Counterbalance

Lit Bits Lite - The Reject or Denounce Edition

• Bukowski's De Longpre residence now a landmark.
• LA Weekly's Nancy Rommelman has an in-depth look at JT Leroy (the facts and the fiction)
• Maggie Nelson & Eileen Myles will be on Bookworm tomorrow afternoon at 2:30pm to discuss Nelson's new book Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, which I briefly noted at LAist last week
• Book By Its Cover features many lovely, visual views of books and their covers. I was delighted to find that they recently featured 365 Penguins, which was reminded me a great deal of Fifty Little Penguins, illustrated by fellow litblogger Patricia Storms.
• At the Guardian's book blog, Stephanie Merritt takes a look at prozac's effect on writing and writers and Britian. In short: it works.
• With March only days away - you know what that means...April, Poetry Month, is just around the corner. I'll be taking suggestions and submissions all month long in anticipation of the big month. I know it's never uber-popular to celebrate poetry, but let's try to do it in bang-up style this year. Okay? Email me your goods as soon as you've got them!

Ode to Dutton's

We'll be running a series of posts over the next few weeks about the reasons why Dutton's was so good and why we'll miss it when it's gone. 

The first post, from an LAist reader, is up now.

If you'd like to contribute a post, head on over and let me know.

Some Really Lovely Words from Shepard Fairey

Andy Sternberg at LAist tracked down the story behind the big Obama poster on Sunset and got in a few questions to Fairey.  After a string of all sorts of writerly rejections (are those letters ever a good time?) that have left me totally wounded in writing action, I kind of dig what Fairey has to say about pressing on.

Andy: Any words of wisdom for aspiring street artists / disruptors / dissenters?

Fairey: My advice is to stick to what you believe with tenacity. Don't read snarky blogs and message boards because lazy sideline critics can bum you out, and ultimately have little effect on the outcome of things compared to those who take real action. Just follow your passion.

Yes, follow your passion feels a little cliche. Especially when your passion doesn't (yet?) pay the bills. But on this day, the sentiment works for me. Must remind self to ignore the snarky blogs and sideline critics that have recently sidelined me.  Merci, Fairey. Merci.

Further Evidence that Art Books are Snobby

When I mentioned my recent visit to the Murakami exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary MOCA, I didn't mention that I'd also picked up the book for the show. I, like many others, have a thing about getting the book of the show that I just saw. So that I can pore over certain pieces in private and remember the collection as I saw it on that day.

I'd bet that most flip through these gorgeous coffee table books (ah, there is nothing like opening a fresh art book and smelling that ink!) to look at the photos of the art, not to read the text. I'd even wager that most don't ever read the text.  But I do. As a writer, I feel an obligation to read the work, not just look at the pretty pictures.

It must be said, though, that the text in art books isn't always brilliant. It is often crammed so full of references and hoity-toity "look what I know" passages that it's tough to get through it all. Especially when new fiction lies unread on the very same desk. I'm always tempted to scrap the big fancy art book and hunker down with a work I'd "rather" read.  I expected the Murakmi book might be different, though, especially with five different sections written by five different writers.  With this optimism, I dove in.

I've learned a lot about Murakami's style and influences. I've noted with appreciation the way the text places Murakami's work in context to today's vast array artists, going beyond the obvious comparisons to Warhol. I've also read through the nearly always tricky bit where art writers tell me what the art should mean to me, which annoys me. I've not finished the text portion of the book, so I can't offer my thoughts on the whole just yet. However, I have to report that, so far, it's tough-going and full of the usual art-book dreck. A case in point, from the "Flat Boy vs. Skinny" section written by Dick Hebdige:

"Redemption is historically and spiritually linked to ritual and survival practices involving a descent trajectory such as self-abjection, rag-picking, Dumpster-diving, or recycling, a truism borne out in the work of Occidental artists as various as Hermann Nitsch, Antonin Artaud, Bob Flanagan, Robert Rauschenberg, Walter Benjamin and Agnes Varda. It is perhaps not just because homeless gleaners, those disheveled Christs of the urban sidewalk who collect empty drink cans for the minuscule deposit, are literally engaged in the business of "value redemption" that they sometimes get referred to as "redeemers." The submersion-into-flight motif appears to be a universal trope for spiritual or psychic stumbling and recovery - though, in the right historical or mythological circumstances, the trajectory may be reversed as in the familiar tale of Icarus or, come to that, the by now no less familiar though probably apocryphal story of Joseph Beuys, the Luftwaffe pilot shot down over the Crimea in 1944, badly burned at the point of impact then saved/transformed into an artist-shaman courtesy of his immersion in lard by the nomadic Tartars who, according to the Beuysian fable, found him and nursed him back to health."

I take the point, I see where you're going and yes, I've learned something. But I'm quite, quite sure there's a simpler, more straightforward way to say that.

I suspect, though (you see, I can do it too!), that were I to read Hebdige's works in total, including - but also not excluding - Subculture: The Meaning of Style, I'd find a similar style employed, and possibly a dissection of other theorists' work such as Julia Kristeva and other French subculture experts that have studied things with big important words attached to them and that I'm loathe to, or am simply unable to, understand because, well, I'm not a media theorist and therefore can only speak in the more plain, common language of one who is trying to actually be understood, rather than writing for the express purposes of not being understood, or being understood only by other theorists and the rest can shove it.

There's a simpler way to say that too, but I think you can see where I'm going with this.  More once I've finished the text portion of the pretty book.   

Up & Down, Might as Well Sit Down & Read a Book

It's been an up and down kind of day - in so many, many ways - and while I consider the big questions of to blog or not to blog, to write or not to write, to throw in the towel and relegate myself to the world of work and only work or find a way to still do it all and not worry incessantly (see? i told you it was big!), I stumbled upon this and my mood somehow got lighter. Brighter:

If you can sit in this kind of chair, if this kind of chair exists in this kind of world that has me so turned around and upside down that I don't even know where I'm currently located, well, then, this world can't be all that bad.  Right? Because, that, my friends, is a chair I could sit in. And read in. And, perhaps, that is the kind of chair that would give me just enough room to breathe, just enough room to smile (how could you not smile sitting in that thing?) and just enough room figure it all out and not - as is my wont these last gray days - take it all so seriously.

And Now, Some Good News for LA Booklovers, Authors

Carolyn Kellogg (aka Pinky of, yes, that Paperhaus) is now blogging for the LA Times' book blog Jacket Copy.

Great news for her and great news for the blog that I have on occasion disparaged for being...not so frequently updated and not so hip.  But hey, the same could be said of this blog for the past few weeks as I try to get my entire life in order.

Sad Day for Booklovers, Authors in LA

Dutton's is closing...

UPDATE 2/26: LAT has a longer piece this morning.

Sharp Teeth, Today

Toby Barlow will be reading from and signing his book, Sharp Teeth, at 4pm today at Vroman's.

I've not yet read it - not even a passage - but it sounds like a good, if not off-beat read. A quintessential LA tale, in many ways.

LA Weekly's Holly Myers offers a considered take:

"Oh, and did I mention the whole thing is written in verse? Yes, improbable as it sounds: a blank-verse novel about werewolves loose in the streets of Los Angeles, penned by — just to get all the really questionable details out of the way at once — a Detroit- and Brooklyn-based ad executive. There are a dozen ways in which one could imagine such a book going wrong: tedious formalism, lyrical banality, fatuous genre play, gratuitous pop-culture cleverness, ill-conceived parody, grating neonoirishness, or an outsider's cliched misreading of the city. Barlow, however, happily manages to avoid them all."

Ed Champion's take for the LA Times offers that there is even more to recommend it:

"'Sharp Teeth' demonstrates that fantasy, unlike more literary offerings that play it too safe, may just be the place to find true exuberance and stylistic innovation."

Ed's podcast of his interview with Toby Barlow has much to recommend it. (The podcast that is. Much to recommend it. And the book. In that order.)

Good Stuff

The Week in Bookish LA is up at LAist and my goodness, this is a great week to be living in LA.  There's Maggie Nelson, Anne Enright, Colm Toibin, Amy Hempel, Russell Banks, Peter Carey, John Rechy, Charles Bock, Toby Barlow, Gayle Brandeis and so much more. You'd think it was book fair week!

I'll be making it to as many events as I can this week and hope to see you out there or back here when I provide blow-by-blow commentary on the events.

This week will also offer readers a glimpse inside my recent silence. Thank you all for your emails - I'm alive and fine and doing well. I've been taking stock, counting my wins and losses Didion-style.  The net: I need - no have - to do something with my life that matters. But that also pays the mortgage! So much easier said than done and so I've been exploring, investigating, sussing out what matters to me and what doesn't. Making a lot of noise blogging all day may or may not matter to me...so I had to explore it. And other things.

I do not have the answers yet, but I'm closer than I've been for a long, long time and I needed some distance from all the things that were weighing down on me to get some clarity. More soon. You may like it and you may not. We'll have to see together.

But for now: more book blogging.

These Are the Things...

...that are roiling around in my head.

Sicko made me angry.

Once made me cry and fall in love with Dublin and my old piano all over again. And my musician husband.

The final day of the Murakami show inspired a dozen designs and a dozen more stories.

I'm taking my influences where I can get them these days.

And my, it's refreshing to take them from a non-novel.