Lunamania

Lisa Asagi and R.Z. Linmark's reading last night was great. Asagi read from her Hatchery Diaries. It is a journal/memoir/lots of fun piece chronicling her life and experiences at her family's chicken hatchery. It's written as a series of journal entries so there's something kind of roaming and intimate about the whole thing. She has this mesmerizing cadence to her voice that made me all relaxed. This was interspersed w/Linmark's theatrical haiku explorations and excerpts from his sequel to Rolling the R's. I learned that both writers are/will be shopping their work for publication soon so I'm really looking forward to their books--must finish Middlesex before then.

The world continues to inspire outrage and sadness. There are the ongoing revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. I'm finding that I'm dedicating a lot of brain time processing the whole thing. Unfortunately, I have nothing that hasn't already been said better by someone.

My friend Omar gave me heads up that Brenda Fassie passed this weekend. He turned me on to her voice and brand of South African pop/dance/just plain fun music a couple of years ago. Check out Memeza and if you're not happy after listening to Vuli Ndela then you are clinically depressed. Get thee on some Prozac. When I started listening to her stuff I dug around a bit and learned that she's family! And she had a kind of "so what, fuck you" attitude about it. Nice. I guess her lesbian drama was fodder for the tabloids and some say contributed to her substance abuse and blah blah. Yea, yea, blame it on the queer factor. It's sad to lose such a joyous voice.