Awake

by David Dannov

Overview

Marcus, and a small group of friends, embark on a psychedelic journey over a period of four years, finding themselves wandering through the city of Long Beach on acid, eating mushrooms in the hills of Laguna Beach, wandering Vegas at night while hallucinating on LSD, meeting Timothy Leary at his house in the Hollywood hills, and tripping at a Grateful Desert concert in the desert. These hallucinogenic experiences, and many others that follow, including an affair with a young waitress from Mississippi, lead Marcus from a frustrated college student in the early nineties to finding himself in the role of an artist who can see thruugh centuries of lies, hypocrisy, and deceit.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013066328
Publisher:	black joke press
Publication date:	09/02/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	166 KB

About the Author

Born and raised in Orange County, California, while attending Long Beach City College David Dannov eventually moved to Long Beach and enrolled into the creative writing department at CSULB; Gerald Locklin was one of his professors, whom he still keeps in contact to this day.

Dannov was accepted into two MFA programs but decided to drop both and focus on the writing. He does not believe the academic circle should be holding all the membership cards regarding publishing connections.

He was the bass player, singer, songwriter for a band called, Fossil Face that played in Long Beach for three years. A few songs from their album, Blackwood Universe, were payed on KPFK. David coupled with a Southern woman from Mississippi for nine years, married for five of those years; she was an elementary teacher in Downey.He was also in a seven year relationship with a woman from Whittier. They lived in Long Beach and San Diego. Currently single David has traveled through the States and Europe, Canada, Egypt, and Thailand. Publishers have a difficult time labeling Dannov's work, particularly his poetry because it's often a mix of personal essay with poetry, or poetry with personal essay. He does not rhyme. He leaves that tombstone for the cemetery.Think Bill Hicks mixed with Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Eddie Izzard. Some of his poems read like stories, some are snapshots, some are rants, some are thoughts and feelings. Some just drop onto the page like a bucket of paint.Most of his novels are memoirs besides The Script, which could be cateogrized as magic realism, and his middle grade urband fantasy novel, Natasha and the Tree, and his middle grade novella, McManland, under the name Sherwood Moody. His favorite authors are Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, John Fante, and Dante Fante with an admiration for Bill Hicks and Eddie Izzard and Joseph Campbell and George Carlin and Robert Williams and R. Crumb and the painters from the Beinart site (beinart.org), and so many authors and artists he just doesn't have time to list. Dannov has written seven novels, most of them memoirs, a short story collection, and seven full length poetry manuscripts each about 200 to 350 pages a piece. If you'd like to see some of Dannov's old paintings and some illustrations and clay heads and white board drawings he'd created while substituting in L.A. and Long Beach schools go to myspace.com/circusfreak35

Editorial Reviews

If you don't feel you fit in with the world, its prejudices and arbitrary limitations, and that there are deeper values for the human being and our existence in nature, then read this account of a soul's journey.

--Co founder of The Stuckists.

Charles Thompson

This is a classical oddyseey of youth, though unlike Kerouack's conquest of the awesome dimensions of the United States, David Dannov's journey leads him through the vastor, more perilous realms of his inner worlds and out again.He writes very vividly indeed.


--author of Counting Myself Lucky.

Edward Field

A wonderfully alive, vivid, completely engaging and well-written exploration, not only of a specific sub drug culture - but of life.

--Publisher of Ludlow Press

Jun Da