News, publications and blog for the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2).
In Tucson. Last night we hung out with Spork makers Andrea and Drew. A thunderstorm surrounded us and we ate lemon ice. Aaron and I are heading out in a couple hours, after sourdough pancakes. This home is my home.
We set up a Twitter. I got an interview up at Black Heart. Sass in the grass. Looking forward to seeing Lindsay and friends up the coast.
though I should have been asleep for the past two hours because it is very late and I have an early appointment:
now just fix Teach for America and we'll be all set
1. Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of D.C. Schools, who just dismissed 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor appraisals and 76 who were not properly licensed to teach, in an attempt to turn around a district with one of the weakest academic records of any urban school system in the nation.
2. The Austin Women’s Shelter SafePets program, which asks for volunteers to foster animals when their owner needs to go to the shelter. “In recent surveys of survivors entering shelters across the country, half report that their partner threatened, hurt or killed their pets before they left.”
3. The crowded Pima County morgue as deaths in the desert around Tucson rise with immigration enforcement. “As we gain more control, the smugglers are taking people out to even more remote areas,” said Omar Candelaria, the special operations supervisor for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. “They have further to walk and they are less prepared for the journey, and they don’t make it.”
obviously this guy was going to be a huge threat
reader, I married him
Trip-planning for this west coast tour. Our Kickstarter got mega-funded. I had to peel my jaw off the ground and reconstruct a new face. Aaron and Lindsay and I are very grateful for your generosity. It’s going to be open for a few more days for anyone else who wants t-shirts/books/sand. We decided that if there’s a profit after shipping, t-shirt buying, books, rental, and gas, we’ll put it towards rental expenses for the Quickies Midwest tour happening at the end of the month. My new face looks okay.
Full to-do list. I think I’m going to cry with relief the moment my feet touch the California coast and whoever witnesses that is going to have to look in another direction.
There were two flies on the window screen and when I turned on the a/c, I closed the window and trapped one fly within the window and one fly within the house. I watched them try to reach each other with the layer of glass separating until I couldn’t stand it and opened the glass to let the housefly into the screen, but then the housefly flew further into the house and the screenfly slipped out the screen and flew away too and now I feel like an idiot.
Spent some time reading “Airplane!” trivia today. Did you know that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was offered $30,000 to appear in the film, but he asked for $35,000 to buy an oriental rug? That’s something that happened in the history of the world.
Yesterday I covered myself in vinegar to relieve a sunburn and then I smelled like a salad with a sunburn. I’ve lived alone for three years now. Half of my bed is covered in laundry. I have a lot of stuff to do today but all I want to do is write in my blog and watch the flies try to escape my air-conditioned home.
We added a new San Francisco date to the tour, see list below. Come-on-out. Then, check out the video Aaron Burch made for our Kickstarter. We need gas money or else we will make mistakes with credit cards!
Nancy Lili G has a kind review and a sweet contest over at her blog: comment over there before Wednesday for a chance to win a copy of AM/PM. I like that someone read my book while waiting to get a tattoo. Thanks, Nancy Lili G.
It’s a cicada day in Texas. Somebody is using a machine.
I’m mapping out a plot today, using different colored inks and pencils to delineate action and requirement because I am five years old. I can’t keep elements clear in my head so it needs to go on the big paper. Back to work.
halfway done
San Diego:
Saturday, July 31 8pm – 11pm
Vermin on the Mount
with Aaron Burch, Lisa Fugard, Amelia Gray, Jess Jollett, Lindsay Hunter, Enriqu Limón, Adam Novy & Andy Roe
Sushi Performance & Visual Arts
390 Eleventh Ave FREE!
Los Angeles:
Sunday, August 1st 9-11pm
Vermin on the Mount Six-Year Anniversary
with Jillian Lauren, Aaron Burch, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter & Adam Novy
The Mountain Bar
473 Gin Ling Way FREE!
San Francisco:
Tuesday, August 3rd 9pm
The High Emission Book Tour
with Aaron Burch, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter and Reynard Seifert
Amnesia Bar
853 Valencia St. FREE!
San Francisco:
Wednesday, August 4th 7:00pm
Random Hookup: Corium + Hobart
with Aaron Burch, Lauren Becker, Amelia Gray, Andrea Kneeland, Greg Gerke, and Adam Novy
The Knockout
3223 Mission at Valencia St FREE!
Sacramento:
Thursday, August 5
Burch & Gray with Flatmancrooked PubQuiz
with Aaron Burch and Amelia Gray
Pangaea Cafe, 7pm FREE!
Tucson:
Wednesday, August 11
Powhaus Productions Presents Lit!
Rialto Theatre, 7pm
with Spork Press
318 E. Congress St. $3
BEIJING — When viewers tuned into China’s most popular dating show this spring, they saw beautiful women, brutal rejections and plenty of money worshiping, as when a female contestant was asked by a possible date whether she would like to go for a bicycle ride.
“I’d rather sit and cry in the back of a BMW,” she said.
(NYT)
Today I saw the trailer for that movie about Facebook. I think the producer that greenlit that project made a huge mistake in assuming that the Zuckerberg kid is not going to do something crazy down the line that will render this movie utterly obsolete. It is like making a movie about O.J. Simpson’s successful college football tenure at the University of Southern California.
Thanks to the telephone game that is the internet, the XX Factor called me a poetess. This is what I get for making fun of W.S. Merwin last week, the man who can only accept the laureate position if he can escape a pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano. We broke all manner of hit count records around here. The blog went platinum and Mark Zuckerberg sent me a check with an ascii middle finger in the PAY TO THE ORDER OF section. There was some excitement but now things are quieting down. I’m emptying out the ashtrays. For the record, I am not a poetess.
Oh, and I saw Inception after the Facebook trailer, the trailer for the movie about Facebook. Good plot weaving and fun overall, but anyone who thinks the writing is presenting some seriously new ideas has not read much, or seen The Matrix. I said “Look at that handsome Shia Labeouf” multiple times and later had to be told his name is pronounced “Shy-ah” and also it was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I am my own grandmother.
Wishing I knew 300 people who wanted to come over and play the baba yaga with me tonight. My downstairs neighbors would flip.
It’s my last day in Portland. I put my face on the green grass. I was here in order to teach at a workshop for young writers and I didn’t ask how old they were individually because I always hated it when people asked me that when I was their age. They all seemed kind and industrious. I felt envious that they were spending the whole two weeks wandering around a grassy campus and doing writing exercises, but I got to be there for two days and that seemed good enough to get a general feel for it.
Ruth Franklin wrote a review of my threats reading in New York last week for The New Republic. It’s an interesting piece and I’m beyond flattered to be on a triptych with Sarah Silverman and Joan Rivers, complete with ideas about women and subversive performance. I feel like I’m developing some kind of related theory, though I’m taking a long time to figure it out because my brain is the brain of a baby who smacks his own stomach with his fist over and over. I hope that baby is sitting next to me for the flight home so I can tell him my ideas about women and subversive performance.
There is a coyote outside. If you ever hear what sounds like someone shaking a dog over a balcony rail, that’s a coyote. How did a coyote get to Portland? How did I get to Portland? I sat next to a toddler on the flight here and she slept from the moment the plane took off until when it touched down. She woke up, looked at the change in scenery out the window, and started crying in hysterical terror. I was like, girl, I know it.
I’m coming out to read to room-sized portions of California in a few weeks. I always hold myself back from saying “Keep it locked for more details” but now that I’m going to California I believe it’s time for you to keep it locked.
Black Heart Magazine named me one of the top 5 emerging writers under 40. Click here to see me straight up looking like an elementary school librarian between sexy ladies AV Flox and Gillian Sze. Man, 41 year olds are EATING IT this season.
Another cool thing happened: India Menninghaus wrote a review of AM/PM that ended up in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago paper. Check out the larger size of the image to see the hand-lettering from India. And look at her site. Maybe if you’re sweet to her, she’ll send you a handwritten letter.
I keep forgetting to mention it but now I will, speaking of reviews, if you or someone you love would like a review copy of my book, to review, for a place that runs reviews, please drop me a line via that “Contact” link above. I promise I won’t write a crazy 1,500 word rebuttal if this action results in a bad review. Or will I? (Yes.)
As the President of Hot Dogs I’m obliged to say that I ate a hot dog in New York and it was okay. It was at Gray’s Papaya and it burned the flesh at the back of my mouth. There were tanks behind the men that looked like the type that serves those nasty daiquiris in New Orleans, so I felt hungover, though I was not hungover. Get it together, Gray’s Papaya.
I’m on the ass-end of a whirlwind here on the fifth floor of the Larchmont in NYC. The bed is on casters and the shower is down the hall. The style of this hotel room is “cozy institutional.”
The A/C works great
I always rip my feet up in this city. Yesterday I got my toes done in the cheapest place I could find. I started walking down the hallway to go to the bathroom and a woman got in my face and asked me what I was doing. I said I was going to the bathroom. She was mad about it. There was a language barrier. The soak water was so hot it started parboiling my feet. Another woman touched my toes. She asked if she should cool the water down and I said no. She asked if I wanted the razor and I frowned at her and she said I only needed the stone.
I met a new friend named Emily and we had adventures. The food we ate was so pretty I wanted to photograph it, and she said the restaurant’s sister restaurant experienced that so much they had to ban the practice. They served sliced scallops mixed with spicy red and crunchy green bits. We drank a tequila cocktail with a long pepper afterburn. The train stopped while we were underneath a river.
I read at Happy Ending, which was fun like a Lynchian dream sequence, accordions followed by Shane Jones reading a story about a hair monster making love to a handicapped girl followed by Audrey “the time traveler’s” Niffenegger reading Finnegans Wake backwards, I shit you not. Then we ate late-night treats from Central Mexico, I think, shredded meats in corn masa pockets and a plate of fried plantains. I signed a copy of AM/PM by squirting salsa into it.
My dad wanted me to go check up on Bleeker Street Pizza, an establishment he has not visited since 1973 but thinks fondly of. I walked an hour, found it, and drank some water while sitting next to an oven and eating the most perfectly crispy slice of mushroom pizza in the middle of one of the hottest July days on record. Fine, New York. I give in. I love you.
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