The Happy Booker: Not Your Mother's BookMobile

Scenes from Pindeldyboz 5 West Coast tour

Jami Attenberg, our new cyberpal, emails from the road, as a member of the Pindeldyboz 5 West Coast tour. Celebrating its fifth anniversary and release of volume 5, the literary magazine's editors and contributors headed west for a memorable reading series featuring new authors, hot music and cold beer.

For you East Coasties who are feeling left out (and you will, after you read Jami's account!), there will be another opportunity to share the love, p'boz style, when the tour bus rolls into Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a blow out literary event—with a promise of a "the only punk-rock pirate puppet show on the planet."

Info on Pindeldyboz 5 and its contributors can be found here.

Here's Jami, filling us in on what we missed on the opposite coast:

We're in Seattle right now, sitting on my friend's deck on Capitol Hill, staring at the omnipresent Space Needle, and we are recovering, gently, from the last night of readings. The kind people of Seattle
sure do know how to show a girl a good time. But I'll get to that in a second.

We're promoting the release of Pindeldyboz 5, a literary magazine from Queens, by touring the West Coast. We started out in San Francisco last Wednesday at the Makeout Room, a well-attended event featuring the likes of Stephen Elliott, Suzanne Kleid, Shauna McKenna, Keith Knight (my personal favorite - he did a reading with a slide show of his comic strips and talked a bit about censorship), and Jimmy Chen. Rounding out the night were my tourmates Pboz Executive Editor Whitney Pastorek and Associate Editor Sarah Balcomb, performing their world famous Phil Collins Operetta. It was nice to see such an enthusiastic audience, because sometimes readings can be pretty dull, I'm the first to admit that. And as with all of the stops on the tour, all of the readers brought their A-game. So thanks San Francisco literati, you rule.

The next night Whitney headed to Oakland for another reading at some vegan cafe and Sarah and I stayed in San Francisco and had really awesome sushi. Man, I love sushi. Why don't people ever have
readings in sushi restaurants?

We headed up toward Portland next, pulling into Eureka for the night. As it turns out two folks from the Perpetual Motion Roadshow - Todd Dills from The 2nd Hand and Liisa Ladouceur (Sign Poetry) - were
coming down from Portland on their tour and had stopped in Eureka as well, so we met up for a beer or two. They told us ghost stories about a house they had stayed in, and we learned about Liisa'sproject, which involves her taking pictures of signs in towns the day she arrives there, and then creating a new slide show presentation and poem for that very night. Isn't that awesome? She reminded me you can always be upping the stakes in your performance.

The next day was a loooong drive to Portland. The first part of the day was lovely (sticking our feet into the Pacific, stopping at the huge Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues), but the last three hours in the driving rain really sucked.

But then Portland saved us. Portland we love you! We love Kevin Sampsell (Future Tense) and Frayn Masters (who got my personal favorite award for the night with her story about a guy who dates
donuts) and Emily Bliquez (Tin House) and the kind folks at the Urban Grind. It was the first night I got to read, as well, so I enjoyed it more than the previous event. Afterwards Kevin and Frayn and local
ingenue Maggie Powers hosted us, taking us to a dive bar/restaurant the name of which currently eludes me in my hungover state, and then to Voodoo Donuts, where the following conversation took place:

Whitney (who has her guitar with her and often does lovely 80s covers renditions): Hey, I wonder how much money I could make if I started busking.
Frayn: Four dollars.
Whitney: OK, let's see.

And so she did and it was brilliant. When you can get a skate punk to give you a dollar, that's some talent. If she had only done it every event, we would have had some serious gas money.

The next day we visited Powell's (oh my god the best book store EVER), and stopped by Portland's annual literary festival Wordstock for a minute but then we were off again, up and away to Seattle. Our reading was at the Rendezvous, a former junkie bar transformed into merely a dive bar now. I had thrown a performance event years ago there when I used to live in Seattle, so it was nice to see everything came full circle. Sean Carman, Shya Scanlon, Louisa Peck (personal favorite award winner with her story about the theft of a fish), and Ryan Boudinot read, as did I, and Whitney and Sarah of course. Then some homeless superhero performed, but I have to admit by then I was well on my way to getting drunk, so I cannot report on that particular part of the night.

And then: more drinking and bar hopping and really it was the first night we didn't have to get up early the next day and it was so nice to be in Seattle and there was so much talking and laughing and storytelling but now my head really hurts. We don't want to go back, but alas we will return tomorrow, with memories of the kind people of the Northwest to take with us. We'll do it all again in one more week in New York City at Galapagos in Williamsburg on 5/5/5. New Yorkers, come help us celebrate Pindeldyboz's 5th Annniversary!

Comments

Dan Wickett did an interview with Whitney from PBoz and I thought "I could write for her." Sure I haven't worked up the guts to submit, but that's more a testament to the fact that I don't really do short stories (heck, I can't explain the presence of a new purse in less than two hours!). That interview made me search out the website (not as easy as you'd think -- there was a typo in the interview) and pre-order the new issue.

I'm a proud owner of Attenberg's "Deli Life" -- the husband heard her interviewed on WFMU (yes, his local station is in New Jersey. Gor figure) and suggested her as perfect for me. At first I thought, "Wow, we're breaking up...", then I realized he was feeding my addiction. Smart man!

Posted by: booksquare | April 28, 2005 at 10:08 PM