Add the blog to your Google Reader and we’ll be back soon.

Blogging! It’s so 2007! But this site needs an overhaul. I know it, you know it, it’s getting obvious even to those who have been in deep denial about it. Until then, because I know you’re dying to know what you should be reading, listening to, watching, &c.

What’s Consuming Melissa/What Melissa Has Consumed Lately:

Books:
Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan
My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor
Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill
This Is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper
The Heart of the the Buddha’s Teaching, by Thich Nhat Hanh
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, by Joseph Goldstein & Jack Kornfield
A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore

Music:
Laura Marling
Florence + the Machine
Gossip (Music for Men)

TV:
Friday Night Lights
Peep Show, Series 6
Mad Men
Glee (”You know what Sue Sylvester’s never done? Paid income tax.”)
Project Runway & Top Chef (even though I can feel the inanity brittling my bones)

Movies
Slim pickings lately. I’m excited about a screening I’m attending today, but it’s a surprise for a friend so maybe I can post about it later. Also anticipating The Fantastic Mr. Fox eagerly.

I’ve become one of those people who makes a lot of smoothies since Lynn gave me a Vita-Mix and it changed my life forever.

I’m going to be blogging occasionally on The Interdependence Project blog at Beliefnet. I’ll try to update here when I do. I meant to blog about A-Rod’s Sudden Buddhism, but, Q.E.D., I’m not the most consistent blogger. Still, it’s a good blog to add to your feed if you’re feeling like you don’t have enough to consume already.

I’ll be “appearing” (like a vision from heaven) at the SMU Literary Festival April 16-17. It’s going to be pretty fantastic, and it’s no secret how much I love Texas.

Here’s the schedule. You might consider getting a cheap flight to the Big D even if you’re not in town, because my brilliant comrade April Wilder will also be there and she’s nothing less than a rollicking good time.

Here’s the schedule:
Thursday, April 16th
2:00 pm: Student luncheon with the Writers (Dallas Hall Reading Room)
4:30 pm: Informal Panel Discussion with Melissa Kirsch, Michael Narducci, and April Wilder, Stanley Marcus Reading Room, DeGolyer Library

Friday, April 17th
5:00 pm: Reception, Texana Room, DeGolyer Library
6:00 pm: Tracy Winn reading, Stanley Marcus Reading Room, DeGolyer Library
7:00 pm: Intermission, Texana Room, DeGolyer Library
7:30 pm: Scott Blackwood reading, Stanley Marcus Reading Room, DeGolyer Library

I’ll be the one having a rib-eye for breakfast.

Everyone sat around the small bar and didn’t look at each other. They sang strange, obscure songs in warbly, coked-up voices and no one performed for anyone else. No one smiled or laughed or hit a wrong note to be funny. It was like prison in that everyone seemed to know each other but not by choice. The No Exit Karaoke Bar. A begrudging acknowledgment that there were other people there but they would get no attention, this was a night to be endured, like every night to be endured. Twenty people in a karaoke bar, the same people every single night they had probably sung every song in that catalog. There was no joy.

When our number, Total Eclipse of the Heart, finally came up, after about one billion years of solitude in a crowded bar, Derick and I got the two mikes and belted. We caterwauled. There were two extra verses that don’t exist in the real song. It was like “Turn around, bright eyes, Every now and then there’s an adorable little boy and now he’s grown up to be a man. Turn around….” What? We sang it anyway. We went for drama. As much as we could in a room full of stoics. I’d forgotten Derick is a real rock and roll singer, rock and roll star, so he could actually harmonize but I was wailing so hoarsely that his sophisticated stylings were mostly lost. The crowd didn’t love us. The crowd was possibly secretly handcuffed to its stools with its jaws wired shut.

Earlier, we ate hamburgers at the Sunburnt Pig that had beets, eggs, pineapple and bacon on them. That’s where we first heard the Bonnie Tyler classic on the sound system and decided it was important that we go sing (sing) karaoke. They also played “Oh Sherrie” by Steve Perry which damn I still love, that’s a love song, it’s so damn earnest I love it . I had a big crush on SP in that video, singing to Sherrie on the steps of like a courthouse (?), so deeply yearning and passionate and then flinging himself around a stairwell, squinting a lot with pain, the exquisite pain of ardor and Sherry and the world too much with him. I also looked a little like Steve Perry when I was a child so I think there was something there–long stringy black hair, middle part…I felt like we were kind of meant for each other. I think I need to find that video.

The work is coming very slowly, refracted, refractory. I hear my name like it’s coming through water. I left the blank page and went uptown.

I looked up “refractory” after I typed it because I didn’t want to confuse it with “refectory.” OS X’s Oxford American Dictionary offers the example his refractory pony. I love this.

I hadn’t been to the Cloisters before. Almost one year ago Ben & I rode bikes over the George Washington Bridge and back and then went to Fort Tryon Park. It’s one of those memories that’s still very present, I see the day crisply, it felt like leaving New York. I wanted to get away from this and go to that.

Really I wanted my own cloister. The Cloisters themselves are lovely, but they’re a museum, and filled with people, babies, shovers. The atrophy of experience: digital cameras trained on pietas, dry fountains, unicorn tapestries. There is a terrace that wraps around the building from which you can see the Hudson and I guess New Jersey. I was looking for quiet. I found it in the Heather Garden of the park outside.

In the grass on the hill I read the The Last Life by Claire Messud, and the gears slowed. I didn’t have any expectations for clarity. Vague hopes that The Project (there’s always a project, but this time it’s a large looming one) would crystallize or stand down or make a tenuous promise to stop confounding, but I read and looked at the river and thought some about my block, where I would have been had I not caught the train.

Something broke. I had one of the tiny Field Notes books with me and things started to make sense. I diagrammed ideas, wrote myself notes for later concerning the manageability of the work in case I was seized by anything resembling doubt masquerading as procrastination.

Oh! The last time I scribbled about museum-going, Lynn & I went to the Dia:Beacon in the Hudson Valley. I took these pictures on our trip, which I’m honored to report are featured in the latest issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review, accompanying Lawrence Wechsler’s (one of my favorite writers) article on Robert Irwin. You can’t see the photos on the VQR site, but you should consider checking out the hard copy for Wechsler’s always riveting prose. Here are the photos:

Now I’ve got spring fever. I’m a mess of allergies and sunlight and already mourning summer’s passing. This winter was kind of the pits. Better things are drawn to summer, they want to happen then. When I finished a perfect 70-degree run last weekend, Lance Armstrong’s voice came eerily on via my Nike+ iPod thingy and congratulated me on my longest run to date. Which is not true, since I’ve only had this gadget for about a year or so and I just recently allowed it to talk to me. Am I inclined to run farther to win Lance’s love again? Yes. Yes I am. Why am I so easily seduced?

I think it’s spring. The construction has abated, the days are long and therefore manageable. There is enough space in them for coffee on the corner and walking to the cleaners in Gramercy and getting A Moveable Feast from the library and seeing a movie about people who won’t feel whole until they’re paralyzed. Yeah, I saw that movie, Quid Pro Quo, tonight. Nick Stahl is aging strangely but attractively. Vera Farmiga is several varieties of troubling. The movie’s got some moments. But then it’s got some moments and you’re just like who greenlit that.

Days wide and warm, in which I wander listening to back episodes of the Fresh Air podcast. Springtime, you count. I will wear a daisy in my hair.

You’d be a fool not to check out the most beautiful letterpress cards in the world.

Messenger Bird Press is the hyper-cool operation of my pal Kelly Hands, who also happens to be the designer of this very website. The designs are pretty and deft and lovely. Swoonworthy, even.

America’s Next…?

The other night, after seeing Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, one of the best and most upsetting movies I’ve ever seen (more on this soon), Avi pointed to a billboard way up in the stratosphere of Times Square that seemed to have been grafittied by some impossibly thrill-seeking daredevil.

I was trying to figure out how someone had climbed up the building to spray paint “Find815.com” on a billboard when it hit me. God I love that show. I can almost consider that there’s only going to be half a season without plunging into tele-grief.

What do all these things have in common?

One of those weird wooden tabletop artist’s mannequins that you can pose in any way you choose (but you probably choose some weird arched-back pose with arms flailing)?

Stumped? These are just a few of the items in the tableau vivant that you are going to be victim to while waiting to pick up your ten weeks worth of laundry at my laundromat.

I have spoken before about the lifetime of nightmares that can be brought on by inexplicable nail salon art. But laundromat art — it’s a whole new invitation to Crazytown.

I was so freaked out/sent into a fugue state by the laundro-art that I could not really process the two people I saw while walking home.

1. Perez Hilton. The gossip blogger. On the corner of St. Mark’s and Second Avenue. White, leather man-loafers. I mean the shoes, not him — Perez Hilton is not (to my knowledge) a white leather man. You know what I mean. He appeared to be motioning to me to come over to him, but I may have confused him with the harlequin clown photo back at the laundromat that was yelling after me.

2. My neighborhood boyfriend. I am not sure how long we have been together — maybe 8 years? I have never spoken to him. It’s really a great relationship: we see each other every six months or so. When he’s not around, I don’t think about him. But when I do see him — on the street, in stores and restaurants when I’m on dates with other guys, at the movies — I fall head over heels for him again. When I see him, it is like no time has passed at all since our last tryst. We share a secret smile. Sometimes we laugh. Once, we ate dinner in the same restaurant, walked our respective dinner dates to the same corner to say goodbye, looked at each other, chuckled our secret “us” chuckle, and walked away.

My relationship with the neighborhood boyfriend is probably my longest relationship to date. We’ve been going steady for almost a a decade. Today, he was decidedly less East Villagey than in the past–he’d traded his tank top and low-riding shorts for a button-down shirt, his hair (which I never noticed is sort of strawberry blond) was cut in a respectable(ish) buzz cut. He gave me our usual bemused, we’re-in-love smile, and walked past.

I’ve considered talking to him. I’ve vowed (this was in my younger years) to stop him and talk. I’ve possibly glanced at “Missed Connections” on Craigslist after an encounter, just in case. It is entirely possible he is five people and not just my one true love, since I would be hard-pressed to give a very accurate description of him to a police sketch artist. That’s not a good thought. I hope I never have to pick him out of a line-up or call the police on him. He’s my BOYFRIEND, for crying out loud. I do wonder how much he knows about me. Or if he feels the same way about me as I do about him. Because it’s so hard to know. Guys can be so uncommunicative. Especially guys you’ve never spoken to.

In the world’s beat-up road sign
I saw new
History of time!
New history of time!

“Wonderlust King.” I’ve been nuts about this song, I make no secret of it. I love the video, I love the song, I love Eugene, I love it all. It’s good for a rainy day (today). Or a sunny day (never, according to my Mac OS X Meteorologist program).

I’m bringing back the Sunday Matinee feature this week. I don’t know why I stopped. Oh yes I do. I felt compelled to find video/images to present and they weren’t necessarily good or worth your/my time. Our time. Our quality time together. We call it QT. Also, blogging on Sunday is sometimes difficult, because I’m too busy watching Kathy Griffin reruns. Or scheming to go for a long run just before it starts to thunder and I am thwarted and must stay inside and watch Kathy Griffin.

Heck, in the interest of reviving yet another recently-slumbering Chickarina feature, let’s take a poll.