A party!!! And all of Internet-land is invited!!!

I wrote a book.

I've gone on about it a bit here. I hope not too tiresomely.

Other people wrote books, too. Those people are:

Mona Gable
Elizabeth Aquino
Zöe Rosenfeld
Laura Fraser

We're all going to be reading from our books at the party that Shebooks, the publisher, is throwing on Thursday night.

There'll be drinks, snacks, cookies, music, literary chit-chat, fabulous company, music, and readings.

It's at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts in Los Angeles. It starts at 7:30.

Oh, and all of our books are available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. You can click the links below for "Birth Mother," my book.

I went to another L.A. Literary Event last night. The daughter C. and I soaked up the neon atmosphere of Chinatown before we entered into the crimson cave that is The Mountain Bar. Hipster dive bar, I've heard it called. C. says all hipster bars are dive bars. But not all dive bars are hipster bars. In her line of work, there are always true dive bars in the neighborhood. Tall ship sailors hang out in ports, and ports are not the gentrified end of town. But in the sea of literary dive-y-ness that washed up in the Mountain Bar last night, there was literary gentry, and it was cool to think, hey, yeah, I'm in the the same lit mag those folks are in. It makes the beer taste better, anyway.

Sam Dunn was one of the readers last night. She said something about "the psychosis of place" as she prefaced her reading, and the phrase has been bumping around in my brain. Place effects me tremendously. In a new place I sometimes feel as if my old self could be taken over by a new me. As if something akin to the French concept of terroir might grow a new person.

Place is context. I couldn't help noticing that in the hundred or so people crammed into the reading, that I was the lone silver-haired woman. There were silver-haired men. They stood at the bar and ordered Cosmos for their wives or girlfriends and carried them back to women who were not gray. Ah, well--this is aging in the context of The City of Angels--even in a bar in Chinatown.

A Weekend of Substance, i.e. Meat

After reading THIS, despite the fact that it is not at all well-written, I decided to take a break from vegetarianism for an evening and seek out some grass-fed beef.  C., the man who loves me, and I went out to a place on the Sunset Strip called The Burger Lounge.

It was good. Really good.

There was more meat to come--at a reading for the launch of Issue 2 for The Rattling Wall held at the trés chic Hollywood Standard. Lots of opportunity for people watching as we waited for the show to begin. And support for C's theory that the hipness of a hotel bar is inversely proportionate to the light in the bathroom. All those pretty people are so dang fine that they don't need to check their eyeliner or their lipstick, I guess.

There was interesting signage--which made us wonder if pictograms ought to employ
punctuation.

  

There was a sort of real-life pictogram, too. Behind the check-in desk in the lobby, there was a large glass case with a gorgeous woman lying on a bed. As if to say, "Hey! This is a hotel! And we have beds! And maybe you could have a someone as attractive as this in your bed if you hang out in this neighborhood long enough!" It seemed too awkward to photograph her, so I didn't. You'll have to take my word for it that a hotel on the Sunset Strip would display a woman on a bed in a glass case.

But the real substance of this Hollywood night (held poolside with a view of The City of Angels spread out before us, of course!) was the reading. I was fascinated by the way the featured writers presented their work--prefacing it or not. Interjecting comments or barreling straight through their material in full-out performance mode. Reading from the magazine or choosing something else entirely.

This morning the man who loves me and I were still talking about Jon Sands's poems, how there really are those moments in life that change everything, how an artist's commitment to his material can be so profoundly moving.