Our first anniversary! and crazy week

Today is M.'s and my first anniversary! (Those of you who remember, or were at, our wedding in April may be a tad confused, but we'd gotten married privately in September since M. entered the country on a 90-day fiance visa; we just didn't have time to plan a wedding that quickly, and I was not at all interested in doing it without him . . .)

Our celebration will be a separate post, probably tomorrow.

I had about three weeks' worth of events in one last week. I started the week worried about money -- usually my adjunct jobs don't pay 'til the end of September, and we'd fallen behind between my dental expenses and the ill-fated party (which ended up costing several hundred more than we'd expected). So when free-lance boss Chris called with an index project, and a cool one (idiosyncratic history of gay life from the 40s to the 80s), I relievedly said yes.

Only to discover that Cooper paid me on Wednesday and to realize that I had all kinds of non-reschedulable social events: lunch with Jen whose baby was due yesterday and who was trying to see everyone individually beforehand; Jacqueline's birthday party (at a really cool art-and-poetry bar in the South Bronx, a neighborhood I confess I'd still had 70's based fear of); Isabella's dissertation defense gathering (populated by colleagues from the Cooper writing center); a Humanities faculty wine-tasting (actually a lot of fun -- I got to talk to quite a few full-time and adjunct faculty members I hadn't really known and learned a bit about some nicer wines); Mary's second-ever performance doing cabaret, and New York is Book Country and related events (which I will describe in a separate entry): Neil Gaiman! Art Spiegelman! A. S. Byatt! Jeffrey Eugenides!

Did make it through the project -- although the author is perhaps more obsessed with Bette Davis than anyone needs to be.

New York *Is* Book Country! (Lots of Gaiman and other cool folks)

I never actually made it to the official NY is Book Country street fair, but related events took up much of the weekend . . . would have done more (some of the readings etc.) but this was one of those weekends when everything was converging all at once.

Saturday morning we saw Neil Gaiman doing a talk at the Equitable Center. ( Read more... )

The next day, I went over to the Barnes and Noble at Union Square for a bunch of New Yorker sponsored signings. A. S. Byatt signed my copy of *Possession*. I told her that when I bought the book I was an attorney and that now I was completing my dissertation in Victorian literature, and she beamed and asked me about my work. She told me her father was a lawyer and that her family was split between attorneys and writers. I also got books signed by Richard Price, Jeffrey Eugenides (the big draw of the day; though I missed Zadie Smith and Jumpa Lhairi the previous day *pout*), and Jamaica Kincaid.

That evening, Felicia and I went to see Neil and Art Spiegelman at the 92nd St. Y. They talked a lot about comics and about writing for children vs. writing for adults. The signing line was considerably shorter -- we were near the end and it took about an hour -- but he recognized me and signed a few more of my Sandman collections (I'm about halfway through) and chatted a bit; Spiegelman also signed my two volumes of Maus, doing a mouse drawing in each. :-) Picked up Little Lit 3, Spiegelman and Mouley's new children's project (stories by Neil, Lemony Snicket, Patrick McDonnell whose wonderfully old-fashioned Mutts I love, etc.) , but didn't get it signed because I was over the limit . . .