I am sitting in my sister's bedroom, in Laurel Canyon near West Hollywood. One of my favorite sensations is to be jet-lagged. The type that makes you get up at Plath hours. You think, this is how it will be from now on, I will write tortured early-AM texts and listen to the world wake up. Of course it always passes. I could be reading now - I brought with me Lady Caroline Blackwood's novel Corrigan, I thought I should try to read her novels now that I am rewriting Heroines, as I get so into the writing and criticism of Elizabeth Hardwick in those pages, Robert Lowell's second wife, and only really mention his first and third wife, Jean Stafford and Blackwood, both writers as well. All three published by the New York Review of Books, all three of Lowell's writer-wives. On my bookshelf at home I place them together, this gives me a perverse satisfaction, I put them into conversation. My bookshelves at home are mostly arranged by literary gossip.
Tonight is the reading of the two Kates at Skylight Books, at 5pm. I might be talking in a throaty voice, as I have that sinus-sickness I get with jet lag that is really kind of delicious, it slows everything down. I am taking homeopathic vitamins and nasal spray and rinsing my nose out with a Neti pot and today before the reading I will go have bibimbap, and hope that it is very spicy.
I don't think I'm very California. Or my experiences here (I've now been here three times in the past few months) are always colored by the slowness of jetlag.
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both kates reading, what a fuckin treat! hope it was so fun xox
ReplyDeletewe keep missing each other. and just barely. i'll be in southern california by the end of the week. but here in the subways of san francisco i thought of you as i read and read and read Close to the Knives. it is such a beautiful, spell-binding, painful text. fuck. it throbs. i don't want to do anything else but read read read all his words. over and over again.
ReplyDeletei don't know where i will put him in my bookshelf yet but my bookshelf is ordered in a similar fashion as your... authors who bounce off one another in my heart somehow. you are flanked by kathy acker and djuna barnes here. on that same shelf are elfriede jelinik, dodie bellamy, vanessa place, sylvia plath, herta muller, and the diaries of anais nin. :) i think wojnarowicz belongs there with you.
i'm not very california either and i am born and raised here.
Gina - It was fun! It was so good to read with Kate. And each of us spoke during the reading of our friendship to each other. That was a special experience for me. (BTW now have your key will post back)
ReplyDeleteAngela - Oh love! He's such a mind-altering genius isn't he. I would love to have more story about how that collection came to be. I can picture, somehow, an editor forcing him to compile it to a collection, or posthumously perhaps. Does anyone know? I can totally see you in kindred spirit with him. I need to read Herta Muller!
I decided I do like Los Angeles, especially SkyLight Books and Silverlake, that area. And the food. And some of it is so beautiful.