Our last day in Hawai'i

Well, that was kind of  tough title to write.

Uzee and I are flying out of Honolulu tomorrow, after four sometimes-great, sometimes-frustrating years. I prefer to dwell on the positives--like the islands' beauty, the ocean, the sea life, the turtles, and especially my many fine students--rather thn the negatives, which pretty much amount to all the reasons we are leaving. To our friends here: thanks. You know who you are.

Anyway, the exciting news is that we're heading for western Massachusetts, home of apple cider, intensely beautiful fall colors, and a thriving music scene (yay!) as well as unpleasant winters (boo!) which we'll both just have to (re)learn to live with. We're actually both pretty excited and ready for the move; it feels like the right thing to do.

"Right" isn't the same thing as "easy," though. It's an especially beautiful day today, whicj just makes it tug a little more. Life, however, trundles on, and will not be denied. The thing to dwell on, I guess, is not that we're leaving, but that we were here in the first place, with four years more than most people ever get.

In honor of our leaving, here's the very first picture we took of our new home back in 2008, as we were flying in to Oahu.

Aloha, and mahalo.

Uzee's new book out in October!

The lovely and talented Uzma Aslam Khan, to whom I have the great good fortune of being married, has just received the almost-final-we-think version of the cover for her forthcoming book, Thinner Than Skin. Behold:

Pretty awesome, eh? The book is due in early October from Interlink Books, and you can read more about it there, or proceed directly to Amazon, where you can pre-order it.

I've had the happy opportunity to read the book already, and trust me it's a corker, so check it out. And for you indie-supporting types (you know who you are), Interlink Books (and its fiction imprint, Clockroot) is a consistently interesting publisher who put out a lot of unusual books by a wide variety of international writers. So they're worth a look as well.

Book Thug Nation, Brooklyn NY, 9/14

Many thanks to Lori over at The Next Best Book Club for creating this fine piece of advertising:

Love the reminder "Books for sale // Bring cash." Hey, books will be just $10, so grab 'em while you can.

As you are probably aware, September 14 is National Cream Filled Doughnut Day, so the event will really be something special. Maybe people will bring cream-filled doughnuts. Or maybe I will. Anything could happen, really. It's that kind of holiday.
Also, for those who can't make it on Friday, I'll be over at KGB Lit Bar on Sunday 9/16, reading along with Kathleen Alcott. Of course--and I know you know this already as well--September 16 is Mexico's Independence Day, which opens up all kinds of possibilities for the KGB event as well.

New tune from The Mast over on Bandcamp

Longtime readers of this blog (that's right--both of you!) will recall my fondness for Brooklyn-based pop duo The Mast, whose first album I reviewed for PopMatters (read it here) and who have lately been uploading new songs for free over at Bandcamp. Their latest, "Seas Across Your Mind" is available for free right here, or you can just click on the video (not really a video, but it does play the song).



If you're interested in seeing what the singer, Haale Gafori, looks like when she's walking around and smiling, take a look at this other video, released late last year:

Don't Open That Door! #5: El Vampiro aka The Vampire (1957)

Who knew that Mexican horror flicks from the 1950s could be so good? Okay, lots of people knew, but never mind that -- the point is that this weeks column over at PopMatters features 1957 Mexican vampire movie El Vampiro, known to us gringos as The Vampire. It's pretty great, and I had a grand old time writing it up for my series, Don't Open That Door! To wit:

"Good natured Marta returns to her home in Mexico’s remote Sierra Negra mountains to visit her sick aunt Eloise; circumstance throws her in with Enrique, a fellow traveler on the same road. Oddly, no one is there to meet her at the station, so she and Enrique bum a lift partway, then go on by foot. Little do they realize that they’re being trailed by a statuesque, black-clad woman who possesses unusual skills such as blinking in and out of existence and raising strong winds just by standing around. When Marta arrives at the house, things get even weirder when it becomes evident that Aunt Eloisa isn’t as sick as originally thought. Heck, she looks better than she has in years! But the real shocker is that Marta’s other beloved aunt, Maria Teresa, is in fact freshly dead and buried. Of course, around here, being “freshly dead and buried” means something slightly different from where the rest of us come from, but that’s another story. Or, hmm, maybe it isn’t."

You can read the whole column here, and you really should, as there are a couple of clips to watch that give a nice feeling for the eerie spookiness (or is it the spooky eerieness?) of the whole enterprise. Plus of course a few jokes and giggles.

As ever, if you find yourself enjoying yourself, please hit the Facebook Like icon, and/or Tweet it or G+ it etc. The more this kind of thing happens, the longer I'll be allowed to play in the sandbox, which is all I ever really wanted to do anyway.

Someday I'll  sit down and try to figure out why iexactly vampires are so perennially popular. It's kind of a mystery to me. As far as movie monsters go, they're probably my least favorite, but obviously, their appeal is widespread and long-lasting. Any thoughts on this are welcome.

Wooden Shjips in-studio live performance

KEXP, Seattle, August 2011. Old guys rule!

Don't ask me about the spelling, though.

"A touchingly human reminder that scar tissue isn't always visible"

Sorry I haven't been posting these last couple days. I've been--you guessed it--packing.

Meanwhile, the reviewers over at Publishers Weekly were kind enough to read An Age of Madness, and then kind enough to write a review that makes it sound like it might be worth reading--but they weren't quite kind enough to avoid the old sting-in-the-tail method of dropping in a last-minute comment to the effect of, "Oh, and it also kind of sucks." To wit:

"Psychiatrist Regina Moss comes on strong in this compassionate, imperfect novel of the surprising, halting ways that the heart and mind heal after tragedy."

(That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? "Surprising" is always nice, and "halting," under the right circumstances, can be mighty effective.)

"Regina works at a 'holding tank for public-sector mentally ill' in a Massachusetts hospital where the afflicted patients’ suffering and symptoms mirror her own troubles, despite her strenuous efforts to keep the effects of personal tragedy at bay through mordant wit and a clinical remove."

(All promising so far. "Mordant wit and clinical remove" ? Sign me up!)

"Regina’s relationship with her college-age daughter is frayed, and the defenses she’s built up allow her to function, if not flourish, years after a terrible personal loss. Two things finally crack Regina open to further waves of grief: her role as dutiful daughter to an ailing father reaches a critical point, and a tenuous affair with a younger subordinate."

(Okay, family tension, I can roll with that. Not a lot of car chases in this book, it doesn't sound like, but that's not always a bad thing.)

"In the deftly sketched Regina, Maine has created a touchingly human reminder that scar tissue isn’t always visible..."

(Nice!)

"...but unwittingly shows how an uneven story can fail to measure up to a well-drawn character."

(WTF?)

Things were going so well, too, right up to that nasty last sentence. Last half-sentence, even.

Oh well. At least they read it, and maybe people will pay attention to the "compassionate" and "surprising" bits about the ""deftly sketched" and "touchingly human reminder that scar tissue isn't always visible." That all sounds pretty good, doesn't it?