Electric Literature, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, Boozing for Charity

Just when I've resigned myself to having no reason to leave the futon for at least two weeks, I get an email from Electric Literature about the issue 05 release party at Housing Works. I've been paying attention to Electric Literature for some time now, mostly for their progressive approach to publishing: their issues are released in print, online, through email and on mobile apps. And on cosmic rays. And quantum carrier pigeons.

This in an age when print media is being about as forward-thinking as a backwards man named Backy Backwards from backwardston, backwardshire.

Print media is the dude still flying a confederate flag after relocating to Portland. Or something.



Of course the event gets a Time Out NY top pick, so everyone and their hipster grandma is there.

Housing Works Bookstore Cafe is both dark and complicated, but you can forgive the hit-or-miss selection because the proceeds go to the homeless and those suffering from AIDS. Though most of these books would be more useful as insulation. Or coat liners.

It is a good place to find random anthologies and lit mags for fiddy cent though.



The upside to all the bustle, though, is that Harpoon was giving away drinks for donations. So not only could you get trashed on fine irish red at $3 a pop, but you could do it all for charity.

Let me tell you, I did my best to help out those homeless. Almost makes up for years of ignoring panhandlers by pretending to listen to an invisible iPod.



After a short movie about eating alien crustaceans, magic crystals and masturbation, there were readings by Ben Greenman, Lynne Tillman and J. Robert Lennon.



Ben Greenman read "What 100 People, Real and Fake, Believe about Dolores."



In general the fiction was hip and full of ironic tics and casual references to pop culture. Which I suppose is what the kids are into these days.

The crowd was your usual SoHo mix, young urban professionals followed by old urban professionals and occasionally a middle-aged urban professional.


Photo by Liz, who doesn't know what animal this is either

By then end I was pretty sodden with charity, and headed down to Tom & Jerry's where I randomly met an architect, a girl from Doncaster and an asian from Alaska. Then I followed someone who was trying to bum cigarettes through the cold for several blocks and randomly punched my best friend in the face for fun. Woo!

Anne Carson, Poet's House, If Not... Brother

Minication. New york and back, less leisurely than my usual trips since I'm on a bit of a schedule. Last night was Anne Carson reading from Nox at Poet's House, the small conference room downstairs filled with interesting and uncomfortable people, and Anne, and her collaborator Currie, and someone from their publisher, with mics that weren't loud enough and a needless overhead display. The people upstairs watched the feed from monitors (live monitors in such a small venue?) and had overall a much better time seeing and hearing everything. We ditched our spots on the windowsill during the Q&A and went upstairs to get a head start on the free wine.

She read quite a bit of Nox, I have no idea how much of the text of it was read but it seemed like most of it. And still it was incomplete: the photos and drawings and clips and cut-outs provide the bulk of the impact of this book-in-a-box. The text itself, Anne's sad, lost, analytical voice laying down the facts and experiences of her relationship with her brother, absent from much of her life until his death, is a small voice, like someone trying to categorize pieces of a thing they can't hope to understand. She describes herself here as an intellectual, an analyzer, a "pinhead" as her brother called her living mostly in her mind. Then we have the figure of her brother, who seems (though how can we know?) to have spent his life at living, passionately, unhappily. And this living tore a hole in the life of her family and her life, so Anne is left, as usual, with pieces. Which is where she always tends to end up. This is a world irreconcilable, being always late to the party, walking into the middle of conversations, wandering in ruins that when they weren't ruins were built on some other ruin. A translation of a translation of which the original is lost. Even the playfulness, which is one of her strongest responses to this feeling, was more subdued in what she read on Thursday, or at least more painfully ironic.

Currie is a strange little man and I wonder what precisely she sees in him. They teach a class on collaboration (they said), and the line they give the attendants is "Now that you've completed it, what are you going to do with it?" Meaning she's started treating her own work like a text, ready for exegesis and adaptation, or maybe more like a scrap of cloth that can only be admired so much for the garment it was once part of. If I had a question to ask her it would be if she has a concept of the original anymore, or has everything in life become like catching hold of a wave you can't know the origins of, can't know what shores it might wash up on.

I wouldn't ask her this question because it is not a question but an answer, and not her answer but my answer, and not a complete answer but an unfair one.

The meaning of the wave of course is loss. The wave is not where it once was. All the mind can really know of the world is loss if it looks hard enough, and I start to wonder if this is a property of the world or a property of the mind. Is loss mind-colored?



Spend the rest of the night in bars, some full of drunks and some not, the bartenders all evenly unsmiling. Headed back to jersey around dawn, got to see the sun rise there on the road. Dawns are so strange and fragile, they have their own color. White instead of red.

I can't remember actually seeing city lit up with dawn before. My knowledge of the city is all evenings and midnights.

It's a different beast in the morning. It's almost kind.



Snapped this photo on the walk from the bus stop, trying to catch the sun as it pushed this dark and hazy avalanche ahead of itself. Didn't capture it. Some photos are to remind you of things, some photos are to remind you of things you didn't see the first time, some photos are to isolate a thing which out there in the world is too lost in the world to be seen. This one's a failure of the first type. I put it here so I can write: this is a failure of myself to remind myself of anything.

Shapes and Sizes, Cake Shop 9/27/07

This must be the first show I've paid for in at least eight months, what with a summer of freebies and hitching rides with three publications. I wrote such a glowing preview for them in the Onion for this week (last thing I did before my term ended), I hope they're proud. Plus Cake Shop is $7 for four bands. And I only stuck around for two.

Though, I thought the benefit of actually paying for a show would be that I wouldn't have to write about it. Well, here I am, writing about it.







Though my love for Caila knows no bounds, what's best about S&S live is how they all seem to move together. Makes sense: three out of the four of them write the songs (poor, lonely drummer), three out of four sing (though Mr. Bass Player usually just provides harmonies). When the three of them scream together it's a thing of beauty.





The other amazing thing is Caila's dancing. Maybe the more intimate setting brought out more of the little kicks and shimmys than when I saw her last year at Irving (they and The Blow opened for Architecture in Helsinki at CMJ, perhaps the most fun night of music I've ever experienced.) or maybe she's grown as a performer. Or maybe she was drunk. But it was dang cute.



Also played: The Forms. Quite rockin'.



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