This is happy, welcome news (oh, how I love the turning of the tide!–Shunned Dixie Chicks top 2 charts:

The Dixie Chicks are on top of the pop and country charts with their first album since criticizing President Bush three years ago.

They did it without the support of country radio, which largely ignored them after singer Natalie Maines told a London audience in 2003 that the group was ashamed Bush was from their home state of Texas.

Even though it appears the real estate market in our area has gone bust, we are undaunted and are preparing to sell our house. As I type, painters are working on the trim. After they leave, we’ll fix the landscaping at the front, etc. etc.

But the other major thing I must do is have a yard/garage/tag sale (what do you call it? Depends on where you’re from, I think. I used to call it garage, but now I call it yard). The thought of this depresses me. We don’t have much stuff. Or at least I think we don’t, until I start opening boxes in the basement and find six billion carved wooden boxes stuffed with crappy jewelry. Not to mention the extra sets of dishes and board games we never play, etc. etc. etc.

I’m feelinng overwhelmed at the thought of it. Where to begin?

Okay, so here’s what my research has turned up so far–How to Plan a Yard or Garage Sale:

Stash large sums of money in the house during the sale and keep it locked up tight. Yard sales can be distracting, and bad guys will take advantage of that fact.

Fantastic. So not only are people going to be rooting through my crap, but they will also be ripping me off at the same time.

And then there’s this–Alt Guide: Yard Sales:

Watch out for the early birds, though; they may show up half an hour early and try to look through your stuff before you even get it out.

Who are these people that do this? Why? And:

Some people are always going to try to get you to go lower than your asking price. Most of those people are just trying to get a good deal, but some of them are buying to resell.

I’m not sure I have the stomach for it. Any advice? Anyone?

Read in this in the paper this morning–Honorary degrees redux: Tributes to Updike go on sale:

In recent years, Updike has been getting rid of keepsakes.

Two years ago, he cleaned out his barn and cellar, which were overflowing with books, and donated the goods to Manchester by the Book, a bookstore in Manchester-by-the-Sea.

Some of the books had Updike’s handwritten notes in the margins.

“I’m at an age when you think about lightening your load, rather than dumping it on your heirs,” Updike told the Globe at the time.

For the Stranger, by Carolyn Forché

Check out Alan Cheuse’s recommendations in Summer’s Most Magical Form of Transport: Books:

Books take us anywhere and everywhere. We look at letters on the page and translate them into scenes in our mind. When we read a wonderful novel, it’s as though, as my dear old late friend John Gardner used to say, we’re falling into a vivid, continuous waking dream. Short stories, novels, poems are someone else’s composition that we play and interpret, and so turn them into dreams of our own.

If you haven’t heard or read about Mountaintop Removal yet, I would urge you to do so by first reading this article–Kentucky writers speak out against mountaintop removal:

A year ago, the writers took a daylong tour of mountaintop removal mining sites in Eastern Kentucky and came away nearly militant in their resolve. The tour was led by Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a statewide grass-roots organization that is seeking to protect the state from destructive mining practices.

“A sharpness has come into my vision,” said Taylor Hall, a Harrison County novelist who made the tour. “I can’t look at the world anymore without envisioning its destruction.”

And this one:

One of the greatest environmental and human rights catastrophes in American history is underway just southwest of our nation’s capital. In the coalfields of Appalachia, individuals, families and entire communities are being driven off their land by flooding, landslides and blasting resulting from mountaintop removal coal mining.

Also, please watch Jim Tomlinson’s journal as he will soon be taking part in the upcoming mountaintop removal author’s tour.

Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Wife, is a book that every wife should read. No, every husband should read. No, every female writer should read. No, every writer should read. NO, every PERSON who has ever been in a relationship with anyone should read.

At its core this is a book about relationships–the barters we make, the deals we strike, the things we give up, the things we gain. It is also about how we perceive ourselves in these relationships–happy/unhappy, innocent/guilty, a victim/a victimizer.

The wife in this story is Joan, who is married to a famous and successful writer named Joe, who has just won the biggest award of his life. They have been together for decades and have three children and an outwardly happy and satisfying life.

But what seethes below the surface are the years of discontent and misuse. Joan would have you believe that she has been the victim all along but as you read her story, you start to see that it is impossible to believe her entirely–she is, after all, a great writer herself. A storyteller among storytellers–she knows how to sift the truth so that it comes out one way or another. She knows how to “interpret” Joe’s stories.

So, even though she would have you believe she is innocent, a victim, in the end you know that, in her enablement, she is as much at fault as Joe:

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else.

“Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.”

And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.

I don’t want to say too much and give away all of this book’s secrets (even though the surprise ending isn’t much of a surprise), but what I will say is that it’s a great read. Fast and funny and entertaining for those of us who like to look under the hood.

The first time I heard about Brad Kessler‘s new novel, Birds in Fall, was when I read an excerpt of it in the most recent Kenyon Review. I was completely awestruck and even more so once I read the follow up interview between Kessler and fiction editor, Nancy Zafris.

Then when my dear friend Kat read the novel, she passed it on to me. I was excited to read it and it did not disappoint. This beautiful novel is infused with science, mythology, history, art, literature, music, and above all else, emotion.

At it’s core, naturally, are the birds–what they represent literally (in a scientific sense–their ability to migrate, to find their way back home, time and again) and metaphorically. So, it is a book of comings and goings–but of always finding one’s way back to that place of safety, of home, of love.

It was happenstance that at the same time I was reading this book, I happened to watch the beautiful, engaging, and often heartbreaking Winged Migration. If you have not seen this film, I would urge you to do so. If you are like Allen and me, you will watch it with your jaw dropped open saying, again and again, “How did they film that?” and then finally giving in to–letting go and just becoming part of the flock.

For some reason I have avoided reading Anthony Swofford’s memoir Jarhead until now. I suppose I thought it would be all gung-ho on war. I just didn’t know and wasn’t sure I could take it. But then a friend mentioned she was reading it and how kick ass she thought it was and so I decided to read it, too, and boy am I glad I did.

Swofford’s memoir is not just of his time as a Marine during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, it is of how one becomes a Marine–makes that decision to give up personal freedom and train to kill–and how one then, afterwards, tries to once again become a civilian, an un-killer.

Written in clear, clean prose, the book waffles back and forth between harrowing self-reflection and stoic observation, moments of perversion and moments of bravery, but where it never wavers is in its honesty: How this one person saw the world he existed in.

In doing so, at some points he speaks for them all–and one of the great tragedies of it for this reader is that even though it has been over a decade since this war, he might as well be writing about today:

We joke about having transferred from the Marine Corps to the Oil Corps, or the Petrol Battalion, and while we laugh at our jokes and we all think we’re damn funny jarheads, we know we might soon die, and this is not funny, the possibility of death, but like many combatants before us, we laugh to obscure the tragedy of our cheap, squandered lives with the comedy of combat and being deployed to protect oil reserves and the rights and profits of certain American companies, many of which have direct ties to the White House and oblique financial entanglements with the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, and the commander in chief, George Bush, and the commander’s progeny.

And so how does a young man who sees his situation so clearly end up here? The answer is that it is both a career, an expectation, and something inexplicably ingrained:

Before me my father had gone to war and also my grandfather, and because of my unalterable genetic stain I was linked to the warrior line. I knew at this early age that despite what some politicians and philosophers and human rights advocates and priests insist, war is about revenge, war is about killing others who have killed and maimed you. After war there might be peace, but not during.

And also, this explanation:

I joined the Marine Corps in part to impose domestic structure upon my life, to find a home. But Marine Corps domesticity always ends. As much as you love your fellow jarheads and love field life and training and firing weapons, you will someday have to leave the Corps, a least spiritually, and find a partner and possibly have children and create a realistic domestic realm. The simple domesticy of the Marine Corps is seductive and dangerous. Some men claim to love the Corps more than they love their own mother or wife or children–this is beacuase love the Corps is uncomplicated. The Corps waits up for you. The Corps forgives your drunkeness and stupidity. The Corps encourages your brutality.

The love is not just ideological, it is also physical, comforting–ultimately in the face of death and killing, it is humane:

Welty solicits hugs. He has many takers, and when I finally leave from under the vehicle, I hug Welty and he hugs me and I feel better for a moment. I’ve never cared much for Welty, a loudmouth, a good marine, and a great shooter, but a very agitating person. But I think his hug idea is sound, and eventually everyone in the platoon has hugged Welty. We are about to die in combat, so why not get one last hug, one last bit of physical contact. And through the hugs Welty has helped make us human again. He’s exposed himself to us, exposed his need, and we in turn have exposed ourselves to him, and for that we are no longer simple grunt savages in the desert ready to jump the Berm and begin killing.

The group has been broken down: It is not just a platoon, a singular entity, it is a group of individuals who believe they are about to die, or kill. We should never forget that.

That is the big message I take: Never forget that those engaged in war are individuals in need of love and comfort and sympathy and empathy. Never forget how they might have ended up there. Do not forget that and do not forget them.

Also, never forget that the rich and the powerful are not on the ground fighting the wars. They are not now and they never will be. It is the men and women who are guided by their principals, their sense of self (or lack there of), their desire to prove something, and, often their seeming lack of choice due to poverty or politics or sense of duty.

This is an important book and I hope that you will consider reading it, just as I hope you will, on this Memorial Day weekend, think of all of those souls who are off fighting wars, who, I’m sure, would much rather be fishing in Crawford, Texas on a day like today.

and read The Canadian Writers Collective , eh?

Had a dream last night/this morning in which my mother and I were going to take some friends of mine to the Bronx Zoo. When my mother was looking for directions, I told her she was wrong to look for the zoo in the Bronx. “Everyone knows it’s in Brooklyn,” I said.

Everyone left me to go get ready for the zoo (incidentally, I detest zoos–they are horrible and depressing and my heart bleeds for the poor creatures). I sat outside at a picnic table near a farm. Part of the road between the table and the farm was washed out and the sky was ominously overcast. A dog, filthy with mud and wet, came bounding down from the barn and jumped over the washed out part of the road and came up to me. It looked to be part Greyhound and part Welsh Terrier. It’s muzzle was wet and muddy but I let it stuff it into my face anyway.

I liked the dog but it made me anxious as it kept running around and around the table as I sat there. Then I woke up.

C&L has this essay from Mike Farrell on his feelings after watching HBO’s Baghdad ER:

I want the criminals who lied and cheated and pretended and twisted and perverted reality – and those who rationalized their crimes – so they could send over 2400 servicemen and woman to their death, nearly 18,000 to come home torn – some never to be whole again – thousands more to suffer mental damage, and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians to be swept into the garbage can of “collateral damage,” to pay.