sleep book a go!

Tuesday, apr. 11, 2006   |   0 comments

Today is the best day: My book, The Secret Language of Sleep, a Couple’s Guide to the Thirty-Nine Positions is now officially available for purchase! It’s at the McSweeney’s (online) Store for a specially discounted, one-week-only price of $12 (it’ll be $15 starting next week), and sure it’s at Amazon, plus I heard it through the gossip-vine that Jim found it at Booksmith in San Francisco, and Inger found it at Green Apple, which means that it might just be in your local independent bookery, too. (!!!)

Meanwhile and elsewhere: my Sleep Advice Column has made its debut over at McSweeneys.net, and one of the hot topics I cover is the whole debate over the official number of positions, which really does seem to throw people: the New York Post claims there are thirty-eight poses, while V Magazine says there’s just twenty-nine (the short piece they did on the book’s not online, but I put some choice pulls on the press page). But, just to be clear: as it says in and on my Couple’s Guide to the Thirty-Nine Positions, the true number of acknowledged poses is 39.

All in all, these are good and exciting times here at Camp Evany. If my heart were an emoticon (and it probably is), it would be one hundred smilies, font size 24!

small thoughts about a small site

Monday, apr. 10, 2006   |   0 comments

This past week I’ve been working on putting together a miniature website for the Language of Sleep book. It’s been a good six or eight years since I’ve even thought about designing a site, and my web know-how is definitely very “1998” (and not in the good “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea“ sense but the bad “These Are Special Times“ sense…though lord knows I have a special hole in my heart for Celine Dion, much as I do for the <td> tag). So I decided that maybe it was time to finally step up to stylesheets? Ugh? After endless fiddling, and many failures, and much badgering of my more advanced web friends (Gene and Mike bearing the most painful brunt of it), I finally managed to cobble something together. It’s a very small site, just five pages wide, which seems embarrassingly scant considering the effort. And it isn’t going to win any design awards, and I’m sure if you viewed my source (careful! that’s how web people get pregnant!), you’d be scandalized by the Frankenstein of code. But it loads on all my browsers on all my computers, including the Sidekick, and who knew how happy just that could make me?

Also I’d forgotten how much I liked the puttering — selecting link colors, FTPing things over and over again, reloading pages, cleaning and shrinking things in Photoshop, viewing other people’s source, and searching the web for how to do baby stuff like “put space between columns.”

And then there’s that particularly dynamite sensation of having a page keep breaking and breaking, and you just can’t figure out what’s wrong, and you’re going nutso trying to find the problem, combing over this mess of nested tags and moving things around and retyping words, but nothing seems to work. Finally, finally, FINALLY you find it: oh, you typed a “-” instead of an “=” and that’s all it took to make the whole world explode. There’s almost nothing like it, that scratched-itch relief of locating and correcting something so small. Finding the exact right analogy for a complicated thought is almost as good, or getting yourself the exact right meal to meet a highly particular craving. Maybe doctors or dieticians feel it, when they finally come up with the right treatment for a thorny and chronic health problem? But key to the greatness of the sensation is the huge buildup of inscrutable frustration that comes before it. It’s like…when I was a kid, in the summer, I used to wear my down jacket to the pool just to heighten the relief and glee of the moment when I finally jumped in the water. This is the glory of building a webpage!

not so hot spot heists

Saturday, apr. 8, 2006   |   0 comments

What’s the sniglet for when you’re happily sipping coffee and clicking at the internet on a laptop in a Mission cafe and then you read about a man who was happily sipping coffee and clicking at the internet on a laptop in a Mission cafe, up until the point mean robbers snatched his laptop and stabbed him in the chest. Maybe there isn’t a word yet for that particular feeling of paranoia born of evil + coincidence. Or there is, but I don’t know it because I don’t speak German.

modern fairytales

Friday, apr. 7, 2006   |   0 comments

Can you think of any reason why an otherwise reasonable looking man would ever be talking to an Automatic Teller Machine? Like leaning down to get his face right up to the card slot and saying, “Can I have my card back, please?” and “Hello? Hello?” Because while I’m pretty sure banks don’t employ wee people to live inside their ATMs (because that would be depressing and cost ineffective), something about the calm sureness with which this man addressed the cold metal machine made me doubt everything.

Maybe he was secretly blind, and what I was seeing was just a new high-end verbal interface for the visually impaired? Or maybe it’s a new form of customer support, a kind of radio-operated help mechanism that patches people throuh to an ATM technician with a binder script in Bali? Or! A mystical menace had taken over the ATM, like a 21st century version of the troll beneath the bridge? Or Candid Camera.

Update: Jill emailed me to report that on very rare occasions (one of which she herself was lucky enough to be a part of), a person’s card gets eaten at the exact same moment a maintenance worker is doing his job “behind the curtain,” and that person can actually be heard talking and shuffling by the frustrated banker out front. So that’s almost surely the explanation for the Man Who Talked to the Slot, though in truth I was really gunning for the “crazy man with suspicions of goblin” option.

wheeeee!

Thursday, apr. 6, 2006   |   0 comments

Adrienne’s piece was so perfect, and the artist Tracey Snelling so quietly appealing, and the woman’s art (little pitch-perfect houses which stand on their own but also photograph beautifully in the strange context of the real-sized world) so fantastically awesome and satisfying! Watching it was like a tidy little reminder that the world is filled with wee explosions of light and possibility. (Also there was a lot of champagne.) See what I mean?

Keith’s opening was yet another huge yay. Marco and I were sadly there for only about ten minutes (last night being crazily jam-packed with television hosting and also bed-frame buying), but it was long enough to say hi, gobble some nuts, and also fall in love; Marco’s favorite was the ordway, and mine was 400 moons (which is wormishly beautiful in and of itself, but also prompts the very personal association of my dreamy trip to Redding).

In other news: I gave my one month’s notice at my beloved apartment. It’s true, Marco and I are taking the cohabitation plunge! I’m moving into his nice apartment in OAKLAND, which turns out is not actually in San Francisco? Eeeeee! Change is scary, and exciting, and wistful! And involves many, many boxes.

Up next: tonight it’s Alice Shaw’s book signing for People Who Look Like Me. (What a stupendous idea for a picture book, holy wow!)