As a longtime fan of fashion designer John Galliano, I really enjoyed this new documentary: “High & Low.” It’s a complicated portrait of a complicated genius. If you’re not familiar with his work, I’d suggest starting here.
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Image credit: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division
I’m delighted to share that I’ll be a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, later this year. While updating my About page at the beginning of the year, I realized how impactful various writing residencies I’ve done over the years have been. So I decided I would apply to, say, a dozen residencies over the course of this year and see what happened. I got a few rejections, so it was extra wonderful to get this opportunity. In an upcoming installment of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” my ongoing series of blog posts on writing, editing, and publishing, I’ll share some tips on getting a residency. One thing that’s especially exciting is that this residency is for the novel that I’m working on. More soon …
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Awhile back, I started this mini-project called 30 Days of Smut. The idea was that I would write a short piece of smut-themed flash fiction every day for 30 days and post it on my website. That specific goal didn’t work out because I got busy, so I crossed out the 30 and the project is now Days of Smut. I’ll probably keep going until I have 30 stories and then stop. Basically, the purpose of the project is just to exercise my creative muscle. So far, I’ve introduced a dominatrix, a porn addict, an auto-cannibalist, a woodsman, and a mannequin.
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I took this photograph near the red carpet at the AVN Awards in Las Vegas, Nevada, in, I believe, 2013.
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Last year I realized I’d read, like, no books, so I thought maybe this year I would read a few. To start, I read the incredible Victory Parade by Leela Corman. You should buy it and read it. Here’s my Amazon review:
This book is an absolute masterpiece. It's an electric, searing, beyond Spiegelman's Maus anatomical and artistic investigation of the twin traumas of war and violence, the nightmares that haunt survivors' waking and sleeping lives, and the banality of evil's horrifying consequences to the human soul. I read about this book in the Washington Post and read it in one day (i had to take a few breaks because it's so powerful). I can't recommend Victory Parade enough. It should win all the prizes and praises. Congrats to Leela.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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I wrote this short story, “E Is for Eunuch,” in the early 2000s. Originally, it was published in 3:AM Magazine. The story was part of a larger project I was doing: The Fetish Alphabet. This story also appears in my 2003 short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In any case, I’m resharing / republishing it here.
You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket, and he had, therefore, since become the ingestor of a multitude of hormone-filled pharmaceuticals, and turned into the personal curator of his own Johnson in a jar, and resultingly realized that he was now the type of individual who could silence an entire dinner-party full of people at the mere drop of a hat with the mere drop of his pants, and yet what he had discovered since this rather sudden change of life events was that while he had fantasized rapturously as a young man of chemical castration, and spent several years seriously considering moving to India to linger amongst the third-sexed there by the banks of the Katni River, it was actually only one year ago that his brain had become wholly overrun by words like “Elastrator,” and “Burdizzo,” and “Underground Doctors,” and it was only rather recently that he had found himself lying quite awake, because he had wanted it that way, on a cold kitchen table, because they had wanted it that way, praying to whomever looked over poor souls like him that someday someone would lean over him in some dark bed somewhere and be happy to find him so wonderfully smooth, but the problem was that now, today, at this very moment, in that imaginary bed he was truly lying, and he knew without a doubt, even with the lights off, that the person lying next to him was doing nothing but snoring, and coming down the back alleyways of his mind for him was his own terrible penis, and it was angry, and it was carrying at its side an entire suitcase filled to overflowing with his whole, long, lonely life that he had lived thus far, and, already, the suitcase was falling open and spilling its whole horrible mess out all over the floor of his mind, and he knew, with no reservations needed, thank you very much, that he would slip in it, and that this new smoothness of his, which had been intended to lubricate his life, would make it impossible for him to ever get back up again.
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I took this photo at a porn convention in, I believe, Las Vegas, although it’s possible it was Chicago, but I’m pretty sure it was Vegas, in, say, 2013, or 2014, or something like that. I can’t remember if I spoke to the woman, although maybe I did, or maybe I didn’t. In any case, it’s one of my favorite shots I’ve taken.
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In the past, I’ve gotten writing residences, so I figured I’d try again this year. So far, I’ve applied to seven writing residencies. By the end of the year, I’ll likely have applied to 10 to 12 — or that’s the goal. To date, I’ve gotten zero acceptances, six rejections, and one wait list. At some point, I’ll probably write a longer post on applying to writing residencies for my “Fuck You, Pay Me” series on writing, editing, and publishing.
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From Burbank to Berkeley, a few recent photographs. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photography.
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Yesterday, I flew up to the Bay Area, where I was doing a brown bag book talk at U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. I got there early, and that gave me a chance to have breakfast, visit Pegasus Books where I was happy to see my book on a shelf, and go to my childhood home and knock on the front door (more on that in an upcoming post). After that, I went to Cal for the talk. I was interviewed by journalist and producer Cecilia Lei, who did a wonderful job asking insightful questions, turning what could have been bearing witness to a Q&A into a three-way dialogue with the audience, and prompting me to think about some of the deeper themes in and larger issues surrounding my book in new ways. Thank you to everyone who came. I’ve been doing a lot of promoting of my memoir this month, these last couple weeks in particular. After I’m done with the last event, which is this weekend, I’ll be writing a longer post about everything I learned about marketing one’s book. The photo is of the courtyard at the J-school. It was a bit overcast, but so are most days in the Bay Area in spring.
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What happens when one former child lab rat interviews another former child lab rat? Things get unhinged. Seth Fischer, who was himself studied as a child by his psychologist parents, and I talked about growing up under a microscope, the consequences of being a human guinea pig, and what happens when the subject sets out to tell his or her own story. Read the rest of our scintillating, strange conversation in the newest issue of Air/Light: “‘I Hate the Subject and the Subject Hates Me’: An Interview with Susannah Breslin.”
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I took this photo ahead of the panel I was on at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books before the room became full. The festival is on the University of Southern California campus, a massive undertaking, and run like a well-oiled machine. My friend and I hung out in the authors’ green room, we got marched over to the hall where the panel was along with the other panelists, and then I answered questions from the moderator and the audience. It was a really cool time and something I’ll be writing about a bit more in a future post. My book is Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And what people are saying about it is here.
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On principle, I hate AI because it is a thief of creatives’ work, but when Meta added its AI whatever you call it to Instagram, I got lured into engaging with it. Initially, I asked it if it was a whore (it responded in the negative and requested I engage with it in a respectful manner). But then my narcissism got the better of me, and I asked it if it knew who Susannah Breslin was (it did). Falling into my AI reflection in a digital pool, I asked it if I write about sex (I did, it responded). Finally, I instructed it to write a paragraph in the style of Susannah Breslin, and that’s when I learned AI knows me and does me better than I do.
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This weekend, I’ll be a panelist at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. The panel, “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology,” is on Sunday, April 21, at 3:30 pm., it’s moderated by Amy Alkon, and my fellow panelists are Dr. Jen Gunter, Cat Bohannon, and M.G. Lord. I’ll be talking about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. And, you can read more about the story behind my book here.
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Ahead of The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this weekend, where I’ll be a panelist—see: “Women and Bodies: Science Meets Sociology”—The L.A. Times shared “The 50 Best Hollywood Books of All Time” and asked readers for their suggestions on the best Hollywood books not on that list. My suggestion made it to “19 Great Hollywood Books We Missed, According to Our Readers.” Find out my suggestion here.
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A few recent photographs from around Los Angeles. Follow me on Instagram for more of my photography.
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I’ve really been enjoying photographer Noah Kalina’s YouTube videos, where he talks about his work, his life, and the world. In particular, I like his hotline show, where people call in and ask questions. I’ve called in twice, including for the most recent hotline episode, “The Hotline Show XII.” One reason I like Noah’s rhetoric around art is that he doesn’t try to tie everything up into a neat bow. Art is messy and chaotic and unpredictable. In any case, I usually learn something about my own practice from his thoughts, so check out his work.
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I was interviewed about my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment (read more about my book here) for a recent episode of ABC Radio National’s podcast about the human mind, “All in the Mind,” out of Australia. The episode is “Being a Human Lab Rat for 30 Years: What Happens Next.”
From the episode’s description:
“Researchers knew Susannah better than her own parents.
They may have even known her better than herself.
Today, how spending thirty years in a psychological study warped journalist Susannah Breslin's life.”
Listen to my conversation with host Sana Qadar here.
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The above image is a panel from “My, My American Bukkake Too,” a comic that I made in 2003 or 2004. I made the comic using photos I shot on a bukkake movie set, running the images through Microsoft Paint, and editing the results. This comic was a sequel to “My, My American Bukkake,” a comic that I made using the same process in 2002. There was some controversy around MMABT, which you can read about here. I believe MMAB was first published in Headpress 23. Later that same year, MMAB was published again, in Dirty Stories Volume 3, which was edited by Eric Reynolds and published by Fantagraphics, alongside comics by Joe Sacco, Bob Fingerman, and Carol Swain, among others. MMAB was republished again or MMABT was published (I can’t remember which one) in Best Erotic Comics 2008, which was edited by Greta Christina and published by Last Gasp, alongside comics by Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, and Toshio Saeki, among others. In a review of Dirty Stories Volume 3, “A Fresh Look at Porn Comix,” TIME called MMAB a “non-fiction standout.” In 2004, MMABT was published on Artbomb (a comics website created by Warren Ellis that no longer exists), where it was described as “a deeply moving account of personal loss set amidst the tapestry of sexual taboo.”
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