Bread and Bread

Last week was seriously culture-packed. It made me happy to live in L.A., grateful to know so many artists and arts lovers, and a little tired. On Thursday Bronwyn and I ate the only non-meat items Phillippe’s serves, then walked across the street to Traxx, the dinky bar at Union Station that Chiwan Choi has turned into a pop-up literary hub this month . One of my favorite writers, Myriam Gurba, read a moving essay about her schizophrenic uncle and showed slides of her face Photoshopped onto famous pictures and famous people . Myriam as ET, Myriam as Kim Kardashian. Her work lives at the intersection of funny, intense, weird and joyful. Mari Naomi presented a graphic personal essay—meaning a personal essay in graphic form, like with drawings, not an essay with a bunch of severed heads in it—about a troubled guy she’d dated. Then a real-life troubled guy wandered into the bar and started standing super close to her and kind of harassing her. (Must be a Union Station thing .) ...

Happy Labor Day, y’all. I’ve had a four-day weekend, thanks to a wonderful East Coast invention called “summer Fridays,” and while it’s been refreshingly slow-paced, it has not been without labor. That’s the world we live in—there’s the job you do (if you’re lucky) for cash and benefits, and the various jobs you do for fun and Facebook “likes.” Or Wuffie, the currency of the reputation economy in Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (For more on that and other August reads, see below.) AK has two papers due next week, so I popped open my laptop and worked next to her at my various pseudo jobs and personal projects. I felt a little bit like Maggie Simpson steering her toy wheel next to Marge in the opening credits of The Simpsons. How I labored: Finished a revision of Chapter 14 of the circus novel. The next one is mostly new material, so it should be more fun and a lot harder. Tinkered with the website I designed to convince birthmothers that AK and I are res...