Holiday Roundup - Bargain Basement books I've written

This one is hot off the press--in stores now. The cover was designed by the ever-elusive (i.e., always running off to Pittsburgh) Casey Hallas. If you happen to see it somewhere with a hideous and outdated cover, that is the UK version.*

"Do you know the original names of your favorite bands? The lyrics to your favorite songs? The singer-songwriters who wrote the songs that became famous only when metal bands covered them? The cover art to the world’s best-selling-albums? Do you know enough to keep up entertaining cocktail party chatter or could you go one-for-one with true music connoisseurs? In the trivia questions presented here, ranging from the years before rock ’n’ roll through every decade to the present including a section for true music geeks (the ones who can, for example, read actual music), you’ll find the stories behind the bands, the real people behind the magazine covers, the breakthrough hits, the lives lived to excess, the one-hit wonders, the secret muses, the bizarre cover versions, the record-breakers, the weirdest misheard lyrics, before-they-were-famous factoids, B-side esotera, best-selling records, and major cultural turning points in the world of music."

This one came out in October. You'll find it alongside an accompanying Italian version. I had to use a pen-name so no one would know the line in the author bio about almost getting fired for keeping a list of incriminating conversations was about me. To make it more confusing, B&N has the author name wrong on the website. I’ve considered letting someone know about that, but haven’t gotten around to it. Oh and by the way, I didn’t write the curses themselves, that was Antonio Martinez. I wrote the scenarios that you would find yourself needing to use them in. If you have young children around, be careful with the audio component. A*shole, Son-of-a-B*tch and C*cksucker really roll of the tongue en Español.

I am pretty sure this dog IQ book from 2007 is still around as it reprinted a couple times.

You can also buy it in Japanese or this language.












A few years back Random House bought Girl Drinks and released it with a slightly more titillating title. Looks like you can get it used for 19 cents!












* The UK cover

Being Here

Being Here

“Be here now,”
My friend tells me on her way to yoga class,
sipping green tea.
And I wonder if she knows just what I’m up against,
How many places other than here I am,
How many times other than the present
are demanding my attention,
engaged in furious battles,
issuing a rousing call-to-arms.
How even as she speaks in her serene,
first-grade-teacher voice,
trumpets are blaring,
summoning every neuron in my head
into that unreal, unraveling future,
into the what ifs and possibilities,
inevitabilities and just missed-
almost-might-have-been-sliding-door
alternate realities.
And how at the same time, bagpipes are
pulling me backward,
toward Gatsby’s green light,
Faulkner’s red and dying evening,
Foucault and his labyrinth:
everything we already–so many years ago–never meant to leave behind.

How I am no match for that unruly past,
the one that, like the engulfing sun from
a 1970s NOVA special, will one day
grow tired of having given so much, for so long,
and swallow up those ungrateful orbiting bodies,
in a splendid, brutal swan song,
a supernova blast of gravitational collapse,
and then, finally, that longed-for quiet air.

How there is a jittery, flailing creature inside,
clumsily chasing memories with a fly swatter,
succeeding only in keeping them airborne
and constantly in the way.
Memories at once microscopically precise:
(the smell of crushed blackberries, a homemade
lily-of-the-valley bouquet, the lonely sound of a departing train),
and other times a maddening optical illusion:
I tilt my head to get a better view,
and they slip off,
then taunt me again,
like children who want to be chased in a night-time game of tag,
but who are older now, and run too fast.

All the while over the horn section,
a stubborn voice is holding forth
in patient recitation:
what happened last year at exactly this time,
three years ago or ten.
(“Can you believe we were just now arriving on West 87th?”)
And another one, shrill and stuttering,
panicking over the buildup of birthdays and New Years,
endings to eras that were themselves already too late.
The keeper of that shrill voice has a ruler
she keeps slapping against the desk,
Sternly counting the overlap, the around, and in between
giving me only a second as I pull down the shade
to think how strange it is
that Grandma and her great grandson were
on the planet at the same time for only five months,
before a reedy, listing pastor
bemoans the falling apart by degrees,
and an overdressed soprano—makeup already starting to run—
belts out Olympian nostalgia.
Here comes a friendly, nondescript neighbor,
marveling in the prosaic as he shuts his car door,
“I can’t believe I get home from work
now and it’s still light out.”

Well,
of course.
That happens every year.
(No need to mention the tilt of the earth,
the rotation around that resentful sun.)
That has happened every year now for…thirty-three years.
Haven’t you gotten used to it?
Thirty-three years, the ruler is whacking,
three years older now
than my grandfather’s age when he died,
Keats, Morrison, so many others,
already long dead.

Stop wallowing in that.
Be here now.
Listen to that gentle voice,
one suited for vespers,
or to murmuring lullabies from across the yard.
That voice is noticing the scenery,
tasting the hint of lemon
in the Blue Sky Vineyard wine—

And that is what I miss most about my dog,
(besides the pressed-up, warm little body snuggled under the covers,
or the ice cold, iron dark, we-are-the-only-two-creatures-alive
midnight walks along the edge of Prospect Park)—
The endless, unflinching, be here now of her life.

Dogs are Buddhists, without green tea or lotus positions.
She was here then, equally happy to come in or go out,
take a nap or take a walk,
for five years pulling hard against
the leash every time;
not “tomorrow we will run faster”, but today.

Maybe it’s okay to be here now,
thinking of her there then.
And to picture myself catching my breath behind her,
Maybe we are both still there,
In the space of the until already behind us.

Getting Stung by Bees

1. I spent seven years in the absolute center of the baby universe (Park Slope) and then I had a baby and moved out. 2. Nobody I know growing up was allergic to peanuts or even thought about it as a possibility, unlike, say, penicillin or getting stung by a bee. 3. Next time this week I’ll be in London. 4. My nieces are 3 ½ and 5 years old, which makes them full kids now and no longer babies or even toddlers. This is yet another adjustment for me to make. Being an aunt to babies almost feels like you can pretend you are a sister to a teenage mom. 5. Tomorrow my dog Sky moves on to her next adventure in life. I’ve become one of those awful people who have a baby and give up their dog. No matter how complex and nuanced the confluence of factors that led to this point, the end result is the same. Every time I am about to write the new owners and explain all these complicated reasons I stop myself because everyone has reasons for why they do what they do. 6. Last night my parents said they slivered into little balls on the bed so Sky could take up as much room as she wanted. 7. Number 5 coupled with the fact that I have unwittingly become an office drone makes me a lot more forgiving of people who get beaten down and give up their ideals and go into pure survival mode. 8. Thinking about how we are not the people we dreamed we would be makes me think back to all those late-night high school conversations with my best friend Margaret, from whom I’ve been somewhat estranged. 9. I like the peacefulness of the nighttime routine with Wally and yet lying on the bed in the dark listening to lullabies I often grapple with the most morbid, terrifying sense of loss. 10. It’s true the more you have to do the more you get done. 11. In checking our email again and again and again-what are we looking for? (Train running local; foot of snow expected tonight.) 12. I miss Park Slope, but if I’m honest with myself, I have to wonder: would living there now feel like living out the past? Things happen, and then you have to accept them. There’s this delay where, even after they’ve happened, you can push off, hold at bay, the reality of them, the implications. I guess you could call this denial but I think it’s something else. Moving, people dying, bosses not liking you, parents suddenly leaving the house where you grew up after 26 years, apartments that don’t allow dogs, always being exhausted but refusing to go to bed even one minute earlier. I think it's logical that you shouldn’t go to bed on the same day you woke up. 13. The last few times I’ve seen my brother-in-law he’s been in a great mood, offering to burn discs of music that I like. 14. One other problem now is I keep thinking about everything in terms of infinity. 15. Sometimes it’s not just the day of the week I can’t remember, or the date, or the month, or the year but the decade, the century, the millennium. I suspect this is a common problem. Lately more routine things have been getting more routine, like running out of milk, getting woken up by a fog horn, or seeing someone you know at a farmer’s market and having them give you a blank, unamused, off-center look when you express surprise in the fact that potatoes and other root vegetables are best in early spring.