Big news.  I just googled myself as I do routinely, mainly to check if that pesky profile had been taken down, which it had, and found that Jet Set Desolate's distribution had increased a great deal.  It was selling at Tower Books, Barnes & Noble, and Abebooks, as well as Amazon where it had been listed previously.  I was euphoric.  Giddily running around the living room waving my hands squealing.  Distribution is something I have wanted for so long, and by the looks of the release date they did a second printing of it.  I was worried it was going to be remaindered, I am so glad it is not.  It seems to be a very recent development, I wonder if it is selling in the brick and mortar stores, or just online.

I wonder what I should do now.  It's after midnight, only slightly.  I'm not really tired, and there's no alcohol in the house.  I wish I was participating in NaNoWriMo, and I don't really know why I'm not, I guess because since there was already writing done in my novel I read that that disqualified me...but more so because I've been having kind of a tough time lately and already had to shelve the Annenberg application.  I feel like I don't want to push myself right now, I was at the point of breakdown for much of the last two weeks and am only very recently coming into a place of healing with Katie, and a place of fewer hallucinations.  The symptoms wax and wane, they are sometimes very severe and sometimes less severe.  I am going in and out all of the time.  Having only very recently come back into a pleasant place, it's very tenuous, and just household chores and dinner-making is about all I can handle right now. I don't want to overload myself and end up sick and insane again, breaking down.

Sitting here on a Sunday morning, 9:45 and the caffeine and Ativan are warring in my stomach.  One up, the other down, and I'm still trying to wake up.  I went to Stephen's birthday party last night.  By day we sat by the Los Feliz fountain and watched four weddings and two quincanieras pop and rustle about.  Taking photos, floundering along the slick grass.  Three of the weddings had purple bridesmaids, in one bride was quite lovely, the other two, less so.  I didn't look at the men.

That night we sat on the wide porch of his "frottage cottage" and drank Tecate by the light of Jesus, Mary, and St. Jude who Stephen thought was Judas.  He was so amused that there would be a Judas candle, and we were so sad to tell him, no, it is not Judas.

I woke up early, as I tend to do, fed the cat, fed the rabbit, made coffee, checked email, facebook, tumblr, took pills, now it's almost ten.  At ten I often call Omar.  I have a certain rhythm to my mornings.  Free time management you must install routines or flail about, lost.

The book I am writing has a lot of mornings that begin and then recess into memory.  There is a lot of zig-zagging between memory and the present.  I am drawing formally from Mary Gaitskill's Veronica, one of my favorite books.  We'll see how it turns out.

With that said: commence an actual post

I'm taking a class called Wordlab at Wordspace, and it's really helping me get motivated on the novel...aie, the novel that's been floating about in various forms for about six month now, since first conceptualized last November.  Starting from scratch was the right thing to do.  The punk novella that was supposed to be the first part is cheerily moving on on it's own, a small press (hush hush, won't say who) is interested, I must come up with a revised draft to show the editor.  He thought of a title for it, Scaffolding, which I like very much.

The L.A. Novel that I'm working on now, I'm about...maybe three chapters into it.  It's, as usually, flagrantly autobiographical.  I've gotten so used to spilling my guts by now that it's just like, "typey typey herpes typey typey taking shots of triple sec type bum piss" and etc...It has no title as of yet, and I just changed the main characters name to Ginger. 

But Wordlab, it's been great help so far.  It motivated me to turn out ten more pages for class tonight, which I'm  nervous about presenting, but sort of excited at the same time.

And Featherless.  Right now I am waiting to hear back from three amazing writers, and I am so hoping that all three of them will say yes.  We are trying to get our booking taken care of farther in advance, thus.  Monthly it becomes a rapidly turning wheel, one into another, one stops and the next begins. 

I turn 34 in ten days.  My, I'm getting old.  I still have no job.  I have been floating along this summer on a miasma of SSDI payments, food stamps, careful budgeting and the odd sold book here and there.  I am thinking of trying the ticket to work program once Katie and I are married and the chaos of wedding planning and dual book revisions/writing/Featherless has died down a bit.

Another morning, another day.  Last night we saw a great reading: Eileen Myles and Aimee Bender at Human Resources Gallery, as part of the Rocky Point series.  Bender read a selection from her new book, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and Myles read an electrifying segment from Inferno.

 The tirade of people described, bars, rooms, readings, Warholian celebutants and poetic moments went on and on until it dissolved into applause and the crowd funneled out into the Chinatown night. 

Or, more like, it, the crowd stayed and stayed, so many people, it was like a wedding or a funeral.  They didn't want to leave.  There was a palpable excitement.  I waited by the door peering into copies of Sorry Tree while my friends raided the hors d'oeurves, then we turned to leave.

 Last night I went to see Billy's band, Dona Nicha, and while bobbing my head idly to the surf-rock, I started thinking about my book.  What a mess it was.  What extensive scalpel-snips were needed.  After much thought, I decided that the sprawling five-part structure was ridiculous and self-indulgent and purposeless.  Why?  Why?  Why pad the front end of the novel with previously written text of other cities and other times.  There was no trajectory, there was no...dare I say it, PLOT.

An old friend from Portland always said plot was my weak point, and years later after reading Jet Set Desolate he hadn't changed his mind.  This time, though, I had so lost track not only of plot but of the point...what the hell was the point of all of this?  Who the fuck cares what I spent the last 13 years of my life doing?

So, snip snip snip and a cut cut cut and a new plan has been hatched.  That is, to take the Portland material, my Reed thesis of 1998, which is in itself a completed novella, and try shopping it around to see if any publishers are interested in a punk rock novella of the 90s....who knows, it's worth a try??

And then, flash forwards to what was the most compelling material  of the bloated death corpse of a manuscript, the LA/Echo Park material that I was writing about the present, and make that chapter one.  Start at the end.  Go forwards into the future.  Keep it current and exciting. Don't keep recycling old material, but generate anew.

I will keep the San Francisco and San Diego chapters around on the hard drive, of course, in case a flashback is necessary or suggested.  Razorcut flashbacks are a bit of a fun time.  But I feel so much more excited about the text now that I'm trimming it down, it was sort of an embarrassing dead weight of awkward before.

Another day, another morning, and again I'm drinking coffee and typing while Nevada sits on top of my computer and looks at me with those green cat-eyes.  What has happened?  We flyered for two days for featherless #1, after much tromping of pavement and an inadvertent detour into Boyle Heights (oopsies).  Lessons learned along the way: 

• libraries will only allow flyers for free events,
• it is difficult to go into all of those bookstores without buying things (case in point, this pulp novel)
• waiting until afternoon to leave results in hot hot heat and is ill-advised

Other news.  Skylight Books accepted the valeveil duo, so it is in the LA poets section.   This I am very pleased about.

I went through a storm of sending out submissions to journals, online and print, and am now scanning my inbox, hawklike, waiting for responses.  This was perhaps a distraction from what I really need to be doing, which is finishing...or, even, working on the middle of...that book which I began in such a fury.  I feel terrible about this, I have slacked off, yes, it's true.  I got distracted by other projects, I get distracted by the internet, by housework, by pet care, by cooking, by putting on my face, by just about anything, really.

I need to refocus on this, and so semi-public flagellation seems like the way to do it.

A message from j.s. davis of valeveil:

Dear friends & literary colleagues.

Please consider actively supporting valeveil so that our emergent, independent press can soon publish the 2nd book in the valeveil poetic duo series, entitled A House on a Hill / Under the Bed, pairing the literary work of American writer Harold Abramowitz with the work of Swedish writer/artist Leif Elggren. As little as $5 (approx. 40 SEK) gets your name, company or organization public recognition on valeveil's upcoming sponsor page. Below is a link to the valeveil KICKSTARTER fundraising page for your consideration:

http://kck.st/d7SHPC

Spread the word - and have a fruitful summer!

Yrs,
Jacquelyn

It's hot here, the sort of grim LA heat that batters through the windows with no thought to our puny fans and lack of air conditioning.  I'm dealing with it, I suppose.  Summer's far too full of delightful things, of watermelon and slip-n-slides, beaches and BBQs, all that sort of mythical whatnot of which, I suppose I've participated  in 3/4th of thus far.

Featherless is coming along rapidly, our new logo is as follows.  The readers for the first event are Saehee Cho, Alison Carter, and Flint. We are very excited to have such amazing writers on board.

Trying to get the valeveil poetic duo into stores is a goal I've been working on.  It's in the LA Writers section of Stories Bookstore in Echo Park now, and I dropped off a copy at Skylight Books for review, I'm hoping they choose to stock it.

The novel I'm working on has hit chapter 9 and stalled, a bit, as I look back over it and try to decide what to do next.  It's good to take a moment to revise, fix those typos, fix those grotesque lapses in judgment, etc... but in taking that moment I fear I am losing momentum....no, I know I am.

It's in chapter nine that the character is lounging around in the San Diego summer of 2005, the summer in which I kicked a few nasty habits and got my life back together, somewhat.  Oh fie on thinly veiled memoir, the ego-centrism disgusts me and yet I only know my own material so where to go from there?

I realize that I will have to go somewhere very different in the next few chapters, because, as the character moves through the next half of the book, she must gain momentum, not slow to a peaceful and gracious domesticity.  NO!  There must be some sort of climactic somethingorother.  Oh dear, oh dear.  I must think on this.

Meanwhile, the fan whirs, the bunny flops, the cat sleeps languorously on the kitchen floor.

So we just got back from the urgent care, where the wuzh got her ear looked at.  For some reason it took three hours, so here we are back at home with the rain pouring down, about to make linguine carbonara.  All I can say is YUM.

All there is in my stomach is coffee, fudgy grahams, and a lot of rain. 

One of the techniques I've been thinking about was in The Other Hollywood: The uncensored oral history of the porn film industry, and involved using different oral testimonies to tell increasingly interlocking and compelling stories.  I stayed up till 6 am one night reading it, simply fascinated by the fact that it was all true, and primary source material.  Paragraphs from different voices, layering together to tell the stories.

Katie and I experimented a little bit with taking a story she had written about the two of us, and me adding in my viewpoint in alternating paragraphs.  It was a fun exercise, and I should really finish my portion.

I think the Ocho Y Media project, for which (other to do list) I have to fill out an interview, is projected to form a similar oral history formatted narrative.

To do lists, aie.  I saw Stephen Van Dyck perform at Sea and Space the other day, and he read from his worry list.  I'm fascinated by lists, making them, reading them, the different types of lists, etc...

What would my worry list be:

• getting mugged walking around echo park
• never leaving the house as I have no car now
• slipping on wet steps and losing my front teeth
• running out of ativan and not being able to get more
• the car eating the bunny
• the rats dying of depression

Hmmm...that's about it.

A few things I am excited about right now:

1. these tumblers with bees that were an engagement gift, now filled with sweet tea vodka.
2. the fact that Katie just said, "Nevada, stop giving yourself cattilingus in front of everyone."
3. The book  The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored oral history of the porn film industry by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osbourne.
4. Katie and Nikki's thesis reading, which was tonight, and which was really really good
5. Kara Murphy's new blog, I Love it, SF.
6. The fact that not having a car will force me to get lots of exercise and hopefully become that lithe little minx I used to be.

Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin / 750910-2155 is out now from valeveil press.  Many thanks to J.S. Davis and her excellent work on the project.  I am thrilled to pieces about it.

There is a reading at the REDCAT in the works, where copies will be available for sale, as well as copies of Jet Set Desolate.

The nature of the duo is in a sense subdivided and recontextualized.  Two authors, one Californian and one anonymous Swede, have written two texts each divided into two sections (poems vs lists) (Introduction vs Potentiality in Art).  Each text is translated into English and Swedish, and contextualized by J.S. Davis's foreword, Derailleur.

They will be available for sale on the www.valeveil.se site shortly.

Watching the kitten spasmodically attack things.  I had the most fun last night, it was three Halloween parties in succession.  I wore the Ashley costume to the first one only, then switched to something a little more demure.

I finished Hal Niedzviecki's The Peep Diaries, and it really opened my eyes.  I spend a lot of time as it is with reality TV, blogging, facebook, and paranoia....spent some of last year thinking I was being watched by surveillance cameras and subject to near-constant verbal commentary.  By linking these elements together into a larger cultural zeitgeist, Niedzviecki both validated some of my suspicions about what was going on the the larger digital wonderland, and confirmed that the internet is watching us as much as we are watching it.

However, what I walked away with was a sense of empowerment.  My dear girlfriend had worried that I would become more paranoid after reading it, however I actually felt less.  The key factor here was clarification of surveillance.

After finishing the book somewhere near 6 am, and a restless sleep, Katie and I went to run errands.  Driving through Glendale, I realized that I could finally see the cameras.  This sounds more psychotic coming from an admitted mental patient, but bear with me.  We were driving through a series of car dealerships, and there would be a camera pointed at the goods.  I began to make a hobby out of looking for the camera.  The bland black dome cameras, ubiquitous and subtle.  Once I began looking, they jumped out.  In the makeup aisle at CVS, in the low-income pharmacy, next to a "smile, you're on camera" sign clumsily taped outside a jewelry store.

The recognition of what was being watched clarified to me what wasn't.  It was seeing the eye.  "The eye of god," as K's tattoo artist put it.  Previously I didn't know what the camera's looked like, so they could be everywhere and nowhere.  An old boyfriend used to talk about "spycameras" looking into our bedroom windows through the blinds, and old women selling the tapes by the Powell Station Bart, along with feather earrings and bootleg DVDs.  I suspected and well knew that was psychosis.

The blurry space of psychosis and paranoia, the disconnect of what is perceived and what is believed.  I've had many conversations where I posited that "the ads on the internet change according to what I post in my blog/status update/search for on google" or "the neighbors are watching me and talking about me".  I now know the former is true. The latter, who cares.

Once I knew where I was being observed and where I was not.  I felt a lot more comfortable.  I felt validated, but also safer.  Because I can control what I put into the internet datastream, and then step back and do whatever I want in my home, safe in the knowledge that I know what commercial surveillance cameras look like, and they are not in here.

This also relates to what I put into my writing.  Jet Set Desolate just came out, and my dear family is reading it.  As are housemates, friends, and strangers.  This is both the culmination of a dream and eerily disconcerting.  Once information, stories, secrets become public domain, once the book is on Amazon tagged with mental illness, homosexuality, drugs, etc..., I am outed.  This reveal is both more and less calculated than whatever I overshare elsewhere.

By cloaking the story in fiction, and indeed, some of it is...the novel becomes a separate object.  It is not my diary. However, it is a lurid glimpse into a world now past.  It is a camera into so many secrets.  It is both real and unreal.  It is not the truth.

It's Sunday evening, and I'm watching the bunny get introduced to the new kitten.  Adorable.


Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin / 730910-2155 is going to the printers, and should be out mid-November.

I am trying to get myself to write new material, while the kitten naps and katie does her homework.

Well, there is to be a wee delay. Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin / 730910-2155 is going to be released in Summer 2009 from valeveil.

I am terribly excited, they have done a wonderful job with it.

If you would like to contribute to the fundraising for my poetry book, Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin, Extrapolations on Los Angeles, J.S. Davis of valeveil  is holding a fundraiser involving poetry in the streets of Stockholm.

http://www.valeveil.se/en/support.html

thanks!

I have spent all afternoon lying in bed reading Hillary Raphael's I Love Lord Buddha.

I am agog. I worship this cult already. I am honored to be reading it.

To quote to big and hollow billboards on the 101...OMFG!!! Right by where the Vivid building lost a couple letters, under the palm trees unsustainably captivating.

It is so, so lovely. It was hard to drag myself away to write this.

How long must we sleep on the bed of our madness...

When I got out of grad school, I thought I would be a teacher. I went on SSI. It was the summer of sangria and cards, of serotonin sanitaria sangria schizophrenia. It was the summer I decided my life was over. It was the summer I got a book deal and lost the will to live. It was the summer I got a blue rat baby and regained it.

Summer. I read the philosophy of Andy Warhol every morning and felt blank.

And congratulations to Allison Carter, whose A Fixed, Formal Arrangement is coming out this October on Les Figues Press. Yay Allison!

So, on the topic of sociability, I went to a book release party for Vanessa Place's La Medusa the other day. It was acutely enjoyable, with a plot powerpoint by Teresa Carmody, Sissy Boyd did an exquisite movement piece, Christine Wertheim dissected vocalizations of qua...lecture on the origins of Wilshire boulevard, and more.

By the end, I was melting into the night, margarita glowing, so so pleased with the words I had seen reimagined.

I'm excited to read the core text. "As smart as Ulysses, but sexier."

Good news, today. I just heard from Jacquelyn, that Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin is going to be released in Stockholm and the US this winter. I am terribly excited. It will be under a different cover I think, but here is the old one.

The chapbook was put together out of my zinemakers urge, for some sort of post-school expression, and I'm thrilled that it was found interesting by others. Their new website is here.

My roommate and I were manically bouncing around the room this morning, she's writing new material for her thesis. I am trying to get back into that state, of production, of will. The internet can become such a time-suck...I'm trying to spend less time on it and more working, but the Jet Set Desolate manuscript is at a difficult point right now. It is the problem of perspective...when Brady is present, and Lena is not. Some of these moments can be easily fixed by putting Lena in the room in a passive state, but other situations are more difficult.