buddhist pie

Emily Books, an indy ebook store, has published the buddhist for their February offering.  To the left is a pic I stole from the Emily site of my publishers, Emily Gould and Ruth Curry.  Here's an article about the Emily Books project.  It's been great working with them, and they've sold an impressive number of the buddhist ebooks the past couple of weeks.  I couldn't be happier.  Interactions between Emily Books and Publication Studio and me went super smoothly—and that's a lot of fingers in the pie. 

I just looked up "finger in the pie," and according to Dictionary.com, the phrase hails from the late 1500s, but "the precise origin of this metaphor, which presumably alludes either to tasting every pie or being involved in their concoction, has been lost."

According to Pie Maven:

These idioms originate from the nursery rhyme of Little Jack Horner, which is believed by many to be a true (if figurative) story of the steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, before the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. Legend has it that, just prior to the abbey's destruction, the abbot sent Little Jack Horner to London with a Christmas pie which had the deeds to a dozen manors secretly baked inside. During the journey, Horner opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the manor of Mells in Somerset. The manor properties included lead mines in the Mendip Hills, hence "He pulled out a plum" - from the Latin plumbum, for lead:

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie,
He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said "What a good boy am I!"

Who knew.

The marketing copy Emily Books posted for the buddhist is fucking awesome:

Crushes are the best.  They are also the worst.  In the buddhist Dodie Bellamy renders both of these extremes with precision and immediacy, using the lens of her own breakup with a Buddhist teacher.

The book began as a blog that Bellamy kept during and after this failed relationship.  This intimate, almost epistolary form allows her to skip merrily from shallow to deep concerns, sometimes in the same sentence.  Meandering vignettes develop into devastating observations about love, heterosexuality, dignity, privacy, and the point of writing. If you have felt the sting of a bruised ego, the hope kindled by an out-of-the-blue email, or clung desperately to the false confidence of 'you go girl' affirmations, then there is something in this book that will make you cringe, cry, or burst out laughing.

Bellamy is a poet and writing professor in San Francisco. Boy is she ever: she often writes about getting Taoist internal organ massages, she’s in an open marriage, she wakes up with a ring of eye makeup around one eye and Googles “raccoon spirit guide."  She pays attention to everything, evoking the micro-shifts in her thoughts and feelings and physicality with uncommon skill.  This turns out to be crucial to her project: “An in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability is a powerful feminist strategy … to deny behaviors gendered as weak or “feminine” is not feminist or queer, it’s heteronormative to the hilt.”   Whether or not you buy this 'vulnerability as strength' thing at the beginning of the buddhist,  you’ll almost certainly be convinced by the end.

This past Monday on the phone I marveled to Emily, "You made my book sound so good!"  She was interviewing me for the Emily Books tumblr.  Two days later, the interview was published online.  That's the kind of turnaround an instant gratification addict like me can appreciate.  Emily is so quick and adept!  She sent me an edited transcription on Tuesday and I did some finetuning.  She also posed one additional question, which I wrote a response to.  Emily suggested we do the interview via email, but I'm still insanely busy and I know how much work email interviews are.  If you throw yourself into them, you're essentially writing a series of short essays.  I'm happy with the way our interview turned out, but editing it, I was, again, appalled by how inarticulate I am when speaking as opposed to writing.  I felt like doing a Bob Kaufman-esque vow of silence. I'd stop talking but I wouldn't stop communicating.  I'd carry around a keyboard, and when people would engage me in conversation, my fingers would attack the keyboard in a fury, and in every human interaction I'd be totally lucid and witty and smart.  The spoken words of my conversants could never match the cleverness of my fingers.  My life would be like a Noel Coward play, all the time.  Click click click.  I'd never again blurt out a "sort of" "like" or "you know."  All week I've been thinking of cunning things I'd have put in that interview if I hadn't been too lazy to write it.  But then I wouldn't have had the pleasure of talking on the phone with Emily. And of course the best part of the conversation was when she turned that damned recorder off.  Emily steered much of our conversation to issues of honesty and vulnerability in writing; I was amused and a bit horrified by how often I hedged answering her questions.  Oddly, even off the record, she didn't ask me the identity of the buddhist.  So many people ask me that.  It's a hard thing to get out of me.  Emily's thought a lot about all sides of sharing oneself online.  She wrote a fascinating article called "Exposed" for the New York Times magazine about the pitfalls and glories of "oversharing" online. 

Anyway, this has all been thrilling and I love having my finger in the Emily Books pie.