Accommodatingly

Nathan and I spent the morning at home building and knocking down cardboard towers, eating yogurt, and listening to music.

First we listened to the morning jazz show on WHRB. “That’s a jazz trio,” I said to him. “Trio means three. There’s a piano, and drums, and a saxophone.”

He listened to the saxophone. “Saxophone!” he said. “No three. There’s an upright bass!”

And, indeed, it was: an upright bass, audible, as it had been all along.

Then we listened to the morning indie-rock show on WMBR. “That’s loud guitar,” he said when they played Iggy and the Stooges. “Really loud guitar!”

I told him that it was Iggy. “Iggy fun guy!”

And, indeed, he was. We also talked about numbers, since Iggy sang them: nineteen, and six, and nine.

Having decided that– while we like Tilly and the Wall a great deal– we wouldn’t much enjoy a Tilly show that began sometime after 11pm, Jessie and I took advantage of my parents’ presence here, not to go out and paint the town some late-model indie-rock shade of red, but just to have a neat meal.

The place we chose for our neat meal, the Brazilian restaurant Muqueca, turned to have surely the best Brazilian food we have ever eaten, and probably the best meal we have had in any restaurant since we moved here. I’d recommend everything (even the light, cruncy frog legs), and I would recommend that you not tell your friends, since if the place becomes too popular Jessie and I won’t be able to go back there again and again.

I’m in the new Boston Review on Laura Kasischke, [UPDATE: LINK NOW CORRECT] along with a vivid and neatly challenging poem by my way-talented former student Linnea Ogden: if you pick up the print issue, you can read it while you wait to be seated for awesome Brazilian food.

(I’m still hoping to see one or two of you at this event at BU on Monday afternoon.)

Having decided that– while we like Tilly and the Wall a great deal– we wouldn’t much enjoy a Tilly show that began sometime after 11pm, Jessie and I took advantage of my parents’ presence here, not to go out and paint the town some late-model indie-rock shade of red, but just to have a neat meal.

The place we chose for our neat meal, the Brazilian restaurant Muqueca, turned to have surely the best Brazilian food we have ever eaten, and probably the best meal we have had in any restaurant since we moved here. I’d recommend everything (even the light, cruncy frog legs), and I would recommend that you not tell your friends, since if the place becomes too popular Jessie and I won’t be able to go back there again and again.

I’m in the new Boston Review on Laura Kasischke, along with a vivid and neatly challenging poem by my way-talented former student Linnea Ogden: if you pick up the print issue, you can read it while you wait to be seated for awesome Brazilian food.

(I’m still hoping to see one or two of you at this event at BU on Monday afternoon.)

Steve will be reading at Boston University this Monday March 24, at 5pm in the Katzenberg Center, 871 Commonwealth Ave., Boston. Also reading: David Blair, whose new book of poems looks worth checking out.

Steve will then be reading, and giving a talk or two, at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh on Thursday March 27 (evening) and Friday March 28 (during the day). That distinguished university and its English department perhaps have some issues with their website, but if you’re in or near Pbgh and want to come, you can probably get the complete where and when right here. I’m looking forward to the event quite a bit, especially since I get to see this scholar and this fiction writer, and with luck this Jewish historian too.

At Beacon Broadside, the latest of many cool posts is an expert examination of political dreams. If you woke up last night believing that Barack Obama was hurrying to Christina’s in Inman Square in order to bring you ice cream, and John McCain was blocking traffic and preventing him, that probably means that you’ve been eating too much ice cream from Christina’s great rival, Toscanini’s. And by “you,” of course, I mean “I.”

Also at Beacon Broadside: a very funny anecdote, self-analysis and warning from a memoirist who is a lesbian mom.

Finally, an NPR-style puzzle: Nathan has a set of big, colorful wooden letters with which we spell words— but we can’t spell, or can’t spell accurately, some of his favorite (for example, “MOMMY”) because we only have one of each letter of the alphabet in that particular carved letter-set. What’s the longest word in English that we could spell with that set (that is, the longest word in English which uses no letter of the alphabet more than once)? Without trying too hard, we came up with at least one twelve-letter word you can say on the radio, and with one fifteen-letter word you certainly can’t.

I had a vulgar, incoherent post in the feed reader, and now her blog seems to have disappeared!

Digging back in the unreads in my feed reader, it looks like she had some technical difficulties in Dec. (the link won’t work until she’s back online), and her last post before the vulgar one, titled “Site Deletion,” is “Sorry about the RSS flooding. I thought the hackery was behind me, but a month’s worth of posts disappeared and I was again unintentionally advertising Tramadol.”

Zoiks! I suspect Adam Kirsch! (just kidding)

Knowledge gleaned from today’s pre-hacking posts on Maud… Mary Jo Bang got a much-deserved National Book Critics Circle Award for Elegy. Also honored, Alex Ross, who thanked “the book critics for helping to propel his book from ‘potential total oblivion to a glittering semi-obscurity.””

There is no such thing as minor oral surgery.

My mouth hurts.

And for now, that is all.