Bats
Friday, May 30, 2008
Wednesday night I couldn't sleep. Imaginary bats crawled across my face with their thumb-tacky little flap-hands and licked the sugar from my cheek as I rolled around in bed and thought, for the first time really, of all the ways the reading could go wrong. The Lydia Davis people will show up and pitchfork me; that thought was the tinkerbell song on loop as I finally fluffed my way into unconsciousness at something like five in the morning. And when I woke up at eight, huff! like that, I was thinking of mean things to say to a woman I know, a woman I would wear on my ear like a conch shell. A woman with the heart of a thirteen year old. Which is black, friend, if you're keeping score. Like onyx. Black black black. This was the funk in which I drank my coffee.
The day did not turn out as full of vipers as that. I had work to do, after all. Got the word from Poetry Fred that Philip Nikoleyev would be filling in for Lydia Davis. Very good. I knocked together a review for Kirkus of a life-affirmingly bad book, so that was American money in my pocket. Watched some Dynasty Handbag performances online, which got me thinking about the June 12th performance. Sent along this video to friends. I dressed well and came to the reading. Met Fred and company for plum wine at Hiro, where I kept calling Philip "Nicholas," to the point where I just started calling him "you," and Ange talked about her lost year in Morocco. At Solas, the house was packed, it was our best turnout yet. I think even the Lydia Davis people enjoyed themselves. Philip was fantastic in spite of my mistreatment of him. Lewis Warsh was like good heavy metal, clean and tough. I had a little bed of triumph to sleep on for eight hours last night, thereby fortifying myself for the third-rank horrors of Friday.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:01 PM,
