Barack Obama's daughters loved Drummer Boyso much that when Obama wrote a children's book, he picked Loren Long to illustrate it. The result is Of Thee I Sing:
But toddlers couldn't care less about that. When you need to entertain a five-year-old, you want something a little more funkengrooven. You want a friendship between a tractor and a calf.
If that sounds dumb, it's because you're old and your heart is a brittle, numb thing. It sounded dumb to me when Dylan requested it as his bedtime story, the first time I ever watched Becky put him down. When she read the gentle purring of the tractor's engine that lulls the little calf to sleep, Otis's putt puff puttedy chuff, I fell in love. Being a family is mostly making things up as you go. There are very few moments you feel you're getting it right, while they're happening. That was one.
Also, when it comes to matters of the heart, Becky is my Otis and I am her calf. In fact, when Loren Long scheduled appearances at Books & Books Bal Harbour and Coral Gables, I wanted to ask for the calf to go with her tractor. It would have represented her saving me, us as a couple, and the father I became when she brought Dylan into my life.
But I didn't ask, so we'll have to come with another couple tattoo.
You know how this thing with Becky's arm works, right?
First comes the drawing.
While Mo Willems scribbled the Pigeon in about twenty seconds ("The thing is to capture the energy!"), Loren Long was meticulous. He stopped several times. He'd stand, step back, stare, erase, and start again. "I wasn't this nervous for President Obama," he said.
Then comes the tattooing.
Dicky Magoo of Tattoos by Lou (seriously) loves the challenge of replicating other artist's work, trying to get the same effects in tattoo as they did in whatever medium they originally used. He did Becky's first illustrator tattoo, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and returned to the scene of the ink for Otis.
Side Note: That last link is to the Los Angeles Review of Books, where Lisa Jane Persky writes, "Becky Quiroga’s “Very Hungry Caterpillar,” drawn on her arm by Eric Carle himself, is a piece of body art that soccer moms from Sandusky to Timbuktu would find it [SIC] hard to disapprove of." But people see what they want. The more ink Becky gets, the more strangers are wary of the badass tattooed chick. Few look closely enough to see that they're pictures from children's books.
So it's a tattoo artist's rendering of an illustrator's actual drawing on Becky's arm, get it? Stop saying, "I guess you'll never wash that arm again."
Becky was able to get Otis between Loren Long's first and second appearances, so he was able to see the finished product.
Pictured: Natural behavior.
Long was soooo nice. He's the type of nice guy who's so nice that I walk away thinking, "Why can't I be more like him?" Most people who meet me immediately think I'm an asshole. Which is 1) not far off 2) why hand-selling books is difficult for me. So this asshole thinks I should buy "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet;" whoop-dee-freaking-whoo.
The Otis tattoo made Shelf Awareness as well, on September 19th. Yes, that's how topical I am. More to the point, that's what Miami Book Fair International 2011 did to me. It took over all three of my lives, the internet one, the writing one, and the breathing one.
With the presidential credentials on her forearm, can Maurice Sendak's Max be far behind? Are you listening, Mr. Sendak? Say the word and we're Connecticut bound.
You never know when banana bread is going to be part of your life. It's out there, waiting for you to leave your bananas out too long, then you notice there's a little too much black on the peel. A few more days they'll be completely unappetizing but a few degrees shy of disgusting, and it'll be banana bread time.
I'd forgotten that the perfect banana bread recipe requires three bananas rather than the two I had. We have more bananas for smoothies but they're entirely too yellow. Because you can't will a banana to rot (what an awesome super-power - ripening), I immediately switched gears into muffin land.
I don't want to think about how much seeing the video above played into this decision. Do I make my own decisions, or do I just react to stimuli? Let's just admit that Adaptation is one of the most brilliant movies of all time and move on.
This is a rare real-time post. I can smell the muffins as I type. I woke up at five am, thought about my writing-work-dinner-wedding prep agenda for the day, and looked at the bananas in their now-or-never ripeness. My upbringing won over my longing to write. Wasting minutes I could've spent writing is intangible; throwing two perfectly usable bananas into the trash is real waste.
My posts have thinned out lately, and I expect them to get thinner. If you look over the proceeding, you can imagine why. I'm a bookseller. Unless you're Cory, there's not a lot of drama in the day-to-day. Well, maybe for those of us in the business. But Indie vs. A-Word, paper vs. ebook, dying industry vs. renaissance of the story - those posts can only go so far. I want to write about anything and everything.
The downside is that I sometimes end up writing about nothing.
I flatter myself that my thoughts on books, movies, parenting, relationships, food, and life are worth sharing. Still, I like to polish these thoughts up a bit before I share them. More importantly, especially for things I've started to write for reasons I'm not aware of, I want these posts to have some meaning. This sometimes means opening the same file dozens of times, revising, rearranging, looking for a point. Since Sweet with Fall and Fish doesn't have a unifying theme (apart from being the Official Blog of Aaron John Curtis), it's important to me that the individual posts try to have a point.
I have thoughts about Borders closing, and Amy Winehouse dying, and mass killings in Norway, but by the time I decide how I really feel and the best way to express it, those feelings are years out of date. Witness the post I've been working on about The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, movies which came out in 2008. Not because I just got them on Netflix, but because I wasn't sure how to express my feelings about Heath Ledger's death. After all that microscopic consideration, the challenge becomes making someone care. But I suppose that's always the challenge.
Did you know I saw Patti Smith at the Miami Book Fair International days afterJust Kids won the National Book Award? As part of letting the standing room only crowd know about the upcoming (at the time) OMiami! poetry festival, I was one of dozens who helped P. Scott Cunningham perform Arthur Rimbuad's Vowels, a random act of culture about which Smith said, "I've never seen anything like that."
I've mentioned Hilldawg from time to time? That's her holding the sign.
Did you know Patti Smith performed three songs during the reading, and that the last one became a sing-along? Did you know I loved Just Kids? Did you know I met Patti Smith? Of course you didn't. I worried too much about capturing the magic on the page, I procrastinated starting, then so many months had passed that it seemed silly to try and remember how I'd felt at all. There have been many nights like this I've passed over, but I offer this as an extreme example.
There's a lot of pressure in my life right now.
I'm getting married in 32 days. The marriage doesn't stress me at all, but there's a lot of prep involved in the event which marks the beginning, especially since this is DIY wedding.
Also, I know in this economy I should be pleased to have a job, but the work load I'm saddled with lately is ridiculous. Our week's run Thursday to Wednesday, and I'm over 32 hours for the week. These thoughts occurred while I was baking and I wanted to share, so I'm pushing back biking in to get this posted. I'll probably take Wednesday off to be with Dylan - Becky and I are taking turns watching him this summer since we can't afford camp or daycare - but I can't be sure. I could live in my office and work there every waking minute and it would take half a year to get on top of things, and even then I probably wouldn't be on top of things because they'd find even more for me to do. Grawr.
Finally, I've had a setback in my writing life. The mighty Carl Lennertz has left Harper Collins to become CEO of the North American branch of World Book Night. This is excellent news for the world of books which is semi-devestating to me personally.
As I've written my stories and taken time polishing my novels, it's always been in the back of my mind that my first published essay was a given (I've had pieces published online and in print, so I guess I mean published by the Big 6). I know I acted like it wasn't, but I was fooling myself. I'm glad I chose not to shout State by State from the roof tops, but I no longer have that foot in the door, that significant set of eyes which has looked at my work and deemed it worthy and which invites prospective agents and magazine editors to do the same. I'm back to square one.
In some ways, it's good. It gives my morning writing time more focus. With the help of my writers group, I am polishing four or five of my best stories until they will knock a magazine editor on her ass, so that she'll share the story with her readers, and I'll have a nugget of something to put in my cover letter to an agent, something more substantial than hopes and dreams. I need a credit. As Laura Munson writes in This is Not the Story You Think it Is, "You can't put good rejection letters on a resume."
What this doesn't bode well for is Sweet.
Of course this comes as my gradually-increasing readership reached its zenith in July. I should be writing more to keep you guys coming back, but something's got to give. I'll try to take a day to myself (if I can find it) and automatically schedule a bunch of stuff I've been tinkering with so it looks like I'm active while I take a break (or maybe it will be like today's post: write it, look for glaring errors and hope I didn't miss any, then publish post). Just because I don't see the point doesn't mean you won't, right? Reading is a relationship, and finding a piece's moral and sharpening it to a point is just me trying to bully your reaction. Of course, you might just get nothing but this for a while. We'll see.
Meanwhile, WLRN's Under the Sun released a CD of the last Lip Service event.
"What's this? A CD of a live Lip Service event recorded for broadcast by Under the Sun?"
"And who is that at #5? Why, it's me. Remember when I freaked out over the edits...
Wait, I never blogged about this, either? Fuck me."
As I sat in Books & Books cafe, reeling from the realization that Carl Lennertz left Harper Collins before he could publish me, a favorite customer approached and told me he enjoyed hearing me on NPR. Co-workers told me they'd heard and enjoyed me on the way in to work. It's the only thing that kept me from a meltdown that day.
Since then, strangers have come to the bookstore looking for me. One asked, "Which one of you is Aaron?" while I happened to be there. She didn't shop, but just stopped off on her drive home to tell me how much she enjoyed the piece (thankfully, I wasn't in the buying office at the time). Customers have congratulated Becky on her upcoming nuptials (which I mentioned in the Q&A after the reading). Apparently, I also "sound cute" on the radio. I feel like my writing career is foundering, but more people are aware of me than ever. It's fairly surreal.
So take heart. Even if you don't see much of me here in the coming weeks as I prepare for my nuptials, you may hear me on the radio.
And the muffins? They smelled better than they taste, but they are solid, moist, and they put two rotten bananas to good use. Here's to a morning well spent.
If I had to guess the origin of "ass" as a modifier, it's got to be badass. Most likely Sweet Sweetback's Baadaaaaaassssssssssss Song. It started badass, which makes sense. One's ass had been a stand in for the entirety of oneself for some time, and not-bad-meaning-bad-but-bad-meaning-good goes without saying. Therefore, if one is the ultimate in cool, or toughness, or knowledge, or attitude, then he or she might be labelled badass.
People dug this, and the trend continued with hardass; mostly in military circles. Then wiseass and smartass came along, followed closely by dumbass. These terms all make sense, somewhat, especially given that they take ass into the pejorative.
Then things got weird. Ass started peppering sentences where it had no place, not modifying a word to make a new one (being dumb is bad enough, but being a dumbass is dumb beyond redemption) but on its own, strengthening sentiment.
"That was one lame ass movie."
"That's a sweet ass ride."
"Tell your stupid ass friends that stuffing condoms filled with yogurt between the cushions of my couch is not funny."
I'd been living in Miami a couple of years before a Chilean woman named Janet took me under her wing and started teaching me a few phrases in Spanish. I was fascinated how Latin folks use the word cojone.
"Que quieres?" means "What do you want?" But say you get a call at three in the morning, or your cell phone shows you the name of someone who you really could do without at the moment. A more appropriate response might be, "Que cojone quieres?"
You might think that this translates into "What ball do you want?" You're right, that's what it translates to. What is means, though, is "What the fuck do you want?" I threw cojone in, and now you know I'm pissed. I thought that 1) that was cool as shit, and 2) there was no equivalent in the English language.
The other day I was walking down the street wearing a t-shirt with this image:
Some dude at the bus stop called out, "Hey, that's an awesome ass shirt, man."
Yes, it is. I thanked him, and kept walking. A few moments later, I was like, "Wait, what?" The "not-bad-meaning-bad-but-bad-meaning-good" in badass got mixed up with ass, and now ass is a good thing? Or maybe the fact that it sounded like some new bit of fashion I was unfamiliar with threw me off.
Ass shirt?
After the way this guy used the word ass threw me, I started hearing it everywhere (I'm also hearing counterintuitive all over the place now, which makes me think it will be the next literally, but that's another post). Nice ass shoes, sweet ass website, funny ass movie, cool ass girl . . . nearly every conversation I heard used ass to strengthen a compliment.
When I remembered cojone for a minute I thought, "Hey, we do it, too!" But it's not the same. Latin folks know what they're doing. "¡Qué cojones!" can be used to express extreme excitement, or as the Latin equivalent of the Yiddish "oy vey," but no one's using cojone as a compliment.
Gringos need to take a lesson from our Latin brethren and stop using ass willy nilly. Ass is not appropriate for everything.
John Updike said, "The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding." I don't believe people who say they "hate" New York City. I refuse to accept their statement because it tells me we will have little in common, and finding common ground is what life's all about.
I've visited New York City natives a few times over the years, friends I went to college with who either came to Syracuse University from NYC or who moved there afterwards. This last trip for BEA made me realize their limitations in playing host (and my own in bringing friends and family to Miami); they showed me their New York, but I never really experienced the city as a newcomer. I wanted to wander, to find someplace and dip inside, to stand on the subway as a jangle of nerves because I could never quite be sure I'd taken the right route until I magically ended up where I wanted to be.
The first morning, Becky and I walked from the Holiday Inn to the Javits Center. We stopped at a corner convenience store-cum-deli with a latin dude at the flat-top and a middle-eastern dude behind the registers, guys who only need to hear "a breakfast sandwich with egg and cheese" and "coffee with lots of cream and sugar" to give you a downright delicious meal to start your day, and the best bagel you've ever eaten.
Eating great for cheap is part of what makes New York City cool, more than the accents or the stories you hear strangers exchange in the street, yelling over traffic like they're not sharing something intensely personal (people from LA and Miami seem to think the addition of a cell phone makes them superior to New Yorkers, like yelling dirty laundry into a phone is more refined than yelling it into a face). Even better, every place that catches your eye has a story. Using the criteria that I can't stop myself if I tried, I realize I'm only truly addicted to two things - reading and writing; I'm all about story.
Becky and I stopped at a bakery on impulse, one with a name like Hilda's Bakery (I've searched the internet like Cyber Sam Spade but there are about a billion bakeries in Manhattan and I've delayed this post long enough). We walked in and saw a big-boned black woman and a flamboyantly gay man behind the counter. We assumed Hilda was a figure made-up to sell baked goods.
Then we saw three framed black-and-white photos by the register, and a fourth frame filled with long-hand notepaper, faded by time. Turns out the woman in the photos is Hilda, and the notepaper is one of her original recipes. All of the recipes they use at Hilda's Bakery are, in fact, Hilda's. And the baby in photo number two? That's the current owner, also known as Some Chick From CSI.
(You'd think with that much information, the internet would give up a name. The BBBW who rang us up even flashed the actress's headshot, and I can't remember who it is. Damn.)
How good were these cupcakes? After stuffing our faces with cupcakes Becky and I tried to leave twice. We returned both times to buy more cupcakes. They were that good. Meanwhile, passers-by kept ducking in to critique pastries they'd eaten earlier in the day. The employees and the regulars knew each-other by name, and the employees obviously were having a lot of fun. It made me wish I lived there so I could familiarize myself with Hilda's entire menu, to form opinions I could shout in passing on the way home.
"Hilda's Bakery," Carnegie Deli, Hell's Pizza Kitchen, that no-name corner store with a breakfast counter or the half-dozen other places we dipped into, we saw nothing but cheer amongst New Yorkers. The New York Sneer - particularly post 911 - is like Big Foot. It's legendary, told so often it must be true, but it's doubtful you'll ever see it in person. Plus, the stories behind these places? Forget about it. Fuggedabboutit. Fuhgeddabowtit.
This week Mitchell introduced me to two authors. Both men, both well-respected, prolific writers whose work I have at home, but neither are authors I've read.
The first conversation went like this:
ME (on the way to clock out): How's it going, Mitchell?
MY BOSS: Good, good. You want to meet Fred Savage?
ME: Not really, no.
MY BOSS: Hey, Fred, I'd like you to meet someone. Fred, this is Aaron. Aaron, this is Fred. Aaron is one of our buyers. He's a big, big fan of your work.
ME (grinning hugely): Good to meet you! Wow, great stuff this time!
FRED SAVAGE* (not buying it for a minute, not even a little): . . .
ME: So. . .
FRED: I like your tattoo, Aaron.
The second encounter went like this:
ME (on the way out): S'up, MK?
MY BOSS: Hey, how's it going? Do you want to meet Idi Amin?
ME: No, I'm good.
MY BOSS: Idi, this is Aaron. Aaron, this is Idi.
ME (holding my hand out): Hi, it's good to meet you.
[IDI AMIN** stares past the proffered hand, saying nothing.]
ME (still holding hand out): Uh.... I'm one of Mitchell's buyers.
[IDI AMIN continues to ignore ME's hand, saying nothing. ME's hand falls, his smile wilts. A fissure opens up in the ground, and ME steps inside.]
This is why I'll be avoiding my boss in the future.
As further proof of the world of awkward twos, two authors offered to memorialize themselves on my ass. This is a first for me which managed to happen twice in just a few months.
The first was the mighty Brock Clarke, who I've written about once or twice. He was in town for the early release of his third novel, Exley.
We drank the night away before I realized he hadn't signed my poster for An Arsonist's Guide to Writers Homes in New England, a brilliant piece of marketing with quotes from the book set up as rules to follow when torching historic homes. I was thinking it would look lovely with my signed posters for Choke and Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. Plus, I was going for an even fifty for things I need to get framed.
Two am was a distant memory. Brock was understandably reluctant for me to run across the street, open the locked store, grab the poster, and run back.
"I'll be back for Miami Book Fair. I'll sign anything you want, I promise."
Seeing my lack of enthusiasm for this idea, Brock offered his Ace in the Hole.
"I'll sign your ass," he said.
I worked Miami Book Fair, but my ass and Brock's pen somehow missed each-other.
A few months later, this happened:
PHASE 1: This will be awesome - wheeeee!!! Thanks so much, Lane!
PHASE 2: She realizes she is the most ticklish person who currently exists.
PHASE 3: Lane discovers how hard it is to erase wavy Sharpie Lines from skin.
After mortalizing the bibliophile monkey inside Becky's biceps, Lane Smith was on a high. When he found out Becky and I were a couple, he turned to me and said, "How about one for you? I could put it right on your ass."
I joined a writer's group last month, my first one in a couple years. It was all fun and games until I was handed homework. Homework? Yes, homework. I'm a 38-year-old man with homework.
My assignment was to submit my writing for publication.
While I wondered how to do this, Joe Hill came to Books & Books the very next night. He said he survived the ten years looking for a book deal by always having several stories submitted at once. That way when he got rejections back, there was always hope that another story he had out there would be published.
Okay, I thought, I will submit one story each week for publication and see what happens.
Week one, I submitted a stub I mentioned a few weeks back to Jai-Alai Magazine. I could have sent a longer nonfiction piece but my first love is made-up stuff. I had this tiny piece of fiction which shouldn't have been anything, then I realized that with some polishing, I could use the stub to meet Jai-Alai's 700-word limit challenge.
The verdict is still out on that one. With University of Wynwood caught up with the month long gorgeous madness that is O,Miami! I don't expect an answer anytime soon.
Week two, I submitted a story to Lip Service. They picked me. I'll be reading when they team up with Under the Sun at the Miracle Theater on Saturday, the 23rd. Instead of rehearsing in Andrea Askowitz's living room, we'll be rehearsing in a recording studio. How cool is that?
Two people also reached out to me this week.
One of them saw me at a Books & Books event produced by Moya, which I meant to write about but somehow never did. I'd like to thank him for including me in an evening of music and monologues, and offer a picture to show I was there:
Proof that bigger isn't always better: this shirt.
The first woman was a stranger to me. She saw my name on the upcoming Lip Service event and remembered me from An Evening of Good Things. She wanted to let me know there are other halfbreeds in Miami, to wish me luck, and tell me I should keep plugging away with my writing.
The second woman I used to work with at Borders. We weren't tremendously close, but she was one of the people who got it (and by "it" I mean how absurd life can be), the type of person you're glad to see on a schedule when you clock. She told me she's been having a rough time lately, and my blog helped her get through it.
It's humbling and moving to know something you've written has touched someone else. I'm tremendously excited about Lip Service / Under the Sun, but emails from these two women overshadowed that feeling.
Make no mistake, I write for me. But it's gratifying to know someone is listening.
Facebook might help you connect with the people in your life, but it’s also a huge party with a bunch of people that lasts forever. There's the nervousness over how you present and what people will think of you. There are background folks you barely notice, the person who won’t stop talking your ear off, the klatch of recent marrieds and recent parents, the people you really want to talk to but hook up with all too briefly.
There's also Becky's father. Becky's sister set his profile up for him. When Papa Q discovered Facebook took actual time, he said no way. This gives him a certain mystique in the virtual world. A profile people can approach for friendship that will never answer, because the password is a distant memory. He is the Garbo of Facebook, discussed on my blog, bandied about on updates, tagged in our pictures, but never glimpsed directly.
This approach could work for me.
Virtual identity is supposed to be great for a writer because you can use your strongest asset to present yourself. Little did I know, no matter the distance between what I write and who's reading it, the distance from myself to myself is the same; all the insecurities and social awkwardness I feel in life follow me online.
I see the future, the distance from neighbors and family, the little cocoons built around individual lives, or couples or families, the growing suspicion of the Other. We make friends safely online and forget how to interact in person. The mechanism between mind and verbal communication which creates charm will atrophy. Face-to-face interactions will become stilted, uncomfortable, borderline creepy. A smile from a stranger will become a thing of suspicion, greetings something to ridicule.
Given how crazy the world can be, some people see this as self-preservation. Given how lovely the world can be, I think Stranger Danger should never overshadow the Kindness of Strangers.
Anyway, why not find me on Facebook and friend me? When publishers are trying to decide whether to take a chance on this unknown writer, I'll need body count.
