*
Immediately after the Q&A in Portland, I hit the road (after dropping Robyn off) for a nine-hour drive to Missoula. It was Halloween, but the only costume I would see the whole day would be someone dressed up as a bee in a bar where I stopped to use the restroom. The first few hours were beautiful—gorgeous mountain passes, long, winding river, giant gray-blue sky of blowsy clouds—but by the end of things, it was dark, and I felt as if my body was moving somehow ahead of me… vertigo, hard to stay balanced.
Lucky for me, a good youngish friend named Alec filled up my iPod before the trip… I listened to his 100 Favorite Songs play list over the nine hours… Alec’s taste in music tends toward the melancholy—mostly melancholy indie love longs… Aimee Mann (“Today’s the Day”), Keane (“Underneath the Walnut Tree”), Ben Folds (“The Luckiest”), The Shins (“Caring is Creepy”), Future Bible Heroes, (“No River”), and it got me ruminating—naturally. Several months back in New York, I’d been through a painful and emotionally confusing breakup… I took it pretty hard, and it was difficult to get over things in the city—so many people and stories and neuroses and opportunities to compare and misread and get even more confused… and drink, for that matter.
On the long drive to Missoula, I kept thinking about Keats’ notion of negative capability—the ability to be open, not “chase irritably after fact and reason, etc.” In New York, everything and everyone is so crowded in—all there seems to be is fact and reason—and there’s that corollary space (or lack thereof) inside... I was thinking myself into oblivion there, so it was phenomenal to be out alone on the open road, to mentally and physically consolidate recent losses and gains… and not just those associated with the boyfriend, but also those associated with quitting my job at the hedge fund (yet another breakup). The summer I spent in a kind of haze… thinking too much, crying too much. On the road, I got to shed all that.
Close to eleven—and after all my surprisingly pleasant angsty rumination—I arrived at my friend Prageeta’s house. I knew Prageeta for many years back in New York. Now she directs the creative writing program at the University of Montana. Her house was lovely—the same in many ways as her Brooklyn apartment, but bigger, more stuff. She and I had a glass of wine and then I crashed.
The next day, Prageeta and I took a nice walk by the river. Here is Prageeta:
Some woods:
Here is the audience for the reading. It was great:
I read with Martin Corless-Smith, who I met back at Iowa when I was a student. He had come to read on behalf of his first book, and I introduced myself, soliciting work for the magazine—Explosive—I was editing back then. Here is Martin:
The nice woman who did the introductions:
Martin and Rob, who hosted the series:
Karen Volkman, Brian Blanchfield, Martin, a professor whose name escapes me:
An intense sort of fan; he was interested in photography:
Right before leaving, I did Bikram (more on that later) and bought some vitamins; the last thing I can afford on this trip is to get sick:
So far, so good.
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