tuckova

ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things

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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

the the

The book I am reading (A Gate at the Stairs) is a mystery to me. It is good but I am more than halfway through and I do not really understand a single character. I blame the author, who doesn't seem to want to pin anything down either. There are really truly sentences like "the room was the pale yellow of wheat, like chablis". Listen: the room is pale yellow, or wheat-colored, or the color of chablis, but why couldn't she pick and I am exhausted and the room never gets mentioned again so who cares.

There are these five sentences, quotes from various writers, that I've saved in my "drafts" file and I keep reading them over and over again and I always feel like I'm on the verge of learning it but then I don't.

There is a "Kids in the Hall" sketch (I think) where Scott Thompson (I think?) is supposed to be some awesome author reading aloud from his upcoming brilliant second novel and he goes "write what you know, write what you know, write what you know, I don't know anything." Let me tell you the second book is not at all like that. Or is it. It is. Every day this week will be writing, writing, writing, or I will really be forced to write something closer to the bone, and we none of us want to see that. Scott Thompson totally pwned P.J. O'Rourke and I will love him forever for it.

The man with two first names brought a rattleskin back from his recent stateside visit. I, who had a childhood in one kind of nature, and then remember watching rattlesnakes sunning themselves on the fraught walks of my adolescence, down to Angsty Hoffman park and back, shook the rattle out into my hand and screamed because I thought it was alive. No matter how much country I'm coated in, I'm a city girl on the inside. I could sleep in a museum in an instant but I've never liked tents as much as I've been in them.

These summer days, sudden storms and sunshine, so hard to plan and surprising. It is unsafe for laundry. Today I told the pizza guy downstairs that he'd been written up positively on a local wesite, which he didn't know. I am neighborly. But I haven't been to the beer garden yet.

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