Vanessa Veselka's Blog

I just finished my first draft of my second novel. It’s totally different than ZAZEN and I have no idea what anyone will make of it. Either way, it felt good to finish. And with that, I am closer to the undergraduate degree that I have worked so sporadically to attain. Weeks away….

things are coming my way

and all the peace and quiet that comes with the completion of a task…

things are still coming my way

Also, a few words on this weeks installment of ZAZEN on Arthur Magazine, which starts off with Jimmy and Della going out to Grace and Miro’s for the anniversary. I thought it would be a perfect chapter to post the week of thanksgiving when so many of us simultaneously dread and long for home and parents. Postcards from the week’s posts:

a fresh field of GPS

and the new blossoms of our time…

the calla lillies are in bloom. Such a strange flower...

And finally this week, the long awaited sex party, Dancehall.

just a few close friends in an intimate get together

And before that the chapter on Della’s mother went up. A few ’serious’ words on that. While I won’t say much (those reading along probably haven’t caught up), I will say that the characters of Cady and Grace were ones I have had to argue for and justify. Some have seen this part of the novel as a detour, a slowing of action, but the character of Grace was very important to me because I wanted to write about sorrow and charisma and the bind it creates. I also know that, having given Della’s parents a pretty hard time throughout the text, I wanted them to be different than what was expected and more than the subject of satire. On one hand:

And on the other:

nothing to say

Another character for whom I have had to fight is Jimmy. I will say less on that except that the complaint that a major character cannot enter then leave a novel (the complaint being, why are they there in the first place) is ridiculous. People do that in our lives all the time. Someone we spent every day with for weeks or months is suddenly elsewhere, or we are.

driving over the Black Ocean

but what are borders to a geological mind?

a suburb of Fair Prospect

etails an p

So. For all of you who have asked who drew the cover of ZAZEN the answer is….Stefan Jecusco!  You can click on his scary ID photo beneath the Rat Queen for more insight into his evil schemes.

Regarding today’s chapter, I will say little. Below is a thumbnail trailer. I leave it to you to make your own associations….

Grace shops for shirts atthe library

Hint: These are in order of appearance. But shuffle them in your mind.

roaming charges

it heals all that?

russian doll set of the gods

and finally…a sign, a possibility, a –

surely they would not be missed

ch 15 (The Head of John the Baptist) is going up within hours AND there is a youtube clip of me reading it.

Why? Because Mike Daily, a Portland writer, thought it would be cool and took some of his own sweet time to come over and record me reading.

I only wish I had had enough time to wash my hair.

As far as this chapter goes….it has one of my favorite scenes.

Salome discovers the freedom to creatively accesorize

I’m not saying that all female relationships are constructed by decapitation on the fraying edge of empire, just that the skirt works.

Really though, the scene where the Head of John the Baptist gets destroyed was a pleasure to write.Difficult and antagonistic women figuring out what they think of each other is a favorite subject of mine.

And so is Bubble Tea, which Della has very strong feelings about, but which I don’t mind at all.

something to look forward to=a neoliberal band-aid

Mirror’s continues to plan her enormous sex party but is stricken by two competing potential realities….

the perineum sisters do it again!

NAFTA dreamboat

Chapter 13 of ZAZEN “Manifestation” is up today on Arthur and begins a pretty intense part of the novel. The rise of the Rat Queen. On weds there will be a youtube of me reading chapter 15 (The Head of John the Baptist) posted simultaneously with the pdf. A friend, writer Mike Daily, had the idea that people might want to hear/ see me read and was kind enough to record me doing so. BUT there’s a spoiler alert on it.

thoughts on my future….

a diagram of my future

Several years ago in the depths of a really disconcerting, persistent poverty, I found a record cover by a band from the mid/late 70s called The Fiction Brothers. They were friendly looking mustachioed men standing back to back wearing denim shirts and carrying mandolins. Above their hopeful post-John Denver faces the album title read: Things Are Coming My Way. The record, which was a folk record, was made in the valley between two mountain peaks of interest in folk music. Things were coming their way. It struck me as unbelievably funny.  It was like a personal koan. It was the zen of what? Who knew. Things are always coming your way. The innocent assumption that they would be pleasant was written all over their faces. It didn’t make me feel bitter, it made me laugh for real for the first time in months. That AND calling themselves the Fiction Brothers? A rare moment into the mind of the gods.

I’m going to graduate college in several weeks. Things are coming my way. Here are some of my career opportunities—-

Instead of joining the peace corp I will join the Steve Miller Band

air waitress

Airport strip club owner

The off-center arrangement of my potential future places of employment mirrors their structural relationship to my psyche on the astral plain. And I can’t figure out how to control the alignment function.But I did figure out how to put links on the photos!

Speaking of The Church of Enlightened Capital…I was wondering which resistance strategy to the mirage of wealth would ultimately work best for me. Really, I think the answer is actual money, or a job or something like that–BUT I have decided to break it into three categories, each representing a potential fantasy relationship to money. Which should I foster? An obsession with coins?

coins. the original poker chip

Coins–the golden rope between mountain hippies and redneck, silver-standard survivalists with w guns, ammo and a complete set of the 1961 Encyclopedia Britanica. Hide the money in the mattress! Or in the wheel well of the van next to the pot! Reverse coins:  S/he who seeks comfort in fantasies of permanent currency is destined to have their world disintegrate.

don't worry it's fake--real diamonds aren't blue

What about jewels? Jewels–the geologic proof that mountain building processes that destroy entire eco-regions and their attendant civilizations often leave behind pretty rubble. Reverse jewel: S/he who seeks solace in jewels may grow jealous of the their longevity.

Or….Delusion? Delusion, linger on the vowels. Delusion is the most facile of all the sings/houses of the financial zodiac. Take for example, this image of the Goddess Freya. Let’s examine it a little more closely…

Freya as gamer holiday

First of all she has large balls of yarn affixed to her head. Second of all, she looks a little like Michele Pfeifer, third of all, and most importantly, WHO IS THE ABU GHRAIB PRISONER BEHIND HER WITH HIS HANDS TIED BEHIND HIS BACK AND THE BLINDFOLD?? There are other lesser questions–why does she have ski poles in hands, is that a mechanical owl peeking out over the top right of her hairdo, and, what could that shield on her hip possibly protect? A small burrow? A bunny? Lunch?  So back to delusion…here she is. She’s all ours.  reverse fortune: S/he who relies on fantasies of power to express themselves may find other fantasies stowed away.

coins, jewels, delusion. When what I really want is money, a nice pair of boots and books.

YES, this week more of ZAZEN will be posted on Arthur. Speaking of Heart of Darkness, I have just spent another day annotating a bibliography for a critical history of Heart of Darkness–not because they pay me, not because anyone cares, not because I have anything origial to say, but AS AN ACADEMIC EXERCISE. I need a new pass time. It did occur to me, though,  that the Imperial edges are becoming alarmingly homogeneous. Below is my version of the MMPI. I’ve boiled it down to 3 telling options and one question.

1) Pick Your Leader

healthcare visionary

Hans Christian Anderson and his charming Nightengale

traveling hot tub salesman

In addition to writing novels, raising a kid, playing music, and lamenting my failure to become a paleontologist, I am finishing college. Nope–(I hear the unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, question) –I’m an underegrad. Yes. I am twice as old as everyone at my  college but they gave me a wonderful scholarship and the teachers are all my age so I am not totally alone.  What surprises me is that, while I am twice as old as everyone, I

See Dave Reeves in Arthur for brilliant commentary

seem to be far more aware of subcultural music, trends,  artifacts, etc.. as many of the kids around me.

I will now forward a vague thoughts on this as well as an anticipated response to a potential retort:

Vague thought: When “underground” music and independent art achieved maistream distribution throughout the 90s, several marketing generations (my term “marketing generation” refers to the time it takes for a full cycle of marketing, the smoke signal, the blaze, the repackaging, the shift to a different demographic, AND finally the return of the fetishized object/concept to the younger siblings of the original buying populace as a form of ironic adornment or as an identity statement to prove oneself socially fearless, ie, authentic. This whole thing is what I mean when I say “Marketing generation”) let go the need to continue the oral histories of Our People. (Our People: those who waste their days on a single album, tinker with social networks, invent things that never get patented and often fail at grand plans). People as distribution of ideas, legends and the unmonolithic subcultural heritage, were left behind because ‘availability’ was the drug of the day.We are seeing the results of that now.

Potential retort: Oh, no! That’s just age. They (college kids?) are just rebelling against their green haired parents by courting the mainstream.

Me: AHA! THAT is where you are wrong. This is a determinist lie intended to make  complacency acceptable and lead you out into the pastures of nowhere. The children of “radicals” are not “republicans” (I would like to that Hannah Arendt for the quotation marks…) they are their own weird selves.Many, many of the most  interesting, original, artistic kids I have met have freak parents. I don’t mean that the have hippy parents, or punk parents, I mean seriously freaky parents. Like people who make their own license plates and wrap their weed in bloody underwear so the Goddess will protect them from the cops. Real freaks.

Analysis: 1) Mainstream kids functioning on the outer circle of popculture are illinformed about their subcultural heritage because of the prevalence of distribution methods in the 90s that temporarily broke the word of mouth chain, rendering each object/movement historically discreet. 2) That’s okay because there are some really cool adults/ kids  coming out of the fringe that have untold skills, which have strange and uncataloged skills that we may all need soon.