My "Would You Rather" interview over at TNBBC

The ever-lively Lori over at The Next Best Book Club blog has been running a series of author interviews called "Would You Rather," which feature questions like:  "Would you rather write an entire book with your feet or with your tongue?" and "Would you rather be forced to listen to Ayn Rand bloviate for an hour or be hit on by an angry Dylan Thomas?"

As you can see, Lori isn't interested in asking the same old questions, which is all good. I did my best to answer them honestly but entertainingly, which wasn't always easy.

Next up: Lori asks us writers to donate a recipe for the coming fall/winter. I ought to be able to come up with something... stay tuned.

Don'T Open That Door! #55: Attack of the 50 Foot Woman

The latest installment of my ongoing column for PopMatters.com, Don't Open That Door!, is up and running. This weeks it's the 1959 kitsch-fest Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, starring Allison Hayes and Yvette Vickers.

For those of you unfamiliar with the plot: Allison Hayes plays a woman who grows to fifty feet tall. That's about it, although there's a good deal of other melodrama worked in around the fringes of this basic plot. It's all kind of hilarious, in certain moods.

Better late than never

So there we were, sitting in the Foundry coffee shop in Northampton following our blowout anniversary dinner on Sunday, when this kickass instrumental tune came on over the radio (Radio Paradise from Canada, in case anyone's wondering). I did some digging around, and found it: the song was called "La Femme d'Argent" and it's by a French band called Air. It came out in 1998, hence the title of this post. But in my defense, in 1998 I was living in Morocco and Pakistan, and wasn't totally up to date with the latest developments in the French ambient music scene.

Anyway, I love the song, and the video too, so, happy September 17:

It was twenty years ago today...

There were no cell phones, no computers in every home, no flatscreen TVs. CDs were still kind of new. Bill Clinton had been President for almost a year, Facebook didn't exist, Amazon was just a river. The hottest show on TV was Seinfeld, and nobody had heard of--or probably even thought of--The Sopranos, Lost, Mad Men or Breaking Bad. John Paul II was Pope. No one in the USA knew who the Taliban were except a few people who paid attention to such things. The biggest rock bands in the world were Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and Kurt Cobain was still alive.

Uzee and I were living in Tucson, AZ, and on September 15, 1993, we got married.

This was our civil ceremony. In 1994 we would get married two more times, once in Pakistan and once in the US. This one was legally binding, though, so it counts. We trundled down to the city courthouse in the early afternoon, signed some papers, swore before the judge that we weren't cousins--I'm not even kidding, folks--and bam! We were hitched. A couple friends took pictures. We split a wine cooler instead of champagne and some kind of whole-grain cookie in place of wedding cake, and there you go. We both wore vests, and Uzee wore a thin red leather tie that had been my father's. I wore his hat.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I start teaching at Smith College on Tuesday

And I'm stoked!

That is all.