So explain this to me—a dear friend of mine just wrote to announce he started smoking. He's forty-something. Who starts smoking at forty-something?? MK, if you're reading this—I plan to knock you about the ears.

That aside. I'm listening to my latest mix, and am practically rocking with glee at the Magical Fields' line "So you quote love unquote me." Hee hee! And I keep listening to The Weepies' "World Spins Madly On." So delicious. Now playing: Elvis Costello's "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror," and laughing at the time my ex-husband and two friends and I were on a road trip on a wickedly hot late-summer California day, and got into a very serious conversation about who were the three most important rock artists who ever lived. The Trinity of Rock. I believe we all agreed on Buddy Holly, tho one of us argued for Elvis (Presley). And due to our own biases, I think we said Tom Waits. But we got in a wild fight over the third, and one of the candidates was Elvis Costello. Who, incidentally, a minneapolis acquaintance of mine used to date. Which, by the theory of six degrees of separation, means I know Elvis C. Ha!

Grammar question regarding the above, posed by the fabulous Jaime: When making a name that ends with 's' posessive (viz. Fields or Weepies), do you just put the apostrophe at the end of the word (Fields') or do you add an additional 's' (Weepies's)? I am stumped.

And I just realized that's a punctuation question. Not grammar. Unless—here's another quandry—are they the same thing?

I really should know these things. Really, I should. It is a sad state of affairs that I do not.

It's 4:01 a.m. and I'm a scatterbrain. Too much to think about, and I'm just adjusting to the new house. Finally FINALLY finished unpacking yesterday, and I love it here. My office is painted a fine shade of blue, and I have new purple sheets. I confess that as I was unpacking box #477 of books (ok, slight exagg.—it was about box 16) I was in such a state of despair of ever finishing that I was considering lying face down on the living room floor for approximately forever. I did not. Instead, I began stuffing the remaining 289 boxes onto the shelves willy-nilly at random, which is unheard of. Ordinarily when I move I organize my books alphabetically and by genre. No this is not compulsive; how else can I find a book when I need it? And now indeed I will not be able to find a book. I've got religious philosophy tangled up with critical theory and modern history crushed in with Russian novels and two really awful books of love poetry bought for obscure reasons some years ago stuffed in between two books on Gertrude Stein. Not to mention the entire mess of the Surrealism section. Which, who knows, I may need to reference this very afternoon. The only disaster in the new place so far has involved (what else?) a truly mysterious coffee maker, with which I managed to flood half the kitchen in grounds and coffee at about 3 a.m. on Friday. I bought a new one. It is very simple: you push 'on.'

I am still recovering from the bizarre cruise I went on some weeks ago. As strange as it was, complete with teal carpet and green chandeliers and a chinging casino and duty free fake jewels, I liked my mornings sitting on the balcony watching the ocean glide by under a brilliant white moon. I wouldn't mind being on a boat right about now. A schooner, say. With sails all snapping and billiowing in the wind. Sounds peaceful, no?

I am reading a book you must all immediately read: a short story collection by Nam Le called The Boat. It's absolutely spectacular. Is anyone out there a short story writer? I am not. I've written only a few in my life, and they aren't worth beans. I swear it's the hardest form there is. The ability to bring a story down to its very essence, to its crystalline center, is one I don't have. That's the problem with novelists—we can't shut the hell up. If you're looking for other short story writers, go to Alice Munro and Mary Gaitskill. On the poetry front, while unpacking yesterday I re-discovered Margueritte Duras, whose book on writing I've mentioned before. This book, No More (C'est Tout) is almost not poetry; it's like a kind of diary, but the entries are so elliptical that they (like the best short stories) are broken down to their very center, with no flotsam or jetsam crowding around. And yet you know exactly what Duras is talking about. The book is a love story in just a few lines, written to an unseen subject off the page. But then she writes: "Come love me./ Come./ Come onto this blank sheet of paper/ With me."

You know, you could spend an academic lifetime writing about 'subject' and 'object' of poetry, the 'presence' of the subject or object or speaker or writer or author on the theoretical 'page,' and you still wouldn't get a couple of lines like that.

It's suddenly fall here in Mpls. Happened almost overnight. It was ninety last week; this week I'm wearing sweaters and shivering when I walk down the street to my cafe. The trees are turning faster than you can imagine, and shedding their leaves like they're shaking out their hair. It's lovely. I wish fall lasted half the year. Instead, winter does. Winter's peeking around the corner, and much as I love the snow and the shivering cold (it's bracing) and the red morning sky, I'm still wondering what on earth got into me that I settled here in the tundra. What kind of nonsense is that?

Ok. Last note—Trockman promises me he'll take the lock off the new photos so they aren't password protected as soon as the article for which they were taken comes out. Which should be soon. Quit yer fussing.

More soon...

Peace,
M