Shnirele, perele, gilderne fon

This post comes in two parts.

The first: I am incredibly pleased with last night's reading. Insofar as I can reconstruct from memory, I read "Di Vayse Pave," "Kaddish for a Dybbuk," "Of Chasing After Yesterdays," "Sheydim-tants," "Postscripts from the Red Sea," "Madonna of the Cave," "Martyrology," "Wisdom," "Tzaddik," "Shnirele, Perele," and "Postcards from the Province of Hyphens," all out of A Mayse-Bikhl except for the first and last; Richard Michelson read a cycle of his autobiographical adult work from Battles & Lullabies and a pair of YA poems from Animals Anonymous and I liked both very much. People wanted copies afterward. (Of the two international envelopes erzebet mailed me, I sold the contents of one entire and one additional copy went in trade for Michelson's collection.) People wanted their copies signed. This even happened with people I didn't know—negothick had met me at the train that afternoon in New London, nineweaving joined us for dinner at a slow but tasty pan-Asian restaurant called Red House, and then teenybuffalo, cucumberseed, ap_aelfwine and hans_the_bold all turned up to the reading. I ended up singing "Shnirele, Perele" in the after-conversation, which may have impressed a Hadassah board. There was a small afterparty at Negothick's, with more singing. I stayed the night at the local Marriott and read some essays from my awesome book of An-sky before bed. I am in a lot of pain, very tired, and still quite happy, I wrote to strange_selkie. It's even Connecticut in autumn and I don't want to kill myself right now.

The second: I write all this from Hartford Union Station, where I am stuck until nine-fifteen [update: nine-fifty-five] because we missed the two earlier buses due to a toxic combination of traffic and miscalculation and I cannot even do any of my work online, because the official free wireless refuses to let me log on. The morning was fine—I caught a ride to Newington with Teeny, spent the afternoon with Hans-the-Bold, the Jurassic trackway of Dinosaur State Park (where I bought a book about ancient fossil hunters for my cousin Tristen), and Indian buffet at Bombay Olive. We talked about television, politics, bad philosophy. I recommended him Donald Kingsbury's Courtship Rite (1982). He almost showed me Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987). And I ran out of pain threshold about two hours ago, when we were walking around downtown Hartford in the misting rain. I had to pay double for my ticket because I hadn't bought it online. I don't know why Connecticut wants to keep me—we really don't have good history—and I hate the feeling that I cannot even have an ordinary day to follow a good one; I know it's not reprisal from the universe, but the rest of this sentence deleted for irrational.

I am glad of all of this trip but the getting home. Seriously, I am now sitting on a bus—with wireless—delayed twenty-five minutes and now fifteen minutes more, waiting for the very last connection of the night and I am still in Hartford. I would be self-medicating with the Klezmatics if I could use headphones. There have got to be better ways.

[edit]

Just after one in the morning, I got home. And now I am going to bed.