My New York Sabbatical; What I’m Reading Every Morning

Hello, Thursday!

I used to have a whole box of these cards in the 1980s! I would hand them out when I was working retail. That’s Shar and Jackie (SIR Video) looking fetching in the left corner.

Hey, everyone,

Thank you, for all your encouragement the past couple days as I inaugurated my “birthday pledge drive.”

Oh man, I made so many beginner mistakes I’m sure I would’ve been fired from NPR if I was on the air.

But now I’m settling in! I have some news, too. Remember when I went to Ithaca a couple years ago to work on the On Our Backs archives, my own papers, and Honey Lee Cottrell’s photographs? I’m doing it again, this April and May, til the end of spring quarter. I’ll be teaching, annotating the photographs and stories, just generally hanging out if you are “in the area”— let’s get together!

I’ll return to Santa Cruz just in time to welcome Alison Bechdel, who has a new book out: Spent: A Comic Novel. I’ll be introducing her at the Bookshop Santa Cruz event, May 28th.

You know, Alison and I have known each other since we were in our 20s, scrounging in the underground press, and she wrote the best blurb for me I have ever read: “I have a very scary feeling Susie Bright is not making any of this up. Guns, drug, threesomes, socialist factionalism, a stabbing . . . All before she got her GED?”

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Where I’m Getting My News These Days

You may wonder, what do I subscribe to, what media do I support?