Archives for October 22, 2007

We’re off to a murky gray morning here in the mountains. Last night my book club met, and we had a special guest, Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World. Katherine was inveigled to join us for the evening by one of our members who teaches with her at UNCA. As Tingle Alley readers will already know, my book club’s been meeting about eight years and in that time we’ve grown a little loose and informal in our approach: Currently there’s seven of us, and we meet at each other’s houses every month or so to drink, eat, gossip, and sometimes (but not always) discuss the assigned novel. We’ve never once assayed the questions for reading groups provided by publishers at the end of books; and we sometimes skip reading a book altogether in favor of an article or short story, and there is nothing satiric you can say about any of this that we haven’t already noted.
With Katherine as our guest, however, we mustered a slightly more on-point discussion, while also eating stew, crusty bread and plum crisp, and putting away serious amounts of red wine. I need to get some work done this morning, but wanted to point your attention to an excellent interview with Katherine at The Mumpsimus. She’ll be reading at Malaprop’s on Saturday, November 3rd — and if you live in Asheville, you should attend.

I’m sitting in a departure lounge at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, about which the best can be said is that if there is a hell, it will look much like this place, only somewhat nicer. Fortunately, my trusty MacBook makes it possible for me to work pretty much anywhere, so I’m clicking away industriously, surfing the Web and catching up with my e-mail.
I have much to tell about the past couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to telling it, but I’ll have to do so in dribs and drabs, rather than in the nice tight chronological narrative I’d originally planned to post. The truth is that for the moment, I simply don’t have any spare time. I’m so busy that I had to write two pieces in my Chicago hotel room yesterday, one of which has already been posted, and I spent this morning’s hour-long cab ride to O’Hare skimming today’s Journal and going over a medium-sized pile of accumulated snail mail.
Later in the week I’ll be telling you about:
• My honeymoon visit to Fallingwater.
• The opening night of William Bailey’s new show at Betty Cuningham Gallery.
• Anthony Minghella’s Metropolitan Opera production of Madama Butterfly, which I finally got around to seeing last Friday.
• A new addition to the Teachout Museum.
• My latest videoblog, which will be posted in the next day or two.
• The Letter, which is coming along very nicely.
All this and more…but now I have to catch a plane!

I’m in Chicago–but not for long. I’ll be returning to New York this afternoon, and once I make it back to my office, presumably in one piece, I’ll check in with you at greater length.
Later.

“Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O’Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.”
Russell Baker, introduction to The Norton Book of Light Verse