Saturday

Yesterday was a busy day, beginning with an early brunch with my father, grandmother, and sister at The Dish. This is the start of the Weekend Ritual. They used to eat at Cafeteria, which is actually downstaris in my building, and used to provoke occasional twinges of guilt in my father, who'd call and say how he never used to visit enough when I lived in the country and now they're in my building every weekend... But The Dish, which is a bit further away, is a less-attitude and less-expensive place to get equal-or-better quality food, so since I introduced them to it, they've eventually switched to brunching there every weekend.

Afterwards, we did one boutique clothing store on Eighth Avenue (where the clerks were VERY attentive to my father, as often happens in this neighborhood), three thirft stores, and a flea market. (Dad had actually done two flea markets before meeting us at the restaurant.)

Books I bought:

THE NATURE OF THE CHINESE CHARACTER, which I think is fascinating: it's a lavishly illustrated book which has a detailed breakdown of 40 basic characters, explaining not just how they're drawn (they have a row of boxes down the left side of one page showing mark by mark how the character grows) but also talking abotu the poetic leap for how the root elements combine to create that word. For instance, "sea" being composed of the "water" radical combined with "every" because allrivers flow to the sea; compared to, say, "river," which is also composed of the "wateR" radical, but combined with "work" since rivers are used for irrigationa nd transportation in linking the vast Chinese continent.

Anyway, the book looks lovely (although it uses a textured rice paper image which is printed under each of the spreads; you can and feelthat it's not real, although it looks nice).

Patricia McKillip's THE TOWER AT STONY WOOD. (Achim, made me think of you when I found it.)

Elfriede Jelinek's THE PIANO TEACHER (figured I may as well see what the Nobel fuss was about).

Jonathan & Faye Kellerman's DOUBLE HOMICIDE, although I'm not sure I'm going to like it. But I've read all his other adult novels, so... am willing to give it a try.

Amy Tan's THE OPPOSITE OF FATE, to see if her non-fiction is any better than her recent novels. (I loved JOY LUCK CLUB, liked many sentences in KITCHEN GOD but thought it was very flawed structurally, and haven't had the stomach to read books 3 and 4 although I have them in the to-be-read-stack).

Katherine Roberts's SPELLFALL, a British fantasy ya (whose opening reminded me of janni).

And finally, Dorothy Gilman's MRS. POLIFAX ONS AFARI, one of the series I hadn't yet read.

Then home for a nap before meeting my friend and birth mate, Eve (we were born in the same hospital two hours apart; wound up going to University together, where we were inthe same dormitory; wound up both moving to the same section of NYC after graduation, where our zip code was our mutual birthday, etc.).

Saturday Part 2

Saturday Evening was filled with New York Moments.

The best of which was when Eve and I were having dinner in Zen Palette in Union Square, and suddenly someone comes up to our table berrating us for not letting him know we were in town. Of course, last we knew, said person was living in DC, so we were as surprised to see him as he was to see us.

Marvin sat down at our table and it was as natural and as welcome as when we had first met him, in a different restaurant, what seems like a gazillion years ago when we all lived in NYC. Eve and I were having brunch at Magica, down on 12th Street, and Marvin, who was waiting tables there to pay off his MFA in dance, was exhausted, and sat down with us at our table to rest and chat. Much hilarity and hijinks ensued, including one moment when the boyfriend of one of the other waiters showed up and Marvin leaped through the window, hopped into the convertible, and the car took off with Marvin shouting "Your food's in the ktichen!" to the other table waiting to be served and José staring open-mouthed as his boyfriend drove off withthe wrong waiter from the restaurant.

They only went around the block, of course, but it was one of those moments where the timing was all just so perfect and hilarious.

So it was perfectly normal and New York for Eve and I to be so casually reunited with Marvin just a few hours after she flew in to the City and a few days after I flew back to the country.

And later in the evening I ran into the guy from Amsterdam who organized the queer Jewish conference I had such problems with how it was organized.

And also my friend Charles Flowers, who was throwing a party at the Gay and Lesbian Center for his queer journal BLOOM, but who when I showed up to try and say hello was on the dancefloor tangoing and I didn't want to interrupt...

And I got stood up by someone I don't know (and was ambivalent about meeting anyway), who a mutual acquaintance tried to put us in touch since we were both in NYC this weekend and he called and we made plans to talk again at 6pm to get together at 7pm and around 7:30pm I did finally hear from him, saying he was feeling jet-lagged and could we switch to tomorrow,which we can't since I have plans already for tomorrow (i.e. tonight). C'est la vie, but it was just one more thing in a tumultuous and exhausting Typical New York City day (tm).

So I stayed home to rest a bit, and read Nancy Willard's IN THE SALT MARSHES, which I'd bought last trip but didn't have time to read, not that I missed much since it didn't really have many (any?) of those wonderful moments her poems--and stories/essays/novels/etc.--usually hold for me, and also Gwen Strauss' collection of fairytale poems TRAIL OF STONES, which I was summarily underwhelmed by (if I'd read it before I'd forgotten), and a chapbook of ten villanelles I found on my shelves, none of which were worthwhile...