Bruce Wagner - Dead Stars

She was about to let her presence be known when he opened Google & typed

mother

There were 1,341,000,000 hits.

END

David Rosenthal

Nothing to Undo

Sarah Hochman

Lily Burk

& Greg Burk & Deborah Drooz

John & Lydia Jane & Lisa Stafford Gladwell, Todd & Emily Horowitz & Elroy & Pebbles Solondz, James Truman & Leanne Shapton & Bunny, David & Carolyn Cronenberg, Ed & Danna Ruscha, Andre Balazs, Wallace Shawn & Deborah Eisenberg, Kate Adair Pohlman, Dr. Gary Bravo & Susan Seitz, Andrew Wylie, Leonard Cohen, Wendy Wall and Claudia Liberman, PG, The Midnight Mission, Salman Rushdie, Bunny & Adolfo, Carlos Castaneda, Father Fabricio Magaldi, James Ellroy, Julius Renard & Darien Donner, Rita & John, Eric Peterson, Bill & Carolyn & Bertie, Marylou Shockley, Hal de Becker Sr. & Hal de Becker Jr., Bob & Lauren Dubac, Peter Feibleman, Seth Flaum & Tamara Blaich, Michael & Wendy Tolkin, Danna & Ben & Rebecca Schaeffer, Jim & Kathleen & Julianna Seligman (and Matty & Herb & the boys), Sherman Alexie, Dr. Bob & Marge & Ted (and the boys), Frenchy Ruscha & Francesca Gabbiani, Dr. Edward Kantor, Jesse Dylan & Susan Traylor, Steve & Kathy Kloves, John Waters, Nadine Johnson, Pico Iyer, Chandra and Billy, Chris and Dori Carter, Susan Kamil, George Meyer & Maria Semple, Nick Marck & Linda Lichter, Mary McMannes, Dr David Bockoff, Mary Ann King, Marta Morales, Francisca, Maria, & Flor, Darren Star, Michael & Lisa & Sean Goedecke, Debbie Reynolds & Todd Fisher & Gloria Crayton & Mary Douglas French, Richard Buckley & Tom Ford, Cyndi Sayre, Chris Silbermann, Mark Gordon, Jim Bartholemew, Brad Spielman, Ron Hugo & Janice Hampton & Jeff Prettyman, Joan Halifax, Bret Easton Ellis, William Gibson, Jenn and Geoff and Ian, Andrea & Joshua, Oliver Stone, Allen & Tracey McKeown & Mabel & Johnny McKeown, Grant Vospher, Bryan & Billie Lourd, Dr. Shawn Nasseri, Dr. Bill Stafford, The Atlantic Group, George Garrett, Gayle & Murgatroyd Boarnard, Dr. Michael Chaikin, Paul Bartel, Cotty Chubb, Cita and Myles Cohen, Harry Shearer & Judith Owen, Dr. Jeremy Fine, Tom Scott, Lynne Scott, Laraine Newman, Glen Goldman, Tony Krantz, Alan Poul, Nelson Lyon, Terry Southern, Terry Gilliam, Ed Begley Jr. & Rachelle Carson, Frank Jones, John Graf, Luma & Lilly & Naqaqa staff, Kevin Nealon & Suzanne Yeagley, Ed Moses, UCLA Special Collections, Dave Mirkin & Savannah Brentnall, Paul Fortune & Chris Brock, Garry Shandling, Ken Finkleman and Miriam Cohen, Angela Janklow, Eric & Tanya Idle, Olivia Harrison, Jonathan Carroll, Dana Delany, Christine & Marlene & Guthrie McCarty Vachon, Bob Kaplan & Signe Johnson, Pam Koffler and Russell Fine, John Sloss, John & Kimberly Keefe, “Schultzie,” Brian & Cindy Rogers, Anne Thompson, Frank & Berta Gehry, Gerry Harrington, Gil & Janet Friesen, Leonard Michaels, Haley van Oosten, Wilkie McClaren, Leonard Brooks, Collin & Elizabeth Callender, Hughie Dixon, Charley Powell, Gus Van Sant, James Shaheen, Renee Tab, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Hudson Marquez & Susan Clary, Iosefo Dramea de Becker, David Rozansky, Father Fernando Mata, Miriam Altshuler, Bill Guthy & Victoria Jackson-Guthy & Ali & Jackson & Evan Minogue, Frank Roddam, Rose & Manfred & Hanna, Jerry Hartman, John Liechty, Ricky Jay & Chrisann Verges, Harvey Purgason, Father Thomas Sells, Darrell & Terri W, Jerry Stahl, Joan Hyler, Gail & Moon Zappa, The Delancey Street Foundation, Tom & Kathy Freston, Wes Craven, Marianne Maddalena, Mary Farley, Hector Babenco, Paul Schrader, Brandon Scott & Rylyn Demaris, Ted Field, Tina Brown, Tina Albert, Anne Thompson, Yoko & Yuko Kanayama, John Kinney, Tamara Masloff, Carol and Tony Monaco, Veronica Godoy, Jirka & Rasmus & Olivia, Alan Bernstein, Mike & Vanessa, Kristy & Damon, Liz & Ted

Bruce Wagneris the author of Memorial, The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN/Faulkner fiction award finalist), Still Holding, I’ll Let You Go, I’m Losing You, and Force Majeure . He lives in Los Angeles.

The hyperlinks in this book are not enabled.

* Ass to Mouth

* The Internet informed that Bill Condon, who adapted the musical to film, happened once to have lived with Ryan Murphy — one of the detours of MD’s bewitched, bewitching reverie.

* Even Harry was caught off-guard by the rampant success of THE HONEYSHOT!s webpage Honeyshot! Olden Goldies (Ms. Hawn’s two faces conjoined at the top of the page like those of comedy&tragedy, her Laugh-In -era face with her Medicare one), said page being wholly devoted to peeholes of a certain age as they stepped from their cars — Helen Mirren, Julie Christie, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Debra Winger. Zsa Zsa got hers as she was lifted from wheelchair to gurney, but that was more of a goof — Harry, who always wrote the webtext, called it a funnyshot !

* The kitty-clawed Capote’s comments were prescient, prefiguring the fad of live-streaming Allah Akbar! decapitation, the extreme sport of extremist enthusiasts. The go-go years of online decaps straddled the millennium, peaking with the martyrdom of Daniel Pearl. Bud had planned to write a novella-length fantasia — in the genre critics call “Swiftian meditation”—about a headless man, but nothing ever came of it.

* He thought it ludicrously ironic that the deceased was a frustrated writer whose unfinished novel JCO found and read after his death. (He began writing it before they met, a half century back.) Even though the deceased was an editor by profession, he supposedly never read any of her books. Any. Bud thought that was passive-aggressive o’plenty; there must have been a lot of rage there. Apparently, JCO was remorseful that she hadn’t better encouraged his creative side. Reading between the lines — and there were a lot of lines! — Bud thought it sounded like the poor fellow had literally been crushed by his wife’s productivity — outgunned, deballed & anonymized. (His surname being Smith, he left the world as blandly as he had entered it.)

* JCO became engaged to her 2nd husband just 11 months after Mr. Smith passed — while the body of her meditation on grief was still warm.

* Of course, the Times routinely turned to Toni Bentley when it came to books on ballet, and in the realm of the overtly or mildly incestuous, had Kathryn Harrison on permanent tap; the estimable Julian Barnes recently carved himself a nice little niche when it came to mourning & death. He in fact reviewed Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir of widowhood for The New York Review of Books. Barnes rather gently took JCO to task for omitting mention of her remarriage, which predated publication of her memoir, a criticism JCO initially rebuffed before eventually reconsidering. She set the record straight in reprintings of the mem. Still, the pairing of Liz Phair and Keith Richards did strike Bud as borderline.

* Department of Children & Family Services.

* Not having read the novel, Bud checked it on Wikipedia when he got home. Wallace wrote about a movie , not a virus, which was actually closer to Bud’s initial observations of the bums’ “watching” something on an invisible screen. The plot synopsis said that viewing the film rendered its audience not happy , but lifeless , but it was enough in the ballpark to discourage Bud (for the moment) from further “pitch” fantasies. He remembered a Python bit as well, something about a joke that was so funny that it killed whoever heard it.