Monday, September 22, 2008

 

It was a very busy, very poetical weekend. I got up at 5 a.m. on Friday to get on a train to Baltimore to go teach a class on steel products to a room full of customs agents and customs brokers. I had a very talkative cabbie on the ride from the train station to the Customs House, who informed me that he would not have given Al Gore the Nobel Prize. Well. So I arrived. And I taught, and I listened to some other presentations about steel, and then I decided to skip out and go to the aquarium. I saw puffins and a giant pacific octopus and ate lunch in the aquarium cafeteria. Then I looked at the USS Constellation before taking a cab back to the train station, where I read the Economist until it was time to get on the train. On the train I met up with Jeff, and worked on picking out poems to read and reorganizing and rediting my manuscript, all the way to NYC. Then we took the subway down to our hotel, checked in, went uptown to meet his dad, ate yummy food and got very drunk, went back to the hotel, and went to sleep.

On Saturday we slept in and got room service for breakfast and then achingly, creakingly rolled out to the Lower East Side for the Boog City Festival. We hung out for an hour or so and then decided to walk up to Washington Square to visit the Forbes Galleries, where you can see the toys of plutocrats' children. On the way, we checked out a bookstore that turned out to have a William James biography that Jeff wanted and a Joanna Drucker/Susan Bee artists' book that I wanted. At the Galleries, we learned that Kaiser Wilhelm specifically ordered the toymakers of Germany to make toy submarines, and we saw photos of Lech Walesa and Ronald Reagan (separately) peering at the exhibits. Then we went over to Sixth Avenue and got a snack which included an alcoholic milkshake. Then we walked back to the Lower East Side, caught some more poetry, and I read my poetry, and then I bought a dress with giant gold buttons with the Eiffel Tower on them from a store across from the reading. From there, we went to the Most Feminine Bar in New York, which had scented candles, a clientele consisting entirely of us and two bridal showers, and a continual playlist of 80s Madonna, Sheryl Crow, and En Vogue. There we met Shanna, and all of us walked up to the East Village to eat dinner at a cajun soul food place. Huzzah! Then Jeff and I cabbed back to the hotel, bought a bottle of wine and some chocolate, drank and ate said comestibles while watching football, and fell asleep.

The next day we got up, got to the train station, got on the train, and read until we arrived in DC, where I went shopping for shoes to go with my new dress, before heading up to Adams Morgan to host the first reading of the new year of In Your Ear. We had two poets and a filmmaker and it was very good. I had an ephiphany about my manuscript, so that was double plus good. Afterwards, I headed home and input all my changes into my book manuscript and also did some minor housekeeping on a chapbook manuscript and sent some emails back and forth and watched some football and some baseball and also caught up on a long novel that I am slowly reading.

And then I went to bed. Again. Whew!

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