Everything Frozen

1. I keep changing my mind, but I think this might be my new favorite weather: 25 degrees, snow everywhere like sifted flour, sun burning off the icy puddles. Because it's warm enough to stand outside long enough so that I can give my car a mohawk:



2. I was sort of shocked to find out that Wells Towers's Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned just came out as a full collection recently. I remember reading the title story several years ago, so I'd just assumed the whole book had been published back then. But I guess sometimes that's the life of a short fiction writer--when your first collection hits the shelves, almost every story has already been published in journals and you're probably sick to death of half of them. And now everyone's interested and wants to talk about them.

So I read the book and it's pretty great. Different from what I had remembered. Lots of men making bad decisions and building porch decks with their bare hands. Callouses, tequila, gripping loneliness. Good stuff. He's not bad to look at, either:



3. The downside to the snow is, everyone's car is stuck. Outside my window I can hear wheels squealing against the piles of snow. It sounds like, when you step on a cat's tail. Or more like, if you take a cat and swing it around by the tail. And I can hear a lady hollering helpful instructions to the driver ("I think you should, like, step on the gas? And maybe turn the wheel? The other way?")

The best part about Minneapolis is someone always seems to be walking down the street right when you need a push. And since it's Minnesota, it's usually a big fat person who is jolly and more than willing to heave his shoulder against the back of your car as the tires spin and kick up snow and ice all around him.

Synchronicity + Soup

A couple more moments of synchronicity in this strange week:

1. Drinking a Tsingtao, thinking about Tsingtao, as I read Borges; came across a character who is a "former professor of English at the Hochschule at Tsingtao..."

2. Saw Wallace Shawn in a clip of Vegas Vacation on a bar television, had rousing isn't this guy great? conversation with friends; read Deborah Eisenberg's "All Around Atlantis" and learned from Wikipedia that Wallace Shawn is her real-life boyfriend.

3. There was another one involving Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet, but the details slip my mind.

(Etc., etc. Sounds like trivia but when it happens within a space of a day and my whole life is essentially these conversations and those books, I can't help but find a calm strangeness in all of it.)

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And I made a really good winter soup. Here's my recipe:

1. Peel and dice about 4-5 potatoes while listening to "The Moth" podcast. Wonder: are podcasts italicized or housed within the safety of quotation marks? Chop up about 1/3 cup of onion (like half of a half of an onion, sort of). Put those things in a pot with about 4 cups of water and boil.

2. In a separate saucepan, melt 5 TBS of butter. Or TBLSPS (which is the right acronym?) Stir in an equal amount of flour and you get this fluffy/sticky mixture that reminds you of cotton candy after it sort of gets gooey in your mouth. Then start stirring in some milk. Don't stop stirring! Stir and stir and stir and listen to the screp screp screp sound of the fork on the bottom of the pan, which you are probably scratching up and ruining because you don't have a wisk. Or whisk.

3. On second thought, add some chicken stock or boullion to the potato pot. Or beef or whatever tasty animal you like best in your soup. And vegetables! I only had broccoli, but peas and carrots are really good in potato soup, too.

4. When the cotton-candy pan turns the consistency of hot yogurt, pour it into the potato pot (oh, your potatoes should be pretty soft by now, because it's been like 10 minutes or so).

5. Salt and pepper that bad boy however you like.

6. Dump a fistful of leftover Shredded Mexican Cheese into the pot. Since there's only a little bit left in the bag, and it's not enough for another Taco Night, just dump the rest in there, too.

7. Stir, stir, stir. And cover and simmer for a bit, like maybe 10 minutes or so.

8. Share with someone you love and who will contribute Girl Scout cookies and beer to the meal.
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Precious

OH. And I found the BEST movie theatre in Minneapolis and possibly the whole world.

PROS
1. they serve BEER
2. the seats are LEATHER COUCHES
3. you can have food DELIVERED DURING THE MOVIE
4. tickets are only FIVE DOLLARS

CONS
1. in order to enjoy the four perks above you have to watch Precious, which involves:
     a) poverty
     b) incest
     c) AIDS
     d) Down's Syndrome
     e) gratuitous vomiting
     f) I forget if I said rape already.



But Mo'Nique was stellar, and there are good cameos by the author of the novel, Lenny Kravitz, and Robert DeNiro's wife. Oh, and Mariah Carey with a little Italian 'stache.

Literature/Life

Very strange coincidences happening lately. Let me show you them:

WTF #1. Reading Borges in the coffee shop. Specifically reading "Death and the Compass," which is about a series of murders which may or may not spell out the Hebrew name of God. Long-haired boy with paisley pants at next table loudly exclaims, "Tetragrammaton!" (this being the name of the God of Israel in the Hebrew bible, a name which I have circled in pencil on page 78 of the Borges book).



WTF #2. After the hard drive/ipod crash, concerns developed regarding further catastrophic events which may lie or lay in wait. Read Henry James' "The Beast in the Jungle:" story is exactly about this nervousness, though it does not involve Apple computers because it was written in 1903.

WTF #3. Obtained xeroxed copy of a Toby Wolff story. Girlfriend says out of the blue, "Hey, have you ever read 'Bullet in the Brain?'" I say OMG I HAVE PDF RIGHT HERE.



I am stitching up a new theory. One that I think Borges would have liked. This theory involves a psychic bridge between literature and the material world. Like a metaphysical hallway maybe, where carts of stuff from your consciousness and from the characters' memories are pushed up and down and transferred from one state of existence to another?

Crazy/not crazy?



In normal news: 4 more beers are needed on this leg of the World Beer Tour before I can get my I <3 Beer tee-shirt, one more challenge to be won before another city is unlocked on Skate It, two more minutes of sunshine every single day, I made potato soup and poured almost a whole package of shredded Mexican cheese in it, and it's an unseasonably warm 35 degrees.

My Destiny, Ur Destiny

Just three weeks and three days into the new year, and already I am breaking my 2010 promise of blogging lots more, all the time, often, often.

I re-read a James Baldwin story today ("Sonny's Blues") and remembered how much I liked this passage:

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason.

I guess like the narrator, I'm not much of a music person either, but the whole idea of this "more terrible" evocation rising from a void reminded me a lot of sitting and trying to write. And like the feeling of intense isolation that comes from it--and yet it's a sense of connected isolation, if that makes sense? Like everybody else is isolated, too, and that's perfectly fine?

Speaking of more terrible, Prince wrote a new song for the Minnesota Vikings, who are playing the Saints today in what I hear from my male and lesbian friends is going to be a very exciting game. He woke up in a cloud of inspiring isolation and had to text himself the lyrics fast before they slipped his mind:

all of the odds r in r favor
no prediction 2 bold
we r the truth if the truth can b told
long reign the purple and gold

And then I imagine Prince lying back down on his purple satin sheets, pressing the heels of his palm onto his closed eyes. Feeling the weight of the Muse stretch herself across his holy and concave chest. This man, the artist: a chicken plucked of his feathers.

Because as the narrator in "Sonny's Blues" goes on to say:

I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own...for, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must always be heard.

And to that, Prince would sit up and hit reply:

r spirits may b tired
r bodies may b worn
but since this day is r destiny
r history--that's y we must b
4ever strong...