Graphic Afternoon - Sunday 1/25/2009

I was back at Barnes & Noble this afternoon while Hydra ran a couple of errands and then browsed the shelves himself. Picked up a couple of graphic novels and took them to a table at the cafe and read them. I spend a decent amount of money there every year, so I feel okay about this.

I'm in a bit of a graphic novel frenzy right now. This tends to happen early each year, as the annual Best American Comics comes out and I either receive it as a gift or buy it with a gift card. I'm about half way through it and I've already put some books by graphic novelists on hold at Los Angeles Public Library.

It's a better collection this year than last year, so far. Credit this to Lynda Barry being the guest editor. She drew her introduction! Perfect! Artists I'm seeking out: Rick Geary, who does graphic versions of historical true crime stories like the Lizzie Borden incident and (hee) a biography of J. Edgar Hoover and Lynda Barry's latest book.

Today I read 30 Days of Night written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. The images are, it may be odd to say about such a violent tale of crazed flesh-ripping vampires, kind of magical. A page early on that depicts a police car in a snow storm is what drew me into the story. I've put a couple of this book's sequels on hold, but I'm concerned that Ben Templesmith isn't illustrating them...so I put the book he both wrote and drew on hold too : Wormwood.

Also read the amazing Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa, which I would highly recommend to anyone who's interested in reading a graphic novel that does not involve a vampire, a zombie or a superhero. This is a fable about the lengths a parent will go to, to try and save his child.

I love days like this. I wrote, I read, I watched some home improvement shows on TV, I made soup ahead for my lunches this week. Bliss.

A Perfect Saturday Morning - 11/29/2008

Ah, yes. This is why I drove down to O.C. last night instead of this morning. So I could start a fire, make a pot of tea and read the last chapters of The Thirteenth Tale.

Perfect!

No, wait.

Something's missing!



There now.

Perfection.

Take a Hint! - Tuesday 9/9/2008

I was minding my own business, reading the copy of The Orchid Thief that Tomasina gave me (and loving it) when whoosh! This bookmark inserted itself between the pages.

Dodger fixed me with a knowing gaze from his perch atop my bent knee. He'd been grooming himself and it was time for this feather to depart his wing, making room for a new one.

"It's also time to close the book and pet the parrot," he seemed to say.

And so I did.

Savoring Sunday - Sunday 8/10/2008

It's the beginning of the end of a lovely weekend. Hydra went into town to enjoy Starbucks. I opted to haul the birds out to the front yard of the camper and read So Brave, Young and Handsome, by Leif Enger. Every time I lay down to read during the past few days, I fell asleep.

So armed with strong black tea, I finished the novel this morning. What a great read. It's been a while since I've read a writer I'd like to emulate, but Enger is one. I need to read his first book Peace Like a River. (Both titles are lyrics from songs. Know which ones?)

My breakfast reminded me of OneL's eccentric uncle. He had an alphabet wheel that he'd spin every day to see what he could eat. Only foods beginning with the letter the arrow stopped on. You'd have to hope you could find a quince every so often!

For me: blueberries, banana and bacon. Finishing up things we had with us.



How sweet! How...bittersweet? The camp manager--we'll call her Upright--brought us this pair of cacti in celebration of our 21st anniversary. She took them from her own garden.

I love working with her. I organize the reservations for our group (about 20-35 campsites each time we go) and then co-ordinate with her about who actually showed up and whether or not they need to pay for hook-ups (electrical and water...not the modern kind!), extra vehicles and pets.

She's very straightforward and easygoing, but she has great boundaries and is able to stand her ground when she needs to. She's from Ohio originally. Buckeyes and Hoosiers. Not so different in some ways...well, anyway, she's been managing and improving the campground for more than 20 years and I admire her.



Looks like a movie set to me! That's a tunnel over a railroad track that's supposed to look like the entrance to a mountain. OneL speculates that it's for the Escape to Witch Mountain re-make that she's been working on.

How to Read in Bed - Monday 8/4/2008

I had a rough day at work on Monday. Eleven hours straight--except for walking to El Torito to pick up a salad--with clients questioning all kinds of things and me having to explain to them how and why I do my job the way I do. Aaagh.

Tomasina had kindly offered to pick up Thai food and a banana meringue pie for Braveheart's writing group birthday dinner, so when I got there, I just enjoyed myself. We dished up curry and egglpant and beef and pad thai and checked in. We wrote a little from a prompt. I read them some of my current project. We had pie. Braveheart opened presents.

Where was my camera in all of this? Mostly in my back pack.

After calling Hydra from Braveheart's lovely front patio, I was happy to roll into bed with a book that's destined to be a favorite (So Brave, Young and Handsome by Leif Enger.)

Do you like my book light?

If you get one like this, you can play War of the Worlds with your sweetie.

Remember These? - Friday 6/27/2008

I miss the check-out cards that used to be in all the library books. I liked to look at them and see what sort of life the book had had, based on the dates handwritten in early books and stamped in red, blue and black later on.

Sometimes they had a very active early life, checked out at each possible opportunity in two- or three-week stints for a year or more. Sometimes they languished for months between readings, sometimes they experienced a flurry of attention later in life. Maybe a teacher who discovered the book or remembered it and assigned it was responsible.

There's no trail left in this book, a 1958 edition of Exploring with Fremont: The Private Diaries of Charles Preuss. There is only this pocket.

See how the fine has been changed from 2 cents, to 3 cents to 5 cents? Now I think it's 25 cents a day. Inflation-wise, that's pretty reasonable.

This book is probably experiencing a little renaissance across the country. Like me, others heard it mentioned on a recent episode of This American Life. I saw at least one other person on Good Reads who referenced it.

I worked at the Rosenfeld Management Library at UCLA in the last half of the 1990s, when we converted from a card catalog to an online version. There was a great gnashing of teeth amongst the old-timers and the new traditionalists. As much as I loved the old cards, the new system is really much more accessible and easy to use.

I was one of the people who pulled cards from the books as we checked them out, and added barcode after barcode. I was one of the people who oversaw the dismantling of the old way of doing things. It was kind of sad.

A small beautiful wooden card catalog from the management library's Special Collections room lives in my pantry now. Rather than cards it holds baby food bottles filled with spare nails, screws and house parts.

Fluorescent Dawn - 1/10/2008

No kidding, it was this crazy bright over Acton this morning.

If I hadn't stayed in bed so long with Steve Martin this morning I would have missed it.

My friend Diver and I used to watch lots of talk shows. Star-struck from the get-go, in the early seventies we were too young to stay up for the late night cream. We watched the stuff that was on when we got home from school: Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dinah Shore (it was fascinating when Burt Reynolds came on and we knew they were lovers!)

We were very into stand up comics and were always predicting who would move up to the Tonight Show (which we did see on weekends.) I remember seeing Steve Martin on the Merv Griffin show, I think, and calling Diver to claim him as one of my rising star predictions. The banjo, the arrow through the head. What the heck was happening!?

His King Tut spoof on Saturday Night Live is still one of the most astonishingly funny things I've ever seen. Everyone was Tut-crazed at the time, and it was perfectly kitchy and fabulous. Diver and I learned all the moves at the youth disco we went to every weekend.

I remember diving for the volume control as we listened to the "Cat Handcuffs" on his Wild and Crazy Guy LP in my bedroom. Stuff like that would get you banished in my house (I'd had to return my 45 of Spiders and Snakes a few years earlier, see.) And I wore out an 8 track tape of one of his albums in the truck I appropriated from my dad to drive to my freshman year of college.

He made it big and then bigger. He was my best call. To be fair, Diver called Jay Leno when she saw him live at a comedy club in Cleveland where she had her first nursing job. So we're even I guess.

So, anyway, you see that this Steve Martin thing is not new or fleeting. And of course, you see that I am just reading Steve's new autobiography Born Standing Up. I can't say the writing is great or that he's revealing anything much about his inner life, but it's interesting to a person who's followed him to understand a little about the philosophy of comedy he developed through his stand up.

Don't pick the book up if you're looking for buckets of laughs. It's about as funny as this post.

Sigh.

Thursday Morning - 9/13/2007

Braveheart and I sat at her kitchen table 'til 2 a.m. talking about the evening and this and that. She gave a reading at A Different Light bookstore the night before and completely kicked ass. The novel she's working on is terrific and she's an amazing reader.

Noel Alumit hosts the series, and he always puts the audience at ease. He introduced writers and editors who were in the audience, which I thought was a very good move.

So often I would like to tell the writer I've just heard that I am a f'ellow traveler. But then I worry that might accidentally steal a little of their thunder. I'm concerned that it's like someone saying to a bride on her wedding day, "Hey! I was married once. Wanna see pictures?"

In confessing this to fellow writers, I realized how silly that probably is. I never--I emphasize never--feel that way when someone tells me s/he is a writer after my readings. So if you see me read, and you want to talk about writing, please say something and I won't hold it against you for a second!





Jimmy is not so much interested in the news.

Dueling Blogs! - Saturday 2/23/2007

So. Last night we went to Noël Alumit's publication party/reading at Skylight Books. What fun!

Hydra, our friend Aesop and I went to dinner first and shared the discussions of film and literature that we look forward to with him. Got to the bookstore about half an hour before the reading to find a standing room only crowd! We snagged the last few chairs they broke out of their secret stash. I couldn't be happier about the obstructed view, since it meant he had such a great turn out!

Please consider attending one of his other two readings in the L.A. area. You won't be disappointed. You won't feel nervous for the author--as is sometimes the case with readings--Noël's more than comfortable in front of an audience. Great reading of really engaging material.

You can catch him at Vroman's in Pasadena on Friday, March 2nd and at Book Soup on Saturday, March 3rd. These are terrific venues. Arrive early so you can get a seat, buy his book, and cruise some other great reads.


Noël warns us he's taking a photo for his blog. The light wasn't great and I had my little Kodak with me.



How much is that author in the window? Noël also talked about how both of his book covers feature naked butts. He wants to make sure his next book features no ass photos.

I've thought about it long and hard since then. I've decided that if they put the rear-view of a naked woman in a cowboy hat on the front of my first book, I won't complain. And when people ask if that's me on the cover--which Noël assures us, they will--I'll just shrug and smile self-depricatingly and let my fans think what they may.

Lovely Morning - Saturday 2/24/2007

Lit a fire, made a pot of tea, grabbed my copy of Beloved to finish re-reading, opened the shades to let in the mountain view to the right of this shot. Blissful morning reading, making notes about Basura Canyon (tentative title of the book I'm working on), cuddling Dodger the Grey.

About as good as it gets.

Kickin' Back in my Agent 99 Boots - Tuesday 1/23/2007

Finding myself with another few hours to hang out, I sat outside and read the first chapter of a novel that an e-friend sent me. I liked it!