment. It’s really funny.

maple syrup and other miracles

April 9th, 2009

When I tuned into the live streaming of the legislature on VT public radio Tuesday to follow the same sex marriage proceedings, I was surprised to find the Senate discussing Read the rest of this entry »