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.

Another Romanian interview/review for Trespassing

Uzma Aslam Khan's Romanian edition of Trespassing has engendered yet another Romanian-language interview, which I once again fail to understand whatsoever. it's probably pretty nice, right?

Here is the sum total of things I know about Romania:

1. Nadia Comenici (not sure if I spelled that right)

That's it. Still, if I'm going to know only one thing about your country, it might as well be an astonishing gymnast who scored perfect 10s at the Olympics.

More new neighbors; or, the thing I possibly missed the most while living overseas all those years

Maybe not the most obvious thing, but there it is. I love hummingbirds. As in, loooove them. The affair started in Tucson, AZ, where Uzee and I put out a feeder and had tons feeding there (and saw tons more at other places besides our front porch). All kinds too: purple-beaked and ivory-bileld and whatnot. Hummingbirds migrate, and most species go hang out in South America during our winter, then come up to Texas and the southwest when it gets warm again. 

Since leaving Arizona in (gulp) 1995, we've had to rely on memories, as there are no hummingbirds outside of the Americas, and we were in Morocco, Pakistan and Hawaii. (There were sunbirds, which are very cool and are a relative to hummingbirds; they're small,  colorful, creepery things with long curved bills that slurp nectar out of flowers. but they're not quite the same.) Now, however, we're back, and having moved to our terrific new house with horses in the back yard and bunnies scampering across the lawn, we dusted off our feeder, hung it out, and presto! More hummingbirds than you can believe.

We don't get the variety here in MA that we got in the southwest; the only species that makes it this far north is the ruby-throat. But still, that's cooler than words can adequately describe, so there you go. For some reason we seem to get about 10 females to every male, but whatever.

Of course, they can be tricky to photograph, as they tend to move pretty quick. Personally, I like this action shot the best:

And for those of you NOT prone to motion sickness, here's a little video I took out the window of my study, which appears to have been captured in the midst of an earthquake although it was not. This is a multi-bird melee that was going on one afternoon on our back stoop. I was twitchy because I was trying to film everywhere at once, and because, well, I'm kind of twitchy. But if you can get through it, it gives a pretty good idea of the kind of hummingbird mayhem we're experiencing here.

Don't Open That Door! is back...

After a brief hiatus of a couple weeks, wherein I recharged my batteries and generally took a break from certain things, my PopMatters column Don't Open That Door! is back with installment #51. This week we're focusing on 1951's The Thing From Another World, aka one of the best movies of the decade, no kidding.

Kenneth Tobey and James Arness lead the way, but really this is an ensemble piece that crackles with great dialogue, moody lighting and atmospheric sets. John Carpenter would remake it in 1986 with a lot more blood and gore; it's an okay attempt but lacks the charm of the original.

So take a peek at the column, and do me a favor and Tweet about it, Like it on Facebook and so forth. If people say they like it, I'll be able to do more and more, which is what I'm hoping for...

Attention, Romanian speakers!

The lovely and talented Uzma Aslam Khan was recently interviewed for a Romanian web site site in honor of the recent release of the Romanian edition of her terrific book, Trespassing. (Her 15th edition? 16th? I can't keep up.)

Here's the cover of the new edition, which is pretty sweet, featuring as it does silkworm butterflies in the act of mating.

If you read the book, you'll see that both concepts -- silkworms, and mating in its various forms -- are both crucial to the storyline as well as the bigger themes. So, the cover designer was pretty clever here.

Here's an extract from the interview:

Aşteptarea virează către cititor, căutăm ce nu cunoaştem şi încercăm să ne punem în locul celuilalt. Încă o diferenţă se referă la faptul că în imaginarul vestic există adeseori preconcepţii, generate de media, despre cum ar trebui să arate Orientul, în special cu referire la femei, care, de cele mai multe ori sînt văzute ca nişte fiinţe ascunse, fără voce, obligate să se mărite.

Okay, no idea what's going on in that first sentence. The second has words like "diferenta" and "imaginarul" that are temptingly close to words that I do know, along with the nifty phrase "preconceptii, generate de media." Plus I'm willing to go to bat that I know what "Orientul" is getting at. So okay, I think we're doing all right, as long as that first sentence isn't saying something like, "Milk sure has gotten expensive these days, but at least you can freeze it!"

Interesting blog review of An Age of Madness

Okay so it's not a rave by any means, although the reviewer does say some nice things along the lines of

"I was worried about a male author writing a convincing female lead, and I think Mr. Maine has done a great job with that"

as well as

"while I normally don't like unreliable narrators, I understand why he did it, and I think he pulled it off very well"

But she also has some reservations about the tone of the book -- ie, it's too depressing -- as well as the back cover copy, which she feels misrepresents the story. As far as tone goes, yeah, this is probably my most depressing book. Guilty as charged. It's a pretty dark story about some pretty dark stuff, and once I went there, I wasn't about to get out of it too easily. So okay, if that's not your thing, then I can understand that.

I actually find her criticism of the cover copy more interesting, as she makes the claim that

"unlike the back cover copy, I am not going to intentionally mislead you in order to not give away a spoiler. Don't read that copy. It's bad in that you will think you're about to read a very different kind of book"

I find this interesting because I helped to write the copy (most writers do, I think), and thought I did an okay job. Apart from a series of questions that sketch out the basic parameters of the main character, Regina, the copy pretty much consists of one sentence: "An Age of Madness peels back the layers of Regina's psyche in a voice that is brash, bitter, and blackly humorous, laying bare her vulnerabilities while drawing the reader unnervingly close to this memorable heroine."

I can understand the reservation someone might have about the word "heroine;" Regina is many things but she is probably nobody's idea of a heroine. But she is the novel's main character and narrator, so it seems fair enough to characterize her in this way. Someone else might say the book is too grim to be considered "humorous," even if it's "blackly humorous." But I don't think so; there any number of passages that make me giggle, or even laugh out loud, and I've given enough readings to know that audiences tend to respond the same way.

This brings us to the blurbs from other writers -- Stuart Archer Cohen, Natalie Danford and Jincy Willett, all of whom were kind enough to read the manuscript and commit their praise to print. Everybody says very kind things and they say them memorably. Maybe Stuart's final comment, that the novel is "intriguing and uplifting," would throw some people. I do think there's a good deal of resolution and forward movement by the end of the story, but I can understand why some readers would not find the book "uplifting." It's a pretty sad story, I'll cop to that, and I do my best to avoid pat answers and by-the-numbers "redemption," which has been a buzzword for years now that basically indicates a happy ending.

Anyway I find the blogger's comments interesting, because they raise all kinds of questions about our expectations of a book, and of the description of the book that -- like it or not -- most of us still use in determining whether or not we're going to read something. This is the first time a reviewer has ever commented on the jacket copy of one of my stories, and it makes me wonder about books that I've read that perhaps didn't mesh with the expectations that I had. Were my expectations fed by the jacket description? Quite likely.

No great conclusions here, just food for thought.

Meet the new neighbors

And I do mean "Neigh"-bors...

Sorry. Really, really sorry. I just can't help myself sometimes.

So then, Jasper and Sundance. Two horses who live in the barn behind our new house and whose paddock is more or less our back yard. The landlord who rents the house also rents the barn and yard, so these guys are our neighbors for the duration, which is fine with us.

Jasper is on the left, Sundance on the right with the white blotch and blond mane. I admit, I never knew much about horses--they actually kind of freak me out--but these guys are real characters, very playful and curious and unthreatening. They're also very responsive to both me and Uzee, which is sweet, as they come trotting over whenever we're in the vicinity in order to see what's going on:

So, we already pretty much love them.

Those things on their faces are fly guards, by the way. They look opaque but they're not, they just keep the bugs out of their eyes, which keeps the fellas happy.

Been moving. Been busy.

Been out of touch with this blog. Not much more to say, really. Except this: now that the moving is just about done (hooray!), I'll strive to be more regular about this whole blog thing, again.

I have seen the SHARKNADO...

... And I am speechless. But in a good way.

If you missed it--and really, you owe it to yourself to see this--it airs again on Thursday at 7pm EST on SyFy.

Okay, weirdest diet experience ever. But it's working.

I'm not a guy who ever obsessed much about his weight, but I do come from a family of people who think about it a lot. When my father was my age he was 300 pounds, and various siblings have struggled to maintain their fitness over the years. I was always the skinny one who never had to think about it much.

About five years ago I crept very close to the 200-pound mark, which freaked me out a bit. I was always someone who weighed in the 180-185 range, but apparently the move from Lahore back to the USA caused me to gain some pounds. (I know, big surprise.) So, like a lot of people, I started to look more closely at what I ate, I cut out the snacks and crap desserts, kept a log of my intake and so forth. The upshot was that I lost 17 pounds within a few months, returning to my more-or-less standard 181-182. However, it took a lot of work, and a lot of maintenance.

It will surprise few people that I didn't maintain. I'm in my late 40s now, perilously close to 50, and I'm not as wired or active as I used to be. My metabolism is slowing down, I think, and I have a pretty sedentary life--I write, I teach sometimes, I work at a group home at nights, which involves a lot of sitting. Sure, I still get up and out and I go for walks and all that, but it's not enough to keep the weight from creeping back. Last January I was in the mid-190s again, and it was depressing.

So I started the whole cycle and again got to the mid-180s, but that was about it. After a couple months I stabilized and didn't drop any more, and I got tired of life without nuts or desserts. I more or less resigned myself to being in the mid-to-upper 180s, at best, from here on out.

By chance I came across an article on Yahoo about something called the "East Fast" diet. It's also sometimes called the 5:2 diet, and a book about the same is apparently a hot seller on Amazon, but the principles are simple enough to outline here: Five days out of the week, you eat whatever you want. Two days, you limit yourself to 600 calories for men, 500 for women. The two "fasting" days should not be consecutive. (Mine are Sunday and Wednesday.) If something comes up and you can't keep a fast day, make it up later--the next day, or the day after that.

Sounds bogus, I know. But I've been doing this for three weeks and I've lost six pounds.

Last week Uzee and I went to Provincetown. From Monday through Friday I ate, literally anything I wanted, and there's plenty to eat in P-town. Starting with elaborate breakfasts at the B&B, followed by lunches with beer and/or dessert and/or both, followed by afternoon snacks consisting of green tea and (usually) some sort of cookie or pastry. Dinner would come later, usually significantly large and heavy and also usually containing beer and/or dessert.

This went on for five days, from Monday through Friday. Friday night while driving back I helped myself to some takeout fish and chips and a chocolate shake. It was that kind of week.

Then yesterday I had a fasting day of 600 calories, and this morning, dreading to see how much I had gained, I stepped on the scale. It read 180.5. Yup--after all that bingeing, I had lost half a pound in a week.

Now, it's true that we did a lot of walking during the week, but come on. It wasn't rigorous, vigorous hiking through the woods, it was strolling along Commercial Street poking around jewelry and T-shirt shops. There was a museum or two and a few art galleries and any number of funky outlets selling "contemporary gifts," and one lovely day at the beach where we walked for an hour or so and sat staring at the waves for thirty minutes. But there were no hardcore workouts, no hiking or biking or swimming at all. It was very, very mellow. And I ate like a horse and lost half a pound.

So I'm officially a believer. This diet, whatever it's doing, is doing something. My plan is to keep at it till I weigh 175 pounds, which is what I weighed 20 years ago when I lived in Arizona and rode a bike 6 miles to work every day. If I can do that, now, without a regular exercise regimen, just through diet and a moderately healthy lifestyle (don't drive when I can walk, try to do something active a few times per week), then I'll be a believer for good.

Congratulations to my buddy Julia...

...Who has just gotten married this week. I have yet to meet the guy, who's named John and is Canadian, but who is apparently the bee's knees, as they say. So I'm happy for them both, especially Julia, who's been through some shit and deserves contentment.

We go back quite a ways--to the summer of 1980 in fact. Here's a picture from 1982 or 83 (can't remember which, but I think it's '83), when we were both counselors at an "art camp" called the Center for Creative Youth at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. It was as students at this camp that Julia and I had met in 1980... Anyway in this picture she is laughing about the balloons obscuring her face and I'm being the college-aged geek that I was.

Yup, some blackmail material here. And the cropped close-up doesn't make things any better:

I spent much of life at that time trying to be cool but there's only so cool you can look when wearing a T-shirt that says "Ask Me," and to my credit I think I knew that even then. Good times, sort of.

Congratulations again, Julia. And you too John.

Vieux Farka Toure rules. But then you knew that already. Right?

Uzee and I saw Vieux Farka Toure play at the Iron Horse last night in Northampton. It was awesome, as in, it generated a feeling of awe within me. For several reasons: first, the guy can play like nobody's business. Second, his set was so fluid and effortless, he just rolled from one song into the next, creating this groove that never stopped even when he took a few minutes to chat between songs. Third, his backing musicians (bass, acoustic guitar, kalabash) were so tight within him it was like they were a single organism.

I wish I had a video from the show but I don't, so this will have to do. Here's Vieux playing "Ay Bakoy," a song from his new record Mon Pays, which he played last night:



If you ever get the chance to see him... take it.

Age of Madness now on Kindle

For all you technophiles out there, An Age of Madness has now been released on Kindle. And it's a fair bit cheaper that way than buying the paper-and-ink version of the book, so there you go.

I don't own a Kindle... but I know a number of people who do. Will I ever make the leap? I kind of doubt it, but you know, never say never and all that.

For those of you still without these little plastic devices, but who do own an iPad or tablet or even just a computer, you can download the Kindle app from Amazon, which effectively means you can turn whatever it is you have into an e-reader (even your phone, if that's your thing).

Anyway it's a great book, if I say so myself, so take a look. And thanks.

Uzma's new essay on CounterPunch

The lovely and talented Uzma Aslam Khan has written a new essay on the ongoing violence in Pakistan, which has spread to the mountainous northern areas. This is distressing for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that these areas are historically some of the most tolerant--and beautiful--in the whole subcontinent.

We traveled there in 1996. I looked upon Nanga Parbat ("Naked Mountain") many times. Now I would think twice about going back, and then think again.

Please read this. Thanks.

Teaching at Smith College

I will be teaching an Intermediate Writing Workshop over at Smith College in Northampton this fall, beginning in September. Woo-hoo! as the kids are all saying these days. The class will be small (12 people) and, I'm sure, filled with highly motivated, hardworking students.

It's been a year since I was teaching anywhere and man oh man, I'm looking forward to it.

My Greek's a little rusty, so I'm not clear on the slogan. But I'll work on it.

ANNNND, big thanks to those people who said a nice thing or two about me as my references, in order for me to land this gig. You know who you are, and I couldn't have landed this gig without you.

Not your typical Metal Blade band

Metal Blade is a label, for those of you who didn't know. They sign all kinds of metal bands, and also other bands, like Purson here, who play guitar righteously and rock out.

I'm a sucker for this stuff.



They have a new record recently released and I like it quite a lot.