Why I'm Going to Fail School.

Below are some snippets of things from the novel I’ve been working on. Wouldn’t it be ironic if I fail my creative writing classes because I’m busy working on a novel?

Anyway, the novel is sort of a fictional travelogue across an LA that is only half real. LA is a great settling for that because LA is really only about half real most of the time anyway. The novel is both prose (which I admit is very raw at this point) and poetry (which is not just raw but would have gotten me stoned in an earlier age). Below is a section that occurs as the narrator and his (Dr. Who-esque) companion, Viv, leave the Getty Center and head into the Valley. In a fake travelogue I think it is important to be able to distill history into fast little narrative bits. I’ve written several of these so far but I especially like this one. I know it is going to require a lot of tightening up, but hell, you try to write one and then come talk to me about tightening up when you’re exhausted.

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Illuminated Manuscripts.

So if you got here by reading the posts above then you know that what’s below is a bit of a novel I’m working on. In this (dare I call it a) poem, one of the characters goes to The Getty Center, which if you have never been there, is one of the most bestest museums in the world! Oh, and an “illuminated manuscript” is one of those books that Indiana Jones and Monty Python are always finding, it’s like a giant old book with ink and gold leaf illustrations illustrating the text.

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Five Thoughts I Had at The Museum.

Five Thoughts I Had at The Museum

by james bezerra

I.

I find a wide dim room of medieval

illuminated manuscripts, so called.

Each one illuminated too by a single lamp,

looking then like beacons

glowing through a dark age.

II.

One must remember that oil money

bought all this history here and built

these buildings around it too.

Millenias’ old black liquid dinosaurs

without which there would be fewer

fortunes in the world. Nor any of these buildings.

Nor this strange city that spreads like strawberry runners

rendered in bituminous pitch through the natural canyons in the hills.

III.

An episode from the Getty family history:

In 1973 a grandson kidnapped in Italy.

A seventeen million dollar ransom refused.

An ear arrives in the mail.

Demand drops to $3.2 mil.

Getty again defers. Decrees: $2.2 only,

the max that’s tax deductible. The IRS

has rules about these things, after all.

IV.

All this beauty bought by business.

All this art afforded by oil.

Dead painters had patrons.

Who are the patrons now,

while painters starve? And so

do the rest of us. How much

money at the top, can our

skinny poor shoulders prop up?

At least they give us these beautiful

places and we’re placated.

V.

Manuscript parchment was made from animal skins.

Skins soaked in lime water to loosen hair and flesh.

Then stretched and scraped and stretched and cut.
These glittering old books once breathed.


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When Meeting an Interesting Woman.

When Meeting an Interesting Woman

by james bezerra

It is good to offer to buy her a drink.

It is less good to do so after already having had six youself.

It is good to say funny things.

It is not so good if you can’t remember if she laughed.

It is good if she has lived in London and you have been to London and so you can ask her about the Tate Modern and if she has spent time in the Rothko Room. It is good to be honest with her about how much that dim quiet space of giant canvases affected you. It is good if you can offer special little details of authenticity, like how much you liked the slide in the Tate’s main gallery.

It is not great if you get genuinely upset when she tells you that the slide isn’t there anymore; that it was just part of a temporary installation. That it’s gone. Forever.

It is good that you have met the first person in a long time who you could imagine spending time with. Spending days with. Spending nights with. Other such bullshit. Which isn’t bullshit at all, because you actually love long walks on the beach and brunch and French movies at single-screen little theaters where you can hear the flimsy metal reels spinning away up above and behind you up in the projectionist’s bay.

It is not very good if you can’t imagine sitting in that quiet dark movie theater next to her without the sound of your rapidfastrapidfastrapidfast heart valves drowning out the sound of the projector, to say nothing of the French dialogue.

It would be good if she was deaf, so she couldn’t hear your valves squinching closed and gasping open. If she was deaf then she would be focused on the subtitles anyway.

It would be not so good if, the day after meeting her, you have difficulty remembering exactly the one word that is her name. You can remember that it is a long name, that it is an ornate name, an almost anachronistic name. You can remember that it had sumptuous and voluptuous vowels and that the vowels of her name so seduced its consonants that even the rs and the ls seemed to take on the open, satisfied, sighing quality of vowels. But - you tell yourself - there are so many words in the world that what does it matter if you remember that one word or not, when you remember her and you remember the sound of her name. Isn’t remembering the sound of something just as good as remembering the something? Isn’t that the point of all human language anyway?

It is good if she reminds you of the point of all human language.

It would be not so good if she were to find out that you briefly forgot the word that is her name.

It would be good if you had a friend with you that night! And he wasn’t drinking because he was driving and he remembers the word of her name. But it turns out that that doesn’t matter because she’s fast on Facebook and she already found you!

It would not be good if you immediately accept her friend request and then immediately, giddily, ill-advised-ly start to write a message to her after your sober friend has left you to pass out on his couch.

It would be good if you became - for once in your soggy life - smart and undrunken enough in that moment, laying there on your sober friend’s couch - which smells like Dorito dust and sweat - to - for the first time in your life - not send such a message.

It would not have been particularly very good if you had actually called her ‘a gorgeous little weirdo’ the way that you had intended to. It would not have been great if you had admitted to her that you have some emotional fractures more serious than cracks at the bottom of a dam. It wouldn’t have been so good if you had explained to her that your cat has a psychopathic hatred of small brunette women and that that is somehow probably psychically/telepathically/weirdly attributable to the fact that you like them so much. It would not have been good if - in your first message to her - you had spent any amount of time at all telling her about your cat. It would have been even worse had you implied that your cat has odd powers of divination and that you respect her judgment when it comes to women. No one wants to hear about your cat.

It would be very good - for you as a thinking/feeling/emotional being - if you considered calling one of your best friends and telling her that you have met the first girl in years who you could imagine yourself building a real and actual and healthy relationship with.

It would not be very good if you actually call your best friend because then she might actually expect you to call the girl and go on a date - which you don’t know how to do - and she might expect you to keep your shit together while on a date and not be a complete jackass - which people who know you tend to like about you, but which great and interesting and tiny dark-haired women you’ve just met might not like so much - she might expect you to man up. She might expect you to get past your own shit for just the few brief moments it might take to take the girl from London to The Getty and show her that there is a view of LA that doesn’t make a person want to kill themselves.  

It would be good if you remeber her name and you repeat the sound of it out loud from time to time and it makes you smile.

It would not be good if you do too much of that, or for too long.

It might be good if you call her.

It might not be good if you call her.

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Bad Blogger. Bad.

There comes a time in the life of every blogger when he/she is sitting around the apartment and is suddenly and from seemingly nowhere shocked – SHOCKED I SAY -  by the realization that he/she has completely forgotten that he/she has a blog!

That happened to me just recently.

I know, I am a terrible blogger.

But in my defense, I have been VERY BUSY! True story. Here now I shall make a list for you of all the things I have been doing in addition to neglecting this here blog:

- I discovered that Tostitos makes tortilla chips that are THEMSELVES made of cheese!  I think that this is at least as important of a discovery as anything Marie Curie found.

- Forgot the exact day of my father’s birthday.

- Bought a map online.

- As all LA-based, camera-owning hipsters must, I ditched work one day and went to the Getty.

- Said out loud: “Antiques Roadshow is always good.”

- I visited home and visited what once would have been my birthright (a now ghost town of a dairy three miles outside of “town”.)

- Basically saved the lives of some Swiss people (more on that later).

- Watched “Winnie the Pooh” to make myself feel better on a bad day.

- Failed THREE TIMES to watch Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” on TV.

- Got deleted off Facebook by someone I cared a lot about.

- Stayed in four different hotels in two weeks (I love hotels!)

- Saw The Black Keys live.

- Ate at Long John Silver’s.

- Absolutely did not go to a strip club in Bakersfield. Absolutely. Did. Not.

- Had yet another birthday.

- Saw a bear!

- Successfully did not get eaten by a bear.

- Spent awesome adventure time in the Sequoias (more on that later [but look! Down there at the bottom of this picture, that's ME!]).

- Ate donuts.

- Had two separate sets of pink ear buds devoured by The Kitten.

- Paid twenty bucks for an omelet (and it didn’t even have gold or diamonds in it or noth’en!)

- Bought a new black tie.

- Worked, a lot. A whole lot.

- Took a picture of myself.

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Man at The Getty.

 This is an interesting fellow I met at The Getty.

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