Big news: For the next little while I won’t be here, but here as I guest-blog for the summer at About Last Night, joining two of my favorite bloggers Terry Teachout and OGIC. (Announcement.)

Pleased as punch, etc. etc., with only one concern: I like the people who read here, all dozen of you, and I’ll miss hearing from you in the Comments. So please do join me at About Last Night and feel free to email thoughts, contrarian impulses, suggestions and foundationless gossip (email address is in the upper right corner of this page; although I strongly recommend not using subject lines like “Hi” “Hello” and “I’d like to enlarge your penis” as I only open those if they’re from Clem Snell).

It may get dusty here so I’ve left you with a picture of one of my favorite places in the world: Jacob’s Meat Market in Appleton, Wisconsin. I used to take piano a block from here and after my lesson my dad and I would come here for sausage, which would get fried up in a skillet for dinner (serve with mustard!). I visited at New Year’s and it was astoundingly the same. The woman at the register said that lots of people who’ve moved away stop in to Jacob’s when they’re back in town. Whenever he’s in Wisconsin, Mr. Tingle (who’s a Southerner) likes to intone, “There’s a different mass consciousness at work here.” If that’s true, Jacob’s is a seat of that mass consciousness.

The counter at Jacob’s Meat Market after the jump (warning: not an appetizing shot for vegetarians).
(more…)

Sorry for the unannounced silence. We were traveling and I always have an idea that I will blog from the road and then never do. The trip included stops to the Bond-Rowe household in Lexington, a night in Milwaukee, and then a weekend in Madison for the wedding of my friend Eric, who I’ve known since high school, and his fabulous bride Molly.

A few highlights:
• Recent trips have convinced me that if I ever leave Asheville, it will be to set up residences in Milwaukee and Antwerp, Belgium (with some sort of share in a house in Austin). They really are my favorite cities. In Antwerp, I would bicycle around all day with my small dog in a basket, trying not to be run over by diamond traders. In Milwaukee, I would join the Brewcity Bruisers and when you came to visit me I’d always have a pot of cheese-and-beer soup simmering on the stove.

• I didn’t make it to Schwartz’s in Milwaukee this trip, but I did hit Shakespeare’s in Madison. It’s a used bookstore near the Capitol building that I used to visit in college. I picked up a great copy of Eudora Welty’s collected short stories with this inscription: “My darling, I hope these stories give you as much pleasure as you give me… at this Charleston Christmas in 1980 and every day of the year. Tom.”

• Finally, I rarely talk about my athletic triumphs on this blog as I rarely have any to report. But on Saturday, I hit three bullseyes in a row playing darts. Not three passersby, three bullseyes.

I’m hesitant to post this given the rash of recent health-related posts here, which give the impression that I’m delicate as a corsage (I’m sick, and my feet are exploding! etc.). Just as some people only write poetry when they’re sad or it’s raining, I apparently have a propensity to blog when not feeling well. But wondering: Have any of you had TMJ and if so, do you have advice about it? Particularly any alternative approaches that may have worked or helped, such as homeopathy or exercise?

For the past few weeks I’ve had insane jaw ache. First it was clicking, then it was off-and-on pain, and now it’s fairly constant.* Enough so that I’m thinking of wrapping a handkerchief around my head, old-school comic stizz, and taking the name Lumpy for my own. I haven’t been to the doctor, but I have been to my hairdresser, and she thinks it’s TMJ.

Am going to see my ortho. But in the meanwhile, I’ve been reading up and it seems like it’s an amorphous type of complaint that there’s no sure-fire fix for. Hence the solicitation of advice.

Ok, the feet no longer look like they’re going to pop like balloons. That was my gruesome fear: That they would keep swelling and swelling until they just popped in the night. The sinus infection is almost gone too (thanks, nameless newt!).

Lately, I feel dumb about this blog — I feel as if I’m supposed to be engaged in some sort of literary discourse that I’m incapable of right now — but in the spirit that something is better than nothing: Me and my big feet want to start taking dance class this June.

This afternoon I found two good listings for dance classes, and by “good” I mean “neatly encapsulates Asheville”. Lots of belly dancing, a decent amount of clogging, some shag, much Morris, with a little tango & salsa thrown in.

I think I’m going to stick with ballet, although my dream class would be the one what’s-her-face-with-the-bad-turnout goes to in “Center Stage” when she’s feeling discouraged about her classes at American Ballet Academy, and they do the routine to “Higher Ground” and she realizes that she’s not such a bad dancer, she’s just a maverick who can’t be controlled. However, there doesn’t seem to be a listing for that.

That cold has become a massive sinus infection. I’ve mixed up some Asheville voodoo concoction (usnea; pulsatilla; eye of newt) and we’ll see if that works.

Is it wrong to be cheered by the fact that this week on “American Idol” Jordin Sparks’ hair is bigger than the entirety of Ryan Seacrest (himself newtlike)?*

* Litblog says, “What?”

First, Jane Austen was too homely. Now, Sylvia Plath is too depressing.

Jesus H.

Find some great photos from our trip over at Serial Photo.

We’re home, and it is good. The dog is attacking my elephantine tourist feet*, the cat is minxing in and out the door. Piles of books to open and QVC packages from my mom (sure hope there’s a seersucker muumuu in there). Evidence abounds that our housesitting friend took heroic measures to improve the domestic surrounds, including the resuscitation of a couple of the more dessicated houseplants. I have kissed the coffeemaker all over.

More to come but our basic itinerary was Bonn & Cologne again (where Mr. Tingle had more business), then a train over to Paris to see Mr. Tingle’s son, who’s been living there with his steady since February: playing guitar, smoking cigarettes, getting to know the best 2-euro wines and growing a mustache. (His various emails on these subjects will be collected in a single volume, to be called Dear Paw: Letters from The Boy in Paris). He and the steady squired us all around town and we had a pretty perfect time.

I want to share more adventures, including the stalking of one Ludwig Glock, antiquarian bookseller in Bonn — but for now a follow-up on the post below about the books to be brought on the trip.

So: I have the books all piled in my carry-on. Our flight out of Asheville is delayed and — due to fallout from that giant nor’easter the other week — we’re told that if we miss our connection to Cologne, the best the airline can do is put us up in the Holiday Inn in Newark for a night, then fly us to Amsterdam the next evening, and then we’d have to find our own way down to Germany. Which would mean that Mr. Tingle would miss a day of meetings and we’d finally get to see Amsterdam but only to find the train station, and also I immediately form a picture of the Holiday Inn in Newark and it is a little sordid & depressing & involves us lying around in our underwear (no luggage) and drinking lukewarm water from the bathroom tap (no money) as we listen to the planes rumble by overhead. But: The clouds clear, the wind gusts abate, we fly out of Asheville a little before the time predicted, we arrive in Newark, there is still time to make our flight to Cologne but only if we run (run!), and so we go flying down the concourse. Except I can’t fly because I am carrying a bag of books that includes the frickin’ first volume of Remembrance of Things Past and it is heavy, that bag holding that book. So heavy that even with the spectre of the Holiday Inn in Newark before me I can only manage a hobbled trot. Mr. Tingle runs, I hobble behind him, and eventually I yell to him, “Go on ahead without me!”, meaning go on ahead and ask them to hold the plane, but which I am told came out tonally as an anguished cry of “Alas, I am carrying the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past and am doomed! SAVE YOURSELF!”

* No kidding. They are huge & so swollen they’re hardly identifiable as feet anymore. More like giant lead plugs.

Confidential to Anne Denoon, author of the excellent Back Flip: I accidentally deleted your comment about The Dud Avocado. If you re-leave it, I promise not to do that again. Stop snickering, Sarvas.

Stories found in Charles Crow’s American Gothic: An Anthology, 1787-1916*, price tag $54.95 (table of contents included as Sample Pages here):
• Herman Melville’s “The Bell Tower”
• Stephen Crane’s “The Monster”
• Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby”

RELATED:
• Toni Schlesinger on American Gothic interior design, “After spending enough time with American Gothic—a week—it came to mind that modern life and its minimalism is actually a denial of life, with its smooth surfaces and synthetic veneers (natural materials bring with them the continuing realization that life has a beginning and an end). Looking at American Gothic, one cannot help but think of beginnings and endings, of embracing the inevitable, of heaven (if one believes in it) and where one might be going, or not.”

(Warning: The last is probably a short-lived link; via Jenny D.)

* For all I know Crow’s a self-given name; but if not, kudos to fate for bestowing it on a future academic with a specialty in American Gothic.

[So a long story short, my excuse for ignoring this site goes like this: Work work, Europe (Bonn-Antwerp!-Bruges), book book. But now I come to you with the burning literary questions of the day:

• Can you fricking believe Duke got a 6 seed? When I moved to Asheville, a little over a decade ago, I looked on ACC rivalries as an eccentric custom of the natives: Quaint and a little baroque. Then I realized I really, really hate Duke basketball. I hate their bullying entitled fans. I hate the assistant man-boys in their sports jackets lined up in a row next to Coach K (only Quin Snyder has escaped!). I hate the grinding inevitability of their wins. I hate Duke. So, go Virginia Commonwealth!

• Meanwhile, the brave, scrappy Wolfpack have to face the Drexel Dragons in the first round of the NIT today, which is unfortunate as Drexel will be playing with a grande-sized chip on its shoulder. Should the Dragons ever fall behind, I imagine Jim Boeheim will bound onto the floor to assist with a couple baskets.

• Who do you have in your Final Four? I have Carolina, Kansas, Wisconsin and Melinda Doolittle.

End bracket discussion.]

Last Friday my sister called for the test results related to her surgery. The P.A. said the results weren’t ready (she’d been told she’d have them by Thursday) and then told her — the patient with the leaking, super-painful chest wound waiting to hear if her cancer is inoperable — to have “a nice restful weekend.” Lacking other data, my family spent the next few days deconstructing and shredding and generally reviling “nice restful weekend” (my mom: “What’s worse is the f**ker probably meant it”).

But when things began to happen, they happened very quickly. On Tuesday the results came back negative (yay!), but with the caveat that it might be a couple weeks before a second surgery could take place. On Wednesday, her doctor called and asked if my sister could be ready for surgery on Thursday. Yesterday they operated. This time the surgery lasted only 84 hours. And while it’s early yet, and she’ll have about five weeks of recovery (they had to remove a goodly portion of lung), the doctor is saying it’s a success.

So cautious, tentative and all that, but also joyful and hugely grateful today.

My sister had surgery Tuesday. It lasted approximately 153 hours. Unfortunately, the doctor found more fluid around the heart than expected and couldn’t complete the surgery because they need to — wait for it — do more tests. Those results should come back soon.

In the meantime, thanks for the good wishes and kind messages. At the risk of getting all Mrs. Moweto on you — “my diamonds are in the vaults, may God guide you in what you decide” — it’s meant a great deal.

This is going to be a strange “Dear Internet” letter, but I’ve been gone awhile and it feels like some explanation is in order. Back in November my sister was diagnosed with lung cancer. Since then it’s been a roller-coaster: In the past few weeks, her diagnosis has swung from Stage 4, the gravest stage, to Stage 1*, back to Stage 4 then to 1, settling most recently at Stage 3B (as my mom said, “What about 2? Where’s Stage 2?”). Along the way, her condition has been complicated by pneumonia, several broken ribs from coughing too hard, fluid around her heart and infection, with the result that while she’s been spending a lot of time in the hospital they haven’t even begun treating the cancer yet. What stage they eventually determine she’s at will decide what this treatment is: If it’s a latter stage, she’ll have chemotherapy; if it’s at an earlier stage, she’ll have surgery.

I’ve been reluctant to talk about it here for many reasons. First, it’s just a hard subject to talk about, even with close friends. Second, my sister’s being brave and stoic, she is resolved to get better, and it seems like bad form to sit beside the bed behaving more piteously than the patient.

Also, I’m not sure what’s happened to my ability to talk normally, but it’s absconded, departed, vamoosed. Everything that comes out is ornately formal and off — basically, when I try to talk or write about anything lately it sounds like I’m being scripted by a Nigerian widow named Mrs. Carmelita Moweto who has some funds in Switzerland she’d very much like your urgent assistance with.

Here is me at the bank last week:
Intention: Request that cash back be in $20s, please.
Said: “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I have that in twenty dollar bills, please, if it’s not too inconvenient … kind lady.”

My sister’s daughter, who is 23, isn’t having this problem. Yesterday, after she got off the phone with one of my sister’s doctors, someone at work asked her if she needed a hug. My niece said, “No, I just want to pop someone in the eye.”

There will be one more round of tests next week, and then we should know what’s next. Right now I’m trying to clear the decks so that I can be in Boston for at least some of my sister’s treatment. Or, should the doctors alter or postpone the treatment plan one more time, I will be going to Boston to be a good auntie and help my niece set fire to every back issue of Family Circle and Golf Digest in their waiting rooms. Whichever.

In the meanwhile, I’m going to try to resume blogging here a bit. Maybe even about books, maybe not. Either way, it will be spotty and forgetful and occasionally sound as if one Mrs. Carmelita Moweto is at the helm. Please be kind, buy me a drink if you see me and tell me some funny jokes.

* You can pretty much chart the Stage 1s by spurts of blogging here.

Mr. Tingle’s birthday was last Monday. His presents included a black rotary phone, a bouquet of parrot tulips and a six-pack of Old Speckled Hen, as well as the second volume of Shelby Foote’s Civil War history and Geoff Dyer’s newish book, The Ongoing Moment, about photography. Also, a post-fracas “Smile Time” Angel puppet, which struck the recipient as, uh, a little random (note to self: Do not order from eBay while also drinking SCHNAPPS).

Here’s the Shelby Foote alongside Mr. Tingle’s current reading, Infinite Jest (he’s looking forward to getting to his new books sometime in 2007), as well as a fairly typical snapshot of the household: I am ensconced behind my laptop, with the cat and dog sleeping nearby, and the house is a shambles — we are all in fairly close proximity to the wood stove, which is just out of frame to the right. The cat is wearing another of Mr. Tingle’s birthday presents, a pixilating cape that was knit by my stepson’s steady. It was created for the dog — there’s a Laverne-like “L” for “Lucy” affixed to the back — but that night we put it on the cat.

Here is another version of the shot, with more books but less cape.

Expect little here* as I continue to be swamped with work. My coworker James Frey, once a valued member of the team, has contributed little for the past week. Evidently, his “literary bad boy cred” was challenged in some brouhaha last week, and he’s taken to stalking around the office in a tight-cut pair of gray jeans and an old AC/DC t-shirt. At first we thought this was just a loose interpretation of Casual Friday but he showed up in it again this morning, along with a faux-hawk and a slow ooze of blood and vomit from his left ear lobe where a safety pin was jammed in. Even more alarming is his new habit of leaping onto desks and screeching, “Now you’re messing with … a son of a bitch,” Nazareth stizz, whenever he’s presented with a new file. We’re all like, dude, you’re 36, you’re going to pull something.

While we sort it out with HR, why not scoot over to the Lit Blog Co-op website, where the Winter 2005 “Read This!” pick is revealed. It’s an excellent choice — and we’ll be discussing it beginning the week of February 20 (leaving time for you to pick up a copy and join in the conversation, should you so desire). And check in at the LBC site the rest of this week to see the other four titles nominated this go-round. Lots more good clean fun is in the works, so stay tuned.

* Duh.

Pardon the ongoing lapse in blogging around here. It’s not, as you may have imagined, because the proprietress was on some sort of Schnapps Bender (always great fun until one wakes up one morning on a deserted slope in the Alps, wearing nothing but underwear and a sprig of edelweiss, after an ill-advised “field trip” to the schnappsian fount). Rather, I have been up against one of the great labor inequities of our day, namely the prohibition against blogging in meetings. Since I’ve been in meetings all day every day — in Asheville, in Poughkeepsie, across the Atlantic seaboard; sometimes I just wander into strange businesses and go and sit in their conference rooms, looking around expectantly till someone brings in some coffee and lets me show them my PowerPoint — this has radically curtailed my blogging. In an attempt to find a middle ground between business and blogging, I have even volunteered to live-blog the daily proceedings (“10:31 Jack requests materials for project. 10:32 Client asks for clarification on requested materials. 10:33 James Frey breaks into conference room in crack-fueled rage and combats various cops and authority figures placed around the room, wielding a numchuck in one hand and a 1993 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cierra in the other. The Powerpoint screen is getting sprayed with snot and vomit and blood. Also, my binder. 10:34 James Frey takes seat and admits that this last bit may have been an exaggeration. He was really just wielding some figures from Accounting. He asks that this remain strictly off the record.”) but so far I haven’t been able to get sign-off.

What about the evenings? Well, those have been given to immersing myself in the tragedies of Shakespeare. Also, CSI: Miami. Alas, seriously. Which brings me to, how come no one ever told me there was such a thing as David Caruso?!?!? Mr. Tingle and I are helpless in the face of Caruso’s mad comic genius*; he slays us, we are all laughter and weeping before him. I’m sure there’s buckets about Caruso’s crazy intonation style out there on the World Wide Interweb already, but since I’m new to it, I’m still enthralled. it’slikeeverything he says has Deep Portent with Undertones of Sexy inserted evenwhen it’sjust …. Silly. Like, hey babe takethis to The Lab. Or, edelweiss everymorning you Greet Me.

Sadly, this is what happens when a person decides to turn into a Walking Doppler Effect (see also: Delilah, host of late-night adult-contemporary dedications radio show. CALLER: “Delilah, my husband’s a police officer who lost his right leg after James Frey figuratively mowed him down during a routine traffic stop, and it’s been hard, because we have 9 kids and the insurance won’t pay because they say it never really happened and his mother just moved back in, but I want him to know I love him.” DELILAH: OoooooooooOOOOOOH, sweEEEETie. Andyoustill love him like it was yesterday, Don’t You?” (cues Kool & The Gang’s ‘Cherish.’)).

All of which is a fairly circuitous, non-payoffable way to bring up the headline attached to the New York Time’s already-much-talked-about story on JT Leroy: “The Unmasking of JT Leroy: In Public, He’s a She,” which begs to be read in the style of Mr. Caruso, “TheUnmaskingof J.T. Leroy … In public, HE’S …. A SHE,” (if you don’t know Caruso, just insert some Shatner) and which notably only covers half the revelations in the article (evidently, “The Unmasking of JT LeRoy: In Public, He’s a She, and In Private, He’s Also a She But A Different She Than The First She” ran too long) .

I haven’t read anything by James Frey or JT Leroy so I can’t add much to the conversation about Fake Writer Day, except to note that the five stages of grief for the friends of JT Leroy (He Who Is Two Shes) seems to be: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and “Dude, I held back your hair while you vomited and you won’t even freaking blurb my book?!? And could we get some chocolates over here already? You know Winona’s just going to purge hers anyway.” We’re all for alternate identities and made-up personas here at Tingle Alley — I remain slightly disappointed to this day that T-Muffle is an actual guy and not, as I once supposed, the online persona of two lesbians in Brooklyn**— but it seems strange that the creative mind behind Leroy went to all this trouble to come up with what is, in essence, a composite of the world’s most tiresome, needy and draining user friend. Really, Mendacious Wank is the best you could come up with?

* Mr. Tingle, who is a kind man, insists that David Caruso is in on the joke and works this intonation to play with gender expectations and conventions of alpha-maleness in the cast of Steve McQueen. Or as Mr. Tingle himself put it last night, “He’s doing it on purpose, right? He knows it’s funny, right?”

** It makes the anti-Brooklyn vitriol even funnier.

Yesterday I woke up and realized that if I didn’t hop on it the family was going to be gathering around ye olde Yuletide dying Boston fern this year. Thus far, as you may have observed, the main preparation for the season has been a steady imbibing of peppermint schnapps and hot cocoa. This is, I have come to believe, a foul combination but we have, mysteriously, a mega-bottle of schnapps in the cabinet — maybe it came with the house? — that has now lasted 3 winters. It is, in fact, so large that it is the only object that fits in that cabinet. Yesterday I considered that I could probably pour out bits of it into snifters for everybody on my shopping list — “To our kind neighbors, HAVE SOME SCHNAPPS” “To my beloved stepchildren, HAVE SOME SCHNAPPS” etc. — and still have enough left to get Mr. Tingle and me to spring.

Speaking of stepchildren, my stepson turns 23 today. I invite you to feel mingled feelings of misty sentimentality at how well he and his sister have turned out and “holy crap, I’m getting old” with me. As longtime readers know, I first shacked up with Mr. Tingle when his kids were in high school. One entertaining feature of their domestic routines together was that Mr. Tingle would rise early to pack The Boy’s lunch every morning. Always the same: One turkey sandwich, one plastic baggie of chips, one can of Dr. Lynn (local generic Dr. Pepper), one apple, and one or two miniature Baby Ruths. This routine continued till the last day of high school, and for all I know Mr. Tingle smuggled some sort of snack pack into the graduation ceremony itself. (Obviously, I wasn’t put in charge of any lunch production because I would have been all, “Here, kid, HAVE SOME SCHNAPPS.”)

While I’m nattering on about domestic arrangements, one startling revelation from yesterday’s spree: There lives inside me someone who really, really cares about the quality of her tree skirt. Who knew? It took me a long time at TJ Maxx to fight this alternate personality down and successfully navigate past the display of tree skirts marked 25% off. There was one of red and gold brocade that was particularly tempting, and I stood there fingering it for, like, an hour before shaking off the madness. Our tree skirt is red and green felt — I believe it was bought at the hardware store sometime long ago when I was first setting up house for myself. The tree thinks it’s totally fine.

A while back I asked the tech support team to bring down the font size around here as it felt “overly bulbous.” Maybe I was projecting my own issues onto the font — I don’t know.* However, some readers reported the new font size is too small for comfortable reading, and I promised to have the tech support team look for a happy medium between the bulbous and the anorectic. I haven’t forgotten — and will try to draw the tech support team’s fell geekish attention toward this site this weekend. Because, wow, the font’s looking really leetle, ain’t it?

* So there’s this commercial in rotation right now for a weight-loss supplement that contends that when you’re stressed your body releases a chemical that causes belly bloat. And so by taking the supplement you combat that stress-swelling and become — without benefit of better diet or exercise — lithe and flat-bellied again. Miraculous! So, I’m wondering if a word exists for the state when one simultaneously ridicules and is oddly persuaded by a preposterous advertising promise. I’ve been in a crazed work place for the past four weeks, which is why it’s been so quiet/erratic here, and stationed at the computer pretty continuously, seven days a week, only leaving to attend the odd holiday party, where I sit in a chair and eat and drink too much. This is the sort of existence that leads to the uncomfortable feeling that one may, at any moment, be led off to execution and turned into veal piccata. But it turns out, it’s not this fatted-calf lifestyle that’s making my clothes tight — it’s stress! What a relief.