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.