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Elizabeth Ellen: I am often wary of writers/artists/actors/et al who use their past drug use in their art or for some sort of (seeming) street cred. I have to be honest. I wonder how much heroin Cheryl Strayed did. Black Cloud is a collection of stories, fictions, based somewhat on yr life. Do you ever feel like a poser? Or like you have to prove how big a druggie you were in the way ppl who write about growing up poor are always telling you just how poor they were? How they had chickens in their living rooms and shit.
Juliet Escoria: LOL. I don’t worry about those questions. People are going to talk and think shit, and there’s really no point in trying to defend myself against it all.
I worry about different things related to that, though. I worry that I will be one of those writers who did drugs for a while and then only writes about drugs until the end of time. Drugs are easy subject matter because drug use is both funny and sad. I don’t want to only do the easy thing. But. I tried so many fucking times to write stories that had nothing to do with drugs. And they were shitty. In March of 2013, I decided I would stop giving a fuck about this and write what I wanted to write because I wanted to write it, and then I wrote seven of the stories that make up Black Cloud (the other five I had written either in grad school or the year after).
I feel like I had to get that book out of my system. I put all of myself into that project, like really tried to skin myself for it, and I am proud of the result. But right now I am writing about other things and I hope this trend continues.
EE: what drew you to writing, and to the style/culture of what is being called ‘alt lit’ in particular?
JE: I write because I’ve always written. I started taking it seriously because I’m stubborn and I didn’t want to be one of those people who thought of themselves as a writer yet never did anything concrete with it, so I set up my life in a way where I’d feel like an asshole if I failed.
I’m pretty sure people consider me alt lit because I have a book on CCM, use visual stuff in my work, and am in a relationship with Scott. This is funny to me because I didn’t fully understand what alt lit was until like a year or two ago. This is how I’m a poser, EE. I’m an alt lit poser. Doesn’t get much more pathetic than that.
I like being aligned with alt lit because they are the new impressionists. Like the impressionists, I too get ornery when someone tells me what to do or how to do it.
But shit, guys. Maybe it’s time to move into surrealism.
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Juliet Escoria Black Cloud
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'Reading the stories in Black Cloud is like getting punched in the throat; Juliet Escoria leaves you speechless. Her honesty teaches us that beauty can be found in violence, truth in pain, and life where we’ve always been afraid to look.'-- Benjamin Samuel
'Juliet Escoria is like a gutter-punk Grace Paley.'-- Adam Wilson
'This book is like Julia Child meets Michael Jackson.'-- Mira Gonzalez
'Black Cloud is one of the best things I’ve ever read… I want more literature to be like this: brutal, honest, dark, and incredibly real.'-- Beach Sloth
Excerpt
FUCK CALIFORNIA
That was the summer the waters in the lagoon swelled, and the gnats and mosquitoes swarmed in black clouds. We would sit on the beach in his rusty lawn chairs, the nylon threads turning white before snapping. We drank cases of beer, first cold and then no longer cold and then warm, out of cans hidden in paper bags, and the bug bites popped red on our heels. The day turned into night, and we rolled from the chairs onto the sand, not really minding the bugs, and I whispered to him, “I love you,” for the very first time, and I meant it.
I thought I meant it.
The days grew shorter and the mosquito bites healed. That was the winter the kelp uprooted itself, splaying on the sand in rusty, rotting piles, making the beach stink of death. We went down there one night, hopeful, but I could only stand it for ten minutes. Right before we left—he didn’t want us to go—I said to him, “It just seems like the ocean is trying to get at us,” and he smiled at me like I was a morbid and silly child. He was one of those that came here from somewhere else, and saw everything as great, waking just about every day to declare it a beautiful morning. Fuck California, I said under my breath. And also: fuck you.
We took his lawn chairs back where they came from, to the deck at his house, where we could see a little of downtown and the bay, which was polluted, but mostly we were looking at the airport.
This was also the winter I couldn’t get warm. The sea air dug into my bones, it seemed, and wouldn’t get out. There really was no other explanation. My skin was thinner, more transparent, than before, and my veins seemed much more blue. My arms and chest looked like maps, maps with a whole lot of rivers. I drank to melt away the chill. I couldn’t tell you why he drank, all I know was he did it too.
In the kitchen before dinner one night, it turned out I’d had too much and I fainted. One moment I had my elbows on the counter and the next I was a sloppy puddle on the floor. I’d hit the tile smack on my cheekbone. In the morning I had a black eye. “Looks like you talked back,” he joked. I pretended to laugh, but really I was thinking about how his dumb jokes made me sick.
Our last night together, and we went to the sex shop to buy whippets. I hadn’t done those things since I was fifteen. We went out on the patio and sat in the chairs, our big pint glasses forming rings on the old wooden planks of the deck. The empty cartridges made a pile at our feet, silver and glinting spent bombs. The iciness of the gas brought blis- ters to our fingers. And our thoughts — they stilled before they burst, and then we laughed, and then we laughed.
It smelled like gasoline because of the airport, and looked nothing at all like the beach. But if I sucked enough nitrous and shook my head the right way, I could trick myself into thinking the roar of the jets was that of the waves, and the lights on the landing strip were, in fact, stars.
FUCK CALIFORNIA by Juliet Escoria
Ghost Stories by Juliet Escoria
Taking Antipsychotics & Puking by Juliet Escoria
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'Lodovico Pignatti Morano was born in London, England. He grew up predominantly in Australia, but also England, Italy and Switzerland. After finishing high school in Sydney he moved to London to study Art. In 2009 he graduated from Goldsmiths College (University of London) with a BA in Fine Art Practice, he subsequently moved to Italy to take a job with the legendary Italian bicycle brands Cinelli and Columbus. In 2011 he left his job to pursue other areas of interest. Since then he has written the short Milan-based identity thriller Marco, Milan (forthcoming, Semiotext(e), spring 2014), the large-scale monograph Cinelli, the art and design of the Bicycle (Rizzoli New York, 2012), and served as the Consultant Editor of the first ever monograph dedicated to the Italian sportswear pioneer Massimo Osti, Ideas from Massimo Osti (Damiani, 2012).'-- through europe
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Lodovico Pignatti Morano Nicola, Milan
Semiotext(e)
'It was the lies he told that reminded me of that past of mine that I hadn't encountered in a while. He was telling me the kinds of lies where the teller implies that things that have only happened to him once are long-running habits. Things about too much whiskey, Céline and De Sade, eating alone in expensive Japanese restaurants, knowing nobody (this last fact he would continue to repeat in later meetings, it seeming more barbarously unreal each time).'-- from Nicola, Milan
'Vaguely employed as a brand strategist in a B-version of the Italian Glamour export economy, the twenty-five-year-old unnamed narrator of Nicola, Milan is an international loner, watch checker, tip leaver, shit-talker, drifting from bar to airport lounge, taxi to hotel foyer, drunk and caffeinated at the same time, trying to explain to you the finer points of how to pitch an idea of Italy to Americans.
'But when he meets the slightly older, richer, and worldlier Nicola, he becomes fascinated with him, seeing Nicola as a transcendental exemplar of the international-creative class culture he both envies and loathes. As the narrator stalks Nicola through the streets of Milan and its outskirts, what began as a casual friendship develops into an obsessive attachment, a crisis of identity connecting two hustlers, and a struggle against the quiet oblivion usually hidden by the web of tics and affectations that constitute a personality.
'Combining a Houellebecq-like sense of the psychic malaise beneath the surface of contemporary cultural life with the dispassionate voice of a police report, Nicola, Milan tells a story of perverse, asexual frenzy emptying out into the void.'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt
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LODOVICO PIGNATTI MORANO & TRINE RIEL: SERIAL EUPHORIA AND ITS LONG-TERM PROBLEMS
Download Link : http://www.rarshare.com/nicola-milan-...
Cinelli: The Art and Design of the Bicycle
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'Her aura as she moved onto the stage was both casual and nervous. It was clear that she had done this before. She was not going to stumble or fumble to get the audience on her side, but that confidence was matched by a guardedness, an unease, and a way of maintaining a distance that might have been theatrical. I was not sure. In one of her books, she writes of a character: “Once she dreamed, on the night before a reading she was to give, that rather than words on paper, there were tiny objects linked one to another, which she had to decipher instantly, and turn into words, sentences, a story, flawlessly, of course.”
'She was wearing black; she had a glass of whiskey on the rocks in her hand. Her delivery was dry, deadpan, deliberate. There was an ironic undertow in her voice, and a sense that she had it in for earnestness, easy emotion, realism. She exuded a tone which was considered, examined and then re-examined. She understood, it seemed to me, that everything she said would have to be able to survive the listeners’ intelligence and sense of irony; her own intelligence was high and refined, her sense of irony knowing and humorous.
'I had not come across anyone like her before. It was May 1990 and both of us were touring what they call the United Kingdom in the company of an English writer. All three of us were promoting books. Although I had been in New York once and had read American fiction and seen the movies, I had never really known any Americans. Thus I could not place Lynne Tillman. All I could do was watch her.
'One thing she said made me laugh. When our English friend spoke of London and how hard it was to live there since it was so large and one had to travel miles and miles to have supper with friends, and then, if they moved, one often had to travel farther and indeed farther to see them, Lynne looked pained at all this talk of traveling and said: “Oh, no. In New York, if someone moves more than a few blocks away, you just drop them.”'-- Colm Tóibín
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Lynne Tillman What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
Red Lemonade
'Would Lynne Tillman Do? offers an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Just as many of Tillman’s short fictions have an essayistic quality about them, Tillman’s essays often surge with narrative power. as she upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Tillman, like other unique thinkers, sees the world differently, she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social problems and questions about politics and the polity, change the reader’s mind, startling it with new angles. Which is why so many of us who know her work often wonder: what would Lynne Tillman do? A long-time resident of New York, Tillman’s sharp humor is like her city’s, tough and hilarious. It pervades these pages; Tillman’s generosity and humanity are al- ways there, though, consolations for the sad truth. There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics—Hillary Clinton, interior design, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, art and artists, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, film, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation. There is a great variety, but what remains consistent is how differently she writes about them, how well she understands, how passionate and bold her writing is—she is always surprising and convincing. What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you’re a better, smarter person for it.'-- Red Lemonade
Excerpt
I once read: “All journeys have destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” The beginnings of journeys and narratives can be as surprising as their secret destinations. They can start as mysteriously as they end, they can start before one thinks.
I was living in Amsterdam in 1972 when I was given a Valentine’s Day gift, an anthology entitled Americans Abroad. It had been published in The Hague in 1932, in English, and was an out-of-print and rare book. It included well-known American expatriate writers—Stein, Pound, Eliot—less well-known ones—Harry and Caresse Crosby—and many unknowns. The unknowns dominated, the way they usually do. Immediately, I wanted to edit a new one, to represent American writers now, or then. Some months later, I was introduced to an editor who had a novelty imprint at a large Dutch publishing house. He liked the idea. He also liked enormously obese women and had posters of them, nude, hidden in his office. After he got to know me a little, he showed them to me. I remember this very well and the fact that on signing the contract he paid me an advance of fifteen hundred guilders.
I think 1971 was the year I read Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky and Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies. I knew that Jane Bowles was ill, in a Spanish hospital, unable to speak her name, and I also knew that Paul Bowles was installed in Tangier and had been since the 1940s. To me, he was the preeminent American abroad (the term is aptly dated), and I was determined to have him in the book.
Writing a letter to Paul Bowles was alarming, and I worked on it for a week. After deliberating, in a circuitous and paranoid way, I decided not to reveal that I was female. It was the era of William Burroughs’s vicious or satiric retort to feminism, The Job. Burroughs and Bowles were friends; I considered, in a convoluted way, that even though Paul Bowles was married to Jane Bowles, if he was in any way like some of his friends, or affected by their mean-spiritedness, he might now hate women and not want to be in a book edited by one. This might not be true at all—and if it were, why would I want him in the book? But I was in Amsterdam, smoking hash. I concocted a sexless letter, signed it Lynne Merrill Tillman (Lynne is also a man’s name; Merrill is my mother’s maiden name) and mailed it.
Bowles quickly replied that he’d be happy to be in the anthology. I’d asked for original material; he wrote that he’d send me some, and did. After another letter or two—I’ve kept all of his letters—I received one in which he inquired if I were a man or a woman, and how he should address me—Miss, Mrs. or Mr.? Otherwise he was “obliged to use Dear Lynne Merrill Tillman.” I wrote that I was female, in a letter I hope is lost, and he thanked me in his next letter for setting him straight.
The anthology’s publication date kept being postponed, and everything Bowles had given me appeared elsewhere. Finally he wrote that he had no more new or unpublished work to contribute except some poems he’d written in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and, he said, they weren’t very good. I wrote that they’d be included even if they weren’t very good, because I had to have him in the book. But, I asked, didn’t he have anything else, maybe some letters he’d written?
Bowles sent two letters he wrote his mother when he first went to Europe in 1931 with composer Aaron Copland. One told the hilariously anxious tale of his and Copland’s nearly missing a boat from Spain to Morocco. The other was written from the south of France, where he was visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for the first time. I was overwhelmed by my good luck.
Encouraged by our friendly, frequent correspondence—it was now 1976 or 1977 and I was in New York—I asked him for some writing from Jane Bowles. Requesting her work was even harder than asking for his. She was dying when I began the project, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking him for her work then or right after she’d died. I didn’t want Paul to feel taken advantage of. I thought her death must have been so painful for him that even mentioning her name would upset him. I hesitated a long time. I didn’t appreciate then that people usually don’t want the people they love to be forgotten. Jane Bowles is often and usually forgotten.
(cont.)
Lynne Tillman at the NYS Writers Institute in 2011
The Photographic Universe: 'The Life and Death of Images' with Lynne Tillman and Eduardo Cadava
Lynne Tillman presentation at the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Criticism and Writing Program
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Q: I was telling someone the boiled-down set-up for Crystal Eaters– a village believes in crystal count: that every person contains within themselves a number of crystals that designate how long they have to live, and once they reach a zero-count they die; so a young girl named Remy, in an effort to save her sick mother, sets out to discover a way to increase one’s crystal count – and the thought occurred to me that the premise sounds somewhat like a videogame. Many games that I remember playing – Myst, Zelda– have a fable-like quality to them. Have videogames influenced you at all?
Shane Jones: I think videogames from my childhood influenced me a lot and while writing Crystal Eaters I remember looking at images from a bunch of games like Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and Myst. I think the fable-like quality you mentioned probably comes more from reading fables early on, or just some hardwired thing inside me that leans toward alternative realities, or hating on reality. But some of the images in games like Zelda and Super Mario Bros I really love, I think they are just beautiful pieces of art, and I’m sure they burned into my brain early on. Sega had a game called Alex Kid In Miracle World which was basically a more fucked up Super Mario Bros, more raw and poorly developed and just weird, and I played that game religiously. And a lot of those old school Sega and Nintendo games have main characters with health points or HP and I just love that. The idea of a number you have and you’re losing the number and always trying to increase it to avoid death. That’s a detail from videogames that influenced this book. I will say I don’t play videogames now. The last system I owned was the original Playstation. And here’s a confession: I never owned a Nintendo as a kid. I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone that. I went to a friend’s house whose Dad was a heroin addict and we’d play Nintendo all day and cook hot dogs in a fire pit in the woods. For some reason, I only had a Sega. I was the weird kid playing Alex Kid In Miracle World. You should look that game up if you don’t know it. If I remember right, at the end of each stage you had to play rock, papers, scissors, to defeat a boss, which seems really lazy on the developers side and just strange. This is after you spend the entire stage punching things and avoiding skulls.
Q: Crystal Eaters contains this incredible line: “As a child what you see is creation. As an adult what you see is destruction.” What do you see?
SJ: If I talk to people or read the news I see a lot of destruction. Adults tend to talk about everything that is wrong with the world. Tell a coworker the weather for tomorrow and they’ll probably say what’s wrong with it. But if I just keep to myself and my family and, I don’t know, just walk around and be inside my own head, I see a lot of creation and beauty. The books I read and the books I write are a reflection of destruction and that reflection leads to creation. It’s a cycle, right? The line from the book you mentioned singles out Remy and her father and how the two see the world differently, which creates tension in regards to the dying mother. Sometimes adulthood feels like a trap because the responsibilities, the mundane nature of work and shopping and eating every day, can wear on you and I think that can feel like destruction. That can feel like you’re moving through mud. But not kids, no way. They are constantly in forward motion, always discovering, always creating, and I try and tell myself that often when writing: be a kid and play, don’t be an adult and complain it’s been cloudy for three days.
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Shane Jones Crystal Eaters
Two Dollar Radio
'A grounded epiphany of the highest order, revealing the stark and majestic grace that is present within the loss each living thing must endure. Page after page, Jones's exquisitely styled prose drugs the ear like otherworldly music—this pyretic, hallucinatory novel stings with beauty at every turn.'-- Alissa Nutting
'Remy is a young girl who lives in a town that believes in crystal count: that you are born with one-hundred crystals inside and throughout your life, through accidents and illness, your count is depleted until you reach zero.
'As a city encroaches daily on the village, threatening their antiquated life, and the Earth grows warmer, Remy sets out to accomplish something no one else has: to increase her sick mother’s crystal count.
'An allegory, fable, touching family saga and poetic sci-fi adventure, Shane Jones underlines his reputation as an inspired and unique visionary.'-- Two Dollar Radio
Excerpt
The sky is laced with turquoise worms, and where the sun normally is there’s two red lips, a parting mouth with clouds for teeth. Remy’s bed contains 24 stacked pillows that form a wall. She gets into bed and looks up at the black crystal drawn on the ceiling. She closes her eyes, steadies her breathing, and touches the pillows. The mouth in the sky fills with red and the teeth vanish and it’s the sun. The worms wail and turquoise cascades down an arc in the sky.
The first pillow Remy places on her feet. The next, her legs. The next, her stomach. Finally, her chest. She builds layers until she has to balance the pillows on her body with her breathing. She puts the last three pillows on her head and hugs her face until she passes out. Her arms flop off the sides of the bed and her fingertips dangle near the floor.
She’s a baby. She takes wide, unsteady steps, and on a few occasions, tips backward, arms extended as her diaper thumps the floor. She wears a blue shirt with a hand-drawn black crystal (Brother). Her face is blond hair. She stumbles from her bedroom and into the hallway where she falls down the stairs, blond hair blown open and her body awkwardly sliding down the stairs as Mom shouts from below. Afterward, Remy cried for fourteen hours. Mom stayed awake the entire time, tapping her back in sets of ten, feeding her sips of tea, telling her it would be okay, they will come back on again.
Remy twitches in the wobbly picture and her eyelids flicker. Her arm as baby arm snaps like a bird’s spine beneath a boot. The pillows fall. One hits her arm. Mom moans from her bedroom. Her negative weight floats upward from her refusal of food. Her falling numbers hurt everything around her, even the carpet looks depressed. Dad skips between loving companion to distant husband to angry father. He spends his days alone. Each day this week he’s been sitting gargoyle-perched on the roof. Recently, Remy thought the problem of Mom’s sickness isn’t Mom’s sickness exactly, but Dad’s reaction to Mom’s sickness.
Remy writes in a notebook:
FELL DOWNSTAIRS AS A BABY -5 CRYSTALS.
SUBTRACT -1 FOR EVERY YEAR AFTER FROM AGING.
She puts three pillows on her face and grips tight until she passes out again, her hands falling off the bed, eyes now moving over a dark road. She’s riding her bike with the blue and yellow tassels tied to the handlebar. She wanted red and green, to be special, but Dad bought the commons. This vision like the last is broken from reality but more severe – Remy riding her bike on the road to the mine, blue and yellow tassels blowing endlessly backward and touching her home. Her hair is also endlessly long and it touches the house. She’s followed by a spotlight. Her feet blur on the pedals. She’s trying to escape the light. Skin three inches above her right ankle catches on the rear derailleur and the bike breaks into a severe slide. Water sprays from where the tires skid. The road becomes a beach and Brother is standing there covered in glistening sweat, jogging in place, with Harvak at his side who is also jogging in place. Sea crystals the shape of hexagons colored white foam then harden to black stone on the sand. An octopus is flung by the sun across the sky. The spotlight disappears and the man, who looks just like Dad, who held the spotlight, twirls his hand goodbye, bows, then jumps off the cliff at the top of The Bend.
(cont.)
Shane Jones reading from 'Light Boxes'
Trailer: Shane Jones 'Daniel Fights A Hurricane'
Trailer: Shane Jones 'Light Boxes'
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yep, on the Naucke. So want to see 'Under the Skin'. We have about a month to go before it opens over here. I'll check out Sandra Plays Electronics, thanks! Oh, I have no doubt whatsoever that your excitement about Art101 is going translate perfectly into the moods of those of us out here. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hey, Jeff! Well, yeah, your more practical explanation for the coincidence makes a lot of sense, but the senseless/fated idea is so much more imagination-friendly, and it's hard to deny oneself that boost. Long story short, you deserve to have that book, that's a fact. Awesome that we help each other out on the great discoveries front. Thanks a lot for thinking about and getting into the gig post. That's, you know, the kind of boon that the post and I were dreaming about. Gezan are bonkers, yeah, cool. Envy on that Melt Banana show. Kier just saw them too. I do indeed remember you telling me about that friend, yes, Obvious relief that he's not just alive but okay. Jesus, he's a lucky guy, both for getting found/saved in time and for spending time in Japan. Fascinating story and update all the way around. Thank you for being so awesome and generous. ** Colbaltfram, Hi there, John! Welcome back! I've been great mixed with crazy busy. They're not incompatible. You reading and especially writing a lot is the ultimate excuse, so your absence is fully accounted for. Yes, please link us up when the Billfold piece appears. Great, I haven't gotten to read anything new by you in far too long. Zac's and my film is moving along, yes, and the clock is ticking, and there's a ton to do, but I'm very excited. Nope, I won't be in NYC then, sadly. We'll be shooting the first scene in our film exactly during that time. I read a couple of earlier Bruce Wagner novels, but I haven't kept up for whatever reason. I think I liked them pretty well. I've never even heard of 'Dead Stars', so I'll go see what that's all about, thanks! 600 pages, though, gulp. Bon Monday! ** Torn porter, Thanks a lot, man! Sorry we didn't get to meet up this weekend. I was thinking Sunday would be great, but this film project is a lot hungrier constantly than I had figured, but this week maybe, if that works for you? Cool, yeah, I hope the URM guy says yes. Oh, yeah, I really want to plant myself in that new Seven Dwarves coaster. Really have to get to that multi-theme park utopia spot in Florida one of these soonest days. Thanks, buddy. Hope to see you in the real really soon. ** Steevee, Hi. Will Self wrote a very negative review of one of my books, and that's all I know re: his opinion on my stuff. I'll see if I can find or download 'Two Lovers'. Or 'The Immigrant', if I can't. Thanks a lot. How was your interview with Gray? ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. I'm glad you liked the music day, thank you. And wonderful, and thank you even more, for the work you did on the post. I'm excited, needless to say. I'm so sorry to hear about the limited use of your arms, yikes. Please take good care of yourself. Yes, please. ** Sypha, If going to work is even the slightest bit dreamy, your home life must be even more theater piece-worthy than I thought, or Gisele Vienne-friendly at least. A new Day for here from you would be amazing, of course. Your posts are always the gold standard. Thanks for wanting to, James, and feel much, much better! ** Bill, Someone really needs to get on making that t-shirt, clearly. Nice looking festival you played at there. I would love to be in its vicinity. How much longer are you there? And then what? Back to Berlin, or ... ? ** Kier, Hi, Kier! Thank you for putting here on your away-time agenda! I want to see the spirit tree, for sure, and any lambs that happen to wander in front of your lens. Yes, we went to Tusenfyrd. It was big fun. Tivoli in Copenhagen is fantastic! One of the rides there inspired the way Zac's and my in-progress 'Scandinavian theme park-exploring' book project ended up being shaped. Actually, maybe Zac's and my very favorite park of all the many Scandinavian theme parks we visited is near Stavanger. It's called Kongeparken. It and BonBon Land near Copenhagen were the top 2. Is that the park you mean? We totally adored it. It haunts our dreams and heavily haunts our book project. ** Alan Hoffman, Well, hi there, Alan Very nice to see you! Really glad you like Wanda Group. Me too, obviously. Cool, I'm seeing Christophe H. this week, and I'll ask him about that. Ha ha, I will indeed tell Stephen about Sunn0)))'s presence in the Marathon. Ha ha, nice. And I'll pass along any pictures, of course. Thanks, man, good to see you! ** Misanthrope, Interesting: the negative sentence with 'lacks' in it is so much more catchy than your kind positively spun one. Weird. I'm an older fogey than you, but I totally get drug crazes. Been there. Just not heroin. And crystal meth is some scary, heavily downsided shit too. But I'm post-drug crazing. Yeah, I should know the exact shooting schedule soon. As soon as we meet with our Director of Production (today) and find the second performer we need for the scene (this week, I sure hope). New story by you, way cool! Pretty short, way cool again! ** Rewritedept, Hi, man. You sound better. Im very happy to see that. Oh, your great guest-post is launching on this coming Friday. Thank you again so much! I've never been to the Vegas HOB venue, but the other two HOB venues I've been were gross. My weekend was pretty busy, as has been and will be the case re: my days for the next few weeks at least. But it was all good. Take care, C. ** Randomwater, Hi! It's really great to see you! I've been really good, thanks. That's a scary and weirdly beautiful and sad image of you helping the woman with the dog down the Griffith Observatory path. Antarctica was indescribably mind-blowing and amazing. Literally indescribable. I didn't end up being able to make an illustrative post about the trip that did enough justice to the place to actually finish and post. It's totally empty and raw. There were places to walk and hike and camp in a couple of instances, but there is literally nothing there apart from a few small research centers. No plants or trees or weeds or insects or anything. Maca, no, I don't think I tried that. Huh. I'll look it up. I don't know what 'You and the Night' is, so, no, Frank hasn't clued me in. What is it? Yeah, if you want to hang out here anytime, t'would be awesome. Take good care. ** Right. Those are 4 books I read recently and, yes, loved, and, yes, highly recommend. See you tomorrow.
Elizabeth Ellen: I am often wary of writers/artists/actors/et al who use their past drug use in their art or for some sort of (seeming) street cred. I have to be honest. I wonder how much heroin Cheryl Strayed did. Black Cloud is a collection of stories, fictions, based somewhat on yr life. Do you ever feel like a poser? Or like you have to prove how big a druggie you were in the way ppl who write about growing up poor are always telling you just how poor they were? How they had chickens in their living rooms and shit.
Juliet Escoria: LOL. I don’t worry about those questions. People are going to talk and think shit, and there’s really no point in trying to defend myself against it all.
I worry about different things related to that, though. I worry that I will be one of those writers who did drugs for a while and then only writes about drugs until the end of time. Drugs are easy subject matter because drug use is both funny and sad. I don’t want to only do the easy thing. But. I tried so many fucking times to write stories that had nothing to do with drugs. And they were shitty. In March of 2013, I decided I would stop giving a fuck about this and write what I wanted to write because I wanted to write it, and then I wrote seven of the stories that make up Black Cloud (the other five I had written either in grad school or the year after).
I feel like I had to get that book out of my system. I put all of myself into that project, like really tried to skin myself for it, and I am proud of the result. But right now I am writing about other things and I hope this trend continues.
EE: what drew you to writing, and to the style/culture of what is being called ‘alt lit’ in particular?
JE: I write because I’ve always written. I started taking it seriously because I’m stubborn and I didn’t want to be one of those people who thought of themselves as a writer yet never did anything concrete with it, so I set up my life in a way where I’d feel like an asshole if I failed.
I’m pretty sure people consider me alt lit because I have a book on CCM, use visual stuff in my work, and am in a relationship with Scott. This is funny to me because I didn’t fully understand what alt lit was until like a year or two ago. This is how I’m a poser, EE. I’m an alt lit poser. Doesn’t get much more pathetic than that.
I like being aligned with alt lit because they are the new impressionists. Like the impressionists, I too get ornery when someone tells me what to do or how to do it.
But shit, guys. Maybe it’s time to move into surrealism.
Civil Coping Mechanisms
'Reading the stories in Black Cloud is like getting punched in the throat; Juliet Escoria leaves you speechless. Her honesty teaches us that beauty can be found in violence, truth in pain, and life where we’ve always been afraid to look.'-- Benjamin Samuel
'Juliet Escoria is like a gutter-punk Grace Paley.'-- Adam Wilson
'This book is like Julia Child meets Michael Jackson.'-- Mira Gonzalez
'Black Cloud is one of the best things I’ve ever read… I want more literature to be like this: brutal, honest, dark, and incredibly real.'-- Beach Sloth
Excerpt
FUCK CALIFORNIA
That was the summer the waters in the lagoon swelled, and the gnats and mosquitoes swarmed in black clouds. We would sit on the beach in his rusty lawn chairs, the nylon threads turning white before snapping. We drank cases of beer, first cold and then no longer cold and then warm, out of cans hidden in paper bags, and the bug bites popped red on our heels. The day turned into night, and we rolled from the chairs onto the sand, not really minding the bugs, and I whispered to him, “I love you,” for the very first time, and I meant it.
I thought I meant it.
The days grew shorter and the mosquito bites healed. That was the winter the kelp uprooted itself, splaying on the sand in rusty, rotting piles, making the beach stink of death. We went down there one night, hopeful, but I could only stand it for ten minutes. Right before we left—he didn’t want us to go—I said to him, “It just seems like the ocean is trying to get at us,” and he smiled at me like I was a morbid and silly child. He was one of those that came here from somewhere else, and saw everything as great, waking just about every day to declare it a beautiful morning. Fuck California, I said under my breath. And also: fuck you.
We took his lawn chairs back where they came from, to the deck at his house, where we could see a little of downtown and the bay, which was polluted, but mostly we were looking at the airport.
This was also the winter I couldn’t get warm. The sea air dug into my bones, it seemed, and wouldn’t get out. There really was no other explanation. My skin was thinner, more transparent, than before, and my veins seemed much more blue. My arms and chest looked like maps, maps with a whole lot of rivers. I drank to melt away the chill. I couldn’t tell you why he drank, all I know was he did it too.
In the kitchen before dinner one night, it turned out I’d had too much and I fainted. One moment I had my elbows on the counter and the next I was a sloppy puddle on the floor. I’d hit the tile smack on my cheekbone. In the morning I had a black eye. “Looks like you talked back,” he joked. I pretended to laugh, but really I was thinking about how his dumb jokes made me sick.
Our last night together, and we went to the sex shop to buy whippets. I hadn’t done those things since I was fifteen. We went out on the patio and sat in the chairs, our big pint glasses forming rings on the old wooden planks of the deck. The empty cartridges made a pile at our feet, silver and glinting spent bombs. The iciness of the gas brought blis- ters to our fingers. And our thoughts — they stilled before they burst, and then we laughed, and then we laughed.
It smelled like gasoline because of the airport, and looked nothing at all like the beach. But if I sucked enough nitrous and shook my head the right way, I could trick myself into thinking the roar of the jets was that of the waves, and the lights on the landing strip were, in fact, stars.
FUCK CALIFORNIA by Juliet Escoria
Ghost Stories by Juliet Escoria
Taking Antipsychotics & Puking by Juliet Escoria
____________________
'Lodovico Pignatti Morano was born in London, England. He grew up predominantly in Australia, but also England, Italy and Switzerland. After finishing high school in Sydney he moved to London to study Art. In 2009 he graduated from Goldsmiths College (University of London) with a BA in Fine Art Practice, he subsequently moved to Italy to take a job with the legendary Italian bicycle brands Cinelli and Columbus. In 2011 he left his job to pursue other areas of interest. Since then he has written the short Milan-based identity thriller Marco, Milan (forthcoming, Semiotext(e), spring 2014), the large-scale monograph Cinelli, the art and design of the Bicycle (Rizzoli New York, 2012), and served as the Consultant Editor of the first ever monograph dedicated to the Italian sportswear pioneer Massimo Osti, Ideas from Massimo Osti (Damiani, 2012).'-- through europe
Semiotext(e)
'It was the lies he told that reminded me of that past of mine that I hadn't encountered in a while. He was telling me the kinds of lies where the teller implies that things that have only happened to him once are long-running habits. Things about too much whiskey, Céline and De Sade, eating alone in expensive Japanese restaurants, knowing nobody (this last fact he would continue to repeat in later meetings, it seeming more barbarously unreal each time).'-- from Nicola, Milan
'Vaguely employed as a brand strategist in a B-version of the Italian Glamour export economy, the twenty-five-year-old unnamed narrator of Nicola, Milan is an international loner, watch checker, tip leaver, shit-talker, drifting from bar to airport lounge, taxi to hotel foyer, drunk and caffeinated at the same time, trying to explain to you the finer points of how to pitch an idea of Italy to Americans.
'But when he meets the slightly older, richer, and worldlier Nicola, he becomes fascinated with him, seeing Nicola as a transcendental exemplar of the international-creative class culture he both envies and loathes. As the narrator stalks Nicola through the streets of Milan and its outskirts, what began as a casual friendship develops into an obsessive attachment, a crisis of identity connecting two hustlers, and a struggle against the quiet oblivion usually hidden by the web of tics and affectations that constitute a personality.
'Combining a Houellebecq-like sense of the psychic malaise beneath the surface of contemporary cultural life with the dispassionate voice of a police report, Nicola, Milan tells a story of perverse, asexual frenzy emptying out into the void.'-- Semiotext(e)
Excerpt
LODOVICO PIGNATTI MORANO & TRINE RIEL: SERIAL EUPHORIA AND ITS LONG-TERM PROBLEMS
Download Link : http://www.rarshare.com/nicola-milan-...
Cinelli: The Art and Design of the Bicycle
_____________________
'Her aura as she moved onto the stage was both casual and nervous. It was clear that she had done this before. She was not going to stumble or fumble to get the audience on her side, but that confidence was matched by a guardedness, an unease, and a way of maintaining a distance that might have been theatrical. I was not sure. In one of her books, she writes of a character: “Once she dreamed, on the night before a reading she was to give, that rather than words on paper, there were tiny objects linked one to another, which she had to decipher instantly, and turn into words, sentences, a story, flawlessly, of course.”
'She was wearing black; she had a glass of whiskey on the rocks in her hand. Her delivery was dry, deadpan, deliberate. There was an ironic undertow in her voice, and a sense that she had it in for earnestness, easy emotion, realism. She exuded a tone which was considered, examined and then re-examined. She understood, it seemed to me, that everything she said would have to be able to survive the listeners’ intelligence and sense of irony; her own intelligence was high and refined, her sense of irony knowing and humorous.
'I had not come across anyone like her before. It was May 1990 and both of us were touring what they call the United Kingdom in the company of an English writer. All three of us were promoting books. Although I had been in New York once and had read American fiction and seen the movies, I had never really known any Americans. Thus I could not place Lynne Tillman. All I could do was watch her.
'One thing she said made me laugh. When our English friend spoke of London and how hard it was to live there since it was so large and one had to travel miles and miles to have supper with friends, and then, if they moved, one often had to travel farther and indeed farther to see them, Lynne looked pained at all this talk of traveling and said: “Oh, no. In New York, if someone moves more than a few blocks away, you just drop them.”'-- Colm Tóibín
Red Lemonade
'Would Lynne Tillman Do? offers an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Just as many of Tillman’s short fictions have an essayistic quality about them, Tillman’s essays often surge with narrative power. as she upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Tillman, like other unique thinkers, sees the world differently, she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social problems and questions about politics and the polity, change the reader’s mind, startling it with new angles. Which is why so many of us who know her work often wonder: what would Lynne Tillman do? A long-time resident of New York, Tillman’s sharp humor is like her city’s, tough and hilarious. It pervades these pages; Tillman’s generosity and humanity are al- ways there, though, consolations for the sad truth. There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics—Hillary Clinton, interior design, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, art and artists, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, film, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation. There is a great variety, but what remains consistent is how differently she writes about them, how well she understands, how passionate and bold her writing is—she is always surprising and convincing. What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you’re a better, smarter person for it.'-- Red Lemonade
Excerpt
I once read: “All journeys have destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” The beginnings of journeys and narratives can be as surprising as their secret destinations. They can start as mysteriously as they end, they can start before one thinks.
I was living in Amsterdam in 1972 when I was given a Valentine’s Day gift, an anthology entitled Americans Abroad. It had been published in The Hague in 1932, in English, and was an out-of-print and rare book. It included well-known American expatriate writers—Stein, Pound, Eliot—less well-known ones—Harry and Caresse Crosby—and many unknowns. The unknowns dominated, the way they usually do. Immediately, I wanted to edit a new one, to represent American writers now, or then. Some months later, I was introduced to an editor who had a novelty imprint at a large Dutch publishing house. He liked the idea. He also liked enormously obese women and had posters of them, nude, hidden in his office. After he got to know me a little, he showed them to me. I remember this very well and the fact that on signing the contract he paid me an advance of fifteen hundred guilders.
I think 1971 was the year I read Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky and Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies. I knew that Jane Bowles was ill, in a Spanish hospital, unable to speak her name, and I also knew that Paul Bowles was installed in Tangier and had been since the 1940s. To me, he was the preeminent American abroad (the term is aptly dated), and I was determined to have him in the book.
Writing a letter to Paul Bowles was alarming, and I worked on it for a week. After deliberating, in a circuitous and paranoid way, I decided not to reveal that I was female. It was the era of William Burroughs’s vicious or satiric retort to feminism, The Job. Burroughs and Bowles were friends; I considered, in a convoluted way, that even though Paul Bowles was married to Jane Bowles, if he was in any way like some of his friends, or affected by their mean-spiritedness, he might now hate women and not want to be in a book edited by one. This might not be true at all—and if it were, why would I want him in the book? But I was in Amsterdam, smoking hash. I concocted a sexless letter, signed it Lynne Merrill Tillman (Lynne is also a man’s name; Merrill is my mother’s maiden name) and mailed it.
Bowles quickly replied that he’d be happy to be in the anthology. I’d asked for original material; he wrote that he’d send me some, and did. After another letter or two—I’ve kept all of his letters—I received one in which he inquired if I were a man or a woman, and how he should address me—Miss, Mrs. or Mr.? Otherwise he was “obliged to use Dear Lynne Merrill Tillman.” I wrote that I was female, in a letter I hope is lost, and he thanked me in his next letter for setting him straight.
The anthology’s publication date kept being postponed, and everything Bowles had given me appeared elsewhere. Finally he wrote that he had no more new or unpublished work to contribute except some poems he’d written in the late 1920s or early 1930s, and, he said, they weren’t very good. I wrote that they’d be included even if they weren’t very good, because I had to have him in the book. But, I asked, didn’t he have anything else, maybe some letters he’d written?
Bowles sent two letters he wrote his mother when he first went to Europe in 1931 with composer Aaron Copland. One told the hilariously anxious tale of his and Copland’s nearly missing a boat from Spain to Morocco. The other was written from the south of France, where he was visiting Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas for the first time. I was overwhelmed by my good luck.
Encouraged by our friendly, frequent correspondence—it was now 1976 or 1977 and I was in New York—I asked him for some writing from Jane Bowles. Requesting her work was even harder than asking for his. She was dying when I began the project, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking him for her work then or right after she’d died. I didn’t want Paul to feel taken advantage of. I thought her death must have been so painful for him that even mentioning her name would upset him. I hesitated a long time. I didn’t appreciate then that people usually don’t want the people they love to be forgotten. Jane Bowles is often and usually forgotten.
(cont.)
Lynne Tillman at the NYS Writers Institute in 2011
The Photographic Universe: 'The Life and Death of Images' with Lynne Tillman and Eduardo Cadava
Lynne Tillman presentation at the School of Visual Arts MFA Art Criticism and Writing Program
____________________
Q: I was telling someone the boiled-down set-up for Crystal Eaters– a village believes in crystal count: that every person contains within themselves a number of crystals that designate how long they have to live, and once they reach a zero-count they die; so a young girl named Remy, in an effort to save her sick mother, sets out to discover a way to increase one’s crystal count – and the thought occurred to me that the premise sounds somewhat like a videogame. Many games that I remember playing – Myst, Zelda– have a fable-like quality to them. Have videogames influenced you at all?
Shane Jones: I think videogames from my childhood influenced me a lot and while writing Crystal Eaters I remember looking at images from a bunch of games like Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and Myst. I think the fable-like quality you mentioned probably comes more from reading fables early on, or just some hardwired thing inside me that leans toward alternative realities, or hating on reality. But some of the images in games like Zelda and Super Mario Bros I really love, I think they are just beautiful pieces of art, and I’m sure they burned into my brain early on. Sega had a game called Alex Kid In Miracle World which was basically a more fucked up Super Mario Bros, more raw and poorly developed and just weird, and I played that game religiously. And a lot of those old school Sega and Nintendo games have main characters with health points or HP and I just love that. The idea of a number you have and you’re losing the number and always trying to increase it to avoid death. That’s a detail from videogames that influenced this book. I will say I don’t play videogames now. The last system I owned was the original Playstation. And here’s a confession: I never owned a Nintendo as a kid. I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone that. I went to a friend’s house whose Dad was a heroin addict and we’d play Nintendo all day and cook hot dogs in a fire pit in the woods. For some reason, I only had a Sega. I was the weird kid playing Alex Kid In Miracle World. You should look that game up if you don’t know it. If I remember right, at the end of each stage you had to play rock, papers, scissors, to defeat a boss, which seems really lazy on the developers side and just strange. This is after you spend the entire stage punching things and avoiding skulls.
Q: Crystal Eaters contains this incredible line: “As a child what you see is creation. As an adult what you see is destruction.” What do you see?
SJ: If I talk to people or read the news I see a lot of destruction. Adults tend to talk about everything that is wrong with the world. Tell a coworker the weather for tomorrow and they’ll probably say what’s wrong with it. But if I just keep to myself and my family and, I don’t know, just walk around and be inside my own head, I see a lot of creation and beauty. The books I read and the books I write are a reflection of destruction and that reflection leads to creation. It’s a cycle, right? The line from the book you mentioned singles out Remy and her father and how the two see the world differently, which creates tension in regards to the dying mother. Sometimes adulthood feels like a trap because the responsibilities, the mundane nature of work and shopping and eating every day, can wear on you and I think that can feel like destruction. That can feel like you’re moving through mud. But not kids, no way. They are constantly in forward motion, always discovering, always creating, and I try and tell myself that often when writing: be a kid and play, don’t be an adult and complain it’s been cloudy for three days.
Two Dollar Radio
'A grounded epiphany of the highest order, revealing the stark and majestic grace that is present within the loss each living thing must endure. Page after page, Jones's exquisitely styled prose drugs the ear like otherworldly music—this pyretic, hallucinatory novel stings with beauty at every turn.'-- Alissa Nutting
'Remy is a young girl who lives in a town that believes in crystal count: that you are born with one-hundred crystals inside and throughout your life, through accidents and illness, your count is depleted until you reach zero.
'As a city encroaches daily on the village, threatening their antiquated life, and the Earth grows warmer, Remy sets out to accomplish something no one else has: to increase her sick mother’s crystal count.
'An allegory, fable, touching family saga and poetic sci-fi adventure, Shane Jones underlines his reputation as an inspired and unique visionary.'-- Two Dollar Radio
Excerpt
The sky is laced with turquoise worms, and where the sun normally is there’s two red lips, a parting mouth with clouds for teeth. Remy’s bed contains 24 stacked pillows that form a wall. She gets into bed and looks up at the black crystal drawn on the ceiling. She closes her eyes, steadies her breathing, and touches the pillows. The mouth in the sky fills with red and the teeth vanish and it’s the sun. The worms wail and turquoise cascades down an arc in the sky.
The first pillow Remy places on her feet. The next, her legs. The next, her stomach. Finally, her chest. She builds layers until she has to balance the pillows on her body with her breathing. She puts the last three pillows on her head and hugs her face until she passes out. Her arms flop off the sides of the bed and her fingertips dangle near the floor.
She’s a baby. She takes wide, unsteady steps, and on a few occasions, tips backward, arms extended as her diaper thumps the floor. She wears a blue shirt with a hand-drawn black crystal (Brother). Her face is blond hair. She stumbles from her bedroom and into the hallway where she falls down the stairs, blond hair blown open and her body awkwardly sliding down the stairs as Mom shouts from below. Afterward, Remy cried for fourteen hours. Mom stayed awake the entire time, tapping her back in sets of ten, feeding her sips of tea, telling her it would be okay, they will come back on again.
Remy twitches in the wobbly picture and her eyelids flicker. Her arm as baby arm snaps like a bird’s spine beneath a boot. The pillows fall. One hits her arm. Mom moans from her bedroom. Her negative weight floats upward from her refusal of food. Her falling numbers hurt everything around her, even the carpet looks depressed. Dad skips between loving companion to distant husband to angry father. He spends his days alone. Each day this week he’s been sitting gargoyle-perched on the roof. Recently, Remy thought the problem of Mom’s sickness isn’t Mom’s sickness exactly, but Dad’s reaction to Mom’s sickness.
Remy writes in a notebook:
FELL DOWNSTAIRS AS A BABY -5 CRYSTALS.
SUBTRACT -1 FOR EVERY YEAR AFTER FROM AGING.
She puts three pillows on her face and grips tight until she passes out again, her hands falling off the bed, eyes now moving over a dark road. She’s riding her bike with the blue and yellow tassels tied to the handlebar. She wanted red and green, to be special, but Dad bought the commons. This vision like the last is broken from reality but more severe – Remy riding her bike on the road to the mine, blue and yellow tassels blowing endlessly backward and touching her home. Her hair is also endlessly long and it touches the house. She’s followed by a spotlight. Her feet blur on the pedals. She’s trying to escape the light. Skin three inches above her right ankle catches on the rear derailleur and the bike breaks into a severe slide. Water sprays from where the tires skid. The road becomes a beach and Brother is standing there covered in glistening sweat, jogging in place, with Harvak at his side who is also jogging in place. Sea crystals the shape of hexagons colored white foam then harden to black stone on the sand. An octopus is flung by the sun across the sky. The spotlight disappears and the man, who looks just like Dad, who held the spotlight, twirls his hand goodbye, bows, then jumps off the cliff at the top of The Bend.
(cont.)
Shane Jones reading from 'Light Boxes'
Trailer: Shane Jones 'Daniel Fights A Hurricane'
Trailer: Shane Jones 'Light Boxes'
*
p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yep, on the Naucke. So want to see 'Under the Skin'. We have about a month to go before it opens over here. I'll check out Sandra Plays Electronics, thanks! Oh, I have no doubt whatsoever that your excitement about Art101 is going translate perfectly into the moods of those of us out here. ** Jeffrey Coleman, Hey, Jeff! Well, yeah, your more practical explanation for the coincidence makes a lot of sense, but the senseless/fated idea is so much more imagination-friendly, and it's hard to deny oneself that boost. Long story short, you deserve to have that book, that's a fact. Awesome that we help each other out on the great discoveries front. Thanks a lot for thinking about and getting into the gig post. That's, you know, the kind of boon that the post and I were dreaming about. Gezan are bonkers, yeah, cool. Envy on that Melt Banana show. Kier just saw them too. I do indeed remember you telling me about that friend, yes, Obvious relief that he's not just alive but okay. Jesus, he's a lucky guy, both for getting found/saved in time and for spending time in Japan. Fascinating story and update all the way around. Thank you for being so awesome and generous. ** Colbaltfram, Hi there, John! Welcome back! I've been great mixed with crazy busy. They're not incompatible. You reading and especially writing a lot is the ultimate excuse, so your absence is fully accounted for. Yes, please link us up when the Billfold piece appears. Great, I haven't gotten to read anything new by you in far too long. Zac's and my film is moving along, yes, and the clock is ticking, and there's a ton to do, but I'm very excited. Nope, I won't be in NYC then, sadly. We'll be shooting the first scene in our film exactly during that time. I read a couple of earlier Bruce Wagner novels, but I haven't kept up for whatever reason. I think I liked them pretty well. I've never even heard of 'Dead Stars', so I'll go see what that's all about, thanks! 600 pages, though, gulp. Bon Monday! ** Torn porter, Thanks a lot, man! Sorry we didn't get to meet up this weekend. I was thinking Sunday would be great, but this film project is a lot hungrier constantly than I had figured, but this week maybe, if that works for you? Cool, yeah, I hope the URM guy says yes. Oh, yeah, I really want to plant myself in that new Seven Dwarves coaster. Really have to get to that multi-theme park utopia spot in Florida one of these soonest days. Thanks, buddy. Hope to see you in the real really soon. ** Steevee, Hi. Will Self wrote a very negative review of one of my books, and that's all I know re: his opinion on my stuff. I'll see if I can find or download 'Two Lovers'. Or 'The Immigrant', if I can't. Thanks a lot. How was your interview with Gray? ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. I'm glad you liked the music day, thank you. And wonderful, and thank you even more, for the work you did on the post. I'm excited, needless to say. I'm so sorry to hear about the limited use of your arms, yikes. Please take good care of yourself. Yes, please. ** Sypha, If going to work is even the slightest bit dreamy, your home life must be even more theater piece-worthy than I thought, or Gisele Vienne-friendly at least. A new Day for here from you would be amazing, of course. Your posts are always the gold standard. Thanks for wanting to, James, and feel much, much better! ** Bill, Someone really needs to get on making that t-shirt, clearly. Nice looking festival you played at there. I would love to be in its vicinity. How much longer are you there? And then what? Back to Berlin, or ... ? ** Kier, Hi, Kier! Thank you for putting here on your away-time agenda! I want to see the spirit tree, for sure, and any lambs that happen to wander in front of your lens. Yes, we went to Tusenfyrd. It was big fun. Tivoli in Copenhagen is fantastic! One of the rides there inspired the way Zac's and my in-progress 'Scandinavian theme park-exploring' book project ended up being shaped. Actually, maybe Zac's and my very favorite park of all the many Scandinavian theme parks we visited is near Stavanger. It's called Kongeparken. It and BonBon Land near Copenhagen were the top 2. Is that the park you mean? We totally adored it. It haunts our dreams and heavily haunts our book project. ** Alan Hoffman, Well, hi there, Alan Very nice to see you! Really glad you like Wanda Group. Me too, obviously. Cool, I'm seeing Christophe H. this week, and I'll ask him about that. Ha ha, I will indeed tell Stephen about Sunn0)))'s presence in the Marathon. Ha ha, nice. And I'll pass along any pictures, of course. Thanks, man, good to see you! ** Misanthrope, Interesting: the negative sentence with 'lacks' in it is so much more catchy than your kind positively spun one. Weird. I'm an older fogey than you, but I totally get drug crazes. Been there. Just not heroin. And crystal meth is some scary, heavily downsided shit too. But I'm post-drug crazing. Yeah, I should know the exact shooting schedule soon. As soon as we meet with our Director of Production (today) and find the second performer we need for the scene (this week, I sure hope). New story by you, way cool! Pretty short, way cool again! ** Rewritedept, Hi, man. You sound better. Im very happy to see that. Oh, your great guest-post is launching on this coming Friday. Thank you again so much! I've never been to the Vegas HOB venue, but the other two HOB venues I've been were gross. My weekend was pretty busy, as has been and will be the case re: my days for the next few weeks at least. But it was all good. Take care, C. ** Randomwater, Hi! It's really great to see you! I've been really good, thanks. That's a scary and weirdly beautiful and sad image of you helping the woman with the dog down the Griffith Observatory path. Antarctica was indescribably mind-blowing and amazing. Literally indescribable. I didn't end up being able to make an illustrative post about the trip that did enough justice to the place to actually finish and post. It's totally empty and raw. There were places to walk and hike and camp in a couple of instances, but there is literally nothing there apart from a few small research centers. No plants or trees or weeds or insects or anything. Maca, no, I don't think I tried that. Huh. I'll look it up. I don't know what 'You and the Night' is, so, no, Frank hasn't clued me in. What is it? Yeah, if you want to hang out here anytime, t'would be awesome. Take good care. ** Right. Those are 4 books I read recently and, yes, loved, and, yes, highly recommend. See you tomorrow.