Worst. Blogger. Ever.

by Jonathan on August 19th, 2008

I see, with mingled pride and awe, that I’ve not posted anything to my blog since April 1. PSYCH!!!

I’d like to say that this is because I’ve been busy – writing, working, traveling – but mostly it’s because I have the attention span of a jackdaw. Writing these three lines alone, I’ve already taken breaks to look at Alafair Burke‘s and Jason Pinter‘s blogs, as well as to browse the new Crate and Barrel 2 catalog, and to listen to Carcass’s 1991 death metal classic Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious. I blame the internet! There are too many flashing lights and loud noises to allow easy concentration.

Jason and Alafair put me to shame. While I maintain a sleek average posting rate of once every 4 1/2 months, they are daily bloggers, their posts well-constructed and glimmering with photos and useful links. I vow that I shall be more like them!    Both have new books out, and both recently gave excellent readings to packed houses in NYC. And because I’m now a serious blogger, fully intent on festooning my posts with pictures and links, here are their covers:

 

Of course, life in NYC is more than just attending friends’ readings and going out for drinks afterwards! There’s also going to concerts and going out for drinks afterwards. On Friday evening, I went to an outdoor event at Lincoln Center: Ronen Givony of Wordless Music, with Lincoln Center’s Bill Bragin, had put together an ambitious program called 800 Years of Minimalism. The show started with 13th century vocal music from Perotin, then Manuel Gottsching, one of the early pioneers of krautrock, performed a 70 minute version of his 1984 classic E2-E4, improvising on keyboard and guitar over a rich bed of electronic polyrhythms (E2 – E4 is essentially Ravel’s Bolero for the Ecstasy generation).

It was a beautiful evening; the rain eased for Gottsching’s performance, and a couple thousand of us sat in the dark blue dusk, blissing out to the music and the psychedelic light show like so many filthy hippies. It was a wonderful NYC experience, but it did have its sad side: the rain forced cancellation of the US live debut of Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail, for which 200 electric guitarists had gathered from across the country to perform. It was a sensible move, seeing as how 200 electric amplifiers in several inches of water is a recipe for electrocution. Both Bragin and Chatham vowed that the show will eventually take place; since I’d been looking forward to the show for months, I guess I can wait a little longer.

Anyway! I bumped into some old friends there, including Adam Shore of Vice Records, who I knew from my raving days. I remember him most fondly at some rave on a ski slope in Western Massachusetts in the mid-90′s, lying blissed out under the bass bins during Carl Craig’s set like a filthy hippie.Since it was about 10PM, dinner was on the agenda, and Adam, his  cool friend Vanessa and I went to Gotham, where right now I think the duck is about the best thing in the world.

The conversation somehow turned to heavy metal and black metal and death metal, which was when Adam recommended the Carcass album, particularly for the lyrics. Which are, in fact, hilarious, a barely comprehensible salad of words clipped out of a Lovecraft novel. Take, for example, the opening lyrics to “Forensic Clinicism/The Sanguine Article”:

Insipid fumes bellow from the atrabilious chimney
Whilst in the sanctified crevet I calmly pillage and rake
For hot dry powdered human slag
Still steaming in the crematorium’s grate

Quick, someone get that lyricist a mug of warm Ovaltine! Find him a koala to cuddle! And a DVD about penguins!

And the Magic 8-ball says, “Signs point to atrabiliousness“…

Some Cover Possibilities

by Jonathan on April 1st, 2008

My friend Kevin Kroos found my struggles with my paperback cover highly entertaining. He decided to do his own version for the American market and, since he knew the book would be coming out in Sweden, went with a Pippi Longstocking theme to broaden the Scandinavian appeal.  Check ‘em out:     

I’m gonna have to go ahead and ask you to fix this…

by Jonathan on March 4th, 2008

I just got a dummy of a possible cover for the mass market paperback edition of Precious Blood, and, well…

(well, that was then, this is now – the final version is pretty strong!)

fly sleep eat drive read drive sleep read drive

by Jonathan on November 19th, 2007

So I’m on my book tour.

My reading on Thursday November 8th at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble was a blast – the hometown crowd was somewhat boisterous, people laughed at my jokes, the store ran out of chairs and then they almost ran out of books.

My tour began officially with a reading in Miami at the huge international Book Fair on Saturday the 10th, so the night after my B&N reading I flew down. In honour of the occasion, I flew business class on Delta. And it was a complete disaster. First Delta delayed my 6:55PM flight until 10:40PM (just shy, as I understand it, of the four hour mark, at which point they’d have had to compensate passengers for the delay), putting us into Miami at 2:30AM. Then they lost my luggage. I ended up getting to my hotel well after 3:30AM, pissy as all get out.

I spent most of Saturday rushing around preparing for my reading – made a misguided foray in search of toiletries in the broiling sun, returning to the hotel sweaty and my normally unruly hair sproinging from the humidity, got a new power cord and iPhone hook-up for my MacBook (I’d tossed the cables in my bag, and both computer and phone were dwindling rapidly), washed my clothes in the sink, then sitting on the john slowly drying them with a hairdryer that kept giving up the ghost. The cab for the fair was half an hour late, the volunteers weren’t familiar with the location of the Authors’ Lounge, we got lost trying to find the site of my reading. Long story short, I arrived in physical and intellectual disarray when the other authors on my panel were already seated and the questions about to begin.

The attendance was good, but that was mostly because two of the four writers on the panel were Florida-based – Tim Dorsey and Jeff Lindsay (who does the Dexter books). To my horror, Jeff and Tim did schtick, with Tim even whipping out props. I firmly believe that I can do schtick with the best of them, but I was beat, and sweaty and cranky. I introduced myself and did a straight reading from Precious Blood. It went pretty well – the selection I chose was a bit more intense when read out loud than it had seemed in my head when preparing it.

Back at my hotel, my bags still hadn’t arrived, and hadn’t even been located in Delta’s system – the thought of recycling my travel clothes yet again was really harshing my mellow. I was thinking I’d skip the Authors’ Party at the Raleigh Hotel, but at 9PM I decided to stop being such a wuss, showered and climbed into my clothes again, and headed over. I was just going to do a flyby, but it was a beautiful night, and the crowd was lively, and there was a DJ playing rather gorgeous minimal tribal house while two percussionists built up the texture, so I installed myself on a banquette by the DJ stand and watched the people come and go. I ended up spending much of the evening chatting with the lovely Tina Andreadis from Harper, and later with Jeff Lindsay and Christine Kling.

Despite the exhaustion, the feeling unkempt and unwashed, the desperate shopping and the frazzled reading, it really was a lovely night in Miami Beach.