Little Do You Know

I moved again. Please bookmark accordingly.

Mom and I went down to the Paramount on Thursday night to see John Prine. It was heaven, almost. His voice is so strong. Opening for him, waif-like Mindy Smith. She has an angelic voice and funny and quiet between-songs banter. She also came on later and sang Angel From Montgomery with John. He sang so many songs I love, starting off with The Six O’Clock News. There isn’t a bad John Prine song.

O, were it not for the awful awful girl next to me. She was about twenty, scruffy, vagabond clothes, dirty hair, which in and of itself, who cares? She was sitting behind us with her mother, and they were loudly talking during Mindy Smith. Unfortunately, the three seats to my left were unfilled (sold out show!) so she actually CLIMBED over the seats and plopped down next to me, continuing her conversation with her mother, again, loudly, over her shoulder. When John came on, they were ecstatic, screaming and trying to talk to him, a call and response situation where he would say something and they would answer, as though he’d asked them for an opinion. The mother clapped during every song, out of rhythm, and they both sang along, trying to harmonize, badly. I am a good giver of the icy stare, but they were impervious to me. Near the end of the show, the people in front of us left, and so Scruffy did some above the head leg stretches, then put her booted feet on the back of the chair, just grazing the shoulder of the poor man who sat there. They of course made many disparaging remarks about the crowd, how boring we were and how “civilized,” they scoffed. I was just dumbstruck, literally, by the narcissim. They were interjecting themselves into the show. In that customary space where the artist leaves the stage and the crowd is demanding an encore, she climbed up on the chair and I was sending ESP to her that said “If you fall on me, I’m going to sue you into oblivion.” And I don’t even believe in lawsuits! Then he came back to the stage. And while John was singing, in the final song, about the “world’s largest shovel,” he was being drowned out by the world’s largest asshole.

If you like John Prine, there’s a great 90 minute movie here, as he’s interviewed by Ted Kooser at the Library of Congress.

I re-read my post from the other day and it seemed like the glaring hole in logic is that I wasn’t writing about what I do have.

One good thing is my Netflix subscription. Here are the movies coming to my house for the weekend. Volver, with Penelope Cruz; Marie Antoinette; Dreamland. Dreamland is about this:

Okay, so lately, in the middle of all the chaos–or what can be categorized by an overwrought and melodramatic nature–of publishing and raising the difficult, lovable adolescent, I have been listening to this amazing book called Eat, Pray, Love. It’s the memoir of this writer who takes a year away from her own life and painful divorce to seek a spiritual path in three countries: Italy, India, and Indonesia. But it isn’t preachy or treachly. Her story is tender and friendly and self-deprecating. And it’s making me think a lot about what my own life is missing. I think it’s making me want to set some things straight, to maybe take up some meditation, to spend more time away from the screens. I don’t know who I am when I read this book.

A tulip bloomed today. Great sign that things will turn around.

I spent the whole day at the office today, putting books in big envelopes and printing mailing labels, postage included. The girls are on spring break so tomorrow they will go with me and help haul all the piles to the car, then into the post office.

I watched six episodes of Sex and the City last night. We’ve been ill with some virus for about three weeks now. My tonsilitis is back and I feel drained. But the work still has to get done, and marathon tv is always a good cure.

That’s about all for now.

This post will be interesting to people who get raw address lists and have to format labels, and who don’t want to either retype the data or cut and paste each address block one by one: Continue Reading »

It was seventy again today. Almost all the snow is gone and the potholes are big enough on some streets to bury small cars. I drank some coffee out on the deck today, thinking about a few flowers to plant, nowhere near the kind of garden Emma has, but I’d like a little color back there.

Not much new but a steady flow of work.

I’m still in the middle of converting the press finances from quicken to quickbooks (not the same story as my previous trial of moving a different set of books from peachtree to quickbooks) and it’s just plain tedious. But necessary. Four of the six books are done completely, and now it’s time to start mailing out review copies. That’s a good feeling.

We’re planning a trip to Hawaii this July. Just the two of us in a good hotel for seven days. I am ready to go right now.

I finished William Boyd’s Restless this morning. Very good spy story with mother/daughter protagonists. Not as long or emotionally engaging as Any Human Heart, but a page turner many of you may enjoy. Wait for the paperback and while you’re waiting, Boyd’s The Blue Afternoon is a mystery that’s widely available.
Yesterday I bought a Kate Atkinson novel to take with me on the trip, Human Croquet, and the Fitzgerald translation of The Aeneid. We were supposed to read the new Fagles translation–bookclub has recommitted–but it’s still in hardback and I didn’t want to invest $40. So I figure I can be the foil in the discussion. I liked Fitzgerald’s Odyssey a lot, so this should suffice. I really should take manuscripts to read, and maybe I’ll take a couple, but I really want to read more for pleasure.

Planning on watching the Academy Awards but I haven’t seen many of the movies, so I don’t know why I’m bothering.