Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr.

The last Katy-Jacob book club pick for 2007 was Last Exit to Brooklyn. It was also the latest entry in my own reading mini-theme for 2007, "Pre-Giuliani New York was so much more interesting."

The book is a collection of semi-connected stories. The biggest link is the geography: the same rough neighborhood of Brooklyn, 1950s-ish. The other connection is the repetition of certain characters, but the recurring names may be a writerly trick to establish universality--or just the simple fact that Brooklyn used to have an awful lot of Vinnies hanging around. Otherwise, the stories don't have much of a shared theme, other than the unrelenting brutality of the wrong side of the tracks.

The first story is a short one about a fight between wannabe tough guys and local sailors. It's kinda like West Side Story--only Maria is a hooker, and there's 150% more broken teeth and bleeding kidneys.

Next, there's a longer, better story about Georgette, a transvestite who obsesses over a neighborhood guy who treats her like crap. The really fascinating thing is the inversion of gender roles in this one. Georgette (along with her drag queen clique) is a hyperfeminized figure, a wistful man's conception of what a girl should be. But she still acts like a "man," in that she pursues Vinnie. In turn, Vinnie becomes the coquette, suggesting that he'll let Georgette sleep with him for cash. Unusual for the time period, I would think. There's a very laid-back attitude about the gender/sex issues overall. It's never clear whether Vinnie and his friends are merely hard-up for sex, and are willing to play fast and loose with "girl" parts in order to get some; or whether they're really latent homosexuals, and know exactly what they're doing. These technicalities are beyond the main issue, which is the cruel pageantry of sexual attraction. Also, the story taught me that "Miss Thing" has been in use by drag queens far longer than I would have expected. If everyone weren't so horrible and benzadrine-laden, the matter-of-fact sexuality would have been refreshing.

The book's centerpiece is "Strike," which follows union lackey Harry as he pretends to run a factory strike. Really, he's just using the union's petty cash to escape from his unhappy marriage, and to explore his taboo gayness. Again, the sexual roles are very much switched around: Harry's wife is the bedtime aggressor, and he can't handle it. So he gets ill, lashes out physically, and exaggerates his machismo at work. There's also a weird duality about what he wants. He seeks the softness and femininity of a traditional wife, but the fact that he's gay complicates that. So all biological women are "ballbusting [c-bombs]," but the transvestites and effeminate men become ideal partners. You want to feel pity for his trappedness, but the fact that he's a total jerk (and commits an ultimately irredeemable act) makes that impossible. Unfortunately, the story bears little resemblance to Last Exit to Springfield despite the union elements, but maybe that's best for Homer's sake.

"Tralala" is the apex of the sexual violence in the book, but by the time you get there, it's like, "Oh, is there more spunk and blood? No biggie." Basically, it's the story of young Tralala, whose cheery name doesn't stop the cynicism and obsession with petty amounts of cash that lead her down the ol' spiral. You know, in Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, I don't remember the scene where soldiers, killing time before they ship out to Europe, lined up in a junkyard to gang rape a strung-out girl who's too far gone to care. Maybe I should go back and check.

The book concludes with "Landsend," which is a smaller nexus of stories about a housing project. While discussing, we tried to figure out whether the poverty of the projects was really worse back then, before welfare reform, or if the drug and gang complications of today make that old-style poverty seem quaint. Hard to tell, because the only remotely decent people in this section are a senile old lady and a woman who thinks the trashiness of her neighbors is contagious. The thread of sexual and social dysfunction from the rest of the book continues here, but seems to have exploded. The anecdotes come together to create a purgatory of poor people and even poorer choices.

When the book ends, it's not because there's any redemptive moment, or even an instance of clear social commentary. It just stops. This is the only justifiable way to end it, but it's hard to take the necessary step back, breathe, and try to process what you've absorbed. I can't help but wonder if the book would have faced the same obscenity trial and villification if it had tried for some (any) moralizing on behalf of the characters. We can handle the Hester Prynnes of the literary world, but what do we do with the Tralalas?

I guess you just try to appreciate the blood and the honesty, and look at the parts that are kinda sweet. Like the small scenes of genuine sensuality that pop up sometimes in all the violent or dirty sex, or the hoped-for romance that Georgette tries so hard to create in an environment that just can't sustain it. Or you wait for Rudy Giuliani to come along and clean it all up.

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 by Dave Eggers et al

The Best American books have become one of the best rackets in publishing. I used to stand in the bookstores at year's end, and be guilted into the idea that I hadn't read nearly enough good essays/sportswriting/short stories throughout the year. Then, when the series grew to about fifty different books every November, I gave up on the guilt-induced buying. Best American Poetry by Monkeys 2007 is just never going to fit into my book budget or my limited fun-reading time. But I do make it a point to pick up Best American Nonrequired Reading each year, mostly because it fills me in on the quirky essays/topical writing that I would have enjoyed reading in the first place. Plus it's got the Eggers/McSweeney's stamp of approval. And what good Park Slope-ite doesn't support her neighbors?

Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 was actually better than its lackluster predecessors from the past few years. More brief and funny pieces, fewer wankfest essays from super-literary journals that no one outside of the Iowa Writers' Workshop has heard of. Also, the intro, traditionally from a celebrity who goes out of his way to sound literary, was less boring this year. Sufjan Stevens (whom, admittedly, I know only from recommendations from friends who have much hipper music taste than I) had the honor this year, and he didn't try to be too writerly. He told an entertaining story about growing up in the hippiest of hippie schools in the 1970s--and it could have been the work of any NPR clique member.

One of the things I like best about Nonrequired Reading is that it gives a taste of the genres I can't tolerate in large doses, but should make a nominal effort to know. Like graphic novels. This year's selection is from Fun Home, which was the edgy comic du jour (am I allowed to call it a comic?) about a year ago. I'd avoided it, because it seemed too trendy--but was nicely surprised by the depth of story. I can still look askance at webcomics, though, right?

The cutesy elements get tiring ("Best American Beginnings of Ten Stories About Ponies," "Best American Names of Television Programs Brought to Their Logical Conclusions"), as does the annual segment where scientists are polled about their "dangerous" political ideas. This is the edgy Best American, we get it.

The good parts more than make up for the tedious bits. Scott Carrier's Rock the Junta looks at censorship and rock-and-roll in the uber-repressive Myanmar. Spin sends a writer to cover a goth music fest in the Midwest (three years ago, you know it would have been Chuck Klosterman). Several stories, including a charming one by Miranda July, show why yuppies shouldn't have kids. And the post-Katrina pieces are starting to be less shellshocked and more interesting. Plus, there's a commencement speech from Conan O'Brien that's pure Conantastic joy, especially when you've gone without him for a while (52 days, not that I'm counting).

I don't think I'd trust all (or most) of my reading to a cabal of high schoolers from California, but I'm certainly content to let them weed out some of the wit and grit from the year's literary morass.

Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen

Woody Allen the director makes concessions to modernity. He casts Will Ferrell, has (finally) stopped casting himself as the romantic lead, and seems to have moved beyond the New York of the 1970s. Woody Allen the writer, not so much. Sure, he makes the occasional reference to the internet, or comments on modern food insanity. But for the most part, his prose is pretty much the same it's been since the 60s. Not many contemporary writers could get away with using slang that was first heard in Brooklyn delis in 1956.

In his latest collection, Mere Anarchy, the Woodman does pretty much the same thing he did in Without Feathers and Getting Even--which is to say, he writes a lot of short pieces with hyperactive premises and even speedier language. None of them here captured my heart quite like "The Whore of Mensa" did, but the book was highly readable. It was actually kinda comforting in its familiarity. I was tempted to tag Woody an Endangered Author, merely because of his age and the unevenness of his last five years' worth of films, but he's not really making a last-ditch attempt at anything. He's keepin' it real--1967 or 2007. In fact, I'm not even sure if he was parodying himself, or if he's just perfected the conceit of overwriting on purpose. I guess he's just Woody being Woody.

More importantly, style issues aside, the book is simply entertaining. For every tired borscht belt joke that my eyes slipped over, I found two or three things that made me chuckle out loud on the subway. Some favorite parts:

"To sum up: apart from my own Beyond Good and Evil Flapjacks and Will to Power Salad Dressing, of the truly great recipes that have changed Western ideas Hegel's Chicken Pot Pie was one of the first to employ leftovers with meaningful political implications. Spinoza's Stir-Fried Shrimp and Vegetables can be enjoyed by atheists and agnostics alike, while a little-known recipe of Hobbes's for Barbecued Baby Back Ribs remains an intellectual conundrum. The great thing about the Nietzsche Diet is that once the pounds are shed they stay off--which is not the case with Kant's 'Tractatus on Starches.'"

"Donald lived at Mr. Eisner's home for six months when he and Daisy Duck were separated. Donald had been having an affair with Petunia Pig, Porky Pig's girlfriend. It was a no-no at Disney to socialize with creatures from a competing studio, but in Donald's case Mr. Eisner chose to look the other way, which upset the shareholders."

Norman Mailer

"Mailer had always thought it senseless to undertake an attack unless you made certain it was printed, for otherwise you were left with a determined enemy who was an unmarked man, and therefore able to repay you at leisure and by the lift of an eyebrow."

When I saw Norman Mailer speak at Harvard earlier this year, he was awfully frail. When he canceled his scheduled part in October's New Yorker Festival, it seemed ominous. And when Philip Roth's new book suggested that Mailer was next to go, it sounded likely. Well, now it looks like the foreshadowing wasn't just hokum. Mailer's gone, and with him he takes a giant chunk of literary heart.

Whatever his personal flaws were (and there were many, as the ex-wives and various stabbees could tell you), he was always fierce. Self-aggrandizing and obnoxious, sure. But he never shied from doing anything in print that he wanted to do. And up until last February at least, he was still prodding, prodding, prodding, trying to goad people into reacting to him as entertainingly as possible. It's like he never stopped being the Mailer of Armies of the Night (always one of my favorites), pissing off as many people as necessary to get to the exact intersection of politics and literary theater. We're losing the guys willing to do this without publicists, without focus groups. The mid-20th century writers were never meant to keep this energy up forever, but it still hurts to see it all dying, bit by bit.

Strike, week 2

People have been predicting what the Writers Guild members would do during the strike...humor columns, illicit scripts, blogs. Most of the guesses were jokes, and it looks like that in less than a week, pretty much all were right.

My heart goes out to these guys--especially when Rachel Axler says, "But we’ve given up our salaries and our jobs — easily the only jobs we’re qualified for — to stand outside and yell at people." If I were funnier on the spot, I like to think that I would have tried the TV writing thing. I love publishing, but I'm not sure I'd be in it if I could hack it as a real writer. And I definitely sympathize with the "but this is the only thing I'm good at!" vibe. So this week's project may be doing something nice for the strike people. Something other than avoiding the few reality shows that aren't scripted.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Junior year of college, I had an American Lit professor who seemed positively insane. He'd rant and rave about the inherent pornography of narrative, and tie everything somehow to sex and primal urges. On the morning of September 11, he kept us cooped up in the TV-less classroom, and railed for an hour about how we (as a generation) had been given an amazing historical opportunity. So yeah. Kinda nuts. But he taught me how to read literature in a much more mature way (my high school self never interpreted The Great Gatsby as a love story between Nick and Gatsby)--and he introduced me to the writing of Philip Roth, whom I've enjoyed quite a bit since that fall. Turns out the professor was a friend and editor of Roth's. After I read a few more of the books, Crazy American Lit Prof made a lot more sense. And I found myself thinking of him often as I read the latest (last?), Exit Ghost.

If Roth and the professor are correct, then life really does come down to the basest of human issues: sex drive and control over one's own body. Exit Ghost is a meditation on the end of both of those--and it's terrifying. It's pretty clearly the end of Nathan Zuckerman, the Roth alter ego from so many of this books. Zuckerman can't pee properly and can't get it up, thanks to a prostatectomy, and this isn't really a problem for him--until it is. The plot is set in motion by his emergence from his self-exile, when he leaves his Berkshires hideaway to get medical treatment in New York. The exhilaration of being back in his old city leads him to answer a home-swapping ad (which resolves my longstanding question of who responds to those strange ads in the back of NYROB); and he becomes involved with a young married couple who ignite his long-dormant alpha male urges. (Zuckerman wants to one-up him and possess her.) The infatuation gets out of hand extremely fast, and he struggles with his total impotence (both physical and game-wise, since he can't elicit more than mild curiosity out of young Jamie). Meanwhile, he's dealing with a minor literary scandal, as an old boyfriend of Jamie's is trying to publish an expose on Zuckerman's former mentor. That's when everything becomes a weird tangle of sublimated urges and frustration.

Roth creates a tangible sense of physical deterioration around Zuckerman, who obsesses over his own state. Zuckerman does it in a curiously detached way, though: while he talks almost incessantly about his incontinence and lack of libido, it takes 162 pages before the word "penis" even shows up. He can't face it directly, so he takes the literary route of describing the hell out of it. He also writes around it, creating a strange play of how things should have gone between himself and Jamie. Since seduction is the one thing he can't do, it becomes the charged focus of their fake flirtation. And it's incredibly sad. He gives "Jamie" all sorts of qualities and expressions he never sees in the real girl--qualities that are suspiciously like his dead mentor's young mistress, who made an incredible impression on him back in the 1950s. Said mistress comes back into Zuckerman's life as well, but as a flawed old woman. The parallel between then and now, as Zuckerman starts to disintegrate in every way possible, is painful to see, but pretty fascinating.

One might argue that this is Zuckerman's swan song, not necessarily Roth's...but the sense of finale is hard to ignore. Roth likes to do books in groups, or arcs--why not finish the same way? The Plot Against America was the end of youth. Everyman was the end of the man (no pun intended). And now Exit Ghost is the end of the creation. I think this might be it for him. There's a section where the line between Zuckerman and Roth becomes especially blurred, when Zuckerman talks about the death of George Plimpton, and the concurrent death of American literature. The parts where Zuckerman derides the upcoming generation of literati are extra steely and angry, even beyond the narrator's usual indignance. It's almost like Roth is daring the reader to compare character and author. Eerie, and yet fitting for a writer who has based so much of his career on daring people to look away--from sex, from class, from politics.

If he is going out, he's going out with some excellent, very Rothian writing. Some passages I liked especially:

"I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occured; but because I've withdrawn as witness and participant both, I never made it to the subway. That would have been wholly out of character for the character I'd become. Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, wiling away the afternoon like someone who had no catching up to do."

"To possess control over one's bladder--who among the whole and healthy ever considers the freedom that bestows or the anxious vulnerability its loss can impose on even the most confident among us? I who'd never thought along these lines before, who from the age of twelve was bent on singularity and welcomed whatever what was unusual in me--I could now be like everyone else.
As though the ever-hovering shadow of humiliation isn't, in fact, what binds one to everyone else."


"The light fading, the room getting smaller, a cab or two going by in the street, the city receding while everything around them becomes close and dark. These two people taking their time with each other, listening to each other. So sexual and so sad. Thick with each of their pasts, though neither knows much of the other's. The pace of it, all that silence and what might be in there. Each of them desperate for entirely different reasons."

"For this wholly unautobiographical writer, blessed with his genius for complete transformation, the choice was almost inevitable. It's what opened his predicament out for him and enabled him to leave the personal behind. Fiction for him was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form."

"So yada yada yada, my cookbook looks just like hers."

Elaine: Yeah. I met this lawyer...we went out to dinner...I had the lobster bisque...we went back to my place, yada yada yada. I never heard from him again.
Jerry: But you yada yada'd over the best part.
Elaine: No, I mentioned the bisque.

Anyway, what does Seinfeld have to do with books, you ask? Well, you may have seen Mrs. Seinfeld, erstwhile socialite and current Friend of Oprah, on all the TV shows plugging her new book, Deceptively Delicious. She's made chocolate pudding with secret avocado in it for Al Roker, and be-squashed mac and cheese for Oprah. And the book itself is cute, not to mention a good idea.

Too bad it's awfully similar to The Sneaky Chef, which just happened to be pitched to HarperCollins TWICE before they jumped on Jessica Seinfeld's proposal. The ideas contained aren't so novel (can recipes even be copyrighted?). But I do feel bad for Missy Lapine and Perseus Books on the timing. It's pretty clear that HarperCollins wanted the book, but turned her down because they wanted a celebrity author (or an author married to a celebrity, anyway).

The New York Times has a good article on the whole thing: Sneaky Food Books: Hot and a Hot Topic.

Book publishing is fun, isn't it?

"We were fractious and overpaid."

Okay, so if you didn't go out and read Then We Came to the End because I liked it, you should go out and read it because the National Book Award committee liked it! I'm just sayin'....

I'm glad to see it getting the props--it was easily one of my favorite books of the past year. Had I not heard about it beforehand, I never would have guessed it was a first novel. And I find myself hearing echoes of the prose whenever I'm doing something banal at the office, which is to say every day. Maybe this should be required reading for all new hires at any office job. I hope the special sales people at Little, Brown are all over that.

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

The first time I heard about Prep, someone was talking about it in my book editing class, and describing it as a guilty pleasure kind of book. So I was really expecting something like the Gossip Girl series, a slick package of gratuitous teen bitchery and sex. [Disclaimer: I haven't read any of the series, but having seen a few minutes of the new CW show, I don't think my assessment is far off.] When I saw the book on my roommate's bookshelf, I thought maybe it would be a good end-of-summer vice read. Color me surprised when the cover held a sticker proclaiming, "New York Times Book Review: One of the Top Ten Books of the Year!" Maybe the Times editors, like the thousands of people who made Prep a bestseller, enjoy a little Mean Girl drama too?

But what's this? The book has no uber-bitches, no rainbow parties. (Don't Google the latter if you have any faith left in the innocence of teenagers.) Instead, it's a fairly quiet coming-of-age book about a swank Massachusetts boarding school. The narratrix is Lee Fiora, a girl whose averageness (social, academic, economic) puts her on the wrong end of the social scale at the prestigious Ault School. However, this is mostly her own doing. She's too timid (and later, too apathetic) to compete with the rich kids--they're not really the ones keeping her alienated. Her crippling self-awareness stops her from engaging in any meaningful ways with her surroundings. However, despite her best efforts at hiding, she manages to acquire friends (or at least allies), and a bizarre, masochistic relationship with one of the chosen boys of her grade. There IS some non-PG stuff, but it's more the endearing, fumbly kind than the "oh my God, I can't believe I'm reading this" kind.

It's one of the slower and more maddening maturation narratives--and all the more real because of that. Kind of Holden-esque, in that you kind of want to shake Lee and make her do stuff in her own interest. And frankly, it scared me a little how much I understood Lee. When she gets into a shadowy "relationship" with social king Cross Sugarman, my cringes were for her, but also for all the times I let myself be the secret girlfriend. Most of the observational stuff is similarly incisive. Sittenfeld really nails what it's like to be the unspectacular kid trying to keep up with inflated circumstances.

The writing's quality comes from its ability to keep Lee's voice young, even though she's working from a much later vantage point. It's funny, light, and quick. The pacing gets a little wonky, moving unevenly through semesters, but it's not that big of a distraction. Overall, it's easy to see why so many people picked this book up, and why it was received so well--even without any mean girls involved.

Some bits I liked best:

"But I was living my life sideways. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was always imagining something else. Grades felt peripheral, but the real problem was that everything felt peripheral."

During a game of "Assassins":
"I knew right away I had ruined it. Whatever jokiness had existed between us--I had killed the substance of it. McGrath would be friendly to me from now on...but the friendliness would be hollow. In killing him, I had ended the only overlap between our lives....McGrath didn't want to talk, of course, it wasn't as if we had anything to say to each other. I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny."

"When I think of Cross now, a big part of what I remember is that sense of waiting, of relying on chance. I couldn't go to his room--it was decided. And that meant that in order to convey to him my concern about his injury, I would have to run into him in the hall when few or no other students are around, and when I did, I'd have to quickly intuit his mood to find out if adjustments were to be made so that we could keep seeing each other.
I realize now: I ceded all the decisions to him. But that wasn't how it felt! At the time, it seemed so clear that the decisions belonged to him. Rules existed; they were unnamed and intractable."

Brooklyn Book Festival

So today was the second annual Brooklyn Book Festival. Taking place in picturesque downtown between Borough Hall and the courthouse, it was basically a big jumble of publishers hawking books, authors hawking themselves, and nobody hawking fair food (to Jacob's discontent).

The booths were unspectacular. It's always good to see little presses working hard to stay alive, but it's hard to get excited about what they're pushing. There should have been more free stuff: books, catalogs, even t-shirts (my big new book publicity idea). And I say that because I'm a free stuff whore, but also because I don't want to spend $10 on a completely unknown book/author. Maybe it's due to all that time I spent with MFAs at Emerson. And if I'm not willing to take risks on new stuff, with my background in how publishing works, what are the chances that most people will? It's not the best system, but the small presses will need to do something to address that. There was some swag, though, and now I have a Nancy Drew "Get Caught Reading" poster, an issue of Poets & Writers, and a "Leave No CEO Behind" button from The Nation Books.

Also, there was some free edumacation. We observed the "Define-a-Thon" for a while, which was basically a spelling bee, but with dictionary definitions. None of the questions we heard seemed all that difficult. I bet some seventh grader would have wiped the floor with those adults.

I didn't catch many of the readings (those tend to be better in quieter, less time-restrictive settings), but the panels were quirky enough to be kinda fun. The first one was a retrospective on On the Road, featuring some dude from Viking Books (who was pretty much there to let us know that the book still sells 100,000 copies per year), an ex-lover of Kerouac's who has published two books of their intimate details, a journalist who's written a book about Kerouac, and another woman who was there to fill in crucial 1950s social details for all of us whippersnappers who wear jeans to public events. There was nothing revelatory, just a lot of the usual background about how Kerouac wasn't really a hippie, how Neal Cassady wasn't a role model, etc. I was hoping that the ex-lover would turn it into a Cheever-esque situation. But no--she stuck to lame, PG stories about Kerouac's reactions to book reviews.

It made me wonder, though: is there a whole subculture of women who sleep with struggling writers, on the tiny chance that someday they'll get a book deal out of it? Like groupies, but with higher aims? If so, I totally squandered my time at Emerson. I could have planned far more effectively.

Later in the afternoon, there was a session with the Simmons family, a.k.a. the guys responsible for part of Run DMC and the Def Comedy/Poetry/Phat Farm empires. This was possibly the most un-literary book pub event I've ever seen. Probably because the guys were artists and not writers, they answered questions with real person answers, not Author Answers--and Rev Run didn't even want to publicize his former books. His wife, Justine, tried hard to get him to talk about his writing (and she did a good job publicizing her own children's book), but Rev Run just rolled his eyes at her and refused to answer anything he didn't feel like talking about. It was refreshing. I didn't see any MTV cameras, so I guess those sparks of family dysfunction won't be broadcast any time soon.


The day's ultimate event was a panel called "Everyone's a (Former) Critic," featuring culture critics who are venturing out of the zone and publishing novels/memoirs. The critics were Chuck Klosterman (whom I still read and like, even when he annoys me), Rob Sheffield of Rolling Stone, and Ed Park of The Believer and the Village Voice. They talked at length about what it's like to move from moving from critic to critee (no idea if that's a word, but I'm going with it). There was also a lot of talk about the nature of criticism in general, and all three had insightful comments about trying to create art by talking about someone else's. I was especially struck by something Klosterman said, that book criticism is the only kind of criticism that takes the same form as its subject. Apparently, there's an inherent unfairness in writing about music or movies instead of taking them on in the same media. He talked about the irony that the only thing he's really qualified to do (write about other writers) is the one thing he won't do, opting to take on music and television instead. I'm butchering his words here, but the concept made a lot of sense at the time.

The panel started to get very strange toward the end of the hour. While the critics were still talking, a woman began to creep up the stairs on the side of the stage. Judging by the uneasy looks that the moderator kept casting that way, this was definitely unplanned. When the woman reached the stage and started wandering around, no one really knew what to do. When she sat down behind Chuck Klosterman, nobody (onstage or off) was paying any attention to what Rob Sheffield was saying. Nobody escorted her off, though (ahhh, meek literati). A minute later, after the moderator chose to ingore her, she stole Ed park's water bottle before wandering off again. If the whole thing was staged: worst clown ever.

Cool bit at the end: I ran into some Emerson folks who moved out here last year. Random, but neat.

So yeah...I look forward to an even better organized event next year (they're promising international authors! I assume it will take a full year to get all the visas approved). Either way, definitely a fun way to spend an early fall weekend afternoon.