typing with one hand. I was a finalist. I didn’t win.

okay I fell on a rainy pavement coming out of bookpeople in Austin where I had just been signing books and had an interview with the dallas morning news and had met june and her daughter nikki, we agreed to meet later for dinner, I walked out and came down off a curb on my left foot, slipped, broke left wrist in 2 places, bashed face on left side. off to trauma center in ambulance. june and nikki came and did all sorts of heroic driving in rainy Austin traffic to get my prescriptions get me to hotel and left me w/ hot tea and painkillers.

I ordered chili poblano soup from room service, it was the crappiest soup I ever ate. insult to injury. acid green lichen-like slime. and I had to eat that shit with one hand.

so I drove home next day after I gave reading and signed boox with black eye and emergency cast (yes I actually did, there are witnesses) and then drove home in rainstorm w/ june ahead of me, started fishtailing and spun out on hiway 483 ?? landed in arms of a big cedar, people stopped, got truck back on road, I went on home. drving w one hand leads to various disasters but the point of all this is I made it to n.y. for all the hoopla for nba. this with a grim black eye like the eye of sauron and arm in a cast.

my editor jen brehl and agent liz darhansoff deserve endless accolades and heartfelt thanks for all they did for this book, their kindness all around, and ESPECIALLY since liz had to help me put in my earrings and jen had to cut up my food. Fijate! that is true friendship.

got to stay with liz in her apartment on riverside drive and be driven around in limos!! also my bluegrass group sent me a video of them all yelling good luck! do I deserve all this, I ask myself.

statue of Eleanor Roosevelt riverside drive, liz’ ap’t one of the buildings behind.

voila riverside drive plus park body of water adjacent is the Hudson

one of the cool little elderly buildings surviving intact on r’side drive between huge ap’t bldgs., these are all off bing images.

liz a most amiable companion and good walker, we had a wonderful walk down the park alongside the Hudson ab’t two miles. I have pics of the awards dinner on my phone which I lost and then refound will post them when I get Harold t come help me. lunch w/ HarperCollins people was so nice. amazed at champagne toast from all to me! jen brehl you are amazing person and great editor. and so on I went, floundering from event to event w/ grimy cast and makeup plastered over black eye.

for the awards dinner I cut the cuff off a black sock and put it over cast, jen helped stick rhinestones on it.

so many events and harper Collins supplied limo for all, went up and down west side parkway a gazillion times (a gazillion is the total of the u.s. national debt plus five and a bag of chips).

that’s me at the reading for all finalists held at auditorium of new school for social research and I am laying down the law about something or at least the captain is, probably ‘you will fight with each other on your own time and not during my reading’. note they selected a color for the graphics to match my sweater.

some time later will include more stuff. a short time w/ Gordon lish, far too short, which reminded me why I absolutely love the guy, his stream-of -consciousness gossip is revelatory, heartening, I could have listened for hours.

lish. great image. stole it from numerocinq.com.

this was for congratulations for being a finalist NBA. is it cool or what/  one-handed typing here.

will keep this blog up better now that traveling is over. at the reading tues. nite in n.y. November 15th afterwards a big tall guy came up with five copies notw for me to sign — he had a great n.y. accent. he said he was a retired teacher and ‘I read your blog all the time’. I am continually astonished at the people who read this diaristic rambling thing but here’s to you, tall n.y. guy with cool accent. and twigman jim too.

This is the crest of the 141st regiment 36th division of the texas national guard, jim’s home regiment. he was very proud of it. the 141st was unstrumental in the fight for monte casino and was sent on the disastrous foray across the rapido river at the base of the mountain. few survived. one was jim’s friend Charlie meuth, another was audie murphy. jim joined in high school 1952.

Whatever happens, it is a great honor.

Much traveling and dealing with requests for short things to be written, taxes, the hot water heater is out and had David Mazurek come and fix it, they are such a great little firm here in Utopia. Now have hot water again. Meeting Charles Frazier and the gang at Malaprop was truly fun. Fun can be hard to come by in this world. At least I got back in time to to go to choir and cantata practice, it is so calming. Picking up books in bookstores where I am asked to read is a joy.

This is an important book,  Get hold of it any way you can. Hilarity will ensue. Many dire warnings. Heed them.

They have got the Caprock now for the wall at the city park. It is looking good. Chris Chism has his food trailer almost ready, it is painted turquoise and the lights are strung across the food garden area and he and his dad went down to Hubble near Houston and got a second-hand walk-in freezer and with the help of a squadron of large strong guys got it in Wayne’s pickup and hauled back all the way to Utopia. This is going to be good. It is in a large empty lot (I remember when there was a house there, Bill Keller tore it down about four years ago, Bill Keller has a construction/destruction company, local, and is also a great baritone). (I wish he were in the cantata). But there are two or three large beautiful trees there, one of them a Chinquapin oak and with lights strung up all through the trees it is going to be fabulous.

That is all.

Just to be longlisted is a great honor!

Thank you to all the people at Harper Collins who worked so hard to publicize this book, starting with Lead Read, all the rich and subtle visuals put together by the art department. My editor Jennifer Brehl was tireless in promoting it, and so here we are on the long list! And so onward!

Well done! The Harper Collins art department has made some great choices in terms of tones, color combinations, spacing etc. with all of the assets around launching this book.

Picking on the Porch photos by Hattie Barham.  Been trying to deal with Facebook but it is so frustrating.

Chuck Crane, mandolin player and fearless leader.

So many people tell me they can’t sing but  one can learn to play an instrument and music is joy. Producing music is joy. Being a listener, that’s fun too but making it is far more, well, joyful.

A recent discussion brought this book to mind. It has been over ten years since I read it, I think, but it is one of those unknown classics.

Not a good cover since it is a memoir of urban life, NYC, at the turn of the last century, written with passion, loving remembrances, the frustrations and furies of growing up the son of recent immigrants in particular and the questions children always have in general. It is replete with images of a vanished world. These children were not saturated with images, propaganda, advertising, hectoring and canned music at every turn. A street life, a neighborhood where everybody knew everybody else and got into everybody else’s business for good or for ill. Roth’s biography was written by Steve Kellman, titled Redemption, and it  is also good.

In the new dystopian series I am in some way trying to create a vital street life as portrayed in Call It Sleep.  (What an awful title). Most dystopian narratives portray a beaten, dull populace crushed by the presence of The Authorities but I felt it would be far more true to life to find the liveliness in the urban dystopia. In The Fifth Circle there is a young guy in the prison who had managed to evade the Soviet authorities for two years, without an ID, or residence permit, internal passport etc. and was determined to escape and do it again. Street life is so ad hoc. Inventive.

Roth runs into the problem of dialect — how to portray it, what orthography? He tries to recreate it in spelling, which is a solution that has its own problems but it works. It sounds to me very New York but then I am no expert on New York speech.

     Sophe-e! Above him the cry. Sophe-e!

     Ye-es mama-a! from a girl across the street.

     Comm opstehs! Balt!

     Awaa! 

     Balt or I’ll give you! Nooo!

     With a rebellious shudder the girl began crossing the street. The window slammed down. Pushing a milk-stained rancid baby carriage before them, squat buttocks waddled past, one arm from somewhere dragging two reeling children, each hooked by its hand to the other, each bouncing against the other and against their mother like tops, flagging and whipped. (Me; tops are spun by whipping with a cord) A boy ran in front of the carriage. It rammed him.

     Ow! Kentcha see wea yuh goin? He rubbed his ankle. …

     Ahead of him, flying toward the shore beyond the East River, shaggy clouds trooped after their van. And across the river the white smoke of nearer stacks was flattened out and stormy as though the stacks were the funnels of a flying ship. …At the doorway to the cheder corridor he stopped and cast one lingering glace up and down the street…He’d better go in before the rest of the Rabbi’s pupils came. He turned and trudged through the dim battered corridor. The yard was gloomy. Wash-poles creaked and swayed, pullleys jangled. In a window overhjead a bulky bare-armed woman shrilled curses at someone behind her and hastily hauled in the bedding that straddled the sills like bulging sacks.

     And your guts be plucked! Her words rang out over the yard. Couldn’t you tell me it was raining? 

This is Labor Day weekend, a long weekend and so the people who fly the hang-gliders are flying over my ridge. I have tried repeatedly to get good pictures of them but have not succeeded. This has been the rainiest August on record, a friend tells me. Photographer here day before yesterday to take photo and I probably looked terrible but then one always thinks that.

I will get the schedule up as soon as possible. Looks like I will have to be gone from home for two weeks! Auriel will take care of Gradycat, I am hoping to leave Buck and El Donko in Evelyn and Pat’s pasture down on the Seventy and Girl Dog? Haven’t figured that out yet. It all begins the first of October; first to Asheville NC, then Houston, the Minneapolis, then St. Louis. From St. Louis down to PB with Susan and Mark and then Susan and I will get our Ozark Trail ride in, a little early. Then home.

Of course you want to know what this is. Okay. The roundish object is one of the moons of Saturn, named Daphnis. Daphnis is about five miles in diameter. In the rings of Saturn, there is a gap of clear space. It is called the Keeler Gap.  This is a computer simulation of Daphnis sailing along in the Keeler Gap. You are richer for this, you know. Your mind has been expanded. Woooooooo.

Picture or photo by Kevin Gill/Flicker.

Looking forward to an e-conversation with Tracy Chevalier, an interview with an editor at Kirkus, opening the launch in Houston October 4th, a reading in Asheville NC, introduced by Charles Frazier (really looking forward to that), then Minneapolis, then from there fly to St. Louis the 13th for Left Bank books, then 4 days riding with Susan in the Ozarks, then home. It’s going to be a pressed, busy trip but I think I will be okay.

The video is up at newsoftheworldbook.com. I love it.

Haven’t been riding for a month except one day a week ago, when it was so hot, got on for 15 minutes but both Buck and I thought, ‘this sucks’ and turned around. Then all of a sudden, I think it was, August 11th, Thursday, after it had been 102 F. for a week, the rains came. The temperature dropped to the eighties, so far have had five inches or so. I am working down in the pasture when I can, clearing an area, it’s like landscaping or interior decorating. Exterior decorating. I am making a good place for the equines under two very large, old cedars.

The music group is going to have to do without Chuck for September. Working on my piano scales. Started a new work about a quartet in the post-apocalypse. What good is singing when the world is collapsing? Answer; a great deal.

The thing about inventing a world for sci-fi or dystopia is that the writer loses all that wealth and complexity of dialect and jokes and songs and references and slang that makes up much of our daily life. And you can’t invent that without it sounding false, so you must do without it, and your dystopian world is fall less rich in language and reference than that of a historical novel. Unless you have characters that incessantly refer back to the ‘old world’ — i.e. ‘this ancient song, called I Ain’t Got No Satisfaction’ etc. but that gets heavy and forced after a while.

Lovely, lovely rain.