Three readers tonight, and again I have only brief notes.
Carol Bly read an essay called "How Radiation Oncology Nearly Made Me a Conservative." The style and delivery of this was vaguely reminiscent of Garrison Keillor -- and Bly's from Minnesota, so it must be a Minnesota thing.
Mark Axelrod, who's teaching a screenwriting workshop, read two selections from his novel Bombay California -- a novel which is set in the world of Hollywood screenwriting and which apparently incorporates an actual screenplay (though he didn't read any of that). These were pretty amusing in a "boy, Hollywood is a weird and fucked-up place" kind of way. Then he read several short-shorts from his collection Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage which were quirky and amusing but I didn't find them as funny as the Hollywood stuff.
Last was Cynie Cory, a very energetic redhead; she read several poems from her first book, American Girl, then two from her sonnet sequence Clink Street (which was just a finalist for the Larry Levis Prize), and finally several 8-line syllabic poems from her new manuscript, which she wrote while very sick and reading Byron in London (lots of references to Byron & also to Bob Dylan). While she wasn't quite my personal cup of tea, she had a lot of energy and some interesting turns of phrase, and I think a lot of my fellow bloggers out there would like her -- she's one of those hot young queer semi-formalists. (I think that means like a tea-length dress rather than the full ballgown, right?) She was quite interesting, really. And cute.
I skipped the reception tonight -- I was just tired enough that even the promise of free food didn't lure me in. Maybe tomorrow.
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