i'll let you be my chaperone at the halfway home

This week marked the momentous occasion of my first ever reading as a featured reader. I was extremely psyched at the opportunity and honored to read at SFSU's Poetry Center, where countless illustrious poets have thrown down. I read a big chunk of Thomas, which is growing by the day. Er, week. I'm pretty busy.

So for all egoists out there who have already self-googled, there's another fun web activity awaiting you. Look up your birthday on Wikipedia. See all the events and people with whom you are connected in this truly meaningful way. What killed me are the people with whom I share a birthday: Virgil, Nietzsche, P.G. Wodehouse, Mario Puzo, Italo Calvino, Michel Foucault, Lee Iacocca, and Todd Solondz (who was told personally by one of my students in New York that I have a crush on him). Mata Hari, Dutch exotic dancer and spy, died on my birthday. That's quite the arbitrary family I'm in.

Reminds me of that artificial family that was set up in a Kurt Vonnegut novel (Slapstick?) in which you were assigned family randomly with a word and a number as your middle name, but if you didn't like your family you could tell them "Why don't you take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut? Why don't you take a flying fuck at the mooooon?"

A thought after seeing Interpol this week: Indie rock is becoming the new genre to which teenage girls' ears are bending. They are showing up at concert with posters. WTF?

Some Thomas for you:

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the eagle’s jerky movements gave rise to suspicion. fishing line is undetectable in the film’s grain. animatronic eagle laden with codes and ciphers. its foamrubber head a palimpsest of secret flesh. unnaturally white. cryptology cryptographer raptor. we will learn all its secrets and then send out faxes. i will sing its wire armature, its delicate and convincing synthetic plumage. so downy at the base and nearly weightless, even a handful. i’ll just tuck one in my pocket for safekeeping and xerox the rest.

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