Royal Quiet DeLuxe

i wasn't actually in love

2012-01-25T09:43:00.000-08:00

I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a kind of tender curiosity. The Great Gatsby

Photo: Rolf Henke, Freunde von Freunden

my imaginary self

2012-01-16T18:08:00.000-08:00

is wearing this dress right now.

Mara Hoffman at Bona Drag

bread and butter

2012-01-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

She loves bread and butter and wine and innards and cannot abide fussy eaters. Madhur Jaffrey on Judith Jones in Saveur

The Pleasures of Cooking for One, one of M's favorite cookbooks

a matter of infinite hope

2012-01-14T11:31:00.000-08:00

Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. The Great Gatsby

Photo: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel's flat in Freunde von Freunden

contents may have shifted

2012-01-12T11:36:00.001-08:00

A new book from Pam Houston is due out next month.

Photo from: Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel

you have to take the dive

2012-01-10T14:51:00.001-08:00

Maurice Sendak via Big Other

whatever the scenario

2012-01-07T17:21:00.000-08:00

I'm bringing it up because I want to talk about rejection. I'm not saying Happy Baby is a great book, but it tries to be. If you want to create something great you have to be willing to make something that people dislike, that's the only way to find an audience who is in love with you. If someone loves it then someone else will want to tear it down because it puts certain conventions on display and there it is, what we think we know, sitting uncomfortably on a pedestal, as if under a searchlight, scratching at her neck. Stephen Elliott in The Daily Rumpus, January 8, 2012

Painting: Fathom No. 1, 2010, by Olive Jeffers

where since once we are

2012-01-02T16:04:00.000-08:00

When I am feeling depressed and anxious and sullen
all you have to do is take your clothes off

From "Poem: A La Recherche de Gertrude Stein" by Frank O'Hara via Books vs. Cigarettes

Photo: Built in Suffolk, England by Haworth Tompkins via Cabin Porn

I enjoy the wanting

2011-12-26T11:06:00.000-08:00

This year I gave a lot of gifts made by Wendy MacNaughton and last year I gave a lot of gifts made by mgealach. I also gave M. a copy of Of Recklessness and Water. And M. gave me things that only she could. Sometimes I bookmark a lot of stuff, like this Rye Bread and this t-shirt, but probably I enjoy the wanting more than the getting.

Photo via welcome back, oldtimer

all you have to do

2011-12-23T10:29:00.000-08:00

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Ernest Hemingway

Gold bangle by David Neale via jokemijn

jack didn't know what was going to happen next

2011-12-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

Jessica Serran, "I am waiting for something amazing to happen" (detail). Mixed media installation at West Oakland, CA train station via Art21 blog

the end

2011-12-21T10:29:00.000-08:00

Edward Ruscha, The End, 1991; Eva Roucka; Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions, 1942

the crocodile's snout in the lily pond

2011-12-19T13:00:00.000-08:00

I frequently write about love and therefore about jealousy. It’s part of the deal; it’s what comes with love, for most people, in most societies. Of course, it’s also dramatic, and therefore novelistically attractive, because it’s frequently irrational, unfair, boundless, obsessing and horrible for all parties. It’s the moment when something deeply primitive breaks the surface of our supposedly grown-up lives—the crocodile’s snout in the lily pond. Irresistible. Julian Barnes in The Art of Fiction, No. 165, Paris Review

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Of Recklessness and Water

a novelist's normal condition

2011-12-19T12:31:00.000-08:00

But then, such is my nature—and I assume I share this with lots of other writers—I thought, What if I only have one book in me? So the second novel is always harder, though in my case it was at least quicker. I still find myself thinking, Well, I may have written seven or eight or nine novels, but can I do it again the next time? But I’m convinced that a high anxiety level is the novelist’s normal condition. Julian Barnes in The Art of Fiction: No. 165, Paris Review

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Of Recklessness and Water

forty sixth at grace

2011-12-16T22:35:00.001-08:00

has a new home.

i love you to pieces, distraction, etc.

2011-12-15T12:35:00.000-08:00

If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she's late? Catcher in the Rye

Photo: Mark McNairy cap toe boot via welcome back, oldtimer

pacing, pacing, pacing

2011-12-15T10:44:00.000-08:00

You'd be surprised: all I ever think about in the years of revising a novel is "pacing, pacing, pacing." Andrew Sean Greer

Photo via welcome back, oldtimer

the tuesday interview: gene luen yang

2011-12-13T10:15:00.000-08:00

I first read Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese when I TA'd a children's lit class as a graduate student and was, without reservation, completely blown away. He lives here in the Bay Area and right after that I had a chance to hear him read at SFPL and then again, this summer, I head him read as part of The Diversity in YA Tour. He strikes me as genuinely curious and is thoughtful and creative in ways that inspire my own work.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Gene Luen Yang: I've got three different projects going on right now.1. I'm doing a graphic novel continuation of Nickelodeon's popular animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender for Dark Horse Comics. I'm writing and a Japanese art team named Gurihiru is drawing. I'm a huge fan of the original cartoon, so I'm very excited about this. Of all the main characters, Zuko is my favorite. I relate to his struggle to do -- or even know -- what's right.

2. I'm writing a superhero comic for First Second Books. Sonny Liew is handling the art. The story is set in Chinatown in the 1930's. I can't say much more about the project at this point, but I'm super-excited about this one, too.

3. I'm writing and drawing a graphic novel about The Boxer Rebellion for First Second Books. I've been working on this one for years and years, ever since American Born Chinese came out. The Boxer Rebellion was a war that occurred on Chinese soil over a hundred years ago. At the time, the Chinese government was incredibly weak so the European powers were able to set up concessions all over China -- pieces of land that the Chinese government had no control over. A group of poor, illiterate teenagers from the Chinese countryside decided to take things into their own hands. They performed rituals that called down ancient Chinese gods to possess them. Then, emboldened by the gods' superpowers, they marched through China killing foreigners and Chinese Christians. There are many parallels between The Boxer Rebellion and what's happening in the Middle East today. Of all the projects I'm currently working on, this one is closest to my heart.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

GLY: I have to confess, I'm pretty comics-y. I read a lot of comics and I am primarily inspired by other cartoonists. My musical tastes are lame. I mostly like pop music from when I was a teenager (late 80's, early 90's -- Rick Astley is totally underrated, as are the Fine Young
Cannibals). Even my movie tastes are comics-y. Like pretty much every other cartoonist, I love Studio Ghibli movies.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

GLH: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. As for prose books, I love Silence by Shusaku Endo.

RQD: What are you reading now?

GLY: I'm reading a collection of Father Brown short stories by G.K.Chesterton. I recently read The New New Thing by Michael Lewis. (I really wanted to read the Steve Jobs biography, but my library didn't have it so I settled for the biography of another Silicon Valley
tycoon.)

As I mentioned already, I also read a lot of comics and graphic novels. Comics that I've read in the past month or two: Picket Line by Breena Wiederhoeft, My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf, Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Merrick, Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol, a
volume of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen that I borrowed from a friend, Chris Giarrusso's G-Man with my kids, and the new Wonder Woman comic from DC Comics.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

GLY: I read a lot of comic books. :) I also loved Orson Scott Card, Lloyd Alexander, Judy Blume, Clifford Hicks. Remember Clifford Hicks' Alvin Fernald books? I *loved* them when I was a kid. I wanted to be Alvin. I seem to be the only one, though. Nobody else my age knows what I'm talking about.

I remember reaching the end of the J section at my library and feeling lost in the adult section. That's when I latched onto comics. There wasn't much of a YA section when I was growing up.

Illustration: Still from Studio Ghibli via Cartoonbrew

you have to get accustomed to that

2011-12-12T11:23:00.000-08:00

The only thing you can do is to guess, and to believe. Haruki Murakami in Bomb Magazine

Painting: Mark Rothko, Green Over Blue, 1956 via Books vs. Cigarettes

I am not me the horse is not mine

2011-12-08T12:33:00.000-08:00

William Kentridge asks “how does one find a way of not necessarily illustrating the society that one lives in, but allowing what happens there to be part of the work?” William Kentridge via PBS Art21

Performance still: William Kentridge, I Am Not Me the Horse Is Not Mine, 2008 via Flavorwire

the tuesday interview: peter orner

2011-12-06T10:11:00.000-08:00

I used to carry my copy of Peter Orner's Esther Stories around with me in case I ever got stuck somewhere without something to read. I could open it up to any page and just fall in. Then I heard he was going to read at Dog Eared Books, so I packed in with a bunch of other people and followed along with my book in my lap. Now he has this amazing new book, but he still feels like our own neighborhood storyteller.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?
Peter Orner: I have a new novel out, so I wish I could say I was working at the moment. I think I'm in the process of saying goodbye to characters I've spent so much time with. They are slowly fading away to me and having lives of their own as they get read (or not read) by other people...What interested me for so many years (the book took about seven) was how my people seemed constitutionally incapable of learning from the past.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?
PO: The South African artist William Kentridge I find him amazing; his huge imagination, the way he uses history and politics in his work.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?
PO: A novel by great Nebraskan novelist Wright Morris called Plains Song, I re-read it every year. This and Moby Dick. And also the sea stories of Alvaro Mutis.

RQD: What are you reading now?
PO: Right now I am reading The Book of Ebenzer Le Page, one of the strangest novels I've ever come across, and loving it. Its about a guy on an island off the UK who remembers nearly every single detail about his life. I can't get enough of it.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?
PO: The Phantom Tollbooth. I often think about it at least every day, how easy it seemed in that book to pass from one reality to another. When we're a kid and we read a book like this, we almost take it for granted. These days it's like I'm wandering around looking for that weird and wonderful tollbooth. Where did it go?

Drawing: William Kentridge via Duckrabbit Speaks

and occasionally, very occasionally

2011-12-05T10:42:00.000-08:00

I would rather have the 200 imperfect books that comprise my history and mark the vectors of my path through my art form than to have one perfect book which would comprise nothing but its own perfect self and denote no vectors of a life lived, and an art form struggled with and occasionally, very occasionally, bested. Barry Moser via crankreport

Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg, Of Recklessness and Water

500 words

2011-12-01T09:25:00.000-08:00

A couple of years went by, while I flailed around like this. But one day I sat down at my desk and wrote the first page of Middlesex, 500 words that contained the DNA for the protein synthesis of the entire book. I still had a million things to figure out about the plot and the characters, but I had my voice, my tone, and I was on my way. Jeffrey Eugenides on Middlesex in The Guardian.

Richard Serra, To Encircle Base Plate Hexagram, Right Angles Inverted (1970)

via even*clevland

so i'm reading this frank o'hara poem

2011-11-29T08:05:00.000-08:00

There's no Tuesday interview today. So I'm reading this Frank O'Hara poem: Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern.

And visiting these two favorite blogs: forty-sixth and grace and 16 house. And wanting to see this exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. And admiring Something Changed's reading list.

And next week we'll have a Tuesday Interview from Peter Orner.

Painting: Charles Demuth, Dancing Sailors, 1917.

unbidden

2011-11-28T11:42:00.001-08:00

Izis Bidermanas via Books vs. Cigarettes

until I realised

2011-11-26T15:00:00.001-08:00

The entire structure for the novel appeared in my head, fully formed, as ravishing as a crystal palace on a distant hill. I remember leaving the library that day, passing into the sunshine on the green, overwhelmed with the grandeur of this design and filled with a sense of personal magnificence, and this euphoria lasted for another minute until I realised that I had no idea how to write such a book. Jeffrey Eugenides in The Guardian

Crew member taking a movie of an iceberg, Greenland 1939. Smithsonian via gealach

the tuesday interview: kara levy

2011-11-21T20:13:00.000-08:00

I met San Francisco writer, Kara Levy at a Peter Orner reading at Dog Eared Books through another writer friend, Cora Stryker. The reading was for JoyLand Magazine where Kara is the SF/Bay Area editor. Later, after another reading, we talked about what we say when people ask, "what do you write about?" Kara sometimes says, "sickness and the body." Well, they don't usually ask again after that.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Kara Levy: Right now I'm working on a novel — it's a sort of humorous adventure novel that follows a self-proclaimed journalist-turned-Professional-Sick-Person on an unlikely quest to find a cure for Crohn's Disease. Crohn's Disease isn't curable (yet), but the novel involves a fake medieval-style pilgrimage, battle reenactments, a few infidelities, some madcap teenagers, and a lot of capes and baubles in the characters' quest to see if it could be. It's as much about these characters' quest to find a cure for something incurable as it is about their beliefs (or lack thereof) that the impossible could be possible, through belief or friendship or will or something we can't even understand. As an optimistic skeptic, that's a theme that interests me a lot. I'm also polishing up my finished story collection, Doctors of the Natural World, which examines issues of illness and the body too. In that book, the recurring question seems to be, "What choices do we make after the body makes choices for us?" I spend a lot of energy trying to convince people it's not depressing. I guess you'll just have to read bits of it to believe me.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

KL: I feel like I've been hugely influenced by standup and screen comedians: Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Lucille Ball, George Carlin, and so on. There's so much more than humor behind those performances — and performers — than meets the eye. I'm really interested in comedy for what it can do to express real things about our experience, sometimes more than theater or performance that purports to be serious. I also love medieval art, particularly architecture. You'll see a lot of that showing up in my novel. Is it appalling to say that I wrote a whole story in my collection while listening to an Akon song on repeat? Truth: That happened. Akon knows things.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

KL: Oh, geez, so much. Lorrie Moore's Self-Help is inescapable for me. I think I have two copies of it, for some odd reason. I also love Andre Dubus's story "Fat Girl," and go back to that often. I've reread Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler many, many times and I always learn something new, particularly about structure (which is not a strength of mine). In recent years I've found myself often revisiting a Wells Tower story, "Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned." It's the title story of his collection, and I think it's so brilliant. It's the perfect storm of humor and pain and character and story. He takes the unfamiliar and makes it so familiar it's almost disorienting. I wish I could figure out how to write anything even closely approximating it.

RQD: What are you reading now?

KL: I'm reading Eric Puchner's Model Home. A friend recommended it to me, and I'm really enjoying it. I also just started Erik Larson's In the Garden of the Beasts, also on a friend's recommendation. I find fictional-style retellings of history fascinating. It reminds me a little of a book I loved in high school, Alison Weir's The Six Wives of King Henry VIII. I remember thinking it was such a revelation that history could be communicated so compellingly. (No offense to my high-school history teachers, who were also, of course, totally compelling.)

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

KL: As a kid I loved Roald Dahl, but I don't think I realized until much later in life just how dark he really is. I also liked the Madeline l'Engle books, and then, when I got to middle school, I decided on A Separate Peace as my favorite book. Tortured, woeful Funny! Common theme: I reread it as an adult and was like, Wait, what? I think I saw impact as a different thing back then. The impact was a lot, lot less reading it fifteen years later. Sometimes it's interesting to go back and revisit things you've always held up so high, you know? Sometimes they're just as you remember them, but for different reasons, and sometimes the distance shows you how much your taste has changed, or your threshold for certain types of narratives.

if I can't have you

2011-11-20T14:57:00.001-08:00

city arts and lectures

2011-11-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Joan Didion.

Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton

the tuesday interview: elana k. arnold

2011-11-15T09:34:00.000-08:00

Elana K. Arnold's book Sacred is coming out in Fall 2012 and I can't wait. She's one of those people (Like Lindsay Leavitt) who writes books, raises great kids and is funny and down to earth and you sort of want her to be your best friend.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Elana K. Arnold: Right now I’m doing the research for the sequel to SACRED, my first novel, which Random House/Delacorte is publishing next fall. SACRED and its sequel entwine Kabbalistic mysticism and provocative romance. So I’m reading lots of texts, trying to deepen my own understanding of this complicated and ancient topic—Kabbalah, that is. I love my protagonist,Scarlett because she’s flawed and somewhat broken but determined to heal and grow. Also, both SACRED and its sequel deal with horses—Scarlett is an avid rider—and I love writing about horses.

RQD: What art or artists interest you?

EA: My first love, even outside of fiction, is books. I love memoir; David Sedaris thrills me, John Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye was wonderful, Temple Grandin is amazing. When I listen to music it’s often James Taylor. His voice brings me back to my childhood since my parents always listened to his music, too. And I have a guilty fascination with celebrities… not necessarily as ‘artists,’ but as human beings.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

E: Easy. His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman is always nearby. Everything by John Irving, particularly A Prayer for Owen Meany. And Paul Auster’s books—namely The New York Trilogy—probably because I’m still trying to figure it out.

RQD: What are you reading now?

EA: Aside from texts about the Kabbalah—Arthur Green’s A Guide to the Zohar and Daniel C. Matt’s Essential Kabbalah—I’m revisiting mystery novels (a sort of pleasurable research). There are competing stacks of Agatha Christie and Harry Kemelman on my table. And I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild; I preordered it.

RQD:What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

EA: Anything I could get my hands on. Anne of Green Gables and Gone with the Wind were huge for me, I devoured all of Christie’s books, and was fascinated by Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex But were Afraid to Ask (which I found in my grandmother’s library!). All the Pretty Horses and Cowboys are my Weakness taught me that you could write about horses without being insipid. I read literary fiction—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Rand—and trashy bodice-ripper romances. I was an indiscriminate reader. I think the result is that as a writer I smash together everything I love, highbrow and lowbrow alike.

already, the facts dissemble

2011-11-12T17:41:00.000-08:00

Understand, I love you, even as I turn from you like this,
stumbling breathless down a dim and disappearing street behind
a man who squints at house numbers, bewildered, about to say
something I can almost hear.

From "Apology" by Marie Howe

Undercover and Golden Goose and Maryam Nassir Zadeh

your clever hands never lie

2011-11-12T15:42:00.000-08:00

G1 via JeanaSohn.

because the new york times doesn't have comics

2011-11-11T08:24:00.000-08:00

It turns out that working on Because the New York Times Doesn't Have Comics is a blast. Last week's issue is archived here. Plus, M. put together a Vimeo channel (in our house, this one from anima istanbul is a runaway hit) and started an Indiebound list of the book recommendations we've received. What are your favorite kid-friendly links?

Video: Don't Go from anima istanbul on Vimeo.

the tuesday interview: nova ren suma

2011-11-08T08:34:00.000-08:00

I bought Nova Ren Suma's book, Imaginary Girls, because I loved the cover (I love covers) but when I read the first three pages, I slammed the book shut. Damn this book is good. I saved it for my SF/NY flight and as soon as I got settled, I started in again. I didn't look up. I didn't watch the movie. Five hours went by and I was completely transported.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Nova Ren Suma: I’m working on a few things—all in different stages—so my head’s a mess right now. My next YA novel coming out with Dutton (release date still to be determined) is a ghost story, in a way, and sometimes the pieces I write for it deeply disturb me. WHO wrote that? I think. And then I realize… Oh, that was me. The characters in it, these girls with frightening fates, have been haunting me for the past year. I’m interested in rescuing them from what they have to face, and I think they’re interested in pulling me in with them.

RQD: What art or artists (not fiction, but theatre, painters, music, etc.) interest you?

NRS: There is a photographer who’s fascinated me for years. I first discovered her photographs in a college photo class, when we were studying self-portraits, and she’s been my favorite artist ever since: Francesca Woodman. It’s a very sad story (she committed suicide at age 22), and in her beautiful black-and-white images—many of which are of herself—you can see how stunningly talented she was. There’s so much said in these images, by the way she blurs herself out and hides within the frame, by what’s shown as well as what’s not shown. I can’t even articulate how much I love her photographs.

I’m also drawn to female musicians—to a certain kind of voice (always honest), and a storytelling quality in songs. I have such a crush on Amanda Palmer… she’s amazing. And I’m a huge fan of Chan Marshall, Karen O., PJ Harvey, Emily Haines, and Alison Mosshart. I’d listen to, and write to, any song they sing.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

NRS: There are some books I’ve read again and again and will continue to, probably for the rest of my life. One is a novel called The Last Life by Claire Messud; I’m obsessed with it. Another is Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr. Then there are the short stories, the Alice Munro collections and Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson (which I’ve been known to read aloud to others, especially his story “Dirty Wedding,” which, just… wow) and Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun and the brilliant fairy-tale retellings in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

RQD: What are you reading now?

NRS: I’m reading some YA manuscripts I must keep secret… but I’m loving what I’ve read so far. I also believe in using tempting books as motivators, so my reward for finishing the proposal pages of my next novel and turning them in to my agent will be 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s new novel, which promises to be very magical.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

NRS: I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. When I look back, I see that the books that most impacted me were the novels I found on my mom’s bookshelves. She was—still is—an avid reader. Seeing her read and love books all throughout my childhood certainly shaped me as a person and ignited this dream in me to write my own books one day. When I was about twelve or thirteen I borrowed her Margaret Atwood books: Cat’s Eye and The Handmaid’s Tale. They opened my eyes to what kinds of stories I could tell. They showed me that stories about girls could be books, too. I decided I’d grow up to be a writer very soon after that.

Photo: Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots,

Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 on view at SFMOMA

restroll and stroll some never deepening beach

2011-11-07T20:40:00.000-08:00

Shoes via Dores

(e.e. cummings)

before all that

2011-11-07T13:58:00.000-08:00

Ruby said I’d never drown—not in deep ocean, not by shipwreck, not even by falling drunk into someone’s bottomless backyard pool. She said she’d seen me hold my breath underwater for minutes at a time, but to hear her tell it you’d think she meant days. Long enough to live down there if needed, to skim the seafloor collecting shells and shiny soda caps, looking up every so often for the rescue lights, even if they took forever to come.

It sounded impossible, something no one would believe if anyone other than Ruby were the one to tell it. But Ruby was right: The body found that night wouldn’t be, couldn’t be mine.

We had no idea—this was before the blue-flashing strobe through the pines; the spotlit glare on water; the skidding over rocks; the grabbing of shoes, any shoes, of clothes, any clothes. Before we went running through the brush and the sharp sticks cut our bare feet. Before the heart in my chest went pounding, all the while wondering, Is this really happening? when it was, most definitely it was. Before all that—all we wanted was to go swimming.

From Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma. Tomorrow on The Tuesday Interview

Photo by Keegan Gibbs via Aubrey Road

and the goddaughter said

2011-11-07T13:19:00.000-08:00

Joe Davis designed this site for me and the goddaughter said, "it's like a secret."

for always night and day

2011-11-06T06:36:00.000-08:00

Listening.

Photo: Anna Balecho via M.

through honesty

2011-11-04T08:26:00.000-07:00

I am always very precisely implicated in my films, not through narcissism but through honesty in my approach. Agnes Varda

Sans Toit Ni Loi via Books vs. Cigarettes

she said that we'd see buffalo

2011-11-03T09:09:00.000-07:00

We fought. When my mother and I crossed state lines in the stolen car, I’d sit against the window and wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t even look at her. The fights came when I thought she broke a promise. She said there’d be an Indian reservation. She said that we’d see buffalo in Texas. My mother said a lot of things. We were driving from Bay City, Wisconsin, to California, so I could be a child star while I was still a child. Anywhere but Here, Mona Simpson via distraction no. 99

Photo: Herschel Supply Co. lookbook via Tomboy Style

the tuesday interview: andrew sean greer

2011-11-01T08:32:00.000-07:00

I still find it surprising when writers I admire say yes to my interview requests. Andrew Sean Greer is one of those writers. He's our writer, a Bay Area writer, and he's always struck me as someone you'd like to have around, someone who, as he says, is "game for a mysterious adventure."

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Andrew Sean Greer: I'm finishing the third draft of a novel called "Many Worlds" that is a literary novel set in multiple universes. As for these characters, I finally get to have some people with a sense of humor!

RQD: What art or artists have an effect on your work?

ASG: Poetry and painting has the greatest effect on me; poetry because they are doing the hard work down in the mines, and what they bring up always inspires my own work, and painting because there is something about the intensity of the painted flat surface that mesmerizes and moves me outside all reason. I find portraits to be fascinating. But for intensity, something like Cy Twombly or Serra's recent show of drawings at the Met really do it for me. Big overpowering movement. Cleverness does nothing for me; emotion is all I'm interested in with art. That probably goes for fiction as well.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

ASG: Now I don't return to things because I love them; I return to them because they help my writing. These are related but not the same. And I'd say Proust and Grace Paley and Wallace Stevens. They always knock my socks off and get me going.

RQD: What are you reading now?

ASG: I'm reading Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

ASG: I read antique children's fiction--you know, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, and Tom Sawyer, and the Boxcar Children and all that--that gradually turned into fantasy and science fiction and then turned into philosophical fiction by high school like Camus. Strangely enough, I still find those old books satisfying in ways that sci fi and even Camus are not, anymore. I think it's the quality of the writing and characterization. And the sense of people game for a mysterious adventure!

Drawing: Richard Serra "Late September" 2001

disciplining imaginary children

2011-10-31T13:44:00.001-07:00

"I do remember disciplining imaginary children in the backseat of my car." Tom Waits on Fresh Air

Illustration: "Birds" by Alyson Fox

no other reason than a sky

2011-10-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

As I Walked Out

Don't tell me you've never dreamed of this –
of waking in a room with a wide open window,

the air clear and ringing after night rain;
of needing no other reason than a sky

the unbelievable blue of which
sends you flitting deftly through the house

past the year-old jar of nails and flies,
the pile of dishes in the sink, and out the back door

where you're caught for an instant in the brightness
because the future's so much easier than you'd thought –

slipping your heart under the rosebush like a key,
everything you need in the canvas bag

resting lightly at your hip

and life as simple as turning left or right.

"As I Walked Out" by Esther Morgan via The Saturday Poem

Photo: Hiroshi Sugimoto from Time Exposed

what are we going to do now, asked tommy

2011-10-30T15:55:00.000-07:00

“I don’t know what you are going to do,” said Pippi, “but I know I can’t lie around and be lazy. I am a ThingFinder, and you’re a ThingFinder you don’t have a minute to spare.”

“What do you say you are?” asked Annika.

“A ThingFinder.”

“What’s that?” asked Tommy.

“Somebody who hunts for things, naturally. What else could it be?” said Pippi as she swept all the floor into a little pile.

“Oh, all kinds,” said Pippi. “Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, dead rats, candy snapcrackers, little tiny screws, and things like that.”

Tommy and Annika thought it sounded as if it would be fun and wanted very much to be ThingFinders too, although Tommy did say he hoped he’d find a lump of gold and not a little tiny screw.

Photo: Cricket via Uncrate

it is a brave thing

2011-10-28T17:07:00.000-07:00

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love. The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer

Photo from NYT Archive via Native Kee

the tuesday interview: hannah moskowitz

2011-10-24T17:52:00.000-07:00

There's something about Hannah Moskowitz. She's sorta funny and real. She's written these wonderful books that all the reviewers call raw and poetic and they're right. And she tweets a lot. I started with Break, about a boy who sets out to break every bone in his body. But of course, there's Invincible Summer and you can preorder the hardback of Gone, Gone, Gone now.

RQD: What are you working on now? What interests you about these characters?

Hannah Moskowitz: Right now I'm working on another draft of (what is currently titled) Marco Impossible, my next middle grade book. It's told from the POV of the best friend of an openly gay 13-year-old, so I get to play with a lot of stuff that you don't usually see in MG. There's kissing.

RQD: What other art or artists play a role in your work?

HM: Tom Stoppard, definitely, as far as plays go. Motion City Soundtrack, Death Cab for Cutie, and Bright Eyes for music.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

HM: Indigo's Star by Hilary McKay. I have no idea how many times I've read it.

RQD: What are you reading now?

HM: Right now I'm working on Now Playing, the sequel to Stoner and Spaz, but it's taking me a while because I'm an English major and I have to read a lot for school. My reading-for-pleasure time is very limited during the school year. It pretty much sucks.

RQD: What did you read as a kid?

HM: I read a TON of Middle Grade from a very early age; my mom used to read it to me when I was very young. And since I still read it, that's the age group that feels so timeless to me. There's a part of me that will always be twelve, I think.

Album cover: Death Cab for Cutie Narrow Stairs

in the bay area?

2011-10-24T09:55:00.000-07:00

Marnie Webb and I have been doing some fun stuff over at Caravan and tomorrow night, Tuesday, October 25, we're teaming up with Local 123 (yum), Youth Uprising, Urban Adamah and Live Local Mission to host our first Community Hacks, a discussion series focusing on how communities make change. Please join us and if you do, introduce yourself. I'd love to meet you.

because the new york times

2011-10-22T21:08:00.001-07:00

This week's issue of Because the New York Times Doesn't Have Comics is the best yet. Including a kid-friendly gallery of photos from Greenpeace's Esperanza in the Southern Ocean.

Photo: February 14, 2007 The MY Esperanza in the Southern Ocean

did anyone else

2011-10-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

hear the interview today with Marie Howe on Fresh Air? "Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die." And she read this.

the tuesday interview: hila shachar

2011-10-18T10:30:00.000-07:00

I met Dr. Hila Shachar when I started blogging in 2008. To me she represents so much of what I find in the bloggers I love -- like Porter and Hollister Hovey, like Vic or the ugly earring -- a relentless curiosity. As I've followed her career, I've been interested in how she channels this restless aesthetic into her work.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Hila Shachar: My fictional book has been sidelined in the past year as I’ve been working on a separate, academic book I have under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. I’m close to finishing this book, which will be published next year. It’s called Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company. I basically examine various screen adaptations of well-known novels, from the 1930s to the present times. I find this topic fascinating because I’ve always been interested in those narratives that we choose to tell again and again, in different media.

RQD: What art or artists have you been thinking about?

HS: I’ve always been fascinated by Maira Kalman’s and Sophie Calle’s work. There’s something about their perspective that resonates with me. Maybe it’s the way they approach the things we take for granted. I’ve been deeply influenced by directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski and Jacques Rivette. Their cinema is interrogative and unsettling; it asks questions and seeks to undermine myths. That’s the kind of work I’m interested in. As for music, Kate Bush has influenced me a lot. When I first listened to her album The Kick Inside it was literally like a kick inside. I think it was the first artistic encounter I had with a woman being unconventional. I’d like to create writing that is the equivalent of her music.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

HS: Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Fever 103°’, Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ and Irving Feldman’s Holocaust poems. Feldman’s poems in particular remind me of both the power and limitations of words. He creates double worlds through his poems, in which language is ineffectual in expressing experience, but is also simultaneously necessary to articulate that which has been lost. I guess you could say that most of the books and poems I return to are quite extreme in a sense. I’m most interested in writing that sinks its teeth into you, I don’t like skimming on the surface of things.

RQD: What are you reading now?

HS: I’m re-reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss and Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters. Both hit me so hard the first time I read them, I needed to return to them a second and third time.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

HS: I read everything as a kid. Remember Spot the dog? I loved him. I also loved Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. But the book that made the biggest impact on me was Wuthering Heights. I didn’t understand much of it as a little girl, and I first read it through a Hebrew translation (I grew up in Israel), but it left a mark on my mind. I think this mark had a lot to do with Cathy. Her rebellious spirit and inability to be pinned down to a single meaning just seemed so right to me. I loved the novel so much that I devoted my PhD to it, and I’m now writing a book on its screen adaptations.

Photo: Still from Kieslowski’s "La Double Vie de Veronique"

gerhard richter painting

2011-10-15T16:15:00.000-07:00

Oh. OH, wow, this documentary: Gerhard Richter Painting via Blood is the New Black

Painting: Gerhard Richter via Blue Vertical Studio

new york

2011-10-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

No Tuesday Interview this week, but next Tuesday I'm excited about featuring writer, blogger and academic Hila Shacher. I'm in NY this week with my mom: The High Line, New York Theatre Workshop's The Select (The Sun Also Rises), Other Desert Cities and The Noguchi Museum. Packed: these boots and a bunch of links from Cup of Jo's NY Guide.

Photo from The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

i'm writing a new book

2011-10-05T10:18:00.000-07:00

From top to bottom: Alyson Fox on SF Girl By Bay, photo by Loree on an ambitious project collapsing, Grazia.it via Turned Out by Maya, Boy Crazy in T Magazine by Hedi Slimane via Steal their style, Ugo Mulas, Jasper Johns Laughing, New York, 1964 via Even Cleveland, APC France via Steal their style, photo by shotgun season via welcome back, oldtimer, portraits of Australian criminals 1920 via where is the cool?, Arnsdorf campaign by Turned Out by Maya.

the tuesday interview: lindsey leavitt

2011-10-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

Don't typecast, Lindsey Leavitt is not all tiaras. First of all, she's wry. Really wry. And it's hard to be wry in a tiara. And I loved her new book, Sean Griswold's Head, which is literally, about Sean Griswold's head.

RQD: What are you working on? What interests you about these characters?

Lindsey Leavitt: A contemporary YA that comes out in Winter 2013 called AUTHENTICALLY VINTAGE. I'm only about halfway through the first draft, so I'm still getting to know the characters, but I am loving writing from the main characters point of view. She's a mix of breezy and bitter, and I love exploring those conflicting emotions throughout. Her relationship with her sister is also important in the story, and since my little sister just moved nearby for the first time in our adult lives, it's been fun "researching" that relationship more.

RQD: Tell me about other influences.

LL: Oh man. The I-now-feel-inadequete-because-I-don't-have-a-muse question. I have nothing. Um, I have pictures my daughters colored for on my office walls. I stare at those. And lately I've switched off between Jimmy Eat World, Adele and Simon and Garfunkel when I write. A lot of time I'll just listen to one song on repeat over and over again to try to feel a certain mood. Since I write for teens, a lot of those songs are from my late nineties adolescence.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

LL: This probably makes me cliche, but I've read Pride and Prejudice more times than I can count. Reading Jane Austen is like eating cookies, comfortable, familiar and delicious.

RQD: What are you reading now?

LL: I just barely finished Sweethearts by Sara Zarr and like every Sara Zarr novel, I adored it. She is one of the greatest voices in young adult fiction right now, hands now.

I'm also reading Unfamiliar Fishes by Sara Vowell (digging Saras lately). Her books are like having your most charming friend sum up the history class you ditched, with lots of asides and tangents.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

LL: Lots of Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, dozens of Newbery winners. When I think back on those books, it's the characters I remember, and try to keep that in mind as I write. Then in Junior High I discovered the high concept creepy goodness of Lois Duncan and Christopher Pike. Those stories are very different from my humorous and or heartfelt stories, but I think I learned a lot about infusing tension and pacing into a story.

are you

2011-10-03T16:09:00.000-07:00

on my gift list? If so, you are definitely either getting this book from Wendy MacNaughton and the SFPL, this album or anything by Esperanza Spalding.

because the new york times doesn't have comics

2011-09-30T17:07:00.000-07:00

The full name was going to be Because The New York Times Doesn't Have Comics and My Parents Don't Want Me to Play Angry Birds Right Now. Cool stuff for kids. Subscribe here.

Illustration from Krtek a pramen

my friend clara says

2011-09-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

Oh how lovely to be in love but it takes a lot of our time, no?!?!

Photo by Clara Azulay

the tuesday interview: andrea seigel

2011-09-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

Families are weird. Andrea Seigel gets that. She writes these pitch perfect imperfect characters navigating a sort of it-only-makes-sense-if-you're-related-to-us family dynamic. I found her book, The Kid Table, because Meg Rosoff recommended it and, well, she hasn't steered me wrong yet.

RQD: What are you working on now?

Andrea Seigel: Right now I'm working on screenplays more than books, so I'm writing a script about a new suburban community that starts up out in the desert and the teenagers that attend its very, very small high school. The main character is romantic to a fault even though she's never really had a serious love in her life- extreme romanticism has always interested me because of the divide between the way romance plays out on TV and movies and even in your head, and then the forms it might actually take in your real life. I'm also interested in the idea of a group of people who take a lot of meaning from the initial smallness of their group, which makes it special, and then following to see what happens when more and more people start to come in and dilute that club.

RQD: What about other influences?

AS: The album "Late For The Sky" by Jackson Browne wrecks me, but it also puts a really clear universe into my head, and if I could translate the feel of some of those songs into writing, I'd be amazed with myself. Thomas Kinkade is a big one for me. No, just kidding. There's a photograph by Matthew Spiegelman called "Reconstruction Florida" that I've loved and wanted for years, but can't afford. Oh, and Ralph Lauren's furniture. When I look at ads with rooms staged with his stuff, I get this feeling like I could get a ton of work done if I could just be inside them.

RQD: What book, story or poem do you return to over and over?

AS: I'm not really big on returning to things because I don't have the patience for it, but the two books I can say that I've uncharacteristically read through more than once are Catcher In The Rye and John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire. Catcher because I'll pull it out to soothe myself with the existence of a really popular book that's loose on plot, and Hotel because Irving is so intensely great at plotting (I'm not) that I like to go back and marvel at how that book is put together.

RQD: What are you reading now?

AS: I just got Meg Rosoff's new book There Is No Dog in the mail, so I'm starting on that today.

RQD: What did you read as a kid? What is its impact on your work now?

AS: As a littler kid I read a ton of Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley High, Nancy Drew. I'm sure they had something to do with my favoring getting to know a character over everything else because I kept returning to series- I was more interested in tracking friendships and relationships than I was in whatever dilemma was contained within whichever individual book. And I'm sure that led right into my adult attraction toward soap operas, serial shows, and Us Weekly. I like the intricacies of personalities and smaller interactions more than I care about big external events.
Photo: Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West [after Cormac McCarthy] 2010 by Matthew Spiegelman

the person i am tonight

2011-09-26T09:48:00.000-07:00

I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald via lines in my palms

slipstream

2011-09-22T10:57:00.001-07:00

Today: this photo of The Castro by Hedi Slimane, this interview with Tom McCarthy, using an Alyson Fox illustration as a tattoo, how bittersweet Christopher Hitchens is on Joan Didion's new book via Something Changed, This recording of Red Rain via 2 or 3 things, Kelly Link and how being a teenager is like living in a strange world where you don't know the rules, this playlist from For Me, For You and putting together the first Community Hacks event in Berkeley.

spend a year playing pinball

2011-09-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

What was most difficult about it?

Same as always: getting to the point where you can believe in the book's world as a viable reality. I don't mean a "realistic" one – just one that's carried by its own momentum. Once you get past that point of critical velocity or whatever, the whole project flies – but it's a fucker to get there.

What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting the book again?

Once you've written a book and look back at the process, it's like the build-up to a goal. You wouldn't change anything, even the missed passes and accidental ricochets, because they led to what turned out to be the thing.

Tom McCarthy talking about C. on The Guardian

Photo: Matt Winter by Nicholas Maggio on A Time to Get via CrankReport

the tuesday interview: vanessa hua

2011-09-19T13:28:00.001-07:00

Vanessa Hua is a terribly cool girl. The kind that writes gorgeous stories, wins important awards, and is impossible to hate because she's one of the hardest working writers I know.

RQD: What are you working on now?

Vaness Hua: After finishing the latest revision of my novel, I decided to step away and work on short stories. In the novel, I'd been working on a thread involving female relationships and betrayal, and I continued to explore that in a short story, albeit in a far different setting, and with far different characters. I'm also working on a comic story, based on true events, yet with a high degree of the absurd. A lot of fun to work on, and the perfect break to take before returning to the novel manuscript. At present I'm figuring out how to work in the brief, brief, moments that I have to myself.

RQD: What's interesting to you about the characters you're writing about now?

VH: Both stories involve deceit and secrets, and how the characters carry that burden. I've found that's an ongoing theme in my work. I became a first time mother in August and I’m interested to see how that will influence and change my writing.

RQD: What other art or artists influence you?

VH: I always struggle with the question of influence. While I can readily tell you whose art and music I admire, who am I to say if those elements are present in my work? It seems presumptuous at best, self-deluded at worst. That said, if my writing reflects the playfulness of Calder’s mobiles, the tactile sensuality of Moore’s sculptures, the reimagining of the familiar of O’Keefe’s paintings, then I would be proud and ecstatic.

When working on specific projects, when pondering character and setting, I’ll listen to music and look at art from that era and locale. For example, for my novel, I pored over Cultural Revolution propaganda art and musicals.

RQD: What book or story or poem do you return to over and over?

VH: It depends on what I'm working on. For example, when figuring out how to weave together narrative arcs in two time periods, I studied Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides and Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill, among others. Anything I read while working on a novel, I find myself drawing connections and comparing, analyzing how other authors solve different narrative issues.

RQD: What are you reading now?

VH: World and Town, by Gish Jen and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski

RQD: What were you reading as a kid? how did those books impact the writing you do now?

VH: I read widely and voraciously, from the copy of Little Women that my mother brought over from Taiwan, to my older sister's copies of Candide and Animal Farm (the allegory flew far over my head), and Russian fairytales I found on the bookshelf at home. In elementary school, I wanted to read every book in the library! My favorites were female heroines who were writers: Jo from Little Women, Anne from Anne of Green Gables, and Laura from Little House on the Prairie, and their examples must have made becoming a writer seem possible. I continue to be an omnivore in the subjects and characters I write about.

Photo: Georgia O'Keeffe via PBS

fictions

2011-09-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

Life, as the ultimate unity, lies at the basis of the poeticized. Walter Benjamin quoted in The Night Sky by Ann Lauterbach

Fictions, Untitled #5 by Filip Dujardin on view at Highlight Gallery

self portraits

2011-09-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

Each of these artists enlists the form of the self portrait in their explorations, be their goal disappearance, self recognition, aggrandizement, invention or abstraction; thus showing the versatility of the form. Nica Ross on Self Portraits via ICP's blog, Fans in a Flashbulb

that tin-bright vision

2011-09-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday I saw Christine Schutt read her story ‘The Blood Jet’ at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. I’ve been to over one-hundred readings by fiction writers but this was the most moving. It wasn’t that she performed it so much as she channeled it. But of course what better reader was there? Schutt had worked over those words, those sentences, those movements–she’d created it out of air. Once there had been a blank page and then there was ‘The Blood Jet.’ It’s an angry piece, people treat each other like slop, but the female narrator admits her wrongdoings as well, her naivete. Schutt busted out this murky tune like Coltrane spilling ‘Dear Old Stockholm’ on his eponymous album. She’d didn’t waver at all, the sentences spun, the inflections rose and sank and we were left mesmerized. I started to watch people in the audience. They weren’t moving, they weren’t coughing. The record for the least number of text messages sent during a reading fell. Greg Gerke on The Big Other

the tuesday interview: mark childress

2011-09-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

Thanks to author Lynn Freed I was lucky enough to meet Mark Childress at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley a few years ago and he was everything you'd think he might be if you've ever read his books: funny, gracious and a hell of a storyteller.

From Mark: I know so many writers are superstitious about talking about work in progress that it has become a cliche, but hey I guess I am living that cliche. I find that if I pre-tell the story I’m trying to tell, to my friends and those nice people who care enough to ask, at some point I have already “told” it and the juice goes out of it that you need for the writing of the scenes. Does that make any sense?

I will say that I have fallen in love with characters before and usually they lead me where they want to go. This time is no different. It’s funny - this will be my eighth novel and it hasn’t gotten any easier at all. It is more rewarding, though, because I know whatever obscure little thing I put in there, somewhere there will be a reader who gets it. That is really cool.

I listen to a lot of music when I am reading but not when I am writing. I listen to classical music or sometimes old rhythm and blues in the morning to get my brain cells lined up in order. I like rock, too, and I have all kinds of weird tastes. The Beatles, both Elvises, Bruce, Joni. When I am traveling I go to the art museum like everybody else and try to learn something about the people from the art ... but generally you learn only about the artist. You don’t learn anything general, but everything specific.

There are some books I read over again, as soon as I have read it, because I can’t believe how good it was and I want to take it apart and see what made it tick. Other books, I delay and delay because I don’t want it to end. And then of course there are those that are like the second term of the Bush presidency, an endless dreary slog. I like to read Anna Karenina every couple of years. I like to read most of Dickens again and again. I’ve been on a David Foster Wallace kick since The Pale King came out. I cant imagine a year without reading some Marquez.

I just re-read The Broom of the System, David Wallace’s first book. I had a great time with In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, and The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach. Also a gripping crime novel by Jane Bradley, You Believers.

Every summer I teach writing workshops up at Squaw Valley. This year Annie Lamott and I were talking about books we absolutely inhaled as children. I started talking about a wonderful book called Follow My Leader, by a writer called James B. Garfield. It’s the story of a boy who loses his sight in an accident with a firecracker. He has to learn to deal with being blind, goes off to a special school to learn how to work with a seeing-eye dog. The details of the training were absolutely fascinating to me; I used the glasses we got from the eye doctor with our dilated pupils, and went around pretending I was blind like the hero the book. I read that book about twenty times, I’ll bet.

Afterward, at least two dozen people came up to tell me that was their favorite book too. Many of them had forgotten it until I mentioned it. Apparently it was a Scholastic Book Club perennial choice and a great favorite of kids everywhere. I highly recommend it, although it may seem a bit old-fashioned now. (I was really surprised to discover the hero’s name is Jimmy Carter!)

I’ve never written about a blind person yet, so I don’t think there has been any direct influence of the book. But I always try very hard to plunge the reader into the sensory experience of whatever is happening in the story. And I’m sure it’s because James B. Garfield did that to me, over and over, long ago.

Photo: Joni Mitchell and David Crosby

was, i repeat, highly prized by me

2011-09-12T13:50:00.000-07:00

The slight silken scrape of her knock-knees when she walked quickly was, I repeat, highly prized by me. I thought that if I were a locust such a sound would send me soaring over mountain ranges. From Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow via Karan Mahajan in Canteen

Photo by The Sartorialist

next on the tuesday interview? mark childress

2011-09-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

"You feel anything?"

"Nope."

"Maybe you're supposed to hold it in longer."

It was summer in Indiana, the week before I turned sixteen. All afternoon my friends and I had been on our bikes, following the mosquito truck through the streets, breathing the sweet-smelling clouds of DDT because we'd heard it would get you high. From One Mississippi by Mark Childress

Photo by Colin O'Brien via welcome back oldtimer

Boggsville Boatel

2011-09-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

Ignoring the planes taking off from JFK, the sirens in the background, the rumble of the A train in the distance, the bay seemed idyllic, a wash of muted grays and blues and greens bleeding together like watercolors on a wet page. It was a beautiful way to end the summer - a glimpse into a completely different New York, far from where I grew up and where I now live. Photo and text from What Possessed Me

when this you see remember me

2011-09-06T14:45:00.000-07:00

Untitled (Alice B. Toklas' and Gertrude Stein's Grave) by Felix Gonzalez Torres on view (ending today) at the Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco.

writers nap

2011-09-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

Just as I’m inspired by the past, I find myself drawing comfort from the writers I know. I have the great good fortune to work at the Writers Room, a communal writing space in downtown Manhattan. I write in the silent company of others, in a big, open space much like a newsroom without noise. And it is here that I often draw solace from the writing practices of all kinds of writers. It’s helpful to see that writers nap, take frequent breaks, stare out the window, engage in on-line procrastination. Anne Landsman on second novels via Maud Newton

Photo: Bohemian fashion for Harper’s Bazaar, 1969,

via The Ugly Earring

and lined up like little yellow soldiers

2011-09-02T12:28:00.001-07:00

Doc bought a package of yellow pads and two dozen pencils. He laid them out on his desk, the pencils sharpened to needle points and lined up like little yellow soldiers. At the top of the page he printed: OBSERVATIONS AND SPECULATIONS. His pencil point broke. He took up another and drew lace around the O and the B, made a block letter of the S and put fish hooks on each end. His ankle itched. He rolled down his sock and scratched, and that made his ear itch. "Someone's talking about me," he said and looked at the yellow pad. He wondered whether he had fed the cotton rats. It's easy to forget when you're thinking.

Watching the rats scrabble for the food he gave them Doc remembered that he had not eaten. When he finished a page or two he would fry some eggs. But wouldn't it be better to eat first so that his flow of though would not be interrupted later? For some days he had looked forward to this time of peace, of unbroken thought. These were the answer to his restlessness: peace and the life of the mind. It would be better to eat first. He fried two eggs and ate them, staring at the yellow pad under the hanging light. The light was too bright. It reflected painfully on the paper. Doc finished his eggs, got out a sheet of tracing paper, and aped it to the bottom of the shade below the globe. It took some time to make it net. He sat in front of the yellow pad again and drew lace around all the letters of the title, tore off the page, and threw it away. Five pencil points were broken now. He sharpened them and lined them up with their brothers. Sweet Thursday by John Steinbeck (via crankreport).

Painting: Richard Diebenkorn with Ocean Park No. 123 by Liza Hirst

PS: The Ocean Park Series

the tuesday interview: caroline paul

2011-08-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

Caroline Paul is pretty amazing: there's the writing, including her acclaimed books, Fighting Fire and East Wind, Rain; there's the community she's helped build at SF Grotto; the collaboration with partner Wendy MacNaughton; the passion she has for her family, her friends, and for adventure -- and the generosity that she shows all of us, including writers like me.

From Caroline: I’m reprinting my first book, Fighting Fire. I'm doing it through a micropublisher, because I feel that the traditional publishers can't offer me anything that I can't do myself, and they take way too much of the earnings. I'm interested in new ways of publishing, because I think it's the wave of the future, and what better way to do it than with a book that has already been out there, and has found it's audience?

I do still work with traditional publishers though. I am about to shop what we are calling a children's book for adults, illustrated by my partner Wendy MacNaughton, and written by me. It's a light, short memoir, about an incident with our cat, and how it turned our world upside down, and changed our perspective on who our cat really is. It's an animal book, but it's about the delusions of humans.

I go to lots of movies, often alone. I find that storytelling in cinema is a leaned out version of fiction, so you can really see the bones of a narrative. I'm really fascinated by what works in a narrative, so I like to analyze the movie as it's playing. Why am I interested at this moment? Why am I bored to death right now? It's lucky that mind reading hasn't happened yet, because it would be no fun to go to the movies with me.

I'm reading TC Boyle's The Women. He's such a good writer, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that sometimes he's too good a writer. His clever sentences can interfere with the story. That said, I enjoy them. But sometimes I want to tell him to walk out of the room and not look back, his presence is so obvious.

I was a huge reader as a kid. My twin and I used to come home from school, go to our separate rooms, and read for hours. I read the whole Lord of the Rings series when I was nine. We also read a lot of series by English writers, like Enid Blyton. Many of them were too sophisticated for me. I read a long novel about horses in the Australian outback without understanding what the hell they meant when they said "the bush." "The herd galloped along the bush." "The stallion stood in the bush." "The foal got clumsily up on her new legs and surveyed the bush." I imagined this one scraggly little plant in a big field. Why every horse seemed to be near this bush, was beyond me.

Reading a lot as a kid improved my vocabulary a lot. It also taught me to read very, very fast. Unfortunately, it didn't make me a good writer. I really had to struggle. I used to write long convoluted sentences that I hoped came off as beautiful and poetic. I was like one of those women who applies way too much makeup and perfume and thinks that as a result I'm one hot little number. Now I write very short sentences that I hope gets the idea across in a succinct manner. Then I gussy it up a little, once the thought itself is down. Like many new writers I thought a beautiful sentence was paramount. After wrestling with two (published) books and many many unpublished ones, I know that keeping tension throughout a good storyline is more important.

Writers go through different phases: with your first book, you think every sentence is invaluable. You have so much to say. Your second book, you realize that you don't have a lot to say at all, and you struggle with whether you should really waste people's time and say anything. I think the third book balances out. You go back to realizing that you do have something important to say, but it's just not as much as you once thought.

Photo: Future Firefighter from Caroline Paul

one day's work

2011-08-29T10:03:00.000-07:00

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate. John Steinbeck

Photo via Julien Strangler

tonight

2011-08-28T21:46:00.000-07:00

The Illusionist by Sylvain Chomet

the transformation may not be purposeful

2011-08-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

In George MacDonald's The Princess and Curdie, Curdie is informed that many human beings, by their acts, are slowly turning into beasts; he is given the power to detect the transformation before it is visible, and is assisted by beasts that had been transformed and are working their way back to humanity.

In C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, Eustace Scrubb transforms into a dragon, and the war-monger Rabadash into a donkey. Eustace's transformation is not strictly a punishment - his transformation simply revealing the truth of his human nature. It is reversed after he repents and his moral nature changes. Rabadash is allowed to reverse his transformation, providing he does so in a public place, so that his former followers will know that he had been a donkey. He is warned that, if he ever leaves his capital city again, he will become a donkey permanently, and this prevents him leading further military campaigns.

Also in The Chronicles of Narnia the Dufflepuds are dwarfs who have been transformed into monopods as a punishment. However, it ultimately transpires that they are happier with their new form.

In the novel I, Coriander by Sally Gardner, Prince Tycho is transformed into a fox after refusing to marry Undwin, Queen Rosmore's daughter.

Some giants abducted humans to reduce them to slavery. In the famous Irish legend of Prince Diarmuid, the giant of the forest of Black Beech was holding captive three women. For a given to maintain its appearance, but the other two, turned for fun in a dog and a horse.

In The Marmot Queen by Italo Calvino, a Spanish queen is turned into a rodent by the Morgan le Fay.

In a Turin Italian tale by Guido Cozzano: The Mare of the Necromancer, the Princess of Corelandia was turned into a horse by the baron necromancer for refusing to marry him. Only love and intelligence of a nice guy named Candido save the princess from the spell.

The Neapolitan tale written by Giambattista Basile: The Deer in The Wood describes the transformation of Princess Desiderata into a doe. Envy and jealousy of a fairy who saw his unrequited love, because of the beauty of the noble lady, she decided to take revenge on changing it into a deer. Here, too, will always be the prince to save his beloved princess from the evil spell.

From shapeshifting

Photo: The Sartorialist

vacation

2011-08-19T21:22:00.000-07:00

Headed to Big Sur and packing: The Boys of my Youth, Jo Ann Beard; Fighting Fire, Caroline Paul; The Kid Table, Andrea Seigel; What it Is, Lynda Barry; Imagining Adoption, Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. Marianne Novy; The Night Sky, Ann Lauterbach; and Just in Case, Meg Rosoff.

And what's next for the The Tuesday Interview? Caroline Paul.

Photo: Blondie in a Texas Tuxedo in honor of me and the UE

give me all the parts of love

2011-08-19T09:40:00.000-07:00

If I am honest I will admit that I have always wanted to avoid love. Yes, give me romance, give me sex, give me the fights, give me all the parts of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever. Jeannette Winterson, The World and Other Places via welcome back, oldtimer

Photo: Elliott Erwitt, Valencia, Spain, 1952 via even*cleveland

the tuesday interview: naomi williams

2011-08-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

My friend Naomi Williams writes stories that you can get lost in. Stories about men and women on the edge of continents. On the edge of storms. She writes the kind of stories that you look up and realize that it's grown dark outside and you've forgotten to feed the dog and in a certain way you've forgotten the 21st century.

RQD: What are you working on? What's interesting to you about these characters?
NW: For several years now I've been working on a collection of linked short stories about an 18th-century voyage of exploration. The expedition was supposed to circumnavigate the world and discover all kinds of wonderful things for France, but ended up shipwrecked in the Solomon Islands & never came home. I love disaster stories.

The story I'm working on right now is set in Monterey, California, where these explorers stopped for 10 days in 1786. One character is the wife of the then-governor of California. The year before she met the Frenchmen, she'd created a huge stir by suing her husband for divorce and publicly accusing him of infidelity with an Indian girl who worked in their home. Sound familiar? This is part of what I love about this project: the constant reminder that plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

RQD: What other artwork or artists influence you?

NW: Does cartography count as a visual art? This project was inspired by an old map that my husband gave me years ago. I love the way map-making tries to make sense of the world by inscribing it on paper, but of course there's no "true" map of anything -- it's an act of interpretation, just like writing historical fiction. Or fiction of any kind. Or any writing at all.

RQD: What book or story or poem do you return to over and over?

NW: As for a piece of writing I return to, I'm going to be terribly unoriginal and disappointing and admit that the authors whose work I've reread the most are Jane Austen and Tolkien. I don't know that either has directly influenced my writing, but when I just need a fix of wonderful, that's where I go.

RQD: What are you reading now?

NW: I've been reading through Shakespeare's sonnets, two every night, like aspirin, before I go to bed. Then in the morning I always read some contemporary poetry over my first cup of tea; right now it's Terrance Hayes' Lighthead. I'm also working my way through Sarah Bakewell's wonderful How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. As for fiction, I managed to score an advance copy of Sabina Murray's Tales of the New World, a collection of short stories that are just up my alley: it's all historical stuff about intrepid explorers and the like. Lots of fun.

RQD: What were you reading as a kid?
NW: I had a very odd, anachronistic, and contradictory childhood. I was raised on the King James Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, but my parents' house was filled with old books of all sorts, and there was no censorship of what I read. So while I read "proper" books like the Narnia Chronicles and Little Women, I also had access to Stendhal's The Red and the Black, which I first read when I was 12, and the complete short stories of Guy de Maupassant. Quite an education available on those bookshelves. (Of course the Bible itself had more graphic sex and violence than anything I could find in the family library.) The steeping in old classics certainly affected my writing (and probably explains everything I've said above): I'm a 21st-century writer who's more comfortable writing -- and reading -- about the distant past.

Map: Jean Francois Galaup de La Perouse:

Plan De La Baie De Monterey Situee Dans La Californie Septentrionale

intuition's links

2011-08-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

...perhaps just a desire to experience things as an endless set of beginnings, with the implied promise and permission; a sequence of dawns, of first kisses, a constellation without the picture-making lines drawn. From The Night Sky by Ann Lauterbach

Photo: Black and Cream Tuxedo Jacket by Emerson Made

a novel may begin

2011-08-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

A novel may begin in your mind as an evocative image, a bit of conversation, a piece of music, an incident you’ve read about in someone’s life, a presiding anger, but in any case as something that proposes a meaningful world. And so the act of writing is in the nature of an exploration. You write to find out what you’re writing. And as you work, the sentences become generative, the book foretold in that image, that fragment of conversation, begins to emerge and itself participates in its composition, telling you what it is and how it must be realized. E.L. Doctorow via BIG OTHER

Photo: JonVon Pamer Notebook

they get scared of losing

2011-08-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

“When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.” John Green, Looking for Alaska via Flux

Photo: Urban Outfitters Modern Lovers contest

print makers picnic

2011-08-11T09:45:00.001-07:00

I want to go to this.

the tuesday interview: christine schutt

2011-08-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Lucy Corin, a bunch of us had a chance to hear Christine Schutt read at UC Davis. Her stories, her paragraphs, start with a kind of lurching action, everything embedded in the language, and when I listen to her talk about writing, I think she must write them like we read them. In dense little chunks.

She graciously answered my questions from the Sewanee Writers' Conference where's she's been teaching for the past two weeks.

From Christine Schutt: I am working on a short story that is presently entitled, "Pure Hollywood," a story inspired by a remark I overheard this past spring from a screenwriting friend of my son's. He said, "Don't fly in the face of the hand that feeds you." Out of this has come a brother, named Stetson, after the hat, and his sister, Mimi, both older children of a very rich and successful father-actor, Jim Deminthe. What interested me was exploring their relationship to each other, their (many-times married) father, and Mimi's failed relationship to a Bob Wienstein (sp?) kind of figure. I was also interested in writing about random violence and murder. In truth, I have no idea beyond these particulars as to where it is I am going: every morning I stare dumbly at the screen. The quotation that put the story in motion and was in the story's first paragraph is no longer there.

A third novel, recently turned in and called PROSPEROUS FRIENDS, was inspired by Fairfield Porter's paintings and his biography, especially the time he spent on Spruce Island in Maine. Other Maine artists, David Dewey and Jeffrey Becton (a photographer), were on my mind when I decided to write this novel that had as its working title HOUSES WITH NAMES. All three of the artists mentioned above have moving paintings (in Becton's case, photographs) of houses.

Every summer I read Robert Lowell's last book of poems, DAY BY DAY, and Louise Gluck's AVERNO. The Lowell adoration is over forty years old and the summer ritual of reading DAY BY DAY is almost as old. Every summer I also listen to his last reading given at the 92nd St. Y and recorded in January of 1977.

At the moment, I am teaching at the Sewanee Writers' Conference and reading student manuscripts, but I am reading B.H. Fairchild's work, a poet I have yet to meet but who is teaching here as well. The poem of his I have carried with me from home is "Rave On." Kevin Wilson, who is also here at Sewanee, has a novel about to be released, THE FAMILY FANG (I think that's the title) and it's my next intended read. By the way, Lucy Corin and I met here in 2006; we taught with Barry Hannah (a god in my book and hers).

I recently wrote on a Donald Hall poetry anthology for The Literate, an on-line publication, edited by Dawn Raffel and sponsored by The Center for Fiction in New York City. This anthology of poems was one of the first and most influential books I encountered at the age of 14; otherwise, I was mad for Charles Dickens then, especially HARD TIMES. Many of the poems in the Hall anthology--poems by James Dickey, James Wright, Robert Creeley, Adrienne Rich--are as essential to me today as they were when first I encountered them. Only last night was I talking with Wyatt Prunty, a very fine poet who runs the Sewanee Conference, about James Dickey. We were in agreement on the greatness of some of his earlier poems. "The Sheep-Child," for instance, which is in this same anthology.

Painting: Farmhouse, Great Spruce Head Island, 1954, Fairfield Porter

who told me i was too sensitive

2011-08-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

For a period of 5 years between 1978 to 1982 photography was a way to prove to myself that I was still alive. Unable to unable to make sense of the “real world” and “real people” who told me that I was too sensitive, too quiet, too thoughtful, too strange, I found that my world changed when I picked up the camera. Through the viewfinder a new and better world opened up and, best of all, it acted as a shield. I did not have to get too close when I held the camera. In 1979-82 I used to visit the Clockhouse Community Centre in Woolwich Dockyard, London SE18 and these are a few of the sights I saw. George Plemper via Miss Moss

Photo: Woolwich Dockyard, London Portrait #6 1981

by George Plemper

stitches

2011-08-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

Stitches by David Small

Photo from the Kalamazoo Gazette

the tuesday interview: meg rosoff

2011-08-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

Just ask me who my favorite writers are and I'll tell you that I can't get enough of Meg Rosoff. Then I'll take you to my bookshelf and depending who you are, I'll pull out a copy of What I Was or How I Live Now and give it to you. The next day a weird anxiety will overtake me and I'll have to run to the bookstore and buy another copy, because I want her books around in case I want to reread them.

PLUS: there's a new one, There is No Dog, that should be available any day now.

Royal Quiet Deluxe: What are you working on?

Meg Rosoff: My newest book, There Is No Dog is published in about 2 weeks [excerpt], and I've just finished a sketchy first draft of my next book, which doesn't have much of a name yet. It's temporarily called See You Soon and, not wanting any genres to gather moss, I've switched to a detective story this time. Only of course it's not a detective story, but my usual psychologically investigative story of adolescence. In this case it's an 11 year old girl and her father who go off to search for her uncle, who has disappeared. For reasons the author wasn't clear about until she got to the end! I like a good surprise.....

RQD: What other artists are you thinking about in relation to your writing?

MR: I've been thinking about Edward Albee's The Goat quite a lot recently because the production with Jonathan Pryce that I saw about six years ago blew me away and has been lurking around in my head quite a lot. It's all about the wrong sort of love, which is, of course, the interesting sort..... I've also been thinking about a wonderful play called Future Me by Stephen Brown, also about the wrong sort of love (paedophilia). So I guess a theme is kind of emerging here. One I might have started with How I Live Now (cousins).

RQD: What book or story or poem do you return to over and over?

MR: That might have to be Yeats or Dylan Thomas....my favourite might be Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas (Time held me green and dying/Though I sang in my chains like the sea.)

or Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats.

(Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.)

What are you reading now?

MR: I've just finished an absolutely wonderful book sent to me by a blogger/writer friend in LA called In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard. I don't think it's been published in the UK yet but I thought it was the best thing I've read in ages -- and the perfect example of a book about adolescence that isn't a book for kids.

RQD: What were you reading as a kid?

MR: I read everything I could get my hands on as a kid. I loved the classics like The Secret Garden and The LIttle Princess, but I mixed them up with Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful A Wrinkle in Time, anything by Ian Fleming, Thor Heyerdahl's fantastic Kon Tiki which I read hundreds of times, over and over, and of course any horse book I could get my hands on. I used to haunt the local library, waiting for the new books to come in. I loved being the first person to take out a book.

Photo by Geraint Lewis from The Goat, or Who is Sylvia by Edward Albee

with Jonathan Pryce and Eddie Redmayne

the grown ups also knew

2011-07-30T21:07:00.000-07:00

They all knew it was ridiculous to expect this one poor little candy bar to have a magic ticket inside it, and they were trying as gently and as kindly as they could to prepare Charlie for the disappointment. But there was one other thing that the grown ups also knew, and it was this: that however small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance was there.

The chance had to be there.

This particular candy bar had as much chance as any other to have the Golden Ticket.

And that was why all the grandparents and parents in the room were actually as tense and excited as Charlie was, although they were pretending to be very calm.

From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

Blackpool Rock by Joel Penkman

we're supposed to be in charge here

2011-07-30T10:45:00.000-07:00

We can't believe the house is on fire. It's so embarrassing first of all, and so dangerous second of all. Also, we're supposed to be in charge here, so there's a sense of somebody not doing her job. From In Zanesville, by Jo Ann Beard

Photo by Olivia Bee

(Olivia Bee also shot the cover of In Zanesville)

17 reasons why

2011-07-28T15:19:00.001-07:00

A few reasons why it's good to leave the house

Coffee with Scott Simmon and a preview of National Film Preservation Foundation's upcoming Treasures 5: The West 1898 - 1938
Vintage t-shirts at After Life
Vegetable tacos and an Anchor Steam at Pancho Villa with my copy of In Zainesville
Young muralists working in Clarion Alley
and Margaret Killgallen at Ratio 3

the tuesday interview: ben jahn

2011-07-26T08:45:00.000-07:00

Ben Jahn is a kick ass writer. I'm not sure what else to say. You've got to read his stories. It's like each has its own private language.

From Ben:

I’m working on a novel about a man who lives near a large public rock. He installs fake grass for a living, so it’s about that, and it’s about the people who come to the rock, and, lately, it’s about doll shopping (the guy has young children). What do I like about these characters? I like that there’s still some language left in them. I like that the main character uses his imagination—uses it publicly, I mean. He trusts it, allows it to affect change in his life. I think a lot of people go around making up dialogue, imagining fight scenes, talking out little scenarios while walking the dog; I think a lot of people do this, and I think that it actually effects how they interact with others—if I’m wrong about this, then I’ll just call it semi-autobiographical and sit back and wait for the psychotic break.

Art that’s influenced me. Yeah, I like to see what people are up to. “Influence” is a hard one for me, since real influence probably happens below the level of consciousness. But I’ve recently enjoyed Will Rogan’s pictures. He has a photo of a minivan parked beneath a concrete staircase so that it fits just right (the angle of the stairs is the angle of the windshield—at least this is true in my memory). Also, Kelly Reichardt. Her film Old Joy. I went to a “screening” where Reichardt did a Q &A afterward. There’s a scene in the film at a hot spring in the woods where these two old friends are drinking beer and soaking and enjoying the water sounds. After the movie Reichardt said all those water sounds were dubbed in later—recorded at her friend’s house in New Jersey (I think she said they poured water from buckets off his roof into his pool). It is now my favorite scene of all time, but only because I know where the water sounds came from.

I return to Ray Carver’s Fires. I have an old Capra Press paperback version with a close-up picture of flames on the cover, and a slightly out-of-focus author photo on the back. Fires has a little poetry, some personal/craft essays, and a few short stories (“The Pheasant” among them, the best of the roadkill realism subgenre). The book takes its title from an essay on influence, and so, in a neat (but not too neat) way, the stories and poems become evidence. It’s the only book you can’t borrow.

There are other books that, when I was reading them the first time, I thought: I will read this every three years until I die. But, ten years later I haven’t made it past page 6 in most of those books. There are hundreds of individual short stories that I re-read, and some of these are in books that I feel very strongly about but can’t see taking up again because big-N Nostalgia lurks in the margin notes.

Now I’m reading Speedboat, by Renata Adler; Sprawl, by Danielle Dutton; and Florida, by Christine Schutt. I want to like the Adler book, I really like the Dutton, and the Schutt is Schutty (which means “good-in-small-doses” in my house).

Photo: Pocket by Will Rogan