Good News, Good Reads

Gentle readers, it doesn't have the sparkle or brevity of "Paris," but I have been spackling, sanding, taping, priming, and painting since we parted. 

Little Office, as I have unimaginatively dubbed her, needed to be ready for the phone date my agent and I are having this week about the last (please, the last) changes to THE DESIRE PROJECTS.  Nutshell:  he loves it--yey!  he almost never loves anything:  he's a tough, approval-withholding agent--but the manuscript is still not, if I'm understanding correctly, sufficiently foregrounding the suspenseful parts.  I'm not sure; I'll know more after we talk.  And then it will be time to make final revisions.  He thinks I can finish by the end of my summer break and we can have it out at publishing houses by early fall.

Moreover, we are this close to signing the contract for ISLAND OF BONES, the collection of essays, and then I'll have some time to make revisions to that manuscript as well.  As soon as the ink is dry, I'll divulge all the details, including the two phenomenal writers who served as outside readers for the manuscript.  Their imprimatur is as exciting to me as the contract itself!

Anyway, that's a lot of revising coming up, and I needed smooth, clean--and turquoise, as it turns out; turquoise won the swatch contest--walls within which to write. 

Readers, I'm now intimately aware of why my smarter, better off friends hire professionals to do their house-painting.  (Have I been in here too long, or does spackling compound smell like chocolate?)

Well, the walls are smooth turquoise now, and it looks great.  I'm enrobed in turquoise.  Please forgive my absence from the blog.  The job had to be done.  Thank goodness for Little Office's littleness, and for the HH's help today.

In other news, alas, the inimitable Sonam has abandoned Lincoln, leaving us bereft, but before he departed he kindly gave me modernist Rebecca West's essay "Pounce," and all of you who find cats intriguing creatures should find it.  (I generally don't, frankly, yet I still liked the essay, which is quite a testament to something.)  It's included in The Essential Rebecca West:  Uncollected Prose, which is just out from Pearhouse Press.  West's prose is effervescent, surprising, delicious.  I've always liked her work; this collection offers a chance to read things that never made it onto the beaten path.

And here are a couple of other recommendations, books I've been chomping down since the semester ended:

•  the American Book Award winner When Living Was a Labor Camp, about California's San Joaquin Valley, by Diana García, who was born in a migrant labor camp there.  If you've read or taught with the terrific anthology Latino Boom, you've come across the title poem, but the whole collection is well worth it.  Here's an excerpt from "Valley Fever":

I was a favorite niece, the only daughter
and no virgin:  the valley grew too small.
So I pawned my first flute and typewriter
and headed for a place that had it all--
classy subtitled films, canyon-laced coast,
flamed leaves to the east and desert beyond. . . .

•  One Island, Many Voices:  Conversations with Cuban-American Writers, which includes interviews with, among others, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Carolina Hospital, and Achy Obejas.  Most writers love reading interviews with other writers; I know I'm always fascinated, always panning for gold.  This collection rewarded my eagerness. 

It was also good for me.  Since my own sympathies and views are postnationalist, I'm not naturally driven, as a reader or scholar, by imperatives of cultural nationalism, though that's how the field of literature remains chopped up, so I don't have quite the grasp of Cuban-American literature that I should for someone who teaches in the field of Latin@ lit.  This collection filled gaps for me and offered discoveries, like Dolores Prida, who now fascinates me.

•   Green Metropolis:  Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability.  The title basically says it all.  This book explains, smartly, the rationale for most of the decisions the HH and I've been (fairly inarticulately) making for the past three years.  The book is persuasive without being at all preachy, and New Yorker writer David Owen's clever prose is a joy:  clean, fluid, crisp. 

I'd been longing to read since it came out in 2009.  It was worth the wait.  I highly recommend it.  Unswayed?  You can read the opening here.

•  Lastly, I am loving the stylistic and ethical clarity of Nadine Gordimer's new collection of essays, Telling Times:  Writing and Living, 1954-2008, which just hit the shelves this summer.  PW calls the collection "comprehensive--sometimes too comprehensive," and I can see their point.  It's hefty.  Nonetheless, in the best of these pieces, Gordimer models for me what a writer is supposed to be.  Awake.  Alert.  Speaking.