Oh yeah, so I live in Santa Monica now. I really love being able to walk to the beach, and I’ve been heading over there every evening to catch the sunset. Though Santa Monica is a bit out of the way as far as L.A. geography goes, particularly when traffic is bad. For example, last night it took me two and a half hours to battle my way across the city to get to Skylight Books to see Steve Erickson. Amazingly, it was worth it. He read an excerpt from his new novel Zeroville, in which the protagonist is a guy named Vikar who’s so obsessed with film that he’s had Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his shaved head. Vikar has come to Hollywood in hopes of finding other people who are as into film as he is, but he’s constantly disappointed. In the first section, a hippie confidently misidentifies the actors on Vikar’s head, and Vikar beats the guy with a cafeteria tray. In the next section, Vikar gets the drop on a burglar and ties the guy to a chair, only to discover that this burglar knows way more about film than Vikar does. It was hilarious.
I also recently went to see Alice Sebold (at the Hammer Museum) and Nick Hornby (at Book Soup). Alice Sebold read the first chapter of her new novel The Almost Moon, in which a middle-aged woman suffocates her elderly, infirm mother. Someone asked how Sebold’s own mother had reacted to the novel, and Sebold noted that her mother had received from a friend a T-shirt that reads: “I am not a fictional character.” (Speaking of amusing T-shirts, the best one I’ve seen recently says: “Videogames ruined my life. Fortunately I have two extra lives.”) At Nick Hornby’s reading, he had just been in a shop and found some sort of head lotion for bald men, which delighted him, and he jokingly offered that any bald men who bought his new book would, as a free bonus, receive a dollop of head lotion. Hornby’s new novel, Slam, concerns a shy teenage boy who unintentionally impregnates a girl he barely knows. The protagonist, a huge Tony Hawk fan, has memorized Tony Hawk’s memoir and is able to hold imaginary conversations with his poster of Tony Hawk, and in these conversations Tony Hawk speaks using only material from the memoir. Someone asked if Hornby had gotten Tony Hawk’s permission for this, and Hornby said of course, and that Tony Hawk was actually a fan of Hornby’s writing, which made things very easy. Although Hornby also said that it was probably a little weird for Tony Hawk to read the new novel, since material from the memoir about Tony Hawk’s first sexual experience shows up in the conversations between the protagonist and the Tony Hawk poster.
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