Mood: Beyond the Pale
Location: le Lit
Fashion Mantra: H&M, H&M, H&M
Listening to: The rattle and hum of neighboring air conditioners (who the dickens runs the AC when it’s 62 degrees?!).
Sipping: Strong Arms South Australian Syrah, precisely 4 ounces (doctor’s orders, and it goes beautifully with pasull soup, see below), alternating with filtered NYC tap water.
Random Access: In the kitchen tonight, slurping soup, I suddenly remembered Richard Wilbur’s poem "The Barred Owl", which I had the pleasure of hearing him read live at the West Chester Poetry Conference this past June, and on a recording for the WCU Poetry Salon CD series. Wilbur prefaces this poem by asserting that it’s generally agreed that the barred owl’s call sounds remarkably like "Who cooks for you?"
Tonight, the folks at Pasha, the new Bosnian restaurant in my neighborhood, cooked for me. I’d been meaning to try the pasull ("white bean soup with smoked beef and lamb"), and also ordered the Nutella, banana, and strawberry crepes, ostensibly for the kids, to push the order up and over the $10 minimum for delivery. Of course, Adorable #1 refused to eat a crepe on principle–the only fruit he will consume is a Granny Smith apple–and Adorable #2, who has a much more adventurous palate, barely took a bite. Thus I was forced (against my will, I assure you) to eat one of the gooey things.
The memory of Richard Wilbur, one of my poetry idols, repeating "Who cooks for you?" with its absurd hooting "oo" sounds brought a smile into my dingy kitchen. I remembered how wonderful it was to hear him read that June night, and how nice it was when Dana Gioia introduced Jilly and me to Mr. Wilbur at the reception after the reading. Legendary.
Shameless Plug: Red Hen Press, who to my great delight will be publishing my first full-length collection, Saint Nobody, in early ’09, is taking NYC by storm with a series of fabulous literary events, starting this Friday. Go here for a complete listing. I’m going to try to make as many of them as possible, but a definite must-see is Sunday’s 6 p.m. reading at the Bowery Poetry Club with my pal Ernie Hilbert, the estimable Adam Kirsch, and intriguingly-named novelist Michael Quadland.
I’m particularly fond of the cover of Ernie’s brand-new book Sixty Sonnets, which hearkens back to my previous life as an often-frustrated piano student. 
Daily Confession: I am addicted to Sitemeter. It’s a web tracking device that tells me how many clickers are hitting my blog, when they visited, where they’re located, how they got there, how long they stayed, and how many pages they viewed. I find myself checking it daily, often several times a day, even when i’m too busy or exhausted to blog. I’m always amused by the various ways people find me–from googling my name, or the names of people I’ve mentioned, from other blogs that link to me, or comments I’ve posted on other blogs, from my Facebook profile. I still get hits from Google searches for Terry Tempest Williams’ "Why I Write," which I referenced in an entry over a year ago.
Speaking of other blogs, tonight I had planned to watch Billy Liar, which was recommended to me by my buddy MacGregor Rucker on his bracing and reflective Glossophagia, which is as inventive as its neological title. It’s–[yawn]–too late to start it now. Instead, I will close with (forgive me, Mr. Pepys) a proverbial and so to bed. Goodnight, Sweet Reader, goodnight.