Archive | Cat Lady Matters

Kitchen Witch (Stay-at-Home Automom)

I could pretend what’s pictured here is a kitchen sink salad but it’s more of a garbage pail salad. Meaning I have all kinds of motley ingredients in my fridge and I work at home and hate to throw out food. So this contains chopped blue cheese and pickles and capacollo and kale and asparagus and even a bit of chive and parsley and o shit mint. it’s fine—actually it’s pretty good, salty and fresh and filling and a little oooomami—but i’d never inflict it on anyone else.

Instead I made it after rising at 5 am to revise yesterday’s book pages and then write the film lecture I’m delivering later today out on Long Island. Before editing said lecture, I worked out in the gym recently installed in our basement while doing laundry in our building’s new washer and dryer. (Anything to seduce Williamsburg tenants during 15 months of a modified L Train.) I felt so glamorous doing all this in my own building, on my own time. Herein lies the strange beauty of living and working alone–a spiky, highly singular economy within which I feel most myself. I’m even more grateful for it lately because your support showed me how not-alone I really am. (PS I’m back in book, finally.)

Caturday Night: Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Grace and I are rewatching the brilliant Can You Ever Forgive Me? on this Caturday night and once again are appalled it didn’t score a best picture or best director Oscar nom. Its nostalgia for 90s NYC–which was all about nostalgia for midcentury Manhattan and paying the cultural piper– is pitch-perfect, as is Melissa McCarthy as Israel, reminding us what a terrific actress she can be when her husband doesn’t have his meat hooks in her projects. Continue Reading →

The Spark of Darkness

Dad and I at Ellis Island Museum, c. 1994

My father and I never talk. This is not an exaggeration. I have not heard his speaking voice in almost a decade. Why this is so is not the stuff of blogs– it’s the stuff of the book–but suffice it to say I always feel my father in the very early morning. He is the only person I know who rises as early as I do though we’ve never discussed that pleasure and perhaps never will. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy