Elsewhere 2

Gary Sullivan's Elsewhere no. 2 (w/ text by Nada Gordon)!

Rodney Koeneke: Reading Report

Well, it's been almost a week since Rodney Koeneke's visit in the Emergent Forms Reading Series here at SOU, so this is really late, but I need to report that Rodney's reading and colloquium were both terrific. He read on Wednesday evening from Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003) and his brand-new Musee Mechanique (BlazeVox, 2006), as well as doing his neo-benshi treatment of Guru Dutt's 1957 film "Pyaasa." For the colloquium the following morning, he fielded student questions about his work and spoke about flarf, Bollywood, Olson's Projectivism, and lots of other topics.

Rodney and his wife Lesley Poirier stuck around for the whole weekend, so we were able to do a little junk-shopping and sightseeing. On Saturday we drove out to the nearby little wild-west town of Jacksonville (now a postcardy little cluster of antique shops and bed-and-breakfasts) and had the strongest Margaritas of our lives. I turned Rodney and Lesley on to the first two episodes of Deadwood (which, it has recently been announced, is not going to be picked up by HBO for a fourth season despite having millions of fans and being basically the best television series in the history of the planet). In short, lots of pleasant, stressless fun--it was wonderful to see both of them.

This wasn't much of a reading report, I guess. Those of you who've followed this blog for any length of time know I always have a hard time coming up with things to say about readings--not because the readings aren't memorable, but simply because I am an extremely unimaginative and unexpressive reporter on readings.