I'm riding the 2/3 Express up toward 96th Street. I often call this subway the Red Line, though I don't think anybody else has in fifty years (if ever). I feel most comfortable when riding this train. And lately I also feel an enormous amount of pressure to move to Brooklyn. All my friends live there. For those of you who don't know the city, 96th Street is all the way uptown toward the top of Central Park and right below Columbia University. I can't really picture leaving my neighborhood, but also end up thinking about it constantly. (I was in the East Village yesterday, and as I walked down the street I was doing that
What if this was my street? thing that I do whenever I'm in another neighborhood and feeling that pull.) If I do ever leave, I'll move somewhere convenient to a Red Line stop. Anyway, as for typing on the subway, I can't believe I'm the guy that's so busy that he has to type on his way uptown (and, because of my extreme journalistic integrity, I'd like to make it clear that I finished this entry at home). I touched on this
yesterday in my first post, but it really is strange to have such a time-based schedule these days (this from a man who missed his deadline on the novel by a good six years). I keep feeling the need to apologize to everyone for being in a rush. I was having a quick lunch last week and the food just wasn't coming out of the kitchen, and the diners who came after us were long-ago served, and I really needed to get to my next appointment. I went to ask the waitress where the food was. And all I could say was, "I'm really not that guy that wants to know where his food is. But today I am. That is, I never have to ask this sort of thing, and can't believe it's me asking, but, I sort of need to know if it's going to be any longer, because, well, today I'm just that guy."
And, if making admissions, I'm also really not a blogger ? and unsure of what I'm supposed to do to adhere to the form. Back to missing my deadline by six years, you can imagine that this is not the kind of writing I usually do. (Even the fact that this entry allows me to self-referentially address the idea of the entry and then comment on that commentary in this parenthetical statement is a loosey-goosey structure that scares the pants off me.) All this to say, since the blog is for Powell's and I'm at the start of book tour, I'm not sure how much I'm supposed to address my day-to-day life as writer-guy. A snippet: Since posting yesterday's entry, I ran off to an interview at my coffee shop with a very nice interviewer, who happened to have been raised religious (like myself), and when I asked her how she identified herself (i.e. Orthodox, Conservative, Reform), she said Flexidox, which I liked very much. Then I ran home to pretty myself up and raced over to Michael Chabon's book party which was a lot of fun, and then ran from there to meet up with some other writer-book-folk who probably don't want their names listed. It was a really nice evening. And now (post-subway ride, post-phone interview) I'm going to finish a piece I've been writing about a trip I took to Buenos Aires last month, and then head out for a reading I'm giving tonight at the Strand. My publicist has informed me that pizza bites will be served. I don't know what those are, but neither did I know what a trifle was when I saw it last week. I gave a reading at the 92nd St. Y. with Jonathan Lethem. Afterwards there was a fine spread laid out, and the aforementioned publicist pointed at the table and said, "Look, they have trifles." I said, "You mean truffles." And she said, "No. Trifles." She was correct, and I offer her this public apology, and, taking advantage of this futuristic form, I also offer a link to the Little Debbie recipe page.