1. Every afternoon around three, the sun -- now low in the sky -- crosses a gap in the neighboring apartment buildings and lights up the garden for a few minutes. It's easily the most magical time of the day.
2. As the cats and I rush out to enjoy the spectacle, the birch tree and the dawn redwood (who I like to think get along very well), turn to catch whatever they can. They are now at that point of the year when they are thirsty for light.
3. The smaller trees, such as the maple sycamore "Eskimo Sunset" (aka the most variegated plant in the world), make do with less, but have broader leaves.
4. The toad lilies, who don't need much light at all, still manage to look great. "How do they make it look so easy?" is a question that gets (jealously) whispered around the garden these days.
5. But the ferns and hellebores, who could honestly care less about the light, display an ambivalence that makes them seem very attractive to those of us who are needier.
6. Outside on the streets, people were showcasing their big hairdos and feeling great about it. All of their hard work paid off and they are glowing.
7. This week I learned that while 90 percent of the ten million pharmacies in my neighborhood advertise passport photos, only one (Rite-Aid) has a working camera. I went to one, where they said. "Go to the back." At the back, they said, "Sorry, the boxes are in the way, but there's a place up the street that will do it." At this second place, they said, "No, we don't do it -- go to the Rite-Aid on Amsterdam (Avenue)." Maybe it would be easier, I thought, not to have a passport, but -- after remembering a blog post about certain states soon requiring passports for air travel -- I soldiered on. At Rite-Aid, I went to the back and they said "Go to the front." At the front, they said, "The camera guy is receiving an order, it'll be five or ten minutes." As I waited, for once I felt grateful to be living in the cell phone era. I finally received the pictures and, as I looked at my aging face, felt my earlier reluctance to go anywhere in the modern era displaced by an equally dispiriting sense of passing time. Life, it seemed, was a stack of passport books, probably no more than seven or eight, in the back of a drawer. I wondered if it would be possible in the post-9/11 era to renew my passport with a photograph of one of the cats. It seemed unlikely.
8. Clio doesn't have a passport, which doesn't stop her from constantly plotting to jump over the walls of the garden. I always say to her, "Don't you remember what it was like out there?" But unlike me, she is young and craves adventure.
9. Elektra, who is immortal, has thousands of passports, going all the way back to the beginning of time. As you would expect, her face never changes at all.
10. As the sun moved to the edge of the building, we knew our time was limited, and Zephyr, with or without a passport, was happy to find whatever remained of the fading light.
11. Programming notes: Please click through to read an interview I did with Lambda Literary about my new novel #gods. Also, if you've read the book and have feelings good or bad, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Tell the world how a book can change your life :)
« Notes on Ferns and Moss | Main | Notes on Halloween »
10/21/2017
ORDER HERE
A RADICAL NEW MYTH ABOUT SEX, FAITH, AND THOSE OF US WHO WILL NEVER DIE
A young boy wanders into the woods of Harlem and witnesses the abduction of his sister by a glowing creature. Forty years later, now working as a New York City homicide detective, Gus is assigned to a case in which he unexpectedly succumbs to a vision that Helen is still alive. To find her, he embarks on an uorthodox investigation that leads to an ancient civilization of gods and the people determined to bring them back.
In this colossal new novel from the author of The Metropolis Case, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice collides with a new religion founded by three corporate office workers, creating something beautiful, illogical, and overwhelming. Part sex manifesto, part religious text, part Manhattan noir—with a dose of deadly serious, internet inspired satire—#gods is a sprawling inquest into the nature of faith and resistance in the modern world. With each turn of the page, #gods will leave you increasingly reborn.
Praise for #gods
“#gods is a mystery, an excavation of myths, an index of modern life, a gay coming-of-age story, an office satire, a lyrical fever dream, a conspiracy. One of the most ambitious novels in recent memory—and a wild, possibly transformative addition to the canon of gay literature—it contains multitudes, and seethes with brilliance.” —Mark Doten, author of The Infernal
“Matthew Gallaway’s #gods is a novel so brilliant, so funny, so full of strange and marvelous things, I couldn’t stop writing OMG WTF I <3 THIS SO MUCH in its margins. It’s rare to find a novel that so dazzlingly reinvigorates age-old meditations on faith and f&!*ing, art and eros. Luminous, enterprising, and sublimely cheeky, #gods tells the story, the myth, the dream of the human soul in all its glorious complexity.” —Suzanne Morrison, author of Yoga Bitch
“Matthew Gallaway’s storytelling manages to be both dreamy and serious; lean and luxurious. His words carry an incantatory power of mythic storytelling where beauty and savagery wrap around each other like bright threads in a gorgeous tapestry.” —Natasha Vargas-Cooper, author of Mad Men Unbuttoned: A Romp Through 1960s America
“If the ancient gods were just like us, only more so, then the same could be said for this strange, wonderful book, in which the mundane sorrows and small triumphs of very ordinary lives glow ever so slightly around the edges, sometimes quite literally. At once an oddly romantic send-up of dead-end office culture and an offbeat supernatural procedural, #gods is terrifically weird, melancholy, sexy, and charming.” —Jacob Bacharach, author of The Bend of the World
'It’s to the credit of Matthew Gallaway’s enchanting, often funny first novel that it doesn’t require a corresponding degree of obsession from readers, but may leave them similarly transported: the book is so well written — there’s hardly a lazy sentence here — and filled with such memorable lead and supporting players that it quickly absorbs you into its worlds.'
-- The New York Times
Music: Death Culture at Sea and Saturnine
Listen or download songs and records from my indie-rock past with Saturnine here and Death Culture at Sea here.
Music Video: Remembrance of Things Past
Watch the rock opera Remembrance of Things Past written and performed by Saturnine and Frances Gibson, starring Bennett Madison and Sheila McClear.
Video: The Chaos Detective
The Chaos Detective is a series about a man searching for 'identity' as he completes assignments from a mysterious organization. Watch the first episode (five parts) on YouTube.