three, two

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.