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After bandying around quite a few possibilities, I finally found my spring vacation, a yoga retreat to Guatemala. When I told my pal, who’d heard each of my previous trip ideas—all good none great—she said, “Now that sounds like a Nick vacation,” and I knew there was no turning back. I was equally excited and terrified, the two ingredients that make the most enjoyable and meaningful adventures for me.

I am going alone, which is usually no problem, except this time I’m going alone but with people. I’m meeting about fifteen or so strangers there, the lucky one to be my roommate. Yoga is twice a day, early morning and early evening. Have I mentioned I suck at yoga, that yoga is a physical workout but more than that it’s a mental challenge unlike anything I’ve ever encountered? I have a seven-day date to waltz with my demons while twisting my body into positions that are actually natural but that have been strayed from for over thirty years of habitually trying to mask, hide, and avoid pain, and while doing this, I have to breathe, breathe, breathe. I hope the volcanoes are as imposing and inspiring as the pictures, the lake as majestic as it appears, the setting a cradle to hold me.

I have put a great deal of trust in my teacher, Janet, and she’s earned it after two years of picking me up, consoling me, guiding me in times of struggle. Hers was the first class I ever attended as part of my journey into yoga. It was Friday night mellow flow class, happy hour and a half. I remember being surprised to find an actual DJ in a yoga class and as much laughter as sweat. When my girlfriend and I broke up a few weeks later that Friday night class became my refuge, Janet’s words my salve. It was the one night that I didn’t have to make plans to fill the space and distract myself, an activity I could do alone but with others, a place where I learned to put down the memories of what was, the story of what I hoped could be–it was remarkable actually, that without those two things constantly clouding up my head, the weight of suffering was lifted, if only for a moment.

It was a similar feeling, not nearly as devastating as this time in 2008, but similar in what I’ve now come to recognize as the need to return my attention, energy, and focus to me that opened my ears. And so it was, on a Friday night in February, after months of listening to Janet mention her upcoming yoga retreat that I finally heard her, the invitation became personal and the idea lodging itself inside me, the potential expanding. In the end, it was one word, one explanation, that sold me:

Rasayana. The path to rejuvenation.

There are terms I often use to rationalize and justify my actions, like deserve. Used in a sentence: I deserve this vacation because I haven’t taken a trip since Turkey last April, I work 6- 7 days a week between my book and can’t remember the last time I took more than 3 days off of both. But “deserve” doesn’t work so well for me—I think it encourages me to beat myself up so that I will deserve my reward. Permission is another term, a therapy word, and it’s a tiny bit better. Used in a sentence: I am giving myself permission to blow a shit-ton of money, more than I’ve ever spent on a vacation, staying in hotels rather than hostels, and pampering myself for no reason at all. Permission lacks the “because” element, which makes it more of a skill, and although crucial to my life, it’s not the perfect word.

I like “rejuvenation.” Used in a sentence: I am taking a vacation to rejuvenate myself so that I can return fresh, strong, and grounded to the things I love—waking up before dawn to write my book, going out and being social with my friends, pursuing new relationships, and doing a decent-enough job at my workplace.

Aside from the yoga there will also be the pleasure that I find in every trip, like the time to read. Although this trip is too short to truly develop a travel booklist (I’m even breaking one of my rules and bringing library books) I packed: Robin and Ruby (K.M. Soehnlein)–the new novel by my friend and teacher that I’m ridiculously excited to read; Franny and Zooey (J.D. Salinger) because Salinger’s death triggered my return to his brilliance and reading short books in one sitting is a favorite vacation pastime; Happy Baby (Stephen Elliot) and Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins) as dependable back-ups; and finally, my book, or manuscript in-progress.

It’s sitting right next to me, 200+ pages printed and bound with a large clip, scaring the living bejesus out of me. I am not bringing my computer and will not write/revise my manuscript while I’m gone, but I have promised myself I will read the whole thing. It’s necessary and it’s time. I haven’t looked at this book holistically in years, or ever really, certainly not in any form resembling this current draft. I’ve spent the last several months immersed in the first 6 chapters and now, as I turn to the last 6, I can barely remember what I got down on paper when I first drafted them this past summer/fall. It is part of the rejuvenation, of both my writing process and my book’s narrative to take in the whole story for another big push, the one final push. I do not know what I will find when I read 65,000 of my words and I am truly afraid to find out.

But it is the unexpected that holds the excitement and terror, the adventure. What will it feel like to be outside my comfort zone in Guatemala? Who will I meet, connect with, what conversations will inspire and move me? How will my body and mind feel, starting and ending every day will yoga, feeding it with nourishing food? How will being transgender change my travel experience, my perspective, from that of all my previous trips? What will fill my journal, my blank composition book—will my words come from the triggers in my pocket notebook, the projects I’m currently in the middle of, or will they be fresh and new, born from the present. Will I desperately need to hit publish and share my words with you? What will enter the space once I create it? What will rejuvenate me?

Paul Auster has written fifteen novels and claims he doesn’t know why he writes. But he knows why I do…

“I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. When young people say I want to be a novelist, I’d say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won’t make any money, you probably won’t become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive. You have to have a tremendous taste for solitude. I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else. On the other hand, when I am writing, even though it’s hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I’m not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I’m not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic. I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn’t without that pen in your hand. It’s a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words—but only when you’re writing. You can’t do it in your head. There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don’t know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.”

-Paul Auster (from The Rumpus interview)

On Thursday, I went to see Nick Hornby “in conversation” with Dave Eggers as part of the City Arts & Lectures series. This is some of what I learned:

1. Writing is a great profession because you can wear ripped jeans on stage and still charge people $20 to come see you.
2. There are people over the age of fifty in the San Francisco.
3. Nick Hornby was so moved by a short story in Granta (by Lynn Barber) that he adapted it as the screenplay for the newly released, “An Education.”
4. The phrase “tonal shift” and the permission and encouragement to be both funny and serious in my own book.
5. Writing doesn’t need to be inaccessible to be deep and meaningful.
6. Writers are fidgety, nervous, and spend more time not writing and hating themselves for it than actually writing.
7. I should probably re-read “Of Mice and Men” and pick up something by Roddy Doyle.
8. There is NOTHING objective about art.
9. Authors can and do make a concrete financial impact on our society when they contribute to anthologies and lectures series for which the proceeds go to education and non-profit organizations.
10. Authors whose first books are memoirs can have illustrious careers as novelists.

Don’t think I’ve forgotten. It’s been on my mind for days, weeks, almost a month. I owe you this post, a reflection on the books I did in fact bring and read on my trip to Turkey, the conclusion to my pre-departure post, ”Developing the Travel Booklist.”

What I packed:  Snow (Orhan Pamuk), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz), The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan), The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson).

What I bought: The White Tiger (Arvind Adiga)

Reading in Turkey: The Reflections of a Traveling Book Whore

Things got off to a bad start. You could even say I blew it. The plan was to finish my library copy of Snow (Orhan Pamuk), a political novel fictionalizing the very real tensions surrounding religion, the State, the West, class, and gender in modern Turkey, before departure. For a variety of reasons, including my dwindling lack of interest in this depressing, humorless story, I had to purchase and bring my own copy, spending the first few days of the trip whining, “I just want this book to end.” Although it did give me some desired context for Turkey, I wish I’d gone with (and am currently reading) Birds Without Wings (Louis de Bernierres) for my ”destination-specific” book.

On the five hour bus ride from Gallipoli to Effesus, I fell in love with Oscar, the protagonist who didn’t get as much page time as I would’ve liked, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). What can I say: some of the most inspired original sentences every written, 100 nuanced ways to describe Dominican (and Haitian) women, a plethora of SAT words, New Jersey (where a quarter of my heart lives), and in my opinion, too many points of view that read more like linked short stories than a sustained narrative. I’ve bookclubbed the shit out of this novel with friends and writers alike, and one of the aspects I remain most impressed by is the healthy infusion of Spanish. Not only is it natural for the characters, a gift offering an extra layer of meaning for the bilingual, and clear enough for monolingual readers, it also, without turning me off, made me feel a little stupid for being an American (and a Californian) who doesn’t speak Spanish — a welcome feeling.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan) – This was the “educational” addition to my travel library, and educate it did, linking together the various things I’ve read and learned about the last 50 plus years of Israel-Palestine history in one book. The vehicle is the interweaving narratives of two people, Dalia and Bashir, and the house they both call home. I thought this book of “serious nonfiction” would take me forever to read, but it took only a few days since reading it became more important than being a tourist. This book also provided me with one of my favorite travel feelings, a sensation of, “I don’t give a damn about those must-see sites; I don’t have to go to work today; I don’t have a cell phone; sex is not an option – all I need is a comfortable seat and decent lighting.”

The Lemon Tree is literary nonfiction at its absolute best — sickly researched and beautifully told. Do you have any idea how hard that is to do? I heard the author, Sandy Tolan, speak at a narrative journalism conference once, and he said that if a person is 6′ 3″ and the doorframe is 6′0″, as an author he would not draw conclusions and write the line, the person “ducked when he entered the room,” unless someone was there to witness and record that moment. While I think his adherence to “fact” is over the top (which is why I write memoir), I’m thoroughly impressed by it, and forever in awe of those who who rock the literary nonfiction world. (The Devil in the White City, Erik Larsen is another impressive one.)

I only needed a book for the flight back and had two choices left: My copy of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson) and my brother’s copy of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakami), a memoir that might have appealed to me more if I hadn’t already read his long essay, excerpted from this short memoir, in the New Yorker. My brother, clearly and expectedly, did not put enough thought into his travel booklist. He brought too many books thinner than a slice of New York pizza, would read one in a day, and then be stuck trading it in for the best of the 6 books at the hostel exchange. And, I was kind of a dick, only willing to loan him Snow and the Bill Bryson book, which he read and kept saying, “You know, it’s about a guy growing up in the 50’s. It’s kinda funny. If you want to read a book about a kid in the 50’s, you’ll like it.” I didn’t and sorry, Bill, you are funny, and I know you’re prolific, but you gotta offer me better than a one in four chance of a good read.

I thought some good magazines could carry me home, so I searched the Amsterdam airport on my layover for the New Yorker (I also brought and read two backissues, cover-to-cover on the trip, something I never have the time to do at home. And I even brought a John McPhee essay about lacrosse from an older issue for Bro – which means I’m not that big of a dick, right?) Anyways, the New Yorker cost $15 there — seriously. So, I did something I’ve never done in my whole entire life: I bought a book at an airport.

One of the things I forgot to mention while developing the travel booklist is the enjoyment I take from perusing foreign bookstores (or airport bookstores in foreign countries, if you will) where bestseller lists, awards, national interests, and the sensibility of the reading public are different from those in America. To conclude my international reading adventure, I picked up White Tiger (Arvind Adiga), the Man Booker Prize (British Award) winning novel that seemed to be in every European tourist’s hand, written by an author who has duel Indian and Australian citizenship. The novel is a very quick read, which gives the illusion of it being a Sue Grafton paperback mystery when really it’s a darkly humorous commentary on class or caste, upward mobility, entrepreneurship, globalization and modernization in India. This book carried me home and through my first sleepless night with jetlag.

 All in all, this was a very successful reading trip.

I’m going to Turkey in a few weeks (to travel with my brother). Woohoo! My favorite part of preparing for a trip is the month before when I research, evaluate, plan, review, and finalize my reading list. I have always seen traveling not so much as an opportunity to see another country, but as an opportunity to carry large heavy books around another country, and to read for hours and days on end, uninterrupted by the distractions of city living. While developing a reading list may not seem as hard as nuclear physics, it actually is; there are a great deal of  factors to consider, some mathematical equations to work out, bookstores to visit, people to talk to. The only rule that goes without saying is no hardbacks. Here are some other bits of advice.

1) No library books, no borrowed books from friends. The freedom to ruin a book — to spill foreign sauces on the cover, squash the whole thing into the side pocket of cargo pants, or use the opening pages (the title page, table of contents, author’s note) as stationary — is crucial. However, I also consider the possibility of ownership should the book make it back to the States in one piece. As a rabid library patron, I buy approximately one in every four books I read, so it’s nice to think about how a puchased book would look on my bookshelf. It’s also good to buy newish books for which there is a very long waiting list at the library.

2) A travel book list is like a good mix CD; books need to work together. Usually, this means a selection of mixed genre (novel, narrative nonfiction, memoir, possibly an essay or short story collection). It’s a good idea to change up voice and style, to bring a book with a humorous tone and one that is educational. Within genre, it’s also best to diversify and never bring more than one family saga, one Russian author, one magical realist, you get the gist. The only time I read two books by the same author (Milan Kundera) was when I couldn’t seem to leave the Czech Republic and read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I’m sure you can see how this happened.

3) This brings me to reading destination-specific literature. For Turkey, I’m already going on the country’s most famous contemporary author, Orhan Pamuk. Because Nobel Prize winners (as well as canonical authors) scare me, I decided to start with his novel, Snow, thinking it would be easier to read than his nonfiction. I’m about a quarter of the way in, and if Pamuk manages to use the word “Snow” less than 200 times, I’ll consider reading the nonfiction, Istanbul.

4) It’s okay to take risks on the booklist. While there is NOTHING worse than being stuck in a bus station for 6 hours with the feeling, “I’m just not that into my book,” there’s always the possibility of putting it down and picking up another book in the pack. That’s why you should always put one extra book in, just in case there’s an unanticipated throwaway. That said, because there can be 6 hours of reading time available, challenging books may be tackled. For example, I’m not sure I could handle Catch-22 in spurts on my daily commute, but stuck for two days on a Croatian island in a rainstorm, I pounded through it. If the trip is long enough, it is generally a good idea to bring at least one classic, and by classic, I don’t mean total agony like the Scarlet Letter or the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I mean a classic like Catch-22.

5) Here’s where the math comes in. You want the average book length to be 300 pages, with no more than half the books coming in at exactly 300 pages. Bringing a 500 pager is super important. When it comes to that moment, which for me is usually after the first day, when you’re thinking, “Seen one mosque, seen ’em all,” you need a good excuse, like “I’m at a really good part in my book,” to avoid sightseeing and spend the entire day in the hostel. Travelling also offers the opportunity, almost unheard of at home, to have that unique experience of reading an entire book in one sitting, totally losing yourself in it. I had that experience reading Michelle Tea’s Valencia on a long train ride from Amsterdam to Slovenia.

6) Which brings me to: Don’t leave home without a queer book. Seriously, if you’re going to be surrounded by straight people, it’s sanity-building to have an escape. Old standbys are Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters. If you know your queer book is heavy on the adult content, it’s best to wait until you have your own hostel or guesthouse room to start it.

7) It’s a nice idea, for longer trips at least, to go with a known quantity. Pick your favorite author and hit the backlog. Think of it like a security blanket. I often travel with a John Irving or Paul Auster book for this reason.

Stack the odds in your favor. This means it’s not enough just to pick the right book. You’ve got to pick editions with readibility in mind. I’m talking about more than a tight narrative. I’m talking about eyesight. Bus rides are bumpy, lighting in hostels can suck, eyes strain after hours of reading, yellowing pages are hard to focus on (as are the white pages of the Xeroxed books that are the staple of the SE Asian market). This may be the reason I have to hold off on Lolita for this trip. My copy is just not up to travel standards.

9) Don’t chisel your list in stone. If someone hands you a must-read book, take it, read it. The only thing that might suffer is your back (that’s why trading is a good idea, just make sure the books are of equal merit). The joy in the travel booklist is the same as the joy of travelling. It’s not what you actually accomplish; it’s the process.

10) Remember that you can always go back to a country and see the sights. But you never know when you’ll get another chance to read that special book in that country.

My potential list 

I haven’t done the math or weighed the books, and I’m only going for two weeks, so I don’t think I can take them all. But this is my longer list for the upcoming trip.

• The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy)
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz)
• The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (Sandy Tolan)
• Lighthousekeeping (Jeanette Winterson)
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Bill Bryson)
• Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (Barbara Kingsolver)
• Istanbul (Orhan Pamuk)

I’ll take suggestions, but make a strong case for why your book should be included on my travel booklist.

I rarely read books twice, but I recently picked up a copy of Augusten Burrough’s, Dry, from the library for a second go around.

“Why would pick that one again? My friend, a voracious re-reader of high quality literature, asked.

“Because I want to figure out how to write mass-market best-selling page-turning crap.” I said. “I’m looking for inspiration”

My MFA cost too much money for an answer like that, but it was the truth. By page 70, I wanted to chuck the book out the window. It reads like a skeletal screenplay with some decent one-liners. I did learn how much a good joke can mask a bad description and how much a tight narrative can mask pages and pages of generic dialogue. It’s actually been a long time since I’ve read bad, yet totally competent writing. And the book couldn’t have been that awful. I cried around page 175, although it should be known I also cry during Lifetime movies.

Sadly, the book was an inspiration to me. I don’t remember the last time I put down a book and felt capable of writing my own publishable book. I can do what he does; I really can; I may even be able to do it better.

Lately, I’ve had many discussions about the difference between ”gay” and “queer.” I think (and hope) that the book I’m working on someday enters the conversation on this subject. While I may be writing somewhat of a transgender “coming out” story, I’m also attempting to capture my transition from gay to queer and the larger queer community I feel part of. I think I do a pretty good job of describing/showing the distinguishing aspects of these two groups, at least as I experience them. And although the following quote expresses some of my own sentiments, I am pleased that I say it differently. (There’s nothing worse than reading something and feeling like somebody has already said exactly what I’m going to). I read the following at lunch today and wanted to share it. It’s from a new book (that I’ve been waiting a long time for), Intersex (for lack of a better word), by Thea Hillman, a great local writer.

“‘Gay’ is women loving women and men loving men who want to be recognized as couples and be able to get the same rights and privileges as straight couples. Gays read Out magazine, cry at Gay Pride marches, watch Queer as Folk, and think that bisexual and transgender people are ruining everyone’s chances to be perceived as normal. They believe that if we could all just act normal, we’d get good jobs, be able to get married, and earn enough money to shop at Pottery Barn. Gays wear gold.

‘Queer’ is men who use to be girls who love other queer girls, and boyish girls who only date other boyish girls who behave in a couple as if they are both gay men. Queer is getting off on leather or latex or polyamory, or acknowledging that there are more than two genders. Queer is understanding that gay rights are linked to all other movements for dignity and equality: women’s rights, disability rights, indigenous rights, and workers’ rights. Queers do not shop at the Gap; they protest the Gap. They wear platform heels, work boots, facial piercings, glitter, and tight tank tops. Queers wouldn’t wear gold even if they could afford it.”

While everyone around me is bemoaning Sarah Palin and fretting over the crumbling economy, so much so that the war in Iraq has been forgotten for a few moments, I am obsessed with neither the upcoming election nor government bailouts, but with the death of David Foster Wallace. And by obsessed, I mean that thoughts of him–his writing, his apparent suicide, his depression, his literary brilliance, his iconicity–have been occupying a large space in my head.

I didn’t know the guy, never heard him speak, and haven’t even read much of him. Back in 2001, I did have a roommate who read “Infinite Jest,” a process that I remember as full of breaks followed by the pronouncement: “I will finish this book if it’s the last thing do.” I think my roommate believed he owed it to Wallace for such an ambitious attempt. But I also got the sense that the challenge of reading the whole damn 1,100 pages, including 100 footnoted pages, was more a mid-twenties male rite of passage, a test to measure the overeducated white man’s intellectual cock.

In grad school, I read Wallace’s essay, “Certainly the End of Something or Other One Would Sort of Have to Think.” My enjoyment of the essay ended after reading the title when Wallace moved on to talk about the “Great Male Narcissists” (Updike and Mailer). Forgive me for not reviewing the essay and saying anything intelligent about it, but the senescence of the literary old boys’ club didn’t appeal to me.

I did, however, love the essay, “Consider the Lobster.” Because let me tell you, in that essay he considered the fuck out of the lobster; he considered it more than I’ve ever considered anything in my life, making what I remember as a strong but subtle case for animal rights.

In several of the encomiums (Mark Morford, Jon Carroll) I read about Wallace, the essay, “Shipping Out” (also titled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”), which for a brief period of time (or so it seems) was posted on the Harper’s site, was praised for being his best. I read the long-winded, moderately footnoted essay about his stay on a luxury cruise ship and was pretty much amazed by everything from his 1,000+ word opening list of all that he had seen on the week-long adventure to his extended in utero metaphor for the entire experience. The depth of his reporting surprised me (this wasn’t merely a personal essay), as well as the effectiveness of his enormous vocabulary. What specificity of thought, image, and idea a writer can express with the nuanced word.

Of course, I read into the essay, into the gossip about a ship suicide (on a previous cruise), which Wallace refers to with humor as a “half gainer” off the deck, and specifically into this quote:

“There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. The word “despair” is overused and banalized now, but it’s a serious word and I’m using it seriously. It’s close to what people call dread or angst, but it’s not those things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable sadness of knowing I’m small and weak and selfish and going, without a doubt, to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”

When I started to write this blog, I considered saying that while I’ve often heard people say that suicide is selfish, a waste, that there is always a silver lining, some precious golden nugget in the crap, I understand ending things more than I understand choosing to live. Maybe that is an overly dramatic, not carefully thoughtful statement. But I certainly understand the despair Wallace writes of; the wanting to jump overboard.

I’m approaching territory that is probably best avoided. I don’t quite have my thoughts in order, or a clear point I want to make. So, maybe I’ll just say that last week a major literary figure passed away. It made me read a few of his essays (The View from Mrs. Thompson’s is another good one) and it made me read into his essays. I started to greatly admire his work, to feel kinship with a writer who felt great despair on a pampering cruise ship, and I empathized, at least a little, with a person depressed enough to end his life. I hope he is resting in peace.

For the most part, I am focused on my self. But I’m feeling particularly altruistic today. So please allow me to promote, or pretend to promote my some of my friends, while actually using them as launching off points to talk about myself.

Let’s start with my friend, Mat Honan, who basically got a book deal by telling his wife a joke (see book title) that he astutely turned into a website that attracted a publisher. His book, Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle: 366 Ways He Really Cares, is a compendium of all the wonderful things our next president has done to make himself such a lovable guy. Don’t forget that “Barack Obama left his W-Fi network open in case you wanted to use it,” and “Barack Obama folded you an origami crane,” and are you sitting down for this, “Barack Obama found out your ex was going to be there and warned you ahead of time.” How can you not love him for that? So, if you were uncertain what to get that Obamaniac in your life in celebration of this week’s Democratic National Convention, this is the gift. Or, for that person who treats their bicycle as the be all and end of life (is this everyone in SF?) and is looking for a change in obsession, then perhaps Barack Obama can be their new bicycle.

About my relationship with the author: I traveled with Mat and his wife, Harper, for two months in Asia. Highlights of our time together included two days of discomfort in a motorized dugout canoe traveling up the Mekong River, listening to Bush’s State of the Union address using Mat’s short-wave radio in an electricity-less town in Laos, and my bringing Mat and Harper french fries while they recovered from Dengue Fever in a Bangkok hotel. Traveling with Mat was like having my own wireless Wikipedia by my side; he knows shit about everything, which is why he’s a journalist. He currently edits and writes for Wired Magazine and wrote a damn good feature story in the August issue about coffee and an $11,00 machine that brews by the cup.

Another friend of mine, Cynjai Robinson, has a couple novels (is comic noir a literary genre?) coming out in 2009 and 2010. It may seem like a long time before you can have a copy of The Dog Park Club in your hands, but she just sent me the URL for her new website, which means you can get to know her before then, or pick up some tips on what a good “author’s website” looks like for when you need to pre-promote your next novel. There is a blog component and reading it reminds me of hanging out with her at a bar. Mostly I laugh, but I also just have to nod my head at the words that are too big for me to understand. I had my very first class (a six-week autobiography intensive) in the University of San Francisco MFA writing program with her. I remember reading that first submission of hers; “Oh,” I thought to myself. “That’s writing.”

And finally, my yoga teacher’s web site.

I. Love. Janet. Stone.

I’m not quite sure what to say about her since we’re not really friends. But I, along with over a hundred other people, am comforted by her words and poses, support and love, teachings and wisdom, every Friday night. I will buy her video and I will dream of following her to India.

This is probably the best first line of an author’s note I’ve ever read:

“The events described in these stories are realish.”

Can you guess who wrote it?

David Sedaris. It’s on the copyright page (hidden as all such notes are) of his new book, When You are Engulfed in Flames. With all the hullabaloo about lying in memoir, creative nonfiction, etc. I just think Sedaris has the right idea here. While we all now what “realish” means–close to true–my favorite part of using “realish” is that it’s not even a word. It’s a child’s construction, and the result is that it mocks any sense of seriousness or adherence to Truth.

The second line is not so bad either: “Certain characters have fictitious names and identifying characteristics.”

Such a simple note. Perfect really.