As I was telling Eileenz on the message board just yesterday, I got to see spring springing out in all its glory in Austria, Germany and Switzerland two weeks back and am looking forward soon to watching the season leaf out the trees and reinvigorate the reproductive urges of various creatures up at 7200 feet in the California Sierras. As has been dutifully reported by Fons and Holger, the tour was a packed-house delight, but, as usual, it left me feeling as depleted as Dracula caught out in the sun. Highlights? A tub-thumping five-minute ovation in Vienna, plus schnitzel at an outdoor cafe with Milo; reuniting with Jan Josef Liefers in Hamburg (and oh that riverine lake—the Alster—did shine, as did the swans building their nests not thirty feet from where the traffic buzzed by) and with David Eisermann in two lovely venues, including Germany’s self-proclaimed greenest city, Freiburg; and, lastly, taking a cable car up a slope overlooking Zürich for an outdoor dinner with some handsome and brilliant company (including a couple of not-so-brilliant glebe cows on the grassy margins).
     And then the flight back, a mere twelve and a half sleepless hours in the air, which brought me to L.A. just in time to miss Spencer Boyle’s graduation from the USC Cinema School (Honors, Grad Screenwriting) and take him out to dinner prior to handing him a fat wad of cash. I made it till ten or so and then crashed down at the Figueroa Hotel for a jet-lagged snooze. Only to be awakened by superamplified chanting at six a.m. Saturday morning. Who was chanting? Strikers protesting conditions at the hotel across the street. Why would they be chanting to an empty street at such an hour? A mystery resolved at seven-thirty when the big Cat with the jackhammer attached started tearing up the parking lot. All right. So sleep was hopeless. I decided to go down to breakfast. A single woman was in the elevator when I stepped into it. I said to her, “Good morning.” She said to me, “Guten Morgen.” When I got downstairs, all I heard was German (a hundred tourists, the tour bus parked outside on Figueroa like a transportable wall). Passing strange. For an addled moment there I thought I was still in Europe, but then I saw a guy hosing down the pool area and when I said “Buenos Días” to him, he said “Buenos Días” to me and I knew I was home.
     The news on the publishing front, already announced on the message board, goes as follows: The New Yorker will publish the third of the new new stories, “Birnam Wood,” sometime in July, Narrative will soon run an excerpt from San Miguel, and I have just (successfully, at least to my mind) completed the story interrupted by the German tour, a comic piece with a nasty underbite, called “The Marlbane Manchester Musser Award.” It is one of the very few pieces I’ve written featuring a writer, but hey, why not? I still hope to do a couple more stories to complete the next collection, T.C. Boyle Stories II, before, I fervently hope, plunging down the long dark well of the next novel. And that’s about it, unless I’m forgetting something (and even if I am, I can recall it for you in next month’s blog). Tschuss.

P.S. The accompanying photo is the one (of two) chosen by my editor for the inside flap of San Miguel. It was taken next door by Spencer a couple of days ago, front door open, weird light bounding up off the steps from a sulky sun. New pix. We always need them. Lord bless the Digital Age.