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My people are not from Russia. I've never been there. And I can't stop thinking about these color photos from a hundred years ago. Each one is a story. The photographer invented his own way of taking color images and traveled throughout Russia with his dark room rail car. The Library of Congress has these photos and Newsweek has a recent article about them.
Now, I like sexually and emotionally creepy characters as much as the next person, but even the brilliant, make-me-gasp-in-delight descriptions were not going to get me through all those pages of unrelenting nastiness. Sometimes, an exhausted, overwhelmed a bit in her life, woman just wants to drop into bed and reread the Mavin Manyshaped series. Which I am doing now. Perfect. Gravity's Rainbow is going back to the library. I reached page eighty-five, felt the heft of the next gillion pages, and said "no."
Yippee. Lavanderia - A Mixed Load of Women, Wash and Word is an anthology of written/spoken word and photography from City Works Press, and it includes a piece of my writing.
Although I haven't actually seen a copy yet, anything that "highlights the universal ritual and common interaction of people, places, and things found between loads of laundry" and has chapter headings such as "Hose Stroll," "Dirty Deeds," and "Rocks and Rivers" has much promise.
Here's a mini-excerpt from my contribution to the anthology:
Two arms snaked around her neck, overlapped on her chest, and tightened. "Jesus loves you" was a whisper in her ear, and the moistness of the woman's breath dripped onto Ivy's neck. Controlling the urge to bite the woman's flesh down to the bone, Ivy sunk only her nails into the soft forearms and held on as the woman tried to escape. Ivy turned her head to bring their faces close.
"Fuck you bitch, and fuck Jesus. Touch me again and I'll call the cops.
P.S. I can't make this blog editor put an accent over the "i" in Lavenderia. Sorry.
Dancing With the Stars premiers tomorrow night! Here's my fantasy. A novel of mine is published and does well enough that I get to be a sort of has-been celebrity and thus become not only the first wheelchair-using contestant on the show, but also the first same-sex paired dancer.
Unfortunately, even though I enjoy it very much, I'm not such a good dancer. Along with the ability to carry a tune, a sense of rhythm didn't quite make it through into this lifetime.
But I'm counting on the misplaced sympathy vote to get me through the first cut. I really want to get to wear at least two of those outfits. Oh la la.
Please, stop having these water-sucking, groundwater polluting yards. Plant native plants. And if you live in North Central Florida, come to this next weekend's Native Plant Sale at the Morningside Nature Center in Gainesville. I'll be there to take your money and Grace will load your plants.
These photos are of plants that grow in my yard and thrive on neglect.
Oh, my, China Mieville makes his novel do all the fine things that science fiction is supposed to do. It takes some hard, not-often-spoken truth of our own everyday world and twists it into a fantastical and fantastic story that changes our perceptions. The City and the City is about borders between people and what is seen and not seen. And there's a murder mystery. I'm almost to the end and still not sure whodunit
As you know, I wrote the novel, I wrote the query letter, I wrote the friggin' synopsis. There is a lovely chart of the agents that have received some combination of the above.
And there has been some "interest." (Yes, I know I'm using the passive voice all over the place here, but it helps to put a little distance between me and this weird emotional existence.
So. Now, I wait. And write. And wait. And walk the dog, visit friends, and wait.
P.S. The photo is lifted from Moonrat's blog.
Seven hundred and sixty pages. "Unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene" is how it was described by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize comittee.
But today's the day. I and many other internet connected readers (and maybe you?) are going to read Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Like we did for Middlemarch, we'll read a chunk each week (70 pages), chat with each other about it, and maybe make it all the way through.
Why? Yeah, I wasn't sure at first, but then I read a one liner description of the novel - "centers on the design, production, and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military." It was that word "dispatch." My mother, at seventeen, was a person on whom those bombs were dispatched.
Here's a reminder. September 24-26. Berry College. Rome, Georgia. There's still time to sign up.
