Manquake

I just got Doctor Zhivago in the mail. The envelope describes it as: A brilliant, epic film about a man and his mistress caught up in the manquake of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Manquake.

Plus the disc is two-sided. I've never had to flip before.

All in all, I'm very excited.

Dream

Last night I dreamt that I desperately needed to check my email, but instead of a keyboard there was only a bunch of little blue beanbags in the shapes of the letters. They were in a basket--like kids toys in the living room--and I had to search through to find the letters I needed. The worst part was that you could hardly tell what letter each bag was supposed to be, because they were really blobby. AND I couldn't remember my email passcode, so I kept having to do it over and over. Another weird thing was that the keyboard had been there but was lost by my bestfriend from childhood, Yamuna, who I haven't seen or talked to in about ten years. I think she came up with the beanbag idea to placate me. And then the beanbags worked. Or sort of.

Harper Darper

How is everyone?

In our fucking basement!

I don't want to freak anyone out by posting a picture. But google "water bug" and you will know my horror.

who the?! hey the?!

So I'm reading this novel by Mrs Gaskell and it's nearly 700 pages long and I'm totally into it and I'm all "What's going to happy with Molly and Roger?!" even though I know, really, what's going to happen with Molly and Roger, but I want to see it, you know, I mean because now I've been living with these people for nearly 700 pages, so I stay up til about 2 in the morning reading and reading and then I only have a few pages left and I turn the page and the last chapter is called "Note from the Cornhill Editors" and it turns out she never finished the book! She died. What the fuck!? Shouldn't there have been a warning label?

Tat

I don't know if you can see this. But half of this lovely tattoo is a line from my book. Holy crap! This is from the back of a student of NEG's. I think it's so cool and weird. He must be a really insiprational fucking teacher. I think I want to include it in my bio from now on. Like...her work has appeared in blah, blah, blah, and on the lower back of a young female co-ed at the University of Colorado, Denver. Or something like that. I haven't quite got the wording down yet.

Grrrr

I am CRANKY. And I have no friends here so I have to be cranky by myself (woe, woe!) or else be cranky with Marty who is at a meeting at 5:30pm on a Friday and therefore likely cranky himself.

So: I demand nonsensical stories. Gossip. Movie reviews. Etc. Get commenting!

Much love,
D

Who has the cutest niece? Me!

cmu has a blog!

I had no idea. It's oddly comforting to find these daily rambles online. I guess it feels a little like being near someone when you can't be near them really.

In other news: last night I dreamt that I was responsible for feeding all these small animals - like mice, sure, but also miniature horses and pigs, and dogs (only the small breeds). I fed them miniature vegetables - like cherry tomatoes, sure, but also very small bell peppers. Only it was clear all these animals were starving. And I didn't have enough of the tiny veg to go around. It was awful. At one point, a beagle grabbed (with his mouth) a fistful of tiny green bell peppers out of my hand. It sort of hurt.

Then this morning, M sang the whole Fat Albert song while we were drinking tea.

Lately

I spend too much time in my office and no time writing.

I see a lot of little girls on bikes. Their bikes are usually pink.

I'm into Johnny Cash.

Wine tastes gross.

I eat a lot of lentils.

The leaves are falling off our walnut tree and into our yard.

High School

Okay, this is neither here nor there, but I wanted to say, officially, that probably nothing makes me feel like I'm 16 again more than "Kiss Off" by the Violent Femmes. Now, if I was drunk in the backseat of a beater driving through an orange grove at night, all would be complete (PS - thank god I'm not 16 anymore).

Also, my new favorite word is keening.

What's up with you guys?

Spittlekings

All I do is look at words and I looked really fast a a bunch of words and thought I saw the word "Spittlekings" but I'm pretty sure I didn't and I can't even find the word that might have looked like Spittlekings to my tired eyeballs. Now I'm thinking...if Spittlekings was the name of a band, what kind of music would they play?

Last week one of the interns told me he read my book at it was "creepy."

Also, something's wrong with my computer at work. Whenever I go to blogger everything except that which I type is in some eastern European language, which reminds me...last week Marty put his head on the pillow and two second later I said "Is it ok if I open the window," and I guess he was already asleep because he said "You have to put the accent marks over his name."

Urbana

So my new favorite thing is to get a little bit tipsy after dinner and go for a bike ride with M just as the fireflies are starting to spark-up around the neighborhood. The streets are shady and dusky and green and I feel so floaty. We usually ride over to the High School and make big circle in the sloped (empty) parking lot and watch the bunnies in the soccer field. This morning and last there was a baby bunny in our back yard eating violets. I miss you guys. I wish you could come over and sit on the porch with me and help me decide what color to paint the front room.

Foxy

Last night, after the reading, on my drive home, about 10pm, I saw two foxes running across front lawns, sniffing the dirt and grass, crouching around car tires, one about three blocks away from the other. I'm tempted to think they were husband and wife foxes. The second one seemed much more feminine than the first. A more feminine snout (snoot?). I wonder if they have kid foxes somewhere squirreled away? Were they out gathering dinner for the family? Do they take home cats and birds? There are always so many missing cat signs in the neighborhood...the best sign I ever saw was for a cat named Sancho Panza. He was black and white and fluffy and fat and the night after I saw his sign on a telephone pole I had a dream that he was in my backyard (even though I don't have a backyard) and it was dark and I knew he was out there so I went outside and he was standing upright in the grass and he told me he didn't know where he was.

But the reading before the foxes was also very special. Christina and Julie rocked it, and J'Lyn knocked my socks off with her bird archive complete with a slide show of "found" dead birds. Her first publication just came out: Bear Stories in the new issue of Sleepingfish. I emailed her and told her I thought they were great and we got into a discussion of writing that sparkles, or sparkling too much, or not wanting to sparkle, or wanting to. I think we might define sparkly two different ways. She's worried about being too sparkly, I think. I kept pushing her, trying to get her to define exactly what she meant by sparkly, because I really want to know, but then she stopped answering my emails.

Battles

This evening, on the green-shingled roof next door, there was a battle between a hawk and a squirrel. The squirrel won (i.e., the hawk didn't carry the squirrel away in his talons). Needless to say, Dr. Spanglestein and I were glued to the window, our tails twitching in anticipation.

Two days ago I had a battle with the radiator. Just kidding, it jumped out and burned me for no real reason. Now I have a big, blistering sore on my calf. I'm hideous.

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread

I'm baking and planning what to have my students do for our last day of the semester. I think we'll play with fairy tales. A.S. Byatt writes: "The best single description I know of the world of the fairy tale is that of Max Luthi who describes it as an abstract world, full of discrete, interchangeable people, objects, and incidents, all of which are isolated and are nevertheless interconnected, in a kind of web or network of two-dimensional meaning." She goes on to say: "the fairy tale world is called up for me by the half-abstract patternings of Paul Klee, of the mosaic definition of Kandinsky's early 'Russian' paintings of horses and forests."

Oh, the buzzer just went off!

Here's the recipe. It's good.

3/4 cup sugar
3 tbl. vegetable oil
2 large free-range, vegetarian fed eggs
1 cup applesauce
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tbl. unsweetened cocoa powder
1 1/4 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups shredded zucchini
1/2 cup dark chocolate chips
cooking spray

1. Preheat the oven to 350
2. Place first 3 ingrediants in a large bowl; beat at low speed until well blended. Stir in applesauce.
3. Combine dry ingrediants (flour through salt) in a bowl and mix together. Add dry mixture to wet and stir until wet through (my favorite part). Stir in zucchini and chocolate chips.
4. Pour batter into a loaf pan coated with cooking spray. Cook at 350 for one hour or until a wooden toothpick inserted in center comes out almost clean. Cool in pan 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove and cool completely.

He's leaving

Not my cat. My cat's not going anywhere. He's stuck to me like cat glue. He's next to the laptop (practically on top of it) watching my fingers.

But Matthew Stadler's got stuff to say here about leaving Clear Cut to write. Among his comments (my favorite!), this one about my book: "newcomer Danielle Dutton's groundbreaking S P R A W L, a prose poem that jams Lisa Robertson's intelligence and music into a Jane Austen-ish scrutiny of the manner of being in those new landscapes we continue to call 'suburbs.'" Merci.

Speaking of S P R A W L, it looks like it'll be out next year, late-Winter.

Lutz

Saw Gary Lutz read last night. Heard Gary Lutz read last night. That thing about petalled words. Fantastic. At least two domes (convex). Lots of stalls, or stalling. Everyone talks about his sentences, but the stories themselves are really something else, in the best way (couldn't help it). A very nice person from Pennsylvania, just like my husband, but not actually like my husband (who had Halloween dreams last night...a party in the park near the creek, with torches, and sofas all over the grass). With him was Deb Olin Unferth, whose first book of stories comes out in July from McSweeney's. I'm ready! Now, they both teach in Lawrence, Kansas. Laurence? The only thing I know about that place is that fellow-Visalian Matt Suggs went there for school. Right?

Lately...

Books I've been reading or re-reading or reading around in lately: Pamela: a novel by Pamela Lu Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar An Alphabet for Gourmets by M.F.K. Fisher Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (one of the best books in the English language, PERIOD)

Music I've been listening to lately: Feist and Andrew Bird (thanks to Steve), Holopaw (thanks to Rowland), The Sea and Cake and Dntel (thanks to Mark, years ago), Iron & Wine (thanks to Karla...or was it Ethan?), Cat Power (thanks to Karla, fo sho), Stan Getz Bossa Nova (thanks to...Mom?), pretty violin music (thanks to my neighbor across the street)

What I've been watching: too much TV because I'm stressed out (I'm even Netflixing [a verb!?] old TV shows because I can't get enough TV on TV)