After a few days of jam-packing information into my skull, I was happy to veg in front of the 130 incher and see LOST. Good to have the familiar faces back. I wasn’t wowed, but I wasn’t disappointed, but I decided to stay away from web pages that promise clues and insider info. I am content to just things play out.
So, New York.
Let’s take it slow.

This is Charles Baxter.

He wrote some AMAZING books, like my fav, THE FEAST OF LOVE. I’ll open to a random page:

“The Bat was shorter than Oscar, more kind of pint-sized, very ratty and low-rent with long Brylcreem greaseball hair swept back in hoodlum waves, and this brown mole just to the right of his nose. he looked like one of those smelly little cigaretted guys who ran the Tilt-a-Whirl at a seedy backwoods carnival, just waiting for someone to barf. That’d give him a tickle. They had shaved the warm and fuzzy off this guy a long time ago.”

See why I tracked him down? I’m reading his essays on writing today, then whipping myself with birch branches.

Here we have the glorious Amy Hempel. Who I had to convince to stay for the picture, after the signing, and then the guy couldn’t work the camera-again- and so I just held it at arm’s length and photographed my eyebrows.
Here’s a piece of something from THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL, taken from a story called, Murder.
” Jean recalled the time she had asked the bartended about Sister Marianne, if he had ever considered the M word, and the bartender had said back, “Murder?”
“Imagine that it’s you,” Jean said to me. “Imagine it’s you that is getting married today.”
I do.
I imagine myself waking in some Jim’s bed.
His telephone rings. I imagine it is a woman calling, and because I am the wife, I answer in the voice that says, I’ve had it ten times today and I live here.
This is what marriage means to me. “

Yeah. She’s that good. Chuck Palahniuk learned minimalism from her, I learned to forget boundaries.

This is her student, Daniel Grandbois. he’s also a musician and very nice guy.Buy his book when it comes out in May.More writers tomorrow, and NYC stuff, like cabbies and food and friends and literary parties and women who wear Frankenstein shoes to their grandmother’s funeral.