I’m always amazed when another year ends. When I was a kid, I’d cry at the New Year’s Eve party; I was sad to see the old year leaving. I remember this clearly, and all it makes me think is: What a little artist I was, even then.

Anyhow, this year, WordPress sent me the following report:

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The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. Your blog was viewed about 8,200 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

In 2011, there were 50 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 213 posts. There were 24 pictures uploaded. That’s about 2 pictures per month.

The busiest day of the year was March 7th with 96 views. The most popular post that day was Who is Pauls Toutonghi?.

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The interesting thing about this is the Sydney Opera House statistic. Which would you rather do? Blog for a year — or sell out the Sydney Opera House three times? Hmm.

One of my favorite things is the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest for terrible first lines of novels.

This year, there was one writer who — in my opinion — out wrote all the other terrible writers. When I read these — admittedly truly heartstoppingly awful — sentences, I paused. I read them aloud. Wait a minute, I thought — that’s actually a really good writer masquerading as a bad writer.

I sent them to a writer friend and he wrote back: “She does everything correctly in the worst possible way. The thing is, these aren’t even bad sentences, really… What they manage to do is to set a high standard for themselves that they then fail to meet. They’re writer-bad.”

So: Do you exist, Anna Springfield of Raleigh, North Carolina? And, if so, what about your prose that isn’t trying to be purposefully awful?

Here they are, in their full glory:

1. “As she downed the last Dixie cup of Listerine and let every drop of its 21.6 percent alcohol content hit her like an icy mint anti-cavity brickbat, Karen squinted at the breasts dangling like two electrocuted ospreys from the powerline of her heart and, with a despondency born of a thousand nights spent gaining a decent skill level at internet mahjong, wondered how she and they had all three sunk so low.”

And:

2. “Rosy lips aquiver, Lauren drizzled with tears the wave-tousled sands of Wampauset Municipal Area Public Access Beach, hearing in every shriek of shrike and plaint of plover the ancient wail–kreeAHH, kreeAHH!–of good women widowed by the sea, as well as tonal nuances indicating the shorebirds’ relative levels of copulative receptiveness, for our umber-eyed heroine is both lover and ornithologist.”

From the garden: Three pounds of carrots! Lots of peeling, washing, and cooking. However: A delicious late harvest. And then, on Saturday, went to a strange little thrift store near the airport and found these two old paperbacks — for $1.65.  Not a bad weekend.

Hello, folks.

I was just thinking about the past few months — and what a remarkable time it has been! Lots of things going on in the world of writing and the world of babies. Beatrix walked on August 18th, followed by Phineas on September 3rd. And now, in October, they are both running around the house, intent on destroying themselves and everything around them. Beatrix has been talking more and more — adding, “all gone,” to her vocabulary, along with “bath time,” and “nap time,” and — perhaps worryingly — “no!”

Phineas continues to be quite enamored of graham crackers.

In writing a lot has happened, too. I’ve signed the contracts for the German translation, approved a provisional draft of a cover (which could be really beautiful, I think) — and finalized the text of the book, in typescript. Galleys are just a couple weeks away. There’s been some turmoil at the publishing house, too.

I finished a promotional box for EVEL KNIEVEL DAYS, which includes a recipe (for Christian-Muslim Cooperation Baklava), as well as a piece of that baklava. Wordstock is coming to town. I’m going to be introducing Diana Abu-Jaber, Michael Ondaatje, and Charles Yu. The semester, with its idiosyncratic rhythms, is in full-swing. The Harper’s article is getting closer and closer to becoming a reality.

I’ve published a number of pieces — in Brevity, The Rumpus, The Millions, and Salon. I thought I’d collect all of them, here, in this single post, with links. There’s more soon — a Soapbox feature for Publisher’s Weekly — and some other things.

An Essay on a Rodeo in Brevity:

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/pastissuestwo/brev37/toutonghi_rodeo.html

6 Egyptians Writers You Should Know in The Millions:

http://www.themillions.com/2011/06/six-egyptian-writers-you-dont-know-but-you-should.html

An Interview with Mansoura Ez-Eldin in The Rumpus:

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/the-rumpus-interview-with-mansoura-ez-eldin/

A short story imagining Gadhafi’s final days in Salon:

http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/08/30/solace/singleton/

A profile of the Percy siblings in Salon:

http://entertainment.salon.com/writer/pauls_toutonghi/

My friend from high school, James Gamble, posted this video of his kid “reading” Red Weather.

I simply love it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YMtpVksu_Y

In today’s Wall Street Journal, there’s a cynical editorial by Fouad Ajami — an editorial that is, in my opinion, the opening salvo in the campaign to unseat Barack Obama. Ajami — who achieved some notoriety by being the only prominent Arab intellectual referenced in Dick Cheney’s defense of the Iraq invasion — argues that Barack Obama is actually a “pessimist.”

Now — the more politics changes, the more it stays the same. Ajami references Reagan, who somehow managed to brand himself as an “optimist,” and defeat the sighing, intellectual, “pessimistic” Jimmy Carter, in 1980. This is what the Republican establishment will try to do to Obama in 2012.

I actually think that the opposite is true. I’ve never been so inspired by the optimism of a leader — a leader who has maintained his even-temper in the face of the most cynical politics America has seen in perhaps a century or more. Ajami’s editorial is written in a glib, erudite tone — and conceals the fact that it has, at its heart, absolutely no evidence. But, then again, neither did the folks who said that the Obama Health Care proposal had “death panels” in it.

Reading Orwell as a whippersnapper convinced me of two things: 1) Never trust a talking pig. And, 2) Politicians — and political rhetoricians  — will often use your strengths against you, when they are in a desperate situation. Obama’s biggest strength? His message of optimism and hope. So: Let’s try and spin that negatively — the argument goes — and what will remain?

Here is a link to the Ajami:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576466411161774824.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Are these the new, new, new, new thing?

Can I choose to go home and take a nap?

Though the details have not been finalized, yet, it looks like Rowohlt Berlin has acquired the translation rights to Evel Knievel Days. Extremely exciting. This is the first foreign rights sale for the novel, and is extremely encouraging so early on in the process; the novel isn’t even in galleys, yet.

Here’s an image of a poster that Rowohlt did for the paperback of Red Weather (which they also published). I have to admit — this image made me imagine my own novel in an entirely different way.

Have you heard of the Egyptian writer Mansoura Ez Eldin?

If not — or if you have — I did an interview with her on The Rumpus. It is currently the top link on the site, but here is a direct link, as well:

http://therumpus.net/2011/07/the-rumpus-interview-with-mansoura-ez-eldin/

Lots of great stuff in there, including Ez Eldin saying:

“…Part of the problem is that the translated Arabic works are not necessarily the best of the Arabic literature. Sometimes western publishers and readers search for specific themes from Arab writers—as if our literature was just a social or a political text, and not art…”

It’s a interesting conversation.

I am visiting New York, today and tomorrow, meeting with editors and other folk, catching up with old friends. It’s strange to be back in the city after an absence. It continues on without me, obviously. But it’s still fascinating to return and see the traces of previous lives everywhere.

It reminds me of this quote from Our Man In Havana, by Graham Greene: “They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer — except as a pain in the memory, like the pain of an amputated leg no longer there.” (183)

It’s a complex sentiment, and the anonymity of today in New York seems to confirm it. But — I have to admit — it’s a terrible similie. Greene could have done better, right?