Monthly Archives: November 2011

In which metaphors start off okay, then start to go wrong.

Posted on November 29, 2011 | 3 Comments

Ahoy fine people!  So, I went to Davis.  I am super proud of the Aggie students and faculty.  At the protest, the kids were so cute and polite and respectful it was almost wrong.  (Come on!  Get MAD!)  But there sure were a whole lot of us.  Thousands upon thousands.

Yay us!

Would you like to see a whole bunch of me?  If so, please come to the Outdoor Art Club in Mill Valley this Thursday at 1 PM to watch me shower the audience with history, romance, and my dazzling personality.  If you would like to see a little less of me–like maybe have a little amuse-bouche of me rather than the full-on Elena platter–please come to the Babylon Salon Reading Series at the Cantina in San Francisco this Saturday at 7 PM.  I will be part of a varied tasting menu of delicious authors.

This week, I have submitted to my ongoing obsession with this whole Titanic thing and written a short, hopefully polished piece about it.  I also got feedback from my agent about the perfume nose story, so that one’s back on the table.  Short stories are good: it’s kind of a relief to suck over the course of fifteen pages rather than suck over the course of three hundred.  To stay fit, you have to vary your training in sucking: even if a suckage marathon is the goal, sometimes you have to do a suckage sprint to keep your prose muscles spry at sucking.  Wow.  I apologize for the last two sentences.  But, clearly I am not ashamed enough of myself, because I did not delete them.

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UC Davis

Posted on November 20, 2011 | 4 Comments

When I first saw this image I was.  So pissed.  I could.  Not.  Form.  Cogent sentences.

I am not really a big protest person, but I am going to Davis with my Comp Lit posse tomorrow.  The video footage this photo was pulled from is easily googleable if you can stomach watching it.  The policeman steps over the crouching passive protesters shaking his pepper spray like a can of Raid and strolls down the line blasting these kids in the face as dispassionately as if he were spraying a bunch of roaches along the wainscoting in his house.  AMERICA, WHAT THE FUCK.  I could go on a very, very long rant about this, but arguments are often best made in picture form.  I found this on my facebook feed this morning:

So there.

All that officer did was prove those students completely right for asking what America has done to itself.  It hurts so much to watch a beacon nation degrade its own ideals.  We have to work our way back from this.  Come on.  There are more of us than there are of them.

Meanwhile, an open note to Officer Pike:

Do you want to be the guard who kept the third class passengers locked down below to maintain order on the Titanic?  That guy drowned too, you know.

And an open note to the students:

I am proud of you, kids.  Carry on.

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Confessions of an American Vicodin-Eater

Posted on November 18, 2011 | 2 Comments

What?  It’s already most of the way through November and it’s Thanksgiving next week?  How did this happen!?  CRAZYPANTS.  Amazing how time flies when you’re on palliative narcotics.  Which I’m currently withdrawing from.  Laaaaaaaame.  But at least the broken rib is healed enough that I don’t pass out from pain when I sneeze.  And breathing hurts only a little.  At some point I tried to do a take off on Thomas de Quincey called “Confessions of an American Vicodin-Eater” in which I chronicled all my fevered drug dreams in a posh late eighteenth century voice.  I only got two paragraphs in before the enterprise was abandoned because, you know, one’s motivation is not at its peak when on pain-relieving depressants.  Bummer because my unconscious was like Exploding Jungian Theater every night.  (The nightmares: I am trapped between the living and the dead.  I am trespassing on lost places I used to love and getting in trouble with the authorities.  I am always losing my teeth, or bleeding from somewhere.  I wake up to find that I am still asleep and wake up again to find that I am still asleep, thus in an infinite loop so that when I finally do wake up, I am not entirely certain that I am not still asleep.  I dream of babies and wounded birds and tiny fetal animals that fit in the palm of my hand, small vulnerable things that are easily destroyed.  The water is so icy and the shock of it when it penetrates my lungs makes me gasp and draw more of it in I am the wreck Titanic the wreck Titanic the wreck Titanic)–yeah, it was like that.  I might have also written a couple of ill-advised missives displaying atrocious vulnerability to certain individuals while in the more maudlin throes of chasing the dragon.  Seriously, kids, drugs are bad.  Don’t do drugs.

Somewhere in there, I wrote a short story about perfume noses that my agent liked, so it will probably be submitted after another round of revision.  Must get back to the novel though.  Good God, the nights are long all of a sudden.

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