Laura Lippman

You bring me joy, always.

Jeff, don’t harsh my mellow.

It’s such a scam.

I made a super healthy dinner (kale salad with farro, raspberries, and toasted pistachios & a little pancetta) and there is so much clean-up involved: Am I really going to live longer or is it just going to feel like a lot longer?

Move along, nothing to see here, do not get between me and these shoes.

Since you were okay with suggestions, I just want to add pasta w/ Marcelle Hazan’s tomato sauce, which has only 4 ingredients.
There’s also an Alison Roman dish where you put four chicken legs (thigh & drumstick) in olive oil w/potatoes, garlic and rosemary, bake at 325 for 1.5-2 hours.

I am one of the 150 million although I will demand my senior discount.

Domino Sugar plant at sunrise, seemingly quite excited to see me this morning. But, seriously: I always tell my writing students that they won’t be able to achieve things that they’re not willing to articulate to at least one other sentient being. I tell them they have to own their dreams. If you want to be a NYT bestseller or a Nobel Prize winner or have Marion Ettlinger take your author photo — whatever your dream is, you must speak to it. But there was a time when my own dreams were so limited, when all I could see was a certain kind of house, a career like my father’s, a life like my mother’s, i.e. having a job AND doing almost all the housework/child care. By sheer happenstance, I walked away from newspapers less than a decade before the industry imploded and through crazy luck I’ve kept my head above water in an industry whose obituary is written every six months or so. tl;dr: Who knows what the next 5, 10, 20 years will bring?

Good morning, Bluesky.

I chanced upon my own alternative universe yesterday, unexpectedly taking a long walk through the neighborhood I once thought would be my lifelong home, surprised/gratified/chagrinned at how limited my imagination is when it comes to my own life.

Naw.

It’s true, genre can slide by without terrific writing, but it probably has more terrific writing than people realize? Mick Herron, Megan Abbott, George Pelecanos, Lisa Lutz, Kellye Garrett, Kate Atkinson, John Scalzi, Elizabeth Hand, to name a scant few.

💯

Are they still alive?

A stack of pancakes, two pork patties on a green plate, a bottle of maple syrup. My mother once opined that I “spoil” my kid by offering to make her breakfast whenever she wants it on Saturday morning. I think “indulge” is the better word.

#IfIWereYourMom (cleaning-out-the-fridge-prior-to-a-trip edition).

It is! (And how did I forget you were in the UK. D’oh!)

Hate this, Miranda. Are you in a state that requires a prescription?

Domino Sugar plant at sunrise on a cloudless day, reflected in the water. Yes, I have posted that Frank Lima poem on multiple Saturdays. It’s one of almost 50 poems I typed on a manual typewriter fall 2022/winter 2023. I thought it would help me memorize poems, something I had tried to do during the pandemic, but it didn’t work. It did, however, give me more appreciation for the poems I typed, more of a sense of their rhythms. I taped them into a journal. And I guess because I was sourcing a lot of poems from the Internet, Google figured out I liked poetry and one day in spring 2023, my Google news feed had a Philadelphia magazine piece about the MOOC (massive open online course) Modern Contemporary Poetry, which goes “live” every fall. I signed up for it and I’m now doing it for the third time, although it’s a work-heavy fall for me, with a novel in progress, an essay due by month’s end, teaching in November. Lima is not part of the main syllabus, but I have found a discussion of his poem, Plena, (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89589/plena) at ModPo.org.

Good morning, Bluesky.

1970

Saturday all things happen to us:
I drink lots of brandy
and go to bed early.

Saturday we make a pillow
and revolutionize the apartment.

—Frank Lima—

Strongly recommend the You Are Good podcast on this film. (Context: I respect/kind love this movie.)

Somewhere between group 1 and 2.

Yes, and I'm not even sure what you're talking about.

She is tragically heterosexual.

Yes and no.

Oh, gosh, I love fried okra so. My mother convinced a truck farmer near our Baltimore home to grow okra and then my mom figured out that fried okra in Caesar salad was kind of the perfect crouton.

@bitsy15.bsky.social, whom I know to be an erudite, thoughtful parser of poetry has published a book of poetry and I encourage everyone to check it out.

So the truth is I seldom order crab-anything in New Orleans, but I have had the beignets on LPG and they are magnificent.

I cancelled my digital subscription and I anxiously await your book, Suzanne, which I know will be wonderful. But what the Post did to @karenattiah.bsky.social is indefensible.

Are we speaking of the Mardi Gras outfit that I did not inspect carefully?

Fascists and their collaborators ruin everything, although I guess the music festival in Sound of Music kinda squeaked through.

Ok, technically "erotica."