And as I think on you, America, and on how much I miss and have missed you, suddenly here you come in through the door. And you are wearing the rule of law, and you are wearing intelligence in discourse, and you are wearing administrative competence, and they must have been folded carefully in the back of some closet somewhere because I haven't seen them in what feels like forever but now here they are again and you look terrific. And you smell like justice and you smell like sanity and oh those smells they get me hot. It is so good to have you back, America, so good so very good to have you back and I am not crying but if I were crying if I am crying it is because of how much I missed you and how good it is to have you back. And it would be too much to hope, that you will always look and smell this good. Of course. I know this. You are imperfect just as I am imperfect just as we all are imperfect but just this moment oh you look and smell so good and I have missed you and it is so good to have you back, America, so good to have you back.

This L.A. Times editorial by Victor Cha does a nice job hitting all recent China-related hot spots--Tibet, Myanmar, Sudan, the Olympics and the earthquake--and arguing that the latest Chinese moves in most of these places are for the best. A heartening read, if hollowed a bit by this AP article by Cara Anna about an earthquake exhibition in Juyuan, and a particular photograph that was quickly removed from it.

And why was it removed?

"We don't know if we were told to remove the photo," said Wu Zhiwei, assistant to the general manager of Museum Cluster Jianchuan, the organizer of the exhibit and the largest privately run museum in China. "And if we were told to remove the photo, we're not sure we could tell you."

That quote feels a little soft-focus to me, a little air-brushed, but if it's even close to what Wu actually said, then there's still plenty of ditch left to dig.

Last night I cleared out about twenty pounds of paper. Most of it was easy--paid bills from 2004, warranty slips for things I don't even own any more, that sort of thing. Some of it was harder. I have a file of magazine clippings that I've been carrying around (and adding to) since, I don't know, 1995 or so. So I went through it, pruned what I could. One of the things I kept--easy choice--is the following poem by Melissa Montimurro from Literal Latte, Volume 7, Number 5, and first prize winner in the Food Verse Contest, and it gets me every time:

Why Onions Give Us Their Tears

Because they are secretly afraid of the dark.

Because they are homely and humble and cannot bear the sadness.

Because they've held all of the hopes of the lily yet will never pose wanly in a vase
   but be tamed in a kettle instead.

Because the garden was a long lush dream above them.

Because once for a moment they felt the sun on their maiden heads
   and they knew then what the others knew
   cabbage and chard and sugar snap
   that it was the hot kiss of the galaxy
   and they had misspent their entire lives.

Because they would drown in the waters of their own weeping.

I spoke earlier about how open the Chinese government has been in allowing full reporting, both inside and outside China, in regard to the Sichuan quake and its aftermath. Old habits die hard, apparently. It has been quietly declared that there will be no more stories (at least inside China, at least for now) about the fact that so many school fells and so many government buildings didn't, or about the immense amount of donated aid that is vanishing into thin air long before reaching the victims. (For example.) But the edicts don't seem to have the force they once did. Too many people are too angry. What happens next isn't clear yet: maybe the hammer will fall hard and things will go back to how they were; maybe the hammer will fall hard and break; maybe a new compromise will be reached before the hammer falls.

In other news, I've never done it myself, but I've often thought that "News Crawl" would be a good fiction workshop exercise. You watch any major television news program, see, but instead of watching the images and listening to the anchors and reporters, you only read the headlines crawling across the bottom of the screen, and you have to write a story linking the first, say, five items into a single narrative.

Last night, though, this would have been a stretch. My mouth just kept dropping further and further open at each successive item:

A 747 carrying U.S. diplomatic baggage breaks in half on take-off...

and Tirofijo is dead, not at the hands of the Colombian government or paramilitary deathsquads or some split within his own militia, but due to a heart attack months ago...

and an aftershock in Sichuan (where 79 dams are now considered at serious risk of failure) knocks down 70,000 more houses...

and a cast member from the Harry Potter series was stabbed to death in a bar fight...

All of which was just a little too cosmically incongruent for me, so I stopped watching. I'm guessing that the fifth item would have been in regard to Virginia Quarterly Review and Zyzzyva beating the hell out of each other as re: slushpile etiquette. And I'm guessing that right now some hack at Fox is pitching his superiors on his great new idea: When Lit Mags Attack.

I have just been informed that video footage of the reading I did with Benjamin Percy and Min Jin Lee at the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series is now live online.

I recently had the pleasure of judging the Press 53 novella contest, and they've now posted the results. The editors there, Sheryl Monks and Kevin Watson, narrowed my pool down to ten finalists, which they then forwarded on to me. I read them blind, which added a useful frisson and a necessary ignorance to the exercise, but it's fun, now, to see the names of actual people attached to the manuscripts I read.

And I'm here to report that the wonderful thing happened as I worked through those manuscripts, the thing you always hope for but know not to count on: the group of finalists was very solid, with a clean sub-group of Honorable Mentions rising above, and one novella in particular that was absolutely transcendent--so good that I couldn't believe it wasn't already a book. Congratulations, then, to everyone involved in the contest, and most especially to the winner, Joan Corwin of Evanston, Illinois, whose "Safe Shall Be My Going" is a beautiful novella, and whose name, I suspect, we will be seeing often in the future.