I could probably use a fourth job

[sovay]

In all the excitement of Bertie Owen and the Dude from Sanhedrin 75a and spending yesterday proofreading the interiors for my forthcoming collection, I forgot to mention that I am reading tonight in Providence as the opening act for Caitlín R. Kiernan's Black Helicopters (2018).

But first I have to find a Verizon store because my phone literally just broke in half. I can travel for a weekend without one, but I would not necessarily prefer to.

Technology, folks.

Comments

[selkie]

....longways or crossways???

Have a great reading! Do good! *cheers*

[sovay]

....longways or crossways???

It was a flip phone. The flip part decapitated itself.

Have a great reading! Do good!

Thank you! I read "The Trinitite Golem." I was asked a couple of weird questions afterward (I like the host, but I don't think I was an appropriate jumping-off point for Adorno's question of poetry after Auschwitz; I have actually contacted them to ask what was up with that) but otherwise I think it went well. One of the things I will miss about Caitlín moving in June is reading with her on a semi-regular basis.

[moon_custafer]

but I don't think I was an appropriate jumping-off point for Adorno's question of poetry after Auschwitz;

fdsjfidglerkkmds was this one of those things where someone uses “question time” as *comment time*?

[sovay]

fdsjfidglerkkmds was this one of those things where someone uses “question time” as *comment time*?

It wast the host/moderator whom I have known for a couple of years now and with whom I have a friendly relationship; I read a story with a golem in it, I was asked about its relationship to traditional golem legends, I talked a little about Oppenheimer and his complex relationship with his Jewishness and how although I didn't think of it at the time of writing the golem in this story actually functions for very assimilated Oppenheimer as a perfectly classic return of the repressed (but I did think about blood libel and wrote very carefully to avoid invoking that with the Manhattan Project, because I wrote a Pesach poem once that I have never reprinted because I looked at it years later and decided that while I knew it was about Jewish vampires, readers who were not me might not necessarily know that it wasn't just a poem about how Jews on Pesach drink blood), and then from my perspective the questions went a little whack-a-ding-hoy.

Comment time was the guy who decided to lecture me from the audience about how the U.S. had to develop the A-bomb because otherwise Hitler would have gotten it and used it first and worst and I thought about asking him if he actually knew the state of the German nuclear weapons development program at the end of World War II (spoiler: it was Heisenberg and some heavy water, because if you marginalize theoretical physics as a "Jewish science" and then either murder your Jewish physicists or give them cause to get the hell out of your country, guess what happens? You do not come out ahead in a nuclear arms race) and then decided it was not worth engaging. He came up to me afterward and asked what "Ashkenazi Jews" were, except since he was unfamiliar with the word he actually asked me about "Anasazi Jews," which, dude, the Native Americans/Lost Tribe of Israel theory has been totally debunked.

This makes it sound like the entire evening was about me feeling weirdly and conspicuously Othered and I should stress that it was not or I wouldn't be telling people that I had such a nice time, but it was a bit more weird and conspicuous Othering than I had expected, which is why I have written to the moderator.

[edit] The moderator and I have spoken; we're cool.