This is the end of my first full week after leaving the library. I’m mostly doing bookkeeping and planning right now, as I plan to for the next two weeks, before jumping into my full daily writing schedule. Working from home is pretty awesome so far. In other news, this winter still sucks. We got 1″ of snow yesterday.

I watched the 2015 film Brooklyn earlier this week. I enjoyed it, but it felt thin as a narrative. It was all style and emotion, but with very little actual conflict. I kept waiting for an actual impediment to step in front of Saoirse Ronan’s Irish immigrant, but nothing ever really does. For family movie night on Tuesday, I picked Roman Holiday, which I had watched with my daughter when she was much younger. It was a hit once again.

I’ve also been catching up with the movies of local renegade filmmaker Jim Van Bebber. He’s made a couple low budget features–1988’s Deadbeat at Dawn and 2003’s The Manson Family. They’re…something. Raw, unself-conscious, and entertaining, though very rough around the edges. Jim came to one of my recent classic film screenings, so it’s good to finally see his work. Rumor has it he’s working on a horror film now.

I just read Shari Caplan’s poetry chapbook Advice from a Siren, published last year from Dancing Girl Press. It held some beautiful lines, such as “We will be mothers of our own stories. Our faces will hold the same light.”

I also read an interesting 2002 collection by Jörg called Alcatraz: Poems of the Rock & Mythic California Gold Rush Poems. A dear friend from Nevada sent it to me. It was given to her at Burning Man a couple years ago. The book looks at the history and mythology of Alcatraz, revealing aspects of the island’s past I was totally unaware of. The most poignant moment in the book is from a poem describing the first time the author visited the island with his parents as a child:

“But then we climbed a high hill
to a zoo so weird it was scary.
There were all these tiny cages
but not one had a monkey, bird or snake
or any other animal.
Yet they kept stopping and staring,
as if expecting a miracle.”

I swapped zines with a new friend in Spain recently, and read issue #2 of their very cool LeToMaGic (Letters to Marina Ginestá Coloma) zine. This small, handsewn zine is a fun hodgepodge of football, good beer, travel, and zine culture. This zinester also wants to order more issues of my zine, so Fuggles will be hitting Europe!

Last weekend, I finished Joey Comeau’s Overqualified, an epistolary novel told through resumé cover letters. It’s a clever idea, and basically everything Comeau creates makes me inordinately happy. This one isn’t my favorite of Joey’s, but it was still a fun read.

Here on the blog this week I reviewed the zine Field Notes on the American Sasquatch: A Guide, and shared Water on the Flames, a playlist to accompany the angst of losing one’s faith.

While most of my drinking right now is devoted to prepping for my Cicerone exam, I did have the chance on Sunday to crack open a can of Nowhere in Particular’s Batch Number 006, an explosively tropical double IPA from a gypsy brewer. Look for a full review in the spring issue of Fuggles.

The title of this post is from a poem in Shari Caplan’s Advice from a Siren.