Shanna Compton's Archived Blog (2003-2011)

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Leaving a few days early, Monday...

...so we can spend a coupla 75-degree daze in da German Belt (research! & sauerkraut!) before the conference madness.

But I hope I hope I hope I can find time to get to this this weekend.

Realized my driver license (damn Yankees) expired on my birthday in December (which means, duh, I was driving illegally over Texmas) so ick I gotta go stand on line (damn Yankees) for hours at some point this too-short week. And do all the laundry despite a broken dyer (damn landlord) & oh yeah, layout an entire book of 160 poems.

Missed Copp/Corey/Sheers last night and Limon/Sheers Saturday but will definitely catch Limon Friday! La la!

Almost Austin

Been alternately excited and apprehensive about going back to Austin for the first time since I left in 1995. Reports are that it's changed so much I might have a hard time finding the Austin I knew in the Austin that's now.

But I'm looking forward to going here (too bad the pool will be closed for spring cleaning, because it's spring-fed and always the same temp) & here & here & here (which will provides an excuse to go on campus) & here if not here and very definitely HERE (first stop after the airport!) & maybe here or here. Maybe I'll go here even though the original store (see #10) probably eventually fell down. And here even though the original (see #4) is no more. (I'd mostly switched to Mojo's anyway.) And maybe get in a game of pool here. Even though I practically lived here, and we met there, I don't know if we'll get there. There's such a thing as too much nostalgia, y'all.

Monday, February 27, 2006

People passing

Sorry the blog is so deathy today. I don't mean for these posts to be sad. Just want to note they've gone.

Frederick Busch, 1941-2006

Fred Busch was one of the authors I worked with in my first publishing job. We met only a few times--once I spent the day with him going to bookstores all over New York City as he signed copies of his novel Girls, a book I loved. A couple of years later he very generously helped me out when I needed a recommendation for graduate school. I'd been out of school so long and didn't know anybody to ask for a recommendation, and he offered, and wrote me a great one, and some very sweet letters. He tried to talk me out of going, sort of, but when I told him why I wanted to he'd understood: I was lonely. He once ran up a bill so big while on a book tour (I suspect fine scotches in the hotel bar) that I had to cover for him. He was a poet first, though he said not a very good one in his opinion. He liked his fiction more. He told me how he wrote his first novel sitting on the edge of his bathtub with his typewriter on the toilet lid while his wife slept in the next room, in his off hours from his copywriting job. I got out of publishing and went to write copy not too long after he told me that story, though I didn't stay completely away, when I came back I did it better. I don't know how I missed the news till now. I wrote him last about a year ago but hadn't gotten around to sending him my book yet. I really should have. Bye Fred.