Dear Love of Southern Jesus, the Book Launch Extravaganza last night at the Last Bookstore was a complete success! Not even the horrible LA traffic prevented those brave readers and a pup named Bikini to show up. I was afraid that the food and the booze wouldn’t be enough. They were! And we still have leftovers for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next three days.
Special thanks to Tyson Cornell, Julia Callahan and Winona Leon from Rare Bird Lit, who organized the event.
And to Mr. Hermes Clausz who took care of the delicious catering. Boy, he spent an entire day putting dicks inside his oven for my penis xmas tree.
And of course, special thanks too to Mr. Terry McFadden, my social secretary and current husband, who shopped, drove, carried boxes, and served the wine. Terry looked so handsome behind the bar! He’s such a charming host, so attentive and quite a good conversationalist too. Anyone looking for a bartender? He’s available week nights and all day during the weekend.
We sold a random number of copies last night, between 6 and a quarter million, I can’t be bothered with the exact number. For me, the most important thing was that people had a pleasant time and that I looked good in the pictures. Money is not what impels me to write but a selfless need to share my beautiful prose with humanity. Selling books is such a vulgar activity! I can’t stand authors that prostitute their souls forcing their books down their friends’ throats posting links to Amazon here, or Barnes & Noble here or directly from the publisher here or at your local bookseller here.
Anyways, I have been receiving apologetic messages from friends that couldn’t make it to the event. Don’t you worry. Yes, you rank a little higher on my shit list, but there will be more opportunities. We have just begun this campaign!
The next event is at Beyond Baroque, at 1:00 PM on Halloween day. This is the house of poets in Venice. What will they think of poor Josie García who can’t appreciate beat poetry?
From Chapter 18, In which we attend a private poetry reading
Larry Lipton sat on a big chair in the middle of the living room, like a minister conducting a council. A man wearing shorts and a military coat stood in front of him, facing the crowd, reading a poem. Josie wasn’t particularly keen on Mr. Lipton. She didn’t understand his sense of humor, nor the reason why he spoke so highly of poets who couldn’t write a line that made sense, or two that actually rhymed. She really didn’t like coming to his house that much. She respected his self-appointed authority as the head of the beatniks, just as everyone else did, but that nonsensical, boring poetry shit! She’d rather stare at the empty walls of her bedroom for an entire day than suffer any minute of it.
There was one thing she really appreciated about Mr. Lipton, though, she thought, approaching a table full of snacks. There was always food and plenty of booze in his house. She helped herself to a slice of gelatin salad and a glass of red wine. She didn’t like the poems, but she liked many of the things that the king of the nonconformists offered his guests. Ham and bananas hollandaise! She had to try that.
