gwynnega

I am hennaing my hair on a mild LA afternoon. The bottlebrush trees are beginning to bloom, but the jacarandas are getting a later start than they did last year. Possibly allergies from stuff blooming are the reason I've been dealing with some minor vertigo for the past week or so. I hope it ceases soon.

I'm still slowly reading the wonderful Emily Wilson Odyssey translation, and I've started Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place (which I hadn't realized would be so different from the film).

My poem "50 Foot," inspired by Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (1958), will appear in The Cascadia Subduction Zone. (Technical note: the poem is comprised of 50 poetic feet.)

In other news, we are now past the peak of jacaranda season. It was glorious while it lasted--though it will be awhile before the purple flowers are completely gone for the year.

The weather has finally cooled down to normal late-summer temps today after two days of record-breaking hellish heat. On Friday afternoon there was a brush fire near my workplace, so they did a voluntary evacuation...just in time for rush hour. It took me two and a half hours to get home. Fortunately there were no injuries or property damage from the fire.

Today I celebrated the lack of hellishness by driving to Skylight Books, where I bought the new Junot Diaz book and a couple of little purple Moleskines, and talked myself out of buying numerous other books.

I've been working on the Jo book revisions, which I hope to be able to complete fairly soon. Most of what needs work is in the early chapters. I've started reading Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece. I'm still reading Code Name Verity, though I'm not as entranced by it as a lot of people seem to be. I can't wait to get started on Gwenda Bond's Blackwood (which I heard her read from at Worldcon) and Seanan McGuire's Ashes of Honor.

Los Angeles tends not to get proper fall weather until nearly Halloween, but I'd be thrilled if it started early this year.

It's International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, and I'd been meaning to post the following poem anyway, what with it being the 20th anniversary of the LA Riots. This little poem first appeared in 1992 in High Performance magazine (a special issue they did called The Verdict and The Violence, edited by Wanda Coleman). I'm pretty sure I scribbled the poem while stuck in freeway gridlock. I remember jotting down the traffic sign.


4/30/92

crawling toward work on 405 freeway
morning after Rodney King decision

refineries to my left belch
white smoke

palm trees to my right
jacarandas blooming

Budweiser & Maui $360
roundtrip billboards

N-110 EXITS CLOS
CENTURY - ML KING

I've been trying to think of a name for a fictional mid-1970s women's bookstore (for the Jo book). Any suggestions?

The women's bookstore I worked at (in the mid-1980s, when I was an undergrad at UCLA) was called Bread & Roses. In many ways it was my favorite job I ever had, though I practically paid them to work there, what with all the books I bought. I really wish it (and Sisterhood Bookstore, my other local feminist bookstore) still existed.

As of about an hour and a half ago, my neighborhood finally has power after nearly a day and a half without it. Wednesday night I had a hair-raising drive home from work through high Santa Ana winds. I had to dodge palm fronds, capsized trash cans, a fallen tree in the road, etc. But that was just the beginning. When I got home, the power briefly went out a couple of times. Then, around 1 a.m., it went out and didn't come back on. Hundreds of thousands of people lost power, and LA County (among other local areas) declared a state of emergency.

I stayed home from work yesterday, because the howling wind had kept me awake much of the night. This turned out to be a good move, because traffic was snarled by all the debris from the winds, and lots of traffic lights were still out. (There was also supposed to be more dangerous weather ahead, but that didn't seem to materialize--it was windy, but not horribly so.) Hanging out in my electricity-less apartment got old fast. Fortunately Gelson's had power, so I had coffee. Plus Hard Times Pizza somehow had power, so I had pizza for dinner. But then I huddled in my cold apartment and read A Monstrous Regiment of Women by flashlight.

When I woke up this morning and the power STILL wasn't back on, I was pretty aggravated. But when I went out to get coffee at Gelson's, I saw workmen working on the power lines at my corner, and I took heart--plus the traffic light by the Trader Joe's was finally working again, and TJ's was open again. Sure enough, just as I was walking back home with my coffee, the traffic lights at my corner came back on, and everybody cheered!

Then I went home and had a hot shower. Hooray!

This weekend has just flown by. Today I went to the West Hollywood Book Fair, which was a lot of fun, though we've been having another blast of summer weather and I got too much sun. My friend Lara Parker did a panel with her fellow Dark Shadows actress Kathryn Leigh Scott, plus Julie Newmar; Dark Delicacies bookstore owner Del Howison moderated. It was great to get a chance to chat with Lara Parker, and I bought a copy of Kathryn Leigh Scott's new vampire novel, Dark Passages.

Also this weekend I worked a lot on the Jo book, and watched the Doctor Who finale (loved it) and the Dexter season opener. Next up, The Good Wife and Dirty Soap. Why is there so much good TV on Sunday nights all of a sudden?

This afternoon I went to my beloved Vista Theatre, with its $6.50 bargain matinees and its quasi-Egyptian decor and its ultra-spacious seating, to see Rise of the Planet of the Apes. On one level it's yet another loud, frenetic thriller--but at the same time, it deals with many of the social/political/power issues that the original series did, and it's also a very satisfying character study, thanks to Andy Serkis's affecting, multi-layered portrayal of Caesar. (There are also some other fascinating ape characters in the film, notably an orangutan named Maurice, after Maurice Evans's Dr. Zaius!) As an old school Planet of the Apes fan, I never thought I could care about a new Apes character the way I did about Roddy McDowall's Cornelius and Caesar or Kim Hunter's Zira, but I'm happy to have been proven wrong. Serkis absolutely deserves a best actor nomination--or, for that matter, a supporting actor nomination, though the film would have fallen utterly flat without him. The Academy probably won't bother to acknowledge him, but I don't expect to see a better performance in a movie this year.

I definitely don't want my year to be spent the way I spent the bulk of January 1st: languishing in a Benadryl haze, nursing a head cold and watching the Doctor Who marathon. (Well, the Doctor Who marathon was good.)

And now it's raining again. We are still having a spate of cold-for-LA weather, and the Garage Kitty and I are tired of it.

I keep contemplating writing a detailed post of last year's writing stats, what I want to do in 2011, etc., but my brain's still too cold-addled. But I do want to finish the Jo book revision in 2011 and move the hell on (much as I love the Jo book). Would like to work on at least one other novel project this year. I wrote a few poems last year, and I'd like to continue writing poems. I started a few stories last year but didn't finish any; I'd like to finish some stories this year. (There was also a secret project that I worked on last year but that didn't come to fruition--I'd like to give that another try this year.)

I'm not a fast writer. That's partly because so much time and energy go into my dayjob. But even with the dayjob, I can write a first draft quickly--but it takes time for my brain to figure stuff out when it comes to revision. Still, I think I need to reevaluate my schedule and see if I can work in some more writing time.

Okay, that's all the contemplation my head cold brain can manage at the moment!

This morning I was irked that the police had blocked off the street I take to the office, making me late to work.

Then I got to work and found out why. Yikes!

Hollywood publicist Ronni Chasen fatally shot in Beverly Hills attack

That really puts things in perspective...