Navigating Loss With Poetry

My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, has been on a roll lately with her poetry. Red Ochre Press has just published her chapbook "The Navigation of Loss." Order a copy here. The money goes to a good cause. 

Experimenting With Storify on Squarespace

Update: October 2024.

A note for posterity. Storify, like so many social media experiments back in the 2010s, died an abrupt death, taking about a dozen posts on this blog with it. The posts consisted of embedded tweets from staffers at The Times, using the @nytimes newsroom staff list on Twitter. from the heyday of Twitter, before Elon Musk came at the platform with a wrecking ball and even changed the name. I’m leaving this stub for posterity but deleting the blank posts that were part of this blogging experiment.

This Old Book: 'Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur'

Ah, Le Morte D’Arthur. This 1970s paperback has been kicking around my collection since high school. I probably bought it after viewing "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," one of the first movies I was allowed to see in a theater without adult accompaniment.

Needless to say, Malory is not really as entertaining. I'm with Dennis the Constitutional Peasant: "Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government."

This edition of Malory has a glossary. For example, the questing beast "has the head of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the buttocks of a lion, and the feet of a hart. From its belly issues the sound of thirty pairs of yapping hounds. It is never brought to earth."

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

Poetry Reading on the Lower East Side

More literary news: My wife Jane Rosenberg LaForge will be the featured poet at a reading from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 16, 2012, at JujoMukti Tea Lounge, 211 East 4th St. (between Avenues A and B). The event is part of the Spoken Word Sundays series hosted by the poet George Wallace, the writer-in-residence at Walt Whitman's Birthplace and the first poet laureate of Long Island. 

Music and Verse

If you like handmade music and poetry, this might be your thing. Have a listen: A Los Angeles musician, Thair Peterson, has set some of my wife's poetry to music.

Some Publishing News

My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, has won a Red Ochre Press chapbook competition, had a story published this week at Fiction 365 and was nominated by her small press publisher for a Pushcart Prize for one of her poems. She will be participating at a free reading in New York on Saturday, Oct. 20, 2012.

Returning to Stumptown

​Last Sunday, I rode my bike up to Stumptown in Manhattan to pick up some beans. Stumptown's coffee selections are the most consistently good -- and expensive -- around. The vibe in the place is a wee bit hipster-precious.

The baristas wear old timey hats. There are no chairs. It's cash-only, and the lines are frequently trailing out into the Ace Hotel lobby (above).

But if you can get past all that, you're in for a treat. I've been drinking these two all week; the descriptions are on the mark. Personally, I give the edge to the Guatemala Bella Vista.

This Old Book: 'The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes'

I have a bunch of these Calvin and Hobbes books, purchased when Bill Watterson was still creating the strip for newspapers. Part of me wishes he were still plugging away as a cartoonist, but I respect Watterson for hanging it up while the strip was still a perfect work of art, fresh, funny and not tired, the way so many other strips get in their old age. He is sort of the J.D. Salinger of newspaper comics. Attempts to track him down have become something of a genre. He’s not that hard to find, but I imagine he’s tired of talking about something he did years ago.  At least we have the various collections, including this one from 1990. I re-read them every now and then, and my daughter has recently been absorbed by them. I think it’s cool that she is being entertained by a great and funny work of art that I myself loved and bought a decade before she was born. I do wonder if she’s caught on that I learned most of my parenting style from Calvin’s father.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Ian Shoales' Perfect World'

I fondly remember the National Public Radio of the 1980s, especially "All Things Considered," because it kept me awake on so many long automobile trips in the wilds of Maryland, Pennsylvania and upstate New York. I must have bought this book after hearing a commentary on the show from Ian Shoales, a member of Duck's Breath Mystery Theater. I'm not entirely sure that it was clear to me at first that he was the fictional creation of Merle Kessler. After a blast of cynical commentary, his trademark sign-off was "I gotta go."  In later years, Kessler has written articles, performed on KQED radio, local theater on the West Coast, kept a blog, and even done some recent podcasting. I can't say that this Reagan-Cold War-era book has aged all that well. So much in our culture, world and society was about to change. A lot of the references seem stale or frozen in time. What might have seemed edgy then has been rendered mild in this age of "The Daily Show," Sean Hannity and The Onion. It is a window on a forgotten era.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

An Update on the Coffee Situation

The Krups Espressaria full automatic espresso machine. 

Earlier this year, we moved to Chelsea, and now live I within in a couple of blocks of Cafe Grumpy. It is among the best, if not the best, place for coffee in Manhattan. That has made me exceptionally lazy about seeking out new coffee shops. When I lived in Midtown, I had no choice but to hop on my bike or the subway to get good beans and a cafe vibe.

A couple of months before we moved, my refurbished Jura machine jammed up in some way, and I didn't have time to deal with it. Half of our stuff was in storage while the real estate agents, lawyers, condo boards and bankers toyed with us.

When the dust settled, I decided to treat myself to a Christmas present, this Krups machine. I like some things about it more than the Jura, but it requires a lot more regular attention and cleaning. The bean and water containers seem smaller.

But the more pressing matter right now is that I am almost out of Heartbreaker.  It's time to head to Grumpy.

Poetry and Prose at Sparks Art Center

My wife, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, and three other writers, Lisa Marie Basile, Britt Gambino,​​​ and Jim Meirose will read their poetry and prose from 7 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 20, 2012, at the Sparks Art Center, 161 West 22​nd St., in Chelsea. All four read their work there in 2010. Jane is promoting her new book.

The Cat Is Not Amused

I took this shot of our cat, Zeka, to test the Squarespace app for the iPhone. She is a 9-month-old Siberian, still just a kitten. I've also posted a shot of her watching the Olympics openings ceremony.

This Old Book: 'The Straight Dope'

Before Snopes and Wikipedia, before the Web itself, there was The Straight Dope by Cecil Adams, a column of “answers to the questions that torment everyone.” Was it true what they said about Catherine the Great and the horse? Why does hair turn gray? How do they get the stripes into toothpaste? How come you never see baby pigeons? Does water go counter-clockwise down the drain in the southern hemisphere? The column started in 1973 in the Chicago Reader, but I’m pretty sure I first came across it in a local weekly in Ithaca (possibly The Grapevine), and later in the Baltimore City Paper. The copyright page on this paperback is dated 1984. As of this post, the column is still published, and is available on the Web, but in an age when any and all trivia is at our fingertips, it feels a bit beside the point. Cecil did have an engaging and combative prose style that was entertaining, though his true identity remains a mystery. Many, including Wikipedia, suspect the writer is the man identified as his “longtime editor,” Ed Zotti. 

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.

This Old Book: 'Labyrinths'

No library is complete without some Borges. I obtained this 1964 edition at a used bookshop on the recommendation of a friend who was going through a Borges phase in college. Someone I don’t know wrote an inscription in the cover to someone else I don’t know, dated 1986. A doomed romance or friendship. Upon review, the text seems more oblique than I recall. From a piece called “The Immortal”:

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal. I have noted that, in spite of religions, this conviction is very rare. Israelites, Christians and Moslems profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment. The wheel of certain Hindustani religions seems more reasonable to me; on this wheel, which has neither beginning nor end, each life is the effect of the preceding and engenders the following, but none determines the totality… Indoctrinated by a practice of centuries, the republic of immortal men had attained the perfection of tolerance and almost that of indifference. They knew that in an infinite period of time, all things happen to all men. Because of his past or future virtues, every man is worthy of all goodness, but also of all perversity, because of his infamy in past or future.

This Old Book started as a Tumblr, which is also archived on Palafo.com. These are books that have survived many purges from my shelves over decades, with a few comments about why I have held onto them.