NancyKay Shapiro

Beautiful pic of my literary idol Sylvia Townsend Warner

featured as a Gay Icon At the National Portrait Gallery in London.

I'm now on Twitter: @NancyKayShapiro

... is now available for Kindle or Kindle for iPhone!

Amazon Rank.

Amazon removes all books with any gay & lesbian content or subject matter from sales rankings. Which is stupendously insulting. See more here.

I was awed by the meal service at St Xavier Church, where I helped out this afternoon. This was an amazing operation, beautifully run. It was also deeply troubling to see how necessary it was -- I was told they serve between 700 and 1000 meals to homeless or indigent people every Sunday. The church basement, which was rather vast, was full up. They serve in two waves -- first the elderly and infirm are brought in and seated, and they are brought meal trays. Once they're mostly done, the rest of the comers are admitted and come through in a line, picking up their own trays. In addition to a pretty ample hot meal, there is also free legal services and chiropractic treatments offered(!).

I was there for 4 hours -- at the beginning I helped assemble plastic cutlery, salt & pepper, and napkin bundles. After that I spent a little time as a tray mover, and then moved on to coffee service, which I really enjoyed, because I got to interact with the people, asking them if they wanted coffee (regular? Or black?) or tea, smiling and wishing them bon appetit. We weren't supposed to give seconds but I only said no to a couple of men who came back for fourths or fifths. We ran out of coffee before we ran out of coffee drinkers. Many of the people went through the food line two or three times -- which suggested that this might have been the main meal of their week, and many also left with extra bread and pastries.

I don't know how the meal compared to the usual, or if it was extra special because it was Easter -- it was turkey/cranberry sauce/dressing/mashed/veg/salad/bread/dessert, plus a festive candy bag -- the bags were made by a school class that were also there volunteering -- they'd raised money in the school to buy the candy and put together the bags with ribbons. Their teacher was with me on the coffee service, so we chatted about it.

After the meals were all served, I helped clean up -- collecting trays, then mopping down tables and chairs, and stacking the chairs on the tables. When they let me go at 3:30 I was kind of pooped, and very glad I'd gone. The organizers were friendly and appreciative, and kept saying at the end, "Oh YOU'LL be back." I expect in a couple of weeks, I will.

	Sculpture from Metropolitan Museum I forgot to read the tag, but it's probably Indian, and at least 500 years old. I sort of identified with the guy, or maybe the animal, I'm not sure ....
	Ancient Buddhist sculpture, but these dames look to be straight out of the chorus line.

The novel I'm writing now is moving along fairly well; I'm excited about it, the ideas are bubbling up, it's surprising me and engaging me. I find I'm writing it in a particularly non-linear way (though I probably could've said the same thing about the previous novels). In this case it feels like I'm spiraling, or like the writing process is a sort of wheel of fortune, which keeps spinning and stopping and spinning again. I know that eventually the linear story will all be there, but right now it's coming to me in a state of disorder.

One thing I'm noticing as well, which is also not new to my process, is that I tend to think of fictional time as a Cloud. In other words, all the potential events in the characters' lives coexist; anything is possible, it's all limitless. The characters have form and mass in my mind, but perhaps their ages aren't fixed (or they're many ages at once, since the story I'm telling will probably end up spanning a quarter century at least), nor is the sequence of their actions. I find this state of things immensely appealing, and comforting. Probably I wish my own life could be carried out in a similar cloud. (Some people who know me might say that I live like it is ... for better or worse). Of course this is all beautiful until I realize that I'm writing along and have no idea what season it is, or that I've got a winter or a pregnancy that last for 2 and a half years, or ... or ... or .... I hate that moment when I realize that I must pin down some sort of chronology in order to proceed. Because time isn't a cloud, a character who is 20 when the novel opens can't stay 20 for five years, nor can she remain 20 while her child grows up ... and once one choice is made, it perforce precludes the three others that I was giving equal status while everything was just bobbing around in the cloud, without a horizon line.

I'm pretty much at this point with the novel. I need to peg out a line, even though I don't yet need to worry about writing the story in that line's order. I just need to know where along the sequence my various scenes and POVs get pinned. Also, as it's a novel set in the early 19th century, I need to be careful about anachronisms creeping in -- when exactly was photography invented, and when did passenger ships go from sail to steam? If I make mistakes with this stuff in the first draft, it's not a disaster, but it's good to have your mental image of where you are screwed down fairly tight. Especially when you're the kind of writer who doesn't like to do a lot of research in advance. Historical fiction that shows off lots of research ... well, it's not my cup of tea. I like to write what I want to read.

Click to enlarge images.

I just came across this in my dad's studio. It's the cover to the Board of Education of City of New York's Art Curriculum Guide from 1954-55. Please click on this to see the image larger because these goofy boys must be examined, and you must also examine the incredibly adorable blue sweater on the girl on the left, which has the darlingest no-doubt detachable little fur collar & cuffs, with the little buttoned tabs on the collar. I've never seen the like, and I want one. The girls look about 27 even though they're probably 15, and the boys look like accountants. Also they all look like extras from Mad Men.

Taking some time off from the day job, working on my novel but mostly enjoying my city in new ways.

Lately I've really felt like walking.

Today was another gorgeous cool golden day here. So I set off from Third Ave and 32nd Street, where I'd just seen my dentist, and walked south, cutting over to 1st Avenue, past Stuyvesant Town, and then further east to Avenue B, which I think I've never actually walked on before. When I was new to NYC in the 80s, it was very dangerous for bougie white girls over there. Below Houston Street it turns into Clinton Street. At that point I was starting to really feel my oats and decided to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, which is on Delancey Street. One of my favorite old movies, Naked City (1948), one of the very first to be shot on location in Manhattan, has its exciting climax on this bridge, and I wanted to see what it was like to walk onto it. Also, there's just something really appealing to me about walking across bridges. I busted my bridge cherry the other day w/the Bklyn Bridge and now I want MORE! (Link goes to a Flickr set of Brooklyn Bridge photos taken a couple of days ago).

They've changed the Wmsbg bridge a lot since the movie was made -- many of the buildings that lined Delancey have been knocked down and not yet replaced, and the walkway, which in the film was a sort of park with benches on it and children playing (because at the time the area had almost no park space, and the bridge would've been breezier in the hot summer than the surrounding streets) has been enclosed in a cage, I guess because testosterone-laden teens would jump down onto the roadways or try to surf the subway cars that cross the bridge. As you can see from the photos under the cut, it's all closed off as you walk across, unlike the Brooklyn Bridge which had unobstructed views. But I got some gorgeous views through the mesh (not photos, just views I stopped to absorb, looking north and south along the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines), and really enjoyed the loooong walk. I thought I might turn back half-way across, but I was drawn on by curiosity, and ended up in Williamsburg, where after darting into a public bathroom in a playground, which to my amazement was actually a) open and b) had toilet paper in it, I strolled up to the vibrant area around the Bedford Ave L subway stop, which is hipster central. There was a wonderful arty bookshop I enjoyed poking around in, and a good record store. I didn't buy anything. I got a little lunch and then took the subway back into Manhattan.

Click the photos for larger views. ( Lots and lots of photos of my walk across the Williamsburg Bridge .... )

... can't seem to be both.

Lately I'm being a writer again, after a long period of struggle with a project that seemed well under way under it dug it's little work-in-progress heels in and refused to develop any further. So at last I gave myself permission to set it aside and came up with something else to do. Which is very new and fresh and mysterious and engaging right now, and which I therefore don't dare hint around at here beyond that.

Reading-wise I'm in transition, done for now with Richard Price after reading Lush Life and then Clockers, and mopping up a couple of other so-so reads in order to plunge (back) into the 19th century. I've got some Balzac on tap -- embarrassed to admit I've really never read him before -- and some rereads of English Victorian novels. Am also rereading Sylvia Townsend Warner's wonderful novel set in Paris in 1848, Summer Will Show, a book I wish I'd written. (She's responsible for a number of Books I Wish I'd Written, and it's a source of deep sadness to me that she's so almost completely forgotten, though at least the New York Review of Books has reissued a couple of her novels recently, albeit not the ones I'd most like to press into the hands of my friends [ie, The Flint Anchor]).

Since my last post I've also fallen in love with another TV show, Farscape. I was a fan while it was still on, but never saw the early seasons except for an ep here or there; I'm now watching it all in order from the beginning, and finding it vastly satisfying in the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer was; inventive, rich in character and back-story and lore and continuity (continuity is so damn sexy in a TV series). And what a visual feast -- the show threw most of its production budget (apparently) into designing amazing aliens, and making them up in such a way that it's very easy to forget there's a human actor under the latex and paint. A show with wonderfully credible world-building, and an ability, like BtVS as well, to incorporate both wild humor and wild angst into its storylines without any sense of cognitive dissonance.

I finished reading Lush Life, which was really riveting. I hadn't read anything by Price for the last 20 years -- I was alerted to him originally by my writing teacher at college, a friend of his, David Black, who went on after his little academical stint at Mt Holyoke to be a big-shot TV writer/producer with Law & Order -- he brought Price to campus to read, and I, who at the time just couldn't get interested in the sort of thing he writes (I think the book he'd just published at the time was The Breaks, which I read but didn't enjoy), was also miffed at how coked up Price was and how blatantly he leered at the cute girls in the room (of which I was not one). I was both intimidated by him and felt sort of dissed that he'd come to our campus to talk to us with a nose full of blow. I was even more of a prig at 21 than I am now. The guy was a cokehead every day at the time; it's not like he became one just to face the creative writing heads at MHC. It had nothing to do with us and I shouldn't have taken it personally. But in those days I was so fragile I took everything personally.

I guess my big mistake in life was not staying in touch with Black and worming my way into television. Of course back then I never watched television. Black and I did not get along -- I was writing my first real novel and he didn't like what I was doing and kept trying to steer the story into other avenues; our meetings were tense and I used to have vivid dreams about punching him out from which I'd awaken thinking that my sleeping consciousness could be ridiculously blatant -- where's the symbolism and interpretation in dreams like that?! Though I will cheerfully and heartily admit that he really taught me a lot of about how to revise, because after a while I'd get to the point where I'd rip the shit out of my own stuff before I showed it to him, so as not to give him the satisfaction of ripping it himself. This was really valuable. But we never remotely bonded (I don't think he wanted to be teaching, either, which didn't help matters), and though I saw him once in NYC after I graduated, I didn't have the sense to "work" the connection, just let it go.

This reminds me, I was talking to a friend the other night who is very worried about her 17 year old daughter, who she feels isn't "living up to her potential". She did get into a good college, rather to L's astonishment, but as she doesn't do much in high school, my friend is afraid she also won't apply herself in college. We talked about it for quite a while, and finally A said something that I pounced on, which was that she felt her daughter was socially pretty astute and that she cared a lot about her friendships, and if she spent as much time on her schoolwork as she did on maintaining these friendships, she'd be better off.

And I told her that rather than nag her kid about her grades, because in the end no one cares about your grades in anything, that she should emphasize to her daughter that social skills are what make for success in the adult world, and that if she wants to get into a creative field (she says she wants to be a writer), she should focus on meeting and cultivating relationships with people who can give her a leg up. Which was what I didn't know at the time myself -- and may not have been able to act on even had I been aware of it, because college-age me was a near-fatal mish-mash of Fear of People and Deeply Low Self-Esteem. It's taken me almost 20 years to realize that what I always thought was the Path To Success, or at least a Path to Success -- keeping your head down and doing the work well -- is the least, rather than the most of it. A's daughter may end up doing just fine if she realizes that how you present yourself and who you present yourself to is the major part of the battle in life.

So the weather report said it might go up to 68 degrees today, though I doubt it will. But New Yorkers are nothing if not opportunistic, so this a.m. as I walked to work I saw young women in short skirts with bare legs and ballet flats, others with bare feet in ballet flats, lots of cardigans, lots of people wearing no coat or jacket at all, even though I, dressed in Janis (suede jacket with mongolian trim), was actually slightly chilly. Silly silly New Yorkers!

I wanted to be able to make coffee and steak at home, and my stove-top grill pan results in the smoke alarm going off and freaking out the dog, and the kettle I was using to boil water was a thing of ugliness and bad design. So i ordered a coffee maker and a broiler pan from Amazon. This morning I realized that I already owned a broiler pan, which I'd squirreled away in a seldom-consulted cabinet, and when I went to open the coffee maker box, realized I really don't need or have room for a 12-cup model and should've gotten the 4-cup one. Of course I've already thrown out the shipping box, which has been thoroughly soaked in the sleet storm, so I must wait until I can obtain a suitably-sized box. Meanwhile, I found my crappy but usable kettle and one of my single-cup Bodum french presses, and made myself a cup of coffee. Which I totally could have done at any time in the last bazillion years. Though at 46 I still don't entirely understand how much coffee to put in to get an adequate brew. The package said one heaping tablespoon, but note to self, it should be more like two.

We had a big slush storm overnight. I think it's raining right now. Outside is just a big slick opportunity to take a flying prat fall, but at least it isn't frozen and I expect the streets to be back to their usual dingy winter dirtyness by tomorrow morning.

Woke up this morning at 4:00 and couldn't back to sleep, so I spent over an hour on the sofa reading Hotel De Dream by Edmund White, which I'm loving. The main character is the real writer Stephen Crane, who in his last days as he's dying of tuberculosis just after the turn of the 20th century, is working on a novel about a New York City rentboy, called The Painted Boy, though he knows its subject matter will make it unpublishable, and also that it's doubtful he'll live to complete it.

Here are some recent pics of Traddles:

( Traddles! )