I'm A Maniac For Readings and that Sort of Thing I Guess

On Thursday last week I went to see Tao Lin at Atomic Books. He read for less time than it took for him to start reading, but he gave out nice pictures and was nice and his book seems interesting. It's always nice to go to readings at Atomic Books because they offer free beer and the people who work there are smart and smiley.

On Friday I did a thing at Lauren Bender's show called "Show & Tell." I thought what I was showing -- my bloody shirt -- was a little conceptually light so I tried to call Matthew Savoca, who won my bloody shirt in a drawing but I forgot to send it to him. Of course such a prank doesn't exactly make for full-on heady stuff, so I changed it to "Gameshow & Tell" and asked questions to a divided audience (had Savoca answered, it would have been him against them). That was a perfect amount of intellectual vigor, though not quite like Aparna Jonnal, who argued for the nonexistence of free will.

Here's a photo of me from the Show & Tell:

On Saturday I saw some poets from Philadelphia read, including the great Debrah Morkun, Jamie Townsend and Kim Gek Lin Short. They were each different and each of them were masterful at the thing they do. It was nice to talk to Jamie about what he does and how and why and how it fits into the context of what I know of what other people do; we spoke in vagaries. I was glad to hear Kim Gek Lin Short read from her book Run before I started reading it, because now I know how fun/interesting the reading of it ought to be.

On Sunday I did not go to any readings. I scoured the Internet, though, for footage of the poem that Tony Curtis recites in Spartacus -- with no luck. I want it because I want to learn to fight.

Spartacus: I was wrong about you, poet. You won't learn to kill. You'll teach us songs.
Antoninus: I came here to fight.
Spartacus: Anyone can learn to fight. There's a time for fighting, and there's a time for singing. Now you teach us to sing. Sing, Antoninus.

Here is a link to Antoninus's poem. I did that while watching the Ravens game. Then later I read Lee Child's thrilling novel, 61 Hours

On tonight I'm going to see Tan Lin. I hope that seeing him read will help me get through what I think is his amazing book, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and so on. I hope that seeing him read will make me feel like I'm in grad school.

Or tonight I'm going to see Amy Hempel, assuming she doesn't cancel. One of my guilty shame things is I've never read one thing by Amy Hempel. If she has books for sale, maybe I'll buy one.