Molly Gloss said once that
getting a book published is just
“the first of a hundred new
ways to fail.”

I am staring at about fourteen hundred new ways to fail this morning, wondering which to write about.

The head shot.

Introversion.

Anonymity.

Publishing world crashing to pieces.

Review network going, going, gone, and those reviewers who do remain completely oblivious to my work.

Mormon backlash.

No backlash.

Deep longing to find the right readers without a national forum to find them.

Income.

Hah!

Let’s stick with the head shot.

_ Can’t I just stay home and send someone else to do it?

I’m not a whiner, in all cases, but I do tend to believe that the few hundred photos of me since birth prove that whatever spirit I have ain’t captured on film. Or digits, or whatever today’s digital cameras use to record the particular moments when
I am not at my best.

Still, a writer needs a head shot.

Not one snapped spontaneously in the garden . . .

_ Nor on the back deck by the bar-b-que . . .

_ Nor one with a purple gorilla . . .

_ Nor one clearly photo-shopped to include the out-of-doors . . .

_ Nor, my favorite, one with her nephew Jim.

_ No, a writer needs to find the money and the courage to let someone else catch
the spark of her (arghhsoundofgrindingteeth), so that she opens her book-doors graciously to anyone who comes knocking.

Hello, my name is Barbara.

My book will take you places.
It will not fail,
you will be safe.

Couldn't I send my dog instead?

Tributary coming, summer 2012.

_ May you live in the flow, however chilly.

_ Shelter from the storms . . .

_ And please buy books, give them away, pass them on and cherish them.

“The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.”
--Dr. Samuel Johnson, Preface to his Dictionary 

You might find this an amusing topic. If so, you do not have a farting dog.

My dog Sal can clear a room with one blast.

It is silent.

It is deadly.

We actually began naming her truly extravagant range of farts: rotted pumpkin, mustard gas, putrefying squirrel. When watching nightly movies became too painful due to fog darts, that is, dog farts, I took it upon myself to get to the bottom of Sal’s gaseous attacks.




Here are the family-tested results of my inquiry.

1. Get doggie probiotics from your veterinarian. They are not expensive. Buy a small packet of 10 tablets. Give your dog one per day before breakfast for ten days. You may notice quick results.

2. Buy a giant bottle of Beano. My vet says it is AOK for dogs. Dunk a Beano in something doggielicious like peanut butter or beef gravy. Give to your gasmonster morning and evening right before their meals. You may notice even more improvement.

If these two alone do not solve your gas attacks, your dog’s diet is the problem.

3. Continue using the kibble you always use but stop feeding your tender-tummy dog any canned dog food. And no cookies or bacon or quinoa, just in case they're in your repertoire. Try the following as supplements to settle their stomachs and make their kibble taste better: cooked white rice, yogurt, canned pumpkin and/or a little boiled chopped chicken. Rotate these daily, giving only a tablespoon or two with each meal. (I now keep cooked rice in the refrigerator at all times. If your dog's stomach is really upset, go with white rice exclusively for a day.)

If you still notice the occasional fart . . .

4. Try slowly introducing a tender-tummy food like Hills Science Diet ID. Sal only tolerated a fifty-fifty mix of ID and her usual kibble, Nature’s Balance Sweet Potato and Chicken. You do need a veterinarian’s OK to buy the ID kibble. My vet simply gave the go-ahead with a phone call, no appointment needed.

Of course, Dr. Fuller also gave me most of these brilliant gas-reduction ideas as well. I was desperate. He was a huge help.

Now Sal is 97% fart free. Our evenings are unfragrant. Pardon me for saying it, but Sally’s poop is firm for the first time in years. That makes poop patrol almost a delight.

If your dog is farting, it needs your help. Probiotics for a week, Beano for eternity, and serve easily digestible foods. Your pup and your nose will thank you for it.

Feel free to post any other fart-reduction tips!  Fog darts
in your house can be a thing of
the past.



My dear sister just reminded me: putting two medium-large rocks in your dog's food bowl will slow 'em down. They have to eat around the rocks. By gulping less air while eating, they reduce their need to fart. Try this first, before the probiotics. Thanks, Katherine!

P.S. If your dog eats unknown condiments of the wild (off-trail rancid who-knows-what) nothing will stop those farts but time.

May be a body part with which you are unfamiliar. Oh, you think you know it. You've dipped it in soft ice cream and scalded it with coffee. But do you know if you’re a SUPERTASTER? Have you considered the humble taste bud? Are you in the mood for some late night fun?

Cut out a small square of white paper, approximately 1” x 1”.

Punch a 7 millimeter hole in it (a hole punch works perfectly!).

Now take blue food coloring. And with a Q-tip, paint the end of your tongue midnight blue.

Place the white paper with the hole right over the tip of your tongue. It will adhere due to your spit.

Now have a friend with a magnifying glass count the number of taste buds within that 7 mm hole.

If you have more than 35 taste buds (the raised round “pink” domes dotting your tongue), you are a SUPERTASTER. My entire household qualified.

Supertasters react to flavors far more strongly than 75% of us do. If you count 15-35 buds, you’re a medium taster (50% of the population). Fewer than 15 buds on that tongue tip, and you’re classified a “non-taster.”

Here's a non-dyed tongue tip. And here's a YouTube video on SUPERTASTERS.

This may explain why SPAM was such a popular treat: 75%
of us can't really
taste it!

My ex-husband gave me this as a card once long ago, and I burst into tears. Here was the secret woman I was not, a woman writing in a room filled with air and light. A woman undistracted. The painter is Vuillard. No painter has loved women and interiors so dearly.

I spent a dozen years with my writer-desires hidden in a tumble of life, like sheets, pulled over me. A potent simple love-filled sleep, and then

once I entered graduate school and started to write in earnest, a darker draining jumble.

I remodeled and walked and sewed and knitted and gardened my way through the birth-pangs of my first novel. It went nowhere in the real world. This longstanding pain remained private. The manuscript, after two years going the rounds with various publishers, collapsed in a closet from exhaustion.

About a decade after receiving that Vuillard card, I visited The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. One painting in particular stopped me. I stood mesmerized by this very small, very intimate portrait called “Woman Sweeping.” I trembled and I wept. I simply could not believe the domestic radiance, the woman and the room warm as velvet. The patterns wrenched me out of my twentieth-century freedoms into the intimacy of belonging somewhere.

This unassuming, glorious 17” x 18” painting is by Edouard Vuillard. Yet again, I didn’t choose Vuillard as a favorite painter. Vuillard chooses me.

He helped me through the brighter years, the green period when landscape design and planting trees and still a bit of sewing for tranquility flung me into the arms of a new novel, a contemporary novel, the novel where perfectionism dropped in a puddle and I wrote like a drunk on fire. Guest House. How fitting that most of

Vuillard’s paintings are interiors. Interlocking interiors which glow with belonging. Belonging is a central theme of Guest House.

And still the story goes. Just last week, I went to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, to see a Post-Impressionist exhibit. I expected to be ravished by some of my old pals, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne. I have to admit I loved Renoir’s “The Dancer” so there was a small contest for my heart—but truly and utterly, Vuillard won the day. And I’m proud to say the painting among his half-dozen paintings which threw me over its shoulder and hauled me into its crazy den was “Profile of a Woman in a Green Hat.”

Can you begin to calculate the impact this 8” x 6” card-sized portrait has in a hushed crowd of reverent onlookers? With a Picasso blaring trumpets at it from across the room? I laughed out loud. I love it dearly. It’s Olive Oyl asking Popeye to can the spinach and give her a kiss.

Simeran Maxwell, of the National Gallery of Australia, says about our Olive: The face is an enigma. The conspicuous brow evokes a variety of responses in the viewer. Is the woman anxious, persecuted or suspicious? Is she shying away from our intrusive gaze, archly teasing us, questioning what we are looking at, or crossly glaring at us?

Simeran, she is saying: I am in my place. Don’t you envy my green lucidity?

Edouard Vuillard lived with and adored his mother for sixty years, his dress-maker mother. He loved his best friend’s wife chastely and was often in their company. The radiance of his heart seems the topic of each painting; love of women and their interiors.

A gal could do worse for a favorite. "I don't paint portraits," Vuillard once said. "I paint people at home." Ah, there’s the attraction. Being at home.

NPR on Vuillard.
The New Yorker on Vuillard.

And for the first time on my blog, here is the man himself . . . stunning.

I am flying off to celebrate my mother's 93rd birthday with my family. In her honor, I'm posting the best peanut butter cookie recipe imaginable on this planet, and encouraging everyone to make use of their end-of-season produce in out-of-the-box ways!

*Adapted from "The Whole Jar of Peanut Butter Cookies"

INGREDIENTS

    * 1 cup butter, softened
    * 1 cup white sugar
    * 1 cup packed brown sugar
    * 2 egg
    * 1 egg yolk
    * 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
    * 18 ounces chocolate peanut butter (ground fresh at health food store—it's
            OK to substitute plain old peanut butter, 1/2 crunchy and 1/2 smooth,
            maybe stir in a half cup of cocoa powder to get it chocolatey?!)
    * 2 cups all-purpose flour
    * 1 teaspoon baking soda
    * 1/2 teaspoon salt
    * 1 cup chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS

   1. In a large bowl, cream butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth. Add the eggs, yolks, and vanilla; mix until fluffy. Stir in peanut butter. Sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt; stir into the peanut butter mixture. Finally, stir in the chocolate chips. Refrigerate the dough for at least 2 hours.

   2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Lightly grease a cookie sheet.

   3. Roll dough into walnut sized balls. Place on the prepared cookie sheet and flatten slightly with a fork dusted with flour. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes in the preheated oven. Cookies should look dry on top. Allow to cool for a few minutes on the cookie sheet before removing to cool completely on a rack. These cookies taste great when slightly undercooked. It is not humanly possible to eat just one.

I served a dinner two nights ago that actually induced nirvana.

I am sharing the recipes here, in hopes some other lucky family wants to taste summer at its finest. Do try to use fresh everything: free range turkey, garden beet greens, ripe raspberries. I even clipped fresh herbs from our garden.

The thing is, I improved a meatball recipe from Joy of Cooking, so I know these Hop Klops also fare well in a fantastic winter soup.

The name, Gutentag Hop Klops, is in honor of Will Ferrell's spunky lederhosen dance in The Producers.

1 lb.     ground light turkey
1 ½       English muffins, rubbed together/shredded into light bread crumbs
1 stalk  celery, diced
1/3 c.   parsley, chopped
1 T       lemon zest, approx. 2/3 large lemon
            juice from ½ lemon
1/8 c.   katsup
1/8 c.   yellow mustard
¼ c.      onion, diced
dash     salt and pepper
1          egg

Mix together lightly with hands. Roll into 2” balls. Place on greased baking pans. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.

2 bunches beet greens, stems removed — boil two minutes in a large pot of water.

Saute in a pan:
2 T olive oil
2 cloves garlic, pressed
Sprinkle of chili pepper flakes

Add drained, chopped beet greens to garlic and flakes. Saute one minute.

(Meanwhile, boil the beets for half an hour in just enough water to cover. Cool and then peel them by squeezing off the skins. Serve the following day, sliced thin and chilled.)

1.5 c.     cooked quinoa
1/8 c.    Paul Newman's Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing
15         raspberries, torn to bits
1           Gala apple, chopped
             salt to taste
Combine all and serve chilled.

Not to make anyone jealous, but we finished the meal with . . . no, no, desserts are for another blog.

Happy glorious slow end of summer to us all!

We are seeing the end of patriarchy. It has taken itself to its preposterous cruel end. The insanity you move through that is called contemporary history, these current events that pile on suffering and seem so incontestable, or contestable but unstoppable, are the ruin of a ruinous social system. Does knowing this give any cause for comfort?

Understanding phenomena while you’re in the midst of them does offer strength and detachment. Just enough detachment to know that your values and actions—unlike the global aggressive, destructive, acquisitive swarm—are not prey to the swarm. When the only real freedom is personal, take it. Stand different. Witness your direct line with good. Adore the world still sending its beauty up through you. Reframe the so-called debate of living.

The Navaho call it “The Beauty Way.” Bill Cunningham, eccentric street fashion photographer in New York says: “He who seeks beauty will find it.”

If every one of us fell to the earth in gratitude each day would we be so odd, really?

What if you listened to dirt for one minute, every day? When was the last time you smelled soil? Get on your belly, it’s your inheritance, your support, our own kingdom come.

Society is largely lunatic. Individual wisdom arises continuously. Every one of us can put down the gun.

P.S. The idea of the end of patriarchy was planted in my brain by Paul B. Ferrell, a behavioral economics columnist for Market Watch/Wall Street Journal, who writes:
It is clear that patriarchy — male dominance of world culture, politics and economics throughout history — has failed, bringing the world to the brink of total destruction. Why do male leaders fail? Jeremy Grantham’s firm GMO manages $108 billion. He predicted the 2008 meltdown and now warns: Male leaders are emotional, “impatient ... management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget.” Leadership “requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained.” Yet “we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers,” which guarantees that “every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always to miss it . . . ”

In the coming post-capitalism America, Grantham’s research suggests that women leaders will naturally emerge not just because the male brain is a short-term saboteur. The bigger reason is that women’s brains have evolved naturally as superior long-term thinkers. Brain researchers tell us 75% of men are short-term left-brain thinkers, while 75% of women tend to have strong right-brain traits as forward-thinkers, more aware of the future, the big picture, with a sense of future consequences, peacemakers rather than gamer-players.

P.P.S. I know it is "stand differently," but standing alone is awkward, so the grammatical oddness seems right.

Nothing dislocates the apple cart of order, spills humdrum on its ear quite like a fine art museum.

The Denver Art Museum has dedicated much of its real estate this summer to mud.

Their Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World show has something for literally everyone.




Pubic covers made of clay were fashion-forward in the ancient pre-Columbian Marajó culture in northern Brazil.

Bikini bottoms in 600 A.D.!

Clay foxes had a field day at a gleaming red café.

Two Cubans dreamed up a permanent getaway vehicle.

And this stunning mother of four,

made of straw-stuffed erosion control tubes smoothed with Colorado adobe, is still in progress.

You can see Roxanne Swentzell complete the 10’ tall sculpture “Mud Woman Rolls On” in the coming weeks. (Call the museum for days and times.)

This sculpture stopped everyone in their tracks. The artist says of it: "The special thing about this sculpture is it is going to be made of unfired mud. She will have her babies who are all of us. We are of the earth."

Aside from her gracious proportions, Mud Woman's hair is fantastic, you simply have to see it in person. It's like Tina Turner meditating in public, with kids.

Denver’s psychotic art plaza actually holds wonderful art within. Just don’t try to harmonize the cacophony of architectural styles as you approach.

If you’re looking for traditional art, well, just take another glance at the building. And be prepared for wonders unimagined.