Video: Amanda Gowin at Sylvester Memorial Library

the video!!! took forever to get this mess uploaded. i realize it’s an hour long, but at least stick around long enough for the church fire anecdote… plus i read a story. mainly i ramble. but i think it turned out pretty well! 

World Book Day 2013 – New & Old Love

 

World Book Day??!!  hell yeah. awesome excuse to make book lists.

 

Top 5 Go-Tos for Random Infusions of Beauty 

Sometimes I need icebears and sometimes I need Mario to tell me about the fans’ sounds at night… these are my shelf-grabs for snippet reading or total re-ingestion

1. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

2. The Strangeness of Beauty – Lydia Minatoya

3. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace

4. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

5. East of Eden – John Steinbeck

 

Top 5 Quickest Reads in the Past Year

There’s no way to list the best things I’ve read, there are WAY too many. But for what it’s worth, I devoured these in just a couple days apiece, and I think that says plenty about them. In order beginning with the speediest:

1. Growing Up Dead In Texas – Stephen Graham Jones

2. Full Dark, No Stars – Stephen King

3. Nod – Adrian Barnes

4. Murder and Other Distractions – Michael Estrin

5. The Sound of Loneliness – Craig Wallwork

 

5 Self-Pimps Because Why Not? I’m Proud to Be In This Stuff

1. Warmed and Bound – “The World Was Clocks” available now

2. In Search of a City: Los Angeles in 1000 Words – “Gilded Bones” available now

3. cutaway – “The Cabbage Muse” available now

4. Cipher Sisters – “Asymmetry” (and co-editor) coming very soon

5. The Booked. Anthology – “Short Tendon” coming very soon

P.S. to this list, still a year in the future so can’t really gloat about it just yet – Burnt Tongues – “The Line Forms on the Right” coming summer 2014

Happy World Book Day!!! READ READ READ!!!

The Batman Ring

Messes with my head when I’m up so much earlier than everyone. Kiddo got leapt upon by 3 lbs of black fur at around 3:30 – now kid, dad and aforementioned ball of fur are all nicely settled together in the big bed. Me? Im wider than a stick of gum and had to slip away.

My toenails look fabulous, I want to photograph them, but that’s the same part of me that just spent too long looking for a plastic batman ring I saw shoved on the cat’s ear last evening.

Lets see. What, what? Fourth of july weekend was all the stuff it is supposed to be, more “classic” than any we’ve had so far – kid games at the park, dunk tank with the mayor, swimming, grilling, sparklers, fireworks. Maybe adam’s best holiday to date; Lily really brings out the satyr in him. (Photos in a later post)

There’s a lot of fog.

My stories are getting more compact – working on this thing, thought it was about a whole night, got interrupted, back to it later and I realized it needed two more lines. What, maybe 400 words? But sometimes you WANT something to be sex but instead it’s about moths and alcoholism. It’s voice work, I think. Anais Nin crisis – I go back and forth between Henry & June and her erotica, and try to figure out what she was trying to figure out – the journal voice turning to the writer voice. Henry figured it out, or maybe he just said fuck it. Maybe this is about form. Don’t know. Just know that things that come from scribbles and journal scraps and bundled thoughts fallen from the sky (tied together with cigarette string and stored near the X-files trivia but not too close to the D’inofrio box) shine up into a lot more like my voice than my “this is the story” planned tales. It’s like I put on my fancy writing hat – I dont write anything fancy, but the voices are distinctly different… bridget’s voice is the only narrative voice I like, and its just (to paraphrase andrea speaking of something different) the out loud version of me. We’ll see how all that pans out.

these are good thoughts to have while it becomes daylight and the fog refuses to burn off.

If i had the batman ring, perhaps the answers would feel closer.

Too many books on the side table, but I guess it’s good –  I can say Fuck it to the voice earwhig and listen to other voices for the moment. Ahem, allow me to catalog : Knockemstiff, By the Time We Leave Here We’ll Be Friends, Clown Girl, Henry & June, Sexus, Erotica by Anais Nin. Thats an impressive table. If the PBS schedule and One Fish Two Fish weren’t amongst the pile it would be downrigh hip – and no doubt a calculated lie of a pile.

But this is not about the table. This is about the Warmed & Bound Release Party, isn’t it? No, maybe it’s about the Booked podcast that terrifies me to no end. I shall ramble in new and horrifying ways, and I am AFRAID. Big mouth, more nervous = more talking.

But the release party is exciting shit. Why? Shoes. Shoes and the 1920s and meeting all these people – I want to know what these typed voices sound like out loud, I want to match faces to stories, I want to hit on waitresses dressed as flappers.

I want a pink bandanna for my pirate costume, and to FIND THAT BATMAN RING!!!

 

anais nin

i finished Henry & June last night, i’ve never read anything quite like it. it was very real – most journal/diary books seem shaved at and shaped, so all the pieces match up and it seems to be GOING somewhere. this was just a lovely mess. one day she hates him, the next day she loves him, a week later it’s over for sure and she thinks he’s weak, the next day the doubt seems ridiculous. sporadic expressions of acute guilt, obligation, confusion, confliction – it’s almost as if this could be any intelligent, creative woman’s diary, if they were better able to translate spinning thoughts and webs into words and paragraphs. i loved it, it love her. i want all of her diaries. to read this and to have read Tropic of Cancer so many times, it’s such an amazing counterpoint. not consciously, just that i knew all the characters already, and to see them all from a different point of view is incredible. i love her writing voice. last night i finished the book and while emailing andrea (it got a little long, from the reading i think) looked at all the photographs i could find of anais nin – i’d only seen one or two before, it was strange that she looks exactly how i would expect her to look…. her face matches her voice and her penstrokes.

Henry