i have a new hobby.

Hello, dear internet friends and blogging associates. In case you hadn't guessed, posting here at the Ambulette will be intermittent, even more so than usual, if at all.

Because I mean, really.

Look at this.

life lessons

I've been rereading this lovely old collection of Swedish fairy tales I have (translated by Irma Kaplan in 1953, illustrated by Carol Calder), and you know, there are some valuable lessons to be learned from these stories. I will share some here.

1. Should you happen to meet an ugly old troll in the woods, greet her as "dear mother." She will probably appreciate the kindness and most likely help you out in some way later on when you least expect it. I know, I know -- it seems unlikely. But you'd be surprised.

2. If someone gives you a seemingly baffling gift like a golden apple or a magic dagger, go ahead and hang on to it.

3. If someone says "I will do _____ for you if you just promise to kill the next living thing you see," don't agree. Chances are, the next living thing you see will be your own offspring or spouse. Even if you don't expect it. Trust me.

4. Befriend woodland creatures as often as possible.

5. If you meet a nice-seeming spouse candidate but there is some weird condition like you can't ever look at his face or she appears to be a mouse or something, don't sweat it. They're probably just temporarily enchanted, and you might even be rewarded for your open-mindedness.

the waiting pool

It's a funny kind of thing, this waiting. I could have a baby tomorrow; it could be in four weeks. And once again I ask myself: What kind of system is this? Like, don't even cows know when they're about to give birth? I hope there is a suggestion box at the end of this whole pregnancy project. I've got some things to say.

When really, I ought to just appreciate this time, that I have this time to be not working (thank you, economy) and instead resting and working on the new novel (as I eke ever closer to having a complete draft!) and swimming and daydreaming. I feel as though I should be both prepared and alert and ready at all times and also that I should keep myself distracted.

Here are some of the week's best distractions, in case anyone else is in need of such a thing.

1) Sara Barron! A dear old friend of mine (Apple Tree Theatre Travelling Troupe, hello!) has had her book come out this week -- a collection of personal essays that is bound to make you laugh out loud. If you want to read bawdy and irreverent stories about dating, celebrities, and being a hilarious person in general, and I think you do, I highly recommend buying her book and/or coming to her book release party on Monday. I kind of wish I hadn't just read the book so I could read it again for the first time and snortingly laugh into my tea.

2) Italo Calvino's "The Daughters of the Moon" from the February 23rd New Yorker. What a weird and great story! The moon is old and busted, and so people decide to throw it away. "The moon seemed lost. Having abandoned the course of its orbit, it no longer knew where to go; it let itself be transported like a dry leaf." Young women disrobe and hitch rides to the trash heap, where the moon is deposited among all the other unwanted detritus of the city. I suddenly remember how much I love reading Calvino.

3) Walt & Skeezix, once again. I happily read one of these great, gorgeous Drawn & Quarterly collections of the old Gasoline Alley strips a while back, only to discover I had 2 (2!) more waiting patiently for me on my bookshelf when I was perusing it a few nights back for something that might capture my skittish interest. (This, after putting down several novels in a row. My mushy brain seems to find many things objectionable these days. It's like all my patience has been diverted to other systems, and when reading there are any number of slight offenses that are suddenly unforgivable. Plus, since this summer I've become a book-abandoner! Before then I never would read 1/3 of a way through a book and then sling it aside. But now, well.) So anyway, the sketchy little drawings and soothingly boring stories of the Gasoline Alley gang, Walt and his foundling baby, and their occasional road trips are right up my, ahem, alley.

4) Cat Dancers! The lovely ladies in the video store we live above recommended this documentary about a trio of performers who train and "dance" with large cats...don't google it or read anything about it, since everything online is blithely pocked with spoilers, but totally rent it! I'm such a sucker for documentaries about weird little subcultures, and this one is, well, pretty satisfyingly weird.

Now, to work on the novel, and then to swim. It really is a dreamy kind of existence, when I remember to think of it that way.

another marvellous thing

"For the past two months her chief entertainment had been to lie in bed and observe her unborn child moving under skin. It had knocked a paperback book off her stomach and caused the saucer of her coffee cup to jiggle and dance..."

I came across this story, "Another Marvellous Thing," by a writer named Laurie Colwin, in the anthology of New York stories I've been slowly making my way through. It's a strangely shaped story -- maybe it's an excerpt of something larger? -- but being a pregnancy and birth story of course it captured my attention. Colwin gets so many things so right, in particular the idea of the whole system seeming as ridiculous as it is amazing, and taking over your mind in this extremely persuasive way.

"She had a horror of the sentimental. In secret--for she would rather have died than show it--the thought of her own baby brought her to tears. Her dreams were full of infants. Babies appeared everywhere. The buses abounded with pregnant women. The whole process seemed to her one half miraculous and the other half preposterous. She looked around her on a crowded street and said to herself, 'Every single one of these people was born.'"

The thing that keeps striking me is how pregnancy and birth are such weird, miraculous, unlikely, crazy things, and yet essentially they're so utterly mundane. As this story ends, the new family "walked down the street just like everyone else."

I leave you with a picture of the city animal mobile we made for the visitor we're expecting shortly.

we don't do enough living

I received an interesting email today in response to my little piece in Poets & Writers about how writers aren't really sloppy drunks anymore. It's funny, I think I thought I was saying in the piece that successful writers aren't drunks and/or eccentrics anymore, but tend to be really hard-working and on top of things. The writer of this engaging email seems to think I was equating being a drunk with being an eccentric, which I didn't really mean. That said, I think this thoughtful stranger makes some really interesting points. And also I just enjoyed getting the email. So I figured I'd share.


Dear Amy:

Reading your piece in the newest issue of Poets and Writers scratched my skin. I was slightly irritated by your delightful piece, and annoyed that you considered substance abuse eccentric. I’ve always considered it the norm. Every Estonian I have ever known drinks to their wits end. I’ve watched to-be elementary educators sniff cocaine off coffee tables out of boredom. And why is it that a person of Aboriginal descent slumming it on a street corner, moonshine in a paper bag, is called a drunk when a writer would otherwise be romanticized? Every man in my family has loved the tang of the brown bottle a little more than family – ah, genetics! And having learned a thing or two from history and how it repeats itself I decided to steer clear of addictions, not because I’m a busy writer employed by a slew of other indignities.

Sadly, your MFA experience is common. Contemporary writers (for the most part) are lost in the dismal glow of their computer screens, listening to the snapping of weak wrists melding with the clang of fingers on food stained keys. But that’s not to say that they are without eccentricities. The paradigm of what is considered ‘eccentric’ needs to shift. When I think of eccentric, I think of the Pierre Berton’s of the world who are out there, experiencing and living life – a message repeated like mantra in self-help books. We don’t do enough living, putting ourselves in unfamiliar places doing unfamiliar things, expanding our comfort zones. And in doing that, the eccentricities follow and the well of writing material deepens, simply by living, not by closet drinking.

Thank you for writing such a thought provoking article. A well-written piece that gets me fired up is always a pleasure.

All Best,
A--- G---

What is "eccentricity" anyway? And what is its value? I tend to like eccentrics who don't even know they are eccentrics, I know that much.

listen

I keep meaning to post about this interesting story I read over the weekend in my New York City stories book. But today I have a few hours to dedicate to writing (um, real writing) so I think I'd better do that instead. (I suddenly got some freelance work, which is great, but which really interferes with my yoga-write-nap schedule I'd so quickly gotten used to.)

In the meantime, I think you might enjoy listening to Shelley Green sing some songs. We saw her play at Pianos on Sunday and she's excellent. The baby seems to enjoy her too.

revenge of the nerds

I have a short essay in the current issue of Poets & Writers (that some writer friends/readers of this blog helped me out with -- hello and thanks!!) called "Revenge of the Nerds," about how writers are awfully well-behaved these days. I realize this is a somewhat dubious proposition -- there's always that wild child out there -- and any sweeping generalization is a bit silly of course. But the other writers I talked to seemed to know what I meant -- writers aren't tabloid fodder these days, no one's fist-fighting (unless someone wants to start something??), no one's boozing it up with models at chic hotspots. I mean, it occurs to me that this also has something to do, maybe, with the wide(ning?) gap between successful writers and critically acclaimed writers -- the writers people know about are not neccessarily the best writers (no offense, teenage vampire novel lady). What I mean to say is that I don't feel like there's some cohesive literati that the public cares anything about. This though made sense a second ago and now I'm not so sure. Well, anyway.

Of course I'm probably saying more about myself than anything else in this essay, and that's okay. I can accept that. Nearing the home stretch of this whole baby-making proposition only magnifies my nesty tendencies, but essentially (even in my normal state) the things I like to do -- and have to do, to keep from going bonkers -- involve a lot of quiet reading and writing and time at home with my husband listening to records and making art or whatever. (This has changed since I was child mostly just in the addition of the subtraction of a large gray cat and addition of the husband.)

And then there's the hustling: scrambling for freelance work, searching for teaching jobs. It's time-consuming, and you have to be on your game! I am so worldlessly, mind-numblingly thankful to be a writer, to have a book out in the world, to be working on another, which is all I've ever really wanted. But it's, for people like me anyway, a workmanlike proposition. It is daily work that must be attended to carefully. And I don't think I (a nerd, to be sure) would want it any other way.