The Migratory Complex

Hmm.

I'm an awful blogger.

For a very brief moment in time (about a week) and sort-of/semi/kind-of as a NY resolution, I envisioned myself journaling in this space regularly. I even said to myself, 'You know Edo, this isn't like the paper journals that you always abandon after the fourth entry. This is different.'

Entirely not so, apparently. The only difference online is when I do get a second wind, I don't get to crack open a fresh, new notebook with the spirals still round and springy -- I have to say, it's not quite as invigorating to post over four-month old entries.

Maybe I should start again with a different username.

finally saw The Prestige last night. Loved the dark un-hollywood ending and wonderful reversals; the wild goose chase that actually leads to a very cool McGuffin (although I'm not sure how it worked?).

Anyone read the novel?

Finally took some pictures of the new pieces coming out of the kiln -- here's what we've been working on so far this year:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/momoglass/

"My Name is Red" Orhan Pamuk

I never saw this guy on the bookshelf until he won the Nobel. *great* so far.

The previous owners of the house decided it would be fun to paint the fireplace mantel like theatre curtains. They did a fine job, but it looks ridiculous. And it's too dark to paint over. So we're finally getting around to it...

The word of the day is 'spatula'.

* scrape scrape scrape *

Finished revisions on the Canegirl in Tocon story (now titled 'The Names You Had Before')...it's 500 words longer now :P Hopefully I can cut it back some on small-edit revisions. I haven't read that 10% book but I think I get the gist of it from the title.

If anyone's going to the post office soon, I can paypal you $$ for postage. (I think I'll send it to F&SF first).

Now Reading: The Avram Davidson Treasury (Thanks Kris!), "The Last Temptation of Christ" Nikos Kazantzakis, "Light on Yoga" B.K.S. Iyengar

internet in the house -- weee :) I apologize for being so out of touch, we had a tremendously busy December and moving hemispheres is always a disorienting experience. Things are settling down here, we've been doing work on the house, the workshop is in order with a brand new sound system, today i'm upstairs in my writing bubble and revising the Canegirl story I posted to Miscue a few months ago.

Summer is warm and resplendent here. We made it to the beach last week for a couple days of sun and sand and tennis-football.

Hmm. I'm feeling lazy about it right now but someday soon I'll write a bit more about Tandil and the life here. It's starting to feel like home, at least for part of the year.

Landed in Buenos Aires Dec 26 and swarmed by Rosie´s side of the family ever since. Up to six nephews between all her sisters and brothers and they sure do potentiate each other. Noise Factor 9 for most of seven days around the house, culminating in a lovely NYE family party with all the little kiddies and the mommies and the pappies and the still-withouts dancing to electronic balkan beats and wandering out to the sidewalk after midnight to watch the fireworks blasting and blooming quite randomly and for over twenty minutes across the city blocks. Rosie says it looks as if this year was a good one for everybody, generally speaking, financially. Most everyone is on a tight budget here and fireworks are certainly a caprice. Rosie remembers the NYE following the crisis in 2001, hardly a rocket went up and they were all the cheap kind.

Recovering from serious overdose of children-yelling (am I really going to have one someday?!) by tearing old wallpaper, sanding and painting neglected walls, pruning the garden, and drinking lots of malbec. Happy New Year to everyone and lets make it a good one :-)

"Tag Der Totes"
2,600 w / ?

Hmm. Christmas shows started last weekend and I haven't made much headway on this one. Researching the Mexican underworld (for the story) has been fun.

Sales at the show have been steady but slow. The show has long hours, 10 am - 8 pm from Thursday to Sunday. Rosie sent me to the coffee shop today, since two people in the booth all day can make each other edgy and the shoppers nervous.

And here I am, procrastinating :)

Back from Mexico, tanned and relaxed and renewed. Lots to tell, though I feel strangely ambivalent about journaling on it. Too busy working on a new story. It's the first story I've begun since we returned to the US in May, which confirms that work this year has been very good but also very bad.

"Tag Der Totes"
2,000 / ?? words

Back from Israel. Going to Mexico on Wednesday. Doing a show in NYC this weekend. Critiquing fishywish's novel right now.

Life is very busy, but soon to be injected with a fine, leisurely dose of warm sand, blue sky, green jungle, salty sea. Five weeks of it! I'm anxious to be going. I feel as if I've lost a bit of my creative spirit in the mad shuffle of art shows all summer. I'm hoping that a few rough drafts of stories will be written onto notepads. Certainly, a few good books will be read. Certainly, I'll forget about work for awhile and let my mind drift to other things.

We're landing in Cancun and leaving immediately for Tulum. Maybe Palenque from there, maybe Guatemala. Oaxaca, yes, and Veracruz. Cousin Shelley knows Mexico like an old lover and gave some great recommendations.

My grandmother was in a much better state than I expected. We had a lovely time together, for the short bit it lasted, and I'm realizing that her plea to visit was like a fit of cold before a long indian summer. I'd be very surprised if she goes off now. There was no talk of that, even. I think that grandma wants to spend some more time with her grandchildren before she goes, and this was her way of communicating her urgency to us. I'm sure I'll go back next year, hopefully for a longer spell. She's the last grandmother I have and I love her and afterwards there'll be a gap there, an empty space unfillable. She called me out this time to show it to me, how time is collapsing towards it every minute, but there is still some time to spare; moments of being together, holding hands, playing scrabble, talking about anything at all.

Rosie liked Israel a lot, and her mother wasn't too upset about her going there, which will make the next trip even better.

Rosie's immersed in a beginner's Hebrew activity book right now. So far she knows how to say a few things: "hello", "please", "thank you", "ice cream", and "I'd like ice cream." She also knows how to say "almonds", which is her favorite nut, except for me.

Hebrew letters are tricky. Some of them look so alike, it's kind of like browsing a Find Waldo book for awhile until you get the hang of it.

Apparently we're headed to Israel in a few weeks -- my grandmother in Kfar Saba has not been feeling very well at all lately, and is saying ominous things about how long she expects to live. they're ominous to us, at least. She seems ready to go, and wants to make sure everybody visits her first.

No one this close to me has ever died before. I'm terrified, and also fascinated, but mostly terrified.

I'm starting to realize why everybody chooses alter-egos for their LJ names. This stuff is much too personal, and the internet these days feels like a big airport restroom. I'd better have a think and come up with a nickname.

Got a bounce on the Starry Night story from Strange Horizons today. Jed wrote that the museum was nicely spooky, but he found the plot too predictable (saw where it was going before the half-way point) and found much of the story too implausable.

I wonder where the story became predictable for him... There's a part where the protagonist's supervisor tells her that a statue on the fourth floor looks just like her -- maybe that's too much of a give away. I've been over the piece so many damn times that I can't tell anymore.

Anyway, it's off to Interzone. Other stories out at the moment are "Matryoshka" with Apex and Abyss (or is it Abyss and Apex?) and the fisherman's wife story at LCRW. Eugene reminded me over the weekend that it's a good strategy to get a few more stories out there...*sigh*...this year feels like a slug for me, despite all the great stuff I think I learned at Clarion.

We had a chance to sell a bit before the wind and rain sent everybody scattering Sunday morning. We've been lucky with the weather so far this year, but rain-outs are an eventuality in this business. Unfortunately, there are never refunds for booth fees.

To make amends we rented a few movies Sunday night. "Happy Together", by Chinese director Wong Kar-Wai, proved to be as thoroughly amazing as "In the Mood For Love" and "2046". Two (gay) Chinese lovers fly out to sight-see in Argentina, run out of money, and wind up working odd jobs in Buenos Aires.

I'm consistently awed by the quality of Wong Kar-Wai's film-making. "In the Mood for Love" was the best film I saw last year, and "Happy Together" may well be my favorite film this year.

Why?

* Best cinematography I've seen -- ever. Like a series of animated national geographic photos

* uncliched, improvisational plots and characters

* Tony Leung Chiu-wai stars in all three of these movies. His acting will speak for itself.

* the musical interludes are stunning

These movies are about relationships, lust, love, and solitude, and they attain levels of metaphor and poetry that you simply can't find in film as often as you can in literature. Perhaps the key to Wong Kar Wei's success with this is that the movie comes together as he is filming. In "Happy Together", for example, he arrived in Buenos Aires, with his whole film crew, and little more than a basic sketch of his two main characters. The plot and its conclusion came together as they became acquainted with the city, with the nature of their characters, and as they filmed scene after scene. It's similar to the technique that many writers use in fiction, except that writers don't have to finance a crew while they're struggling for inspiration.

Anyway, he's under 'Kar Wai Wong' in netflix for some reason. Check it out.

I had lasik surgery on both eyes this Wednesday. And I can see perfectly already. The doctor says my vision could fluctuate for the next week or two, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I can see fine. Yes, it feels miraculous. I feel like I'm being cuddled by an omnipotent diety, a goose-blanket divination humming a long-winded celestial version of "My Favorite Things" into one ear while feeding me Toblerones. With the other ear I can hear the world around me, people and cars and birds and printers and Rosie, and these sound-sensations are all at parity again with my vision. A small part of me gets a second chance. My eyes have been pardoned. All is calm, all is glory.

We're leaving later today for a weekend show in Long Island. I started a story on Tuesday, and hopefully the current of it won't be dry by the time we're done working and back home, next Monday.

Can't keep up with these LJ entries. Oh well. Maybe later down the line. Work has been busy, but we have a weekend off ahead and a bit of free time at last. The heat/humidity is oppressive. I'm going to the library for a few hours each day to take advantage of their air conditioning. Fiddling with stories and reading lots for the first time in awhile.

Currently: "River of Gods", Ian McDonald...."Magic For Beginners", Kelly Link

...and for the promoters of the south end open market, who graciously annulled the event and credited the booth fee. As opposed to most promoters, who make you show up and watch water pooling (and leaking) on the tent roof overhead, because absolutely no one in their right mind is out shopping.

And so, our first free weekend yet. I'd thought (excluding weekends) that we'd have plenty of time for ourselves this year, since we did most of our production in Argentina overwinter. Oh how wrong. Between prep and unprep and driving there and back, scanty days are left for indulging other things (like writing in blogs, or writing, say). This year is overkill, with a show every weekend. Next year we'll try for like two a month, tops.

But it's going swell! :) And we make new friends every weekend. And last week between buffalo and pittsburgh we got to visit Chris and Tanis in Ithaca. That was great guys, thanks.

Our new home in Northampton, MA is cozy, if a bit dark when it clouds over. Or maybe its just New England weather we're not used to...there are plenty of windows, after all. I started a little veggie patch out front, just some herbs and tomatoes and israeli cucumbers (smaller, bright green cuke, vastly more flavorful than the supermarket variety). We've been winding down from shows with movies from the local dvd place -- We've seen "Edvard Munsch", "Paradise Now", and Tony Gatlif's "Exiles" in the past few weeks. I'd highly recommend Edvard Munch, of the three. It was made in the 70s I think, but just re-released in DVD -- a biography of the Norwegian painter (1863-1944), and simultaneously a vivid portrait of 19th century life in one of the northern countries. It's filmed as if it were a documentary -- the camera-work, the sets, and the actors do such a fine job that it really seems as if some intrepid filmmaker has lugged all his crew and equipment back in time and managed to film a "living" biography. That in itself was a pleasure, not to mention the rich narrative of Munch's tortured life as an artist.

Ok, I'm done blathering. Off to do critiques....

(found a summer rental in Northampton, MA)

(Boston show rocked [Amy, I missed you!])

(Next weekend, RI)

CWesties, have a ball in Wiscon! Wish I could be there...

Wow!

The weekend was a great success!!

We had a terrific response in Crafts on Columbus and look forward to repeating it -- maybe in October. Today is all organizing stuff and tommorow we go back into NYC to do consignment stuff at a couple of galleries. Who's going to KGB this Wednesday? Eugene and I talked about getting together beforehand for a little hangout, maybe at a local Queequegs. Is anyone else interested? I have to run after the reading so I can't do dinner.

So we've been working all week to unpack pieces, repack (into little baggies), clean, glue, sort, classify, set up a merchant acct, call our galleries, make concrete weights (for the booth, in case of cyclones), wash table cloth, rebuild earring racks, de-lint jewelry trays, gather all the 1001 more and less important objects we might need during the fair, print up price tags, price stickers, price everything, make a new wholesale spreadsheet, apply for fall fairs, find accomodations for other fairs this summer --- And now it looks as if it might rain all weekend.

I'm going to give this another year or so before I sit down with the numbers and try to figure out what my actual $/hour wage is to myself. It's too early to tell, but since we've started doing shows I've been wondering as to whether I might not be better off as a librarian. This should get better, we keep telling ourselves. It takes two to three years to find your market, figure out what people like and where to sell.

Lets hope so. This year we've got enough stock to sell more at the stores.

Read this week: 50 pages of Trash Sex Magic...what a great first novel (although the arc of the plot is too predictable for my taste). I feel guilty about not getting back to it; by the time I do I'll probably have forgotten who half the characters are.

Movies: Saw The Machinist last night with Rosie. Wow Wow Wow. Holy smokes, it blew me away. The tension is gorgeously sustained (reminding me of another great film I saw this year: The Beat My Heart Skipped), the horror is deeply psychological. Kris, have you seen this one? I thought of you.

Writing: not allowed :( too much to do, until we get through our first couple shows and see all our galleries and find a place to rent for the summer.