NYC glimpses

Ivory dreams. The National Book Foundation put us up
 in The Essex after our first hotel was washed out by Sandy.
This shop window is not far from the hotel.

Lalique and Footlongs

Shop window with reflections of Central Park
trees and equestrian statue.

Art deco portals at the Essex.
"THIS CAR AVAILABLE"

At the National Book Award frolics

Greek revival ceiling at Cipriani Wall Street.

Rebecca with Anne and Gary Schmidt.
Gary was the wonderful leader of our judging panel.

Bar, Wall Street Cipriani.

Judith Ortiz Cofer with Rachel and Steve Sheinkin,
Finalist in Young People's Literature for Bomb.

Our panel's star, Susan Cooper...
(Susan Cooper Cronym)

With my daughter Rebecca.

Table companions, poets Dana Levin and Patrick Rosal,
judges for the poetry award.

Author Sophia Quintero with Patrick Rostal.

Cipriani Wall Street.

Picked Sagittarius and Scorpio, as my birthday lands
on the cusp between them.

With Judith Ortiz Cofer. Devoured by judge-corsages.

Fellow YPL panelist Daniel Ehrenhaft, author and now head
of the Soho Teen imprint, along with his wife Jessica,
a vice president at Scholastic.

Rebecca Beatrice Miller in her new pixie cut, all curls gone!
Judges Susan Orlean and Judith Shulevitz in the background.

Table 55 assembling...

Table 55.

Judith Ortiz Cofer and Rebecca.

Myers' list of best fiction, 2012

I am just (barely) back from the National Book Award celebrations and will write something about them anon--for now, I'm just linking to critic D. G. Myers' choices for the best fiction of 2012. His choices are not quite the same as the fiction judging panel. Amid much brouhaha, he was just fired from Commentary, so the list is at his A Commonplace Blog.  Be sure and look at the end of the list (you know, where XY and Z live.)

As I admire his forthright criticism, I am pleased to have crossed his radar. Last week he put Catherwood on a list of historical novels that make good use of historical settings "to instruct and delight."

The 3 Kenneths and the Little Match Girl of Poetry

Could we please get this straight?

There are three poets from approximately the same era named Kenneth. Kenneth Koch, Kenneth Rexroth, and Kenneth Patchen. (You may be interested to know that I am permanently mortified over having become uncontrollable with laughter during a Koch reading in Providence, R. I. back in 1975-ish, back when I was a silly sprat of a girl.)

It was Kenneth Patchen, not one of the others (as I have seen claimed on the internet here and there), who said that "People who say they love poetry and never buy any are a pack of cheap sons-of-bitches." Other versions are floating around--particularly "a bunch of cheap sons-of-bitches"--and I've seen them attributed to a Wrong Kenneth as well. But you may check out the book Sleepers Awake by Patchen and find out the truth. Alas, I'm not incredibly well read but have merely looked it up on Google; New Directions calls the book "novelistic fantasy." Think I will have to try it, sooner or later.

The narrator meets poet Fitzmichael Kell in "a bar on 3rd" and proceeds to buy three of Kell's books "which he was good enough to sign." He does this because he is not one of those "People who say they love poetry and never buy any."

Now you know.

Spread no more internet rumors! Manure not the field of pixels!

And this sterling bit of wisdom reminds me that I have new 2012 (and one 2011) poetry books, namely The Foliate Head and Thaliad (and The Throne of Psyche.) It would make me very happy if you were like the narrator of Sleepers Awake and bought three copies of each. I'm sure that I'm as fine a poet as Fitzmichael Kell. Not to mention the fact that I can go home to the wretched White Camellia Orphanage and snuggle in my raggedy bed instead of standing out here in my match-girl coat, selling wee poetry books and matches to passers-by (and may have to burn the poetry books to keep warm before I can go home.) I may, in fact, freeze to death on this Yankee stoop.

Either that or be overcome by an attack of whimsy.

Three Kenneths and one Kell...