Three Times

Over the next two months or so, I'll be reading three times at the Asian American Writers' Workshop (112 W. 27th St.) 


 The first time is coming up soon: On Thursday, August 2, at 6 p.m. I'll be joining two science fiction writers, Anil Menon and Charles Yu, whose new book is called Sorry Please Thank You, and whose previous book was the excellent How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. (Here's my review from the L.A. Times.) As of this time, I am not sure what I will be reading!

Then, next week, on Friday, August 10, I'll be part of the Ed Lin/Jen Kwok–organized "Mouth to Mouth Open Mic: All Stars Edition." I will be reading from a...call it a playlet...a whimsical dialogue? And I think it won't just be me, there will be a real live actress performing with me. I think.


Then, later in September, I will be reading with Katie Kitamura, author of The Longshot and the new, Coetzee-y novel Gone to the Forest. (Details TK.)


(I will also be doing a non-NYC reading in September—details TK.)

Either/Yore

I sat down for a long interview with The Days of Yore earlier this summer, and it's now up at their site. (The photo is from a reading I did in June, snapped by F.S. Forsyth Harmon.)


One thing I mention is my juvenile attempts to re-create the adventures of Encyclopedia Brown; moments after the interview went up on Monday, I saw the news that EB's author, Donald J. Sobol, had passed away.

Infra dig

Cassavetes’ only professional encounters with Steven Spielberg date from around this same period. For three days, an eighteen-year-old Spielberg worked as a PA on Faces, fetching coffee and cigarettes for members of the cast and crew, before he got tired of it and quit. Two years later, Spielberg was on a Hollywood soundstage watching Cassavetes act in a television show when the filmmaker, who couldn’t possibly have remembered him from before, surprised him buy coming up at a break and asking what Spielberg thought of the scene they were shooting. When Spielberg told him he himself wanted to be a director someday, Cassavetes proceeded to ask him how he would direct him in the scene he was playing and then took his advice in the next take. It was typical Cassavetes. No one was beneath his dignity to talk to and, just possibly, learn from—not even the twenty-year-old kid standing off to the side of a shoot.

—Cassavetes on Cassavetes

The middle years

A writer verging into the middle years lives in dread of losing his way to the publishing house and wandering down to the Bowery or the Battery, there to disappear like Ambrose Bierce. —James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times