new directions

It's brutally hot in New York today. Pittsburgh gets hot, but there's something about the sheer mass of concrete and asphalt here to make it even worse. Fortunately, the boy didn't seem fazed by it, or by the fact that he was up until almost 2am. (We got into the city about midnight, and there's no way one can just go to bed without at least a stroll around the neighborhood!)

The wife is unhappy about how much hassle the alternate-side parking thing can be and how it screws with our plans. I assure her that I just need to get the routine down. Today when I was cruising, looking for a spot, I did manage to hear Rick Santorum on WNYC. Like Jon Stewart did last week, Brian Lehrer gave Santorum a pass, in the part I was listening to. He allowed Santorum to turn his antifeminist crap on its head and say that what he is REALLY after is fathers spending more time with their kids. Great. I'm all about that. So why is your legislation and writing aimed at controlling and limiting women's choices?

And who would have thought that of Jon Stewart, an NPR host in New York, and George Stephanopolous, it'd be Steph who did the most to make Santorum explain himself?

Had a very pleasant lunch with an editor of the great independent literary publisher New Directions and her husband (a serious literary figure in his own right, with one well-respected biography out there and another important one in the pipeline). I have a great admiration for New Directions' founder, James Laughlin (of the Pittsburgh Laughlins), and think the firm is about the classiest literary publisher out there. Talking with them made me wonder about the road not taken. What if I had tried harder to go into literary publishing? Too late now, probably.