I interviewed Adam Wilson about his new novel, Flatscreen. It's a fun book. The interview was fun, too: we talked about fun things such as competitive blow jobs, pot smoking, and the benefits of caffeine and cigarettes. Also: More serious things, such as process, MFAs, and the innernette.
In other news, I have not been sleeping and eating as much as I should. Because I am myself, I am enjoying this. As a result, my sanity, at times, has been questionable.
About Me
- Julia Jackson
- Brooklyn, NY, United States
- Spent most of my life in San Diego. Moved to Brooklyn to get an MFA in 2009. Now I teach, write fiction, and help edit Electric Literature's blog, The Outlet. I'm happy and poor most of the time. Rarely do I have to wake up before noon.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Books I've Read in 2012
Will continue to be edited.
Jan
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner*
Other People We Married, Emma Straub
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Flatscreen, Adam Wilson
Meat Heart, Melissa Broder*
Feb
The Lying Game, Never Have I Ever, Sara Shepard (don't ask)
Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta
Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood**
The Fallback Plan, Leigh Stein
The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits*
*= Exceptional
**= Holy fuck, so good!!!!!!!!!
Jan
The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson
Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner*
Other People We Married, Emma Straub
Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
Flatscreen, Adam Wilson
Meat Heart, Melissa Broder*
Feb
The Lying Game, Never Have I Ever, Sara Shepard (don't ask)
Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta
Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood**
The Fallback Plan, Leigh Stein
The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits*
*= Exceptional
**= Holy fuck, so good!!!!!!!!!
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Fiction Addiction at 2A
New post up at The Outlet here.
Featuring Said Sayrafiezadeh, Joshua Furst, Nadia Kalman and Tanya Rey.
Featuring Said Sayrafiezadeh, Joshua Furst, Nadia Kalman and Tanya Rey.
princess peter strikes again
Moose River from Princess Peter on Vimeo.
this is my roommate steven, my boyfriend/roommate david, and our friend jorge. they're pretty cool.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
the ballad of kenny and ilana
Six years ago, I was with my friend Ilana at a bar. It was right before New Year's Eve, and she met this guy and they hit it off. I was still at the phase of my life where I was more or less a complete drunk and an asshole, so I'm pretty sure I told her he was cute but that guys over the age of 30 shouldn't wear sweatshirts to bars.
She got to know him a little better. His name was Kenny and he was from South Park (the neighborhood in San Diego, not the Colorado TV town). He was a really nice guy. So nice, in fact, that Ilana wondered if he could be for real. I'm pretty sure I said nothing to this.
They dated for a long time. Kenny was, in fact, for real: he was really sweet, and really goofy. Sometimes he would talk your ear off about his occupation (plumbing), or his hobbies (filmmaking, skateboarding, snowboarding). Sometimes he would say nothing at all, and then he would disappear for long periods of time while we were out drinking. I don't know what he did during those gaps of time. He would usually reappear, thirty or sixty minutes later, at the pool table, beer in hand.
Kenny moved to San Francisco for work. Ilana stayed in San Diego to finish school. They broke up. They got back together because they were in love and everyone else sucked in comparison. I got sober, stopped being so much of an asshole, and moved to New York to try and be a writer, but that's another story altogether. Kenny and Ilana talked every day, multiple times a day, and saw each other whenever they could. They called each other "Babe" but it sounded more like "Bape" and my other friends and I made fun of them for this. They, of course, didn't care.
Right before Thanksgiving of this year, I got a text message around six in the morning. Kenny was in the hospital. He had fallen down the stairs, and his pacemaker had stopped. The prognosis didn't look good. He died a few days later.
I went home to San Diego a few weeks later for Christmas. One day I ran errands with Ilana. Our first stop was the SleepNumber store at North County Fair mall; Ilana had inherited Kenny's SleepNumber bed and one of the pillowcases had gone missing. The girl at the store pulled up Kenny's info at the computer. Ilana gave them her address, told her to delete Kenny's.
"What about this e-mail?" the girl said. She had fat blond highlights in her hair and wore too much foundation. "KGskatesnow@hotmail.com?"
"No," Ilana said. "That e-mail's... not good anymore."
The girl updated the account with Ilana's e-mail.
"So, how were your holidays?" the girl asked.
"OK," Ilana said. She turned around and gave me a look, then paid for the pillowcase with her debit card.
"Cute picture!" the girl said. Ilana's Wells Fargo card was custom designed, with a photo of her and Kenny on it, smiling behind a fancy dinner.
"Thanks," Ilana said, pronouncing the word especially sharp.
We ran some more errands, stopped at In & Out for lunch. The last errand was on the coast, at a tattoo parlor on the 101. Ilana showed me the tattoo she wanted to get on her phone. It was a photo of the back of Kenny's neck, where he had the word Devotion tattooed in script between his shoulders. She told me that he had believed you should have devotion for everything you do, even the shitty things in life. For instance, Ilana had had to take a physics class for her grad program pre-req. She hated physics, but Kenny told her to work hard at it anyway, to study with devotion so she could be true to herself (and not repeat the course). He would call her and help her study over webcam and the phone. It worked-- she got an A. "I'm going to get it on my forearm, right here, with the script facing me so I have to look at it."
The guy in the tattoo parlor replicated Kenny's tattoo the best he could on tracing paper. Fifteen minutes later, and Ilana had "Devotion" on her arm. The tattoo artist didn't ask any of the questions that Ilana referred to as "bullets." She tipped him twice what is customary.
Two weeks later, and it was the day before the day before New Year's Eve, or 5 years and 364 days after Kenny and Ilana first met. Me and two of our friends had decided to take Ilana up to Joshua Tree for a bit of an all-girls' retreat. We rented a shitty hotel room and drove around to different dive bars. None of them was divey enough until the last one, which had country music on the jukebox and a toothless bartender. On the way back to the motel, I insisted that we drive into the park to look at the stars.
Once we parked the car, the blackness was all-encompassing. I felt like there could be anything out there: rapists, ghosts, aliens. We laid on our backs in the dirt. There were so many stars. We looked at Jupiter, we looked at Orion. We found the North Star with the help of our iPhones. We waited for falling stars. At first only my friend Meagan and I could see any. But then after a while we grew quieter, and one streaked across the sky long enough that all four of us saw it. All four of us made a wish.
Back in the car, me at the wheel-- me, the sober driver. Someone put on Katy Perry's "Fireworks" on the stereo. I thought the lyrics to the song were moronic because I'm still sort of an asshole, but I've learned that sometimes it's best to keep your opinions to yourself. "Baby, you're a fire work," Katy Perry sang. All four of us joined along. "Come on show them what, you're worth. Make them go, oh, oh, oh, as you shoot across the sky."
The roads in Joshua Tree National Park are windy and poorly-lit. You can't see anything that isn't illuminated by the headlights, besides the stars. You'd never know there's hundreds-year-old twisted trees growing all around you.
The song ended. I started it again from the beginning. We sang louder. While the song played, it felt like we were back in high school again, back when we all lived in the same city, before we'd ever fallen in love, or gotten sober, or moved or not moved for practical reasons, before anyone had died and broken our hearts.
She got to know him a little better. His name was Kenny and he was from South Park (the neighborhood in San Diego, not the Colorado TV town). He was a really nice guy. So nice, in fact, that Ilana wondered if he could be for real. I'm pretty sure I said nothing to this.
They dated for a long time. Kenny was, in fact, for real: he was really sweet, and really goofy. Sometimes he would talk your ear off about his occupation (plumbing), or his hobbies (filmmaking, skateboarding, snowboarding). Sometimes he would say nothing at all, and then he would disappear for long periods of time while we were out drinking. I don't know what he did during those gaps of time. He would usually reappear, thirty or sixty minutes later, at the pool table, beer in hand.
Kenny moved to San Francisco for work. Ilana stayed in San Diego to finish school. They broke up. They got back together because they were in love and everyone else sucked in comparison. I got sober, stopped being so much of an asshole, and moved to New York to try and be a writer, but that's another story altogether. Kenny and Ilana talked every day, multiple times a day, and saw each other whenever they could. They called each other "Babe" but it sounded more like "Bape" and my other friends and I made fun of them for this. They, of course, didn't care.
Right before Thanksgiving of this year, I got a text message around six in the morning. Kenny was in the hospital. He had fallen down the stairs, and his pacemaker had stopped. The prognosis didn't look good. He died a few days later.
I went home to San Diego a few weeks later for Christmas. One day I ran errands with Ilana. Our first stop was the SleepNumber store at North County Fair mall; Ilana had inherited Kenny's SleepNumber bed and one of the pillowcases had gone missing. The girl at the store pulled up Kenny's info at the computer. Ilana gave them her address, told her to delete Kenny's.
"What about this e-mail?" the girl said. She had fat blond highlights in her hair and wore too much foundation. "KGskatesnow@hotmail.com?"
"No," Ilana said. "That e-mail's... not good anymore."
The girl updated the account with Ilana's e-mail.
"So, how were your holidays?" the girl asked.
"OK," Ilana said. She turned around and gave me a look, then paid for the pillowcase with her debit card.
"Cute picture!" the girl said. Ilana's Wells Fargo card was custom designed, with a photo of her and Kenny on it, smiling behind a fancy dinner.
"Thanks," Ilana said, pronouncing the word especially sharp.
We ran some more errands, stopped at In & Out for lunch. The last errand was on the coast, at a tattoo parlor on the 101. Ilana showed me the tattoo she wanted to get on her phone. It was a photo of the back of Kenny's neck, where he had the word Devotion tattooed in script between his shoulders. She told me that he had believed you should have devotion for everything you do, even the shitty things in life. For instance, Ilana had had to take a physics class for her grad program pre-req. She hated physics, but Kenny told her to work hard at it anyway, to study with devotion so she could be true to herself (and not repeat the course). He would call her and help her study over webcam and the phone. It worked-- she got an A. "I'm going to get it on my forearm, right here, with the script facing me so I have to look at it."
The guy in the tattoo parlor replicated Kenny's tattoo the best he could on tracing paper. Fifteen minutes later, and Ilana had "Devotion" on her arm. The tattoo artist didn't ask any of the questions that Ilana referred to as "bullets." She tipped him twice what is customary.
Two weeks later, and it was the day before the day before New Year's Eve, or 5 years and 364 days after Kenny and Ilana first met. Me and two of our friends had decided to take Ilana up to Joshua Tree for a bit of an all-girls' retreat. We rented a shitty hotel room and drove around to different dive bars. None of them was divey enough until the last one, which had country music on the jukebox and a toothless bartender. On the way back to the motel, I insisted that we drive into the park to look at the stars.
Once we parked the car, the blackness was all-encompassing. I felt like there could be anything out there: rapists, ghosts, aliens. We laid on our backs in the dirt. There were so many stars. We looked at Jupiter, we looked at Orion. We found the North Star with the help of our iPhones. We waited for falling stars. At first only my friend Meagan and I could see any. But then after a while we grew quieter, and one streaked across the sky long enough that all four of us saw it. All four of us made a wish.
Back in the car, me at the wheel-- me, the sober driver. Someone put on Katy Perry's "Fireworks" on the stereo. I thought the lyrics to the song were moronic because I'm still sort of an asshole, but I've learned that sometimes it's best to keep your opinions to yourself. "Baby, you're a fire work," Katy Perry sang. All four of us joined along. "Come on show them what, you're worth. Make them go, oh, oh, oh, as you shoot across the sky."
The roads in Joshua Tree National Park are windy and poorly-lit. You can't see anything that isn't illuminated by the headlights, besides the stars. You'd never know there's hundreds-year-old twisted trees growing all around you.
The song ended. I started it again from the beginning. We sang louder. While the song played, it felt like we were back in high school again, back when we all lived in the same city, before we'd ever fallen in love, or gotten sober, or moved or not moved for practical reasons, before anyone had died and broken our hearts.
this, that, the other thing
coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee cigarette coffee coffee coffee. i made a blog (website). someday it will be filled with relevant, witty, and insightful posts. for now, though, there is only this.
i will tell you one thing: tonight, i am going to hotel chantelle. don't ever go to hotel chantelle. it sucks. i just happen to like some of the people that work there.
i will tell you one thing: tonight, i am going to hotel chantelle. don't ever go to hotel chantelle. it sucks. i just happen to like some of the people that work there.
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