MIKE SCALISE

It’s a lit-y couple of weeks, apparently. Readings and book festivals are spread across the DC/VA/MD area like a thin, delicious film of literary mayonnaise (or something), which is exciting if you’re me but kind of grating and awkward if you’re my wife. Either way, I’m a little late to give a good preview of it all, so rather than your standard Monday link dump, here’s a recap of what’s happened and a look at what’s to come.

What’s Already Happened: Cheryl’s Gone + 510 Readings

My Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule caused me to miss this past week’s Cheryl’s Gone reading–which featured a “full-on 6 piece experimental musical collaboration” with poet Rod Smith–so on Saturday I took a quick drive out to Baltimore with a couple friends to check out this month’s installment of the 510 Reading Series. Like this past week’s Cheryl’s Gone, it starred Michael Kimball, but also some people I met in Vermont, and someone who The Today Show recognized for her book about naked swim parties.

The night’s theme was “dirty words.” Each author read a short piece inspired by a lascivious word, which gave way to some of the most surprisingly educational and nuanced forays into vulgarity I’ve ever seen. (Maud Casey’s narrative encyclopedia entry on “pheromones” did some groundbreaking work defining the unsung, common condition of teenage boys’ fingers; and regardless of whether I wanted to or not, I got to learn from Stacey D’Erasmo all about sliverballing). It was a huge crowd in a tiny space. You can see a little slice of me cramped against the wall, obscured by Tita Chico’s beverage. Two infants cried and cooed and spat up on their mother’s legs the whole time, which gave the event a sheen of odd, sublime inappropriate-ness that I haven’t decided how to fully describe.

In People I Know news, it was an added bonus afterward to be able to meet up with my friend, Joanna Pearson, whose recent Modern Love essay in the NY Times about Googling, dating and DC prompted courting experts Alexander Stone and Steven David to take a painfully earnest look at her “low self esteem.” So it was a good night for fun explorations of fundamental awkwardness.

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The last few weeks have been pretty hectic, and during this time a bunch of people that I know have made some things happen. So mixed in with your standard links to everything under the sun, some long overdue news about my acquaintences accomplishments. Nice, right?

Congrats to person I know and DC-deserter Ryan Call, who was named the fiction editor of NOO, a journal that “encourages mainstream readers to reconnect with literature and diverse critical thinking.”

Jacket Copy tries to decipher the recent Candian literary feud (insert “what’s that all aboot?” joke here).

Ever wonder how Dave Eggers & Co. picked the selections for The Best American Nonrequired Reading Series? Well, here are the transcripts.

Person I know Sufiya Abdur-Rahman recently broadcast an excellent essay for NPR’s This I Believe series.

The Believer says goodbye to Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column.

Salon talks with DC-ish author Curtis Sittenfeld about her new DC-ish book, “American Wife.”

Other Latitudes author and person I know Brian Brodeur has a poem up on Verse Daily.

Check out this furniture made from used books (via BoingBoing).

Politics & Prose, meet Junot Diaz. Junot Diaz, meet rabid, stuffed bookstore.

Just because he loves blogs so much, figure I’d link to PaperCuts’ promoting a conversation about “Buzz” Bissinger’s 2000 book, Friday Night Lights.

The annual and tremendous Fall for the Book Festival is underway. Here’s the blog, the website, and the RSS feed of Google Calendar events. (I’m most looking forward to the So to Speak reading–where I stuttered and stammered out this nonsense last year–featuring people I know Alyson Foster, Sarah Klenakis, Danika Stegeman, Sally Keith and Kyoko Mori).

And finally, from person I know Scott Berg’s cover story in the WaPo Mag last week, “The Beginning of the Road“:

DAN BAILEY IS AS CASUAL AND AMIABLE A PERSON AS YOU’D EVER WANT TO MEET, but there’s something about the milieu over which he presides — a seriously funky room full of powerful computers and diligently working students at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County — that seems to require me to use the word “mastermind.” This is UMBC’s Imaging Research Center, a high-technology hive of undergraduates and master’s candidates under Bailey’s tutelage who are producing amazing examples of digital animation at a ridiculous pace. The center’s commissions come from all over and have recently included a tour through the ancient cities of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, a visualization of architect Louis Kahn’s unbuilt Hurva Synagogue, a digital puppet of President Bush for real-time editorial cartooning, and a virtual stroll at eye level through the adjacent apartments of sisters Etta and Claribel Cone in Baltimore’s Marlborough building, where until 1950 one of the world’s most impressive private collections of Matisses, Picassos, Cezannes, van Goghs and Renoirs hung on the walls. Bailey’s students are also working on a digital representation of Sherman’s march and a complex multiplayer video game, based loosely on psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which relies on cognitive teamwork to rebuild a post-apocalyptic world.

I just got back from Middlebury, my apartment smells much, much better than I do, and I think I’m going to sleep for about a week. I’d like to post a nice little wrap-up of the last two weeks, but I’m far too wiped for something like that right now.

Good thing the AP did a story (that WaPo picked up) on my fellow waiters. From the left: Cutter, Gerald, Christian. (I am probably in the kitchen.)  Since I joined the group mid-stream–thanks Victor E., wherever you are–I was getting a blistering orientation from the unstoppable Tiphanie Yanique during the lunchtime shift that the AP reporter came to observe. He wore a tucked-in polo shirt that actually had an Associated Press logo stitched onto it, and though I had an excellent time as a waiter, I was glad to escape his curiosity.

At this point the WaPo article can tell you pretty much the same thing as I can about the experience. So can this one, for that matter. And this one. And this one. Update: and this one.

So Instead, here are some photos people took. Click over to take a look.

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