How To Make Your Next Reading More Interesting (Even If Your Work Really Isn’t)
1) Wear a mask. We all do. There is nothing to hide but hide itself.
A Literary Science Fair, Chicago, Tonight
The Chicago Underground Library celebrates the return of the “Science of Obscurity,” featuring new, unpublished, and in-progress works presented as science fair experiments. The night will also feature a public “book launch” via catapult, scientist speed dating, and digital readings to warm your hardened techie heart. Left and right brains come together, print <3s digital, everyone wins when the laws of physics and literature collide.
Join an awesome line up of writers, designers, and publishers as they intricately explain the scientific principles underlying their work, real or imagined. Reading experiments with Jen Karmin! Storigami with Zach Dodson! Distress charts with A D Jameson! Teenage taxonomies with Mairead Case! Curmudgeonly cuttlefish with Libby Walker! Hand-cranked projector mad libs with Two With Water! All participants will also have work for sale.
Special projects from the Society of Furthering Truth (SOFT), The Book Bike, readings from Featherproof Books’ iPhone application TripleQuick, surprise musical guests, video interviews with the CUL crew about your favorite forgotten and under-recognized Chicago publishers and writers, and Scientist Speed Dating! Yes! We said Scientist Speed Dating. You’ll have two minutes to ask real honest-to-goodness scientists any burning questions of your choice like why recycled paper tastes better and how quickly to induce vomiting after consuming The Christmas Sweater.
This event is free and for all ages.
Logistics
Saturday, 10 July 2010, 7–10pm
Jupiter Outpost (1139 W. Fulton Market, Chicago)
Food and drink will be available for sale
TONIGHT! The AmperLanterProof Last Chance Literary Blast For Endtimes
If you’re in Chicago tonight and looking for something to do, there’s this:
ATTN NYC: Firework Release Party
[a guest heads-up for the NY set]
A Predominately Bespectacled Army
A bunch of poets and poetry enthusiasts, including Anne Carson and Bill Murray walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Wall Street Journal wrote about it:
The predominately bespectacled army of attendees wore sensible shoes. Mr. Murray’s were a hybrid sneaker/hiking boot, quite popular among the crowd, and Ms. Carson wore brand-new, shiny, bright-red Adidasesshe picked up “in the outlet malls in Toronto where I was this weekend.
Who knew that anyone at the Wall Street Journal has a sense of humor?
At first, the earnest verse appreciators ambled awkwardly. They annoyed runners and bicyclists, and people who like to walk fast. They were joined, unintentionally, by The Brooklyn Bridge Boot Camp, a gang of eight heaving women who followed their leader’s barking orders through a variety of laps, leg lifts, and squats.
Tyrant/ParkLit Event Thingy TONIGHT
Tyrant Books is participating in ParkLit again this summer and our event is TONIGHT at 6:30! Oh no, that’s really short notice, but anyway, you should come. Susan Froderberg and Eugene Marten will be reading, and Gordon Lish will be doing the introductions.
The reading is supposed to take place outdoors, it being ParkLit and all, but it looks like it’s going to rain, so the event has been moved to upstairs of the Russian Samovar (russiansamovar.com) on 52nd between 7th and 8th Ave, which is a really gorgeous room with lots of leather and marble and they have all kinds of vodka. And not all kinds like Smirnoff or Belvedere, but all kinds like apple and horseradish.
Some info on the readers:
Susan Froderberg (published several times in the Tyrant under the name S.G. Miller) has a novel, Old Border Road, coming out this December by Little, Brown. Her stories have also appeared in Conjunctions, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly, and Massachusetts Review.
Eugene Marten is the author of In the Blind and Waste. Tyrant Books is releasing his third novel, Firework, on June 25th.
Hope to see you all there!
love and kisses,
Gian
Lee Rourke in New York
All you Brooklyn dwellers should come out to Melville House tonight and be the first kids on the F train to read Lee Rourke’s The Canal, a strange explosion of a book that is out as of today. Lee is in town from London & there will be a launch party tonight at Melville’s space in Dumbo, complete with a reading, beer, wine, snacks and people. 7 pm. 145 Plymouth St. Come say hi.
An interview I did with Lee will be posted here in the not so distant future. Today? Tomorrow? Who can be sure?