It is truly amazing what a meeting with an idol of yours can do ... I feel much better post-Christopher Moore. My idols are usually poets or dead obscure artists or poets ... it's nice to have a living idol, a fiction writer even! I am so picky about my fiction since it seems a great investment to me. But as I have said before ... I love Christopher Moore. It's smart and fun, a pretty good rarity in "popular fiction." Another "popular" fiction writer I truly feel is truly great would be Jasper Fforde. There are others, but these are my current passionate fiction pursuits.
The Christopher Moore reading was amazing. And he didn't read at all, attesting he was not a good reader and talked smartly and hilariously off the cuff ... and off of sticky index card notes. I did not know sticky index cards existed, but I am going to have to get some. Did you know the really old anteater at the Tahoma Zoo passed away? Neither did I ... till Mr. Moore told us so.
I got some photos, blushed A LOT and giggled A LOT, a problem I have when meeting writers I admire ... and I really wish I didn't. I feel it gives me a "stupid" vibe or something. When I was taking a photo he said, "BFF!" so cool. I almost fainted. No, I didn't ... but I was like: "BFF ... Cool!" I am such a geek! But I did give him a signed copy of my book ... he said he'd have something to read on the plane. I hope he likes it and tell me so!
The other good news about that magical evening at the Borders in Ann Arbor was that my poetry book, Small Murders, was in the poetry section. I was not expecting that and so was pleasantly surprised.
Often, I think serious readers are lonely. It is sometimes difficult to hang out with someone and be reading a book (though I have tried this and I have realized it's rude), hence the typical "loneness" of readers. I think that is why it is so great and so amazing to meet an author and like-minded readers. There were a few in line who seemed cool, but I was too shy (and nervous waiting to meet Christopher) to say anything to them.
Now I have begun reading Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. It is truly beautiful and poetic and I will save that discussion for later ... at least after Volume One, Swann's Way. And also Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. I ran into a friend in the bookstore yesterday and he totally turned me on to this fascinating writer. Thanks, Little Paul! More on Pessoa (and Little Paul and I's bizarre chain of coincidences in the period of 30 minutes in Barnes and Noble) later as well. And of course, I always have to have a nonfiction book and a poetry book going as well, and those are The Lobotomist by Jack El-Hai, about Dr. Walter Freeman; and The Dream Songs by John Berryman (again, yes), respectively.
But just a taste of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet:
Writing #154
Who am I to myself? Just one of my sensations. My heart drains out helplessly, like a broken bucket. Think? Feel? How everything wearies when it's defined!
1 comment:
Just a quick note: I was with Carrie on this trip and gotta say -- it was so very cool to see her book of poetry "Small Murders" at the Borders in Ann Arbor, MI.
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