The Plan 99 BookThug launch on Oct 26th was definitely standing room only. (The best seat in the house might be someone’s shoulders, if you’re short enough.) But if the crowd being spellbound and the lineup to buy and have book signed lasting what seemed like hours, indicates anything, it was a popular event too. (Did we break past double-digits? Almost I bet.)
Mike Blouin did part of his story of stuntman from memory. The story mixes script, fact, fiction, poetry, and anecdote. He nails local valley dialect among his snippets of two timelines, the events of the stuntmen and the making of a film about it decades later. Here’s the trailer for his book I don’t know how to behave.
Sandra Ridley read from Counting House which is the opposite of linear thinking in a different direction. Poems arranged in grids sometimes allow the reader to make the combinations in her characteristically dark landscape of transience and almosts. But you knew that we wouldn’t be for forever, right? she asks at one point in the text. (I paraphrase from laziness of finding that actual page with trick-or-treaters almost upon us.)
Andre Alexis’ A, in contrast to both, is a novel that goes ambling forward following a sort of Walter Mitty book geek who adores a secretive poet. The foibled fable of the fellow who is a protagonist fantasizes about tracking down the famous poet, perhaps leaving his bibliography of all his works, in a sort of break and entry gift, should he ever figure out where the writer lives. What happens when you do meet your literary idol? To the idol or to idolator?
Leave a comment