 you let one day go by ...
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And then suddenly it's the day before Thanksgiving! My admiration for Stephen Elliott's daily Rumpus e-mails increases every day that for some reason I slack off or feel I have other "priorities" or am not sufficiently amused by my own prose to send you a letter and next thing you know ...
My mother used to ask, "Where does the time go?" and I would imagine all the places it could go. A hole in the ground in the back yard. Up the river and out into the Gulf. Into the sky. Into my sandwich. In my belly. Into the sun? And I would suggest some of the possible places that time might go and she would say I had an imagination. For that I am grateful. I am grateful my parents appreciated this kid with an imagination. Yet also a bit dreamy and not always on top of things and could tend to brood and procrastinate and in fact procrastinated his way almost completely out of high school, before discovering the joys of solitary scholarship up in the scholar's stacks with William Blake illuminated manuscripts ...
(Oddly enough, I note that the Stephen Elliott e-mail letter -- subscribe by e-mailing the-daily-rumpus+subscribe@googlegroups.com -- also took a few days off, for some of the same, understandable reasons. You write other things ... and then you're supposed to write this too? But you do. You gripe but you do it.)
And back on earth. "Just do it" has the weight of infallible principle.
Plus stuff lumps up. (wow. 4 short u's, 4 stresses. What rhyme/meter is that? Would the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics know? Or should we ask the dog? Tune in next week when Lassie barks an anapest.)
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Quickly, here's what's up.
(Calendar)
Friday ongoing free noon writing practice at Cafe la Boheme. Just come at 11:45. We'll explain.
Saturday 11/27 regular writing workshop 3-6 p.m. Participants please note: This Saturday is not the last one in the series. I am extending this series for one more week, so the last one will actually be Saturday, Dec. 4, 3-6 p.m. We will have a nice potluck and party on Sat., Dec. 4 after the workshop. So put that on your calendar. And then the workshops are going to take a winter break and come back Sat., Jan. 8.
Sunday 11/28 Portuguese Artists Colony reading at Five Points Arthouse, 5 p.m. I will be doing the "live writing" thing, where we get a prompt and sit at a table and write and read it before an audience. Yeah. And then you vote. Yeah. Should be fun.
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That Special Time of Year holiday column collection with exclusive "Cary's Crappiest Christmas Ever" essay about being booted out of the hospital on Xmas Day 2009 arrived from the printer Monday and is ready for you now. What a year. All of a sudden it was October and we wanted to put out a holiday book so we gathered 22 of my best holiday columns and I wrote the essay about my Christmas Day return from surgery in 2009 and so we'll sell it out of the house for $11 plus $6 shipping. Or buy it from me when you see me.
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how do i feel about the holiday book?
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I like it. It's a nice book. I read the first column at the Why are There Words reading last week and it read well. The first column is like, Why you should go visit your family anyway, basically. There are 22 columns in it plus my essay on being booted out of the hospital on Xmas day 2009, for $11 plus shipping. Let us know if you want to buy a few. We'll figure out the shipping. And Norma's been working to convert it into epub and mobi formats for the Kindle (buy the Kindle e-book here) and the iPad/iPhone (still wrestling with that one). In the e-book conversion process, there are glitches. It takes patience. And of course when dealing with new software there is that sense of pointlessness and waste, like you spend all day trying to get this thing to work and the day feels wasted. Yet I feel we are doing the right thing by learning to put ebooks out. So we'll have the e-book for the iPhone ready soon.
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