Ma Vie en Rose
A pink curtain in an East Hollywood art gallery. Follow me on Instagram for more of my L.A. photography.
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A pink curtain in an East Hollywood art gallery. Follow me on Instagram for more of my L.A. photography.
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Just a reminder that you can buy various things in my Gumroad shop: signed books, consulting, a short story.
This week’s must-read essay is “The Last Thing My Mother Wanted” by the (pseudonymous) Evelyn Jouvenet.
I really enjoyed Derf Backderf’s graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer. It’s about the author’s high school relationship with the guy who would become America’s most notorious serial killer. Creepy, suspenseful, voyeuristic, savage, and peculiar, it raises interesting questions about how things might have turned out differently if you’d lived your life another way and didn’t end up murdering and eating other people.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer
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I took this photograph of a porn star on the set of an adult movie in Woodland Hills, CA, in the spring of 2009.
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I watched “All of Us Strangers.” It’s a beautiful movie about ghosts, love, and loss. I highly recommend it.
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I bought this book because I was in Berkeley, my hometown, and I thought it would be funny to buy a book called I Hate Men in Berkeley. The book, authored by Pauline Harmange, is thin, both physically and in its content. I don’t know why the book got sort of attempted banned, since it’s mostly the not actually very radical or provocative musings of a woman not living the life she claims to exalt. Do not recommend.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer
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As a longtime fan of fashion designer John Galliano, I really enjoyed this new documentary: “High & Low.” It’s a complicated portrait of a complicated genius. If you’re not familiar with his work, I’d suggest starting here.
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I’m delighted to share that I’ll be a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, later this year. While updating my About page at the beginning of the year, I realized how impactful various writing residencies I’ve done over the years have been. So I decided I would apply to, say, a dozen residencies over the course of this year and see what happened. I got a few rejections, so it was extra wonderful to get this opportunity. In an upcoming installment of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” my ongoing series of blog posts on writing, editing, and publishing, I’ll share some tips on getting a residency. One thing that’s especially exciting is that this residency is for the novel that I’m working on. More soon …
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Awhile back, I started this mini-project called 30 Days of Smut. The idea was that I would write a short piece of smut-themed flash fiction every day for 30 days and post it on my website. That specific goal didn’t work out because I got busy, so I crossed out the 30 and the project is now Days of Smut. I’ll probably keep going until I have 30 stories and then stop. Basically, the purpose of the project is just to exercise my creative muscle. So far, I’ve introduced a dominatrix, a porn addict, an auto-cannibalist, a woodsman, and a mannequin.
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I took this photograph near the red carpet at the AVN Awards in Las Vegas, Nevada, in, I believe, 2013.
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Last year I realized I’d read, like, no books, so I thought maybe this year I would read a few. To start, I read the incredible Victory Parade by Leela Corman. You should buy it and read it. Here’s my Amazon review:
This book is an absolute masterpiece. It's an electric, searing, beyond Spiegelman's Maus anatomical and artistic investigation of the twin traumas of war and violence, the nightmares that haunt survivors' waking and sleeping lives, and the banality of evil's horrifying consequences to the human soul. I read about this book in the Washington Post and read it in one day (i had to take a few breaks because it's so powerful). I can't recommend Victory Parade enough. It should win all the prizes and praises. Congrats to Leela.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer
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I wrote this short story, “E Is for Eunuch,” in the early 2000s. Originally, it was published in 3:AM Magazine. The story was part of a larger project I was doing: The Fetish Alphabet. This story also appears in my 2003 short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In any case, I’m resharing / republishing it here.
You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket, and he had, therefore, since become the ingestor of a multitude of hormone-filled pharmaceuticals, and turned into the personal curator of his own Johnson in a jar, and resultingly realized that he was now the type of individual who could silence an entire dinner-party full of people at the mere drop of a hat with the mere drop of his pants, and yet what he had discovered since this rather sudden change of life events was that while he had fantasized rapturously as a young man of chemical castration, and spent several years seriously considering moving to India to linger amongst the third-sexed there by the banks of the Katni River, it was actually only one year ago that his brain had become wholly overrun by words like “Elastrator,” and “Burdizzo,” and “Underground Doctors,” and it was only rather recently that he had found himself lying quite awake, because he had wanted it that way, on a cold kitchen table, because they had wanted it that way, praying to whomever looked over poor souls like him that someday someone would lean over him in some dark bed somewhere and be happy to find him so wonderfully smooth, but the problem was that now, today, at this very moment, in that imaginary bed he was truly lying, and he knew without a doubt, even with the lights off, that the person lying next to him was doing nothing but snoring, and coming down the back alleyways of his mind for him was his own terrible penis, and it was angry, and it was carrying at its side an entire suitcase filled to overflowing with his whole, long, lonely life that he had lived thus far, and, already, the suitcase was falling open and spilling its whole horrible mess out all over the floor of his mind, and he knew, with no reservations needed, thank you very much, that he would slip in it, and that this new smoothness of his, which had been intended to lubricate his life, would make it impossible for him to ever get back up again.
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I took this photo at a porn convention in, I believe, Las Vegas, although it’s possible it was Chicago, but I’m pretty sure it was Vegas, in, say, 2013, or 2014, or something like that. I can’t remember if I spoke to the woman, although maybe I did, or maybe I didn’t. In any case, it’s one of my favorite shots I’ve taken.
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In the past, I’ve gotten writing residences, so I figured I’d try again this year. So far, I’ve applied to seven writing residencies. By the end of the year, I’ll likely have applied to 10 to 12 — or that’s the goal. To date, I’ve gotten zero acceptances, six rejections, and one wait list. At some point, I’ll probably write a longer post on applying to writing residencies for my “Fuck You, Pay Me” series on writing, editing, and publishing.
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From Burbank to Berkeley, a few recent photographs. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photography.
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Yesterday, I flew up to the Bay Area, where I was doing a brown bag book talk at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. I got there early, and that gave me a chance to have breakfast, visit Pegasus Books where I was happy to see my book on a shelf, and go to my childhood home and knock on the front door (more on that in an upcoming post). After that, I went to Cal for the talk. I was interviewed by journalist and producer Cecilia Lei, who did a wonderful job asking insightful questions, turning what could have been bearing witness to a Q&A into a three-way dialogue with the audience, and prompting me to think about some of the deeper themes in and larger issues surrounding my book in new ways. Thank you to everyone who came. I’ve been doing a lot of promoting of my memoir this month, these last couple weeks in particular. After I’m done with the last event, which is this weekend, I’ll be writing a longer post about everything I learned about marketing one’s book. The photo is of the courtyard at the J-school. It was a bit overcast, but so are most days in the Bay Area in spring.
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What happens when one former child lab rat interviews another former child lab rat? Things get unhinged. Seth Fischer, who was himself studied as a child by his psychologist parents, and I talked about growing up under a microscope, the consequences of being a human guinea pig, and what happens when the subject sets out to tell his or her own story. Read the rest of our scintillating, strange conversation in the newest issue of Air/Light: “‘I Hate the Subject and the Subject Hates Me’: An Interview with Susannah Breslin.”
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I took this photo ahead of the panel I was on at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books before the room became full. The festival is on the University of Southern California campus, a massive undertaking, and run like a well-oiled machine. My friend and I hung out in the authors’ green room, we got marched over to the hall where the panel was along with the other panelists, and then I answered questions from the moderator and the audience. It was a really cool time and something I’ll be writing about a bit more in a future post. My book is Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And what people are saying about it is here.
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