Events

Announcing the next WOLD NEWTON READING EXTRAVAGANZA! Hosted by Wet Asphalt's own Eric Rosenfield.

Monday Oct 3rd at 6:30pm at an EXCITING NEW LOCATION:
The Way Station
683 Washington Ave
btw Prospect and St Mark's
Brooklyn, NY

The world's greatest steampunk and Doctor Who themed bar!

With a special comic book audio-visual experience! You will SEE and HEAR COMIC BOOKS right before your eyes! With the authors presented IN THRILLING TRUE-LIFE 3D!

With
Dave Roman
Two-time New York Times bestselling creator of ASTRONAUT ACADEMY: ZERO GRAVITY

“There will not be a better all-ages graphic novel published this year than Astronaut Academy. Period.” – Marc Mason, The Comics Waiting Room

And

Jim Ottaviani
World's preeminant writer of comics about science, writer of FEYNMAN, the larger-than-life true story of the SMARTEST MAN ALIVE, a physicist who grew up in Queens, worked on the Manhattan Project at 23, won the Nobel Prize and wrote funny things about picking up girls.

YOU MUST COME TO WITNESS THE SCIENCE!

And THEN!
On Thursday Nov 10th at 7pm
Also AT THE WAY STATION
Will be multiple Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy award winner MICHAEL SWANWICK, whose new book DANCING WITH BEARS is about con men in a delirious future Russia.

With him will be recently Hugo nominated and critically acclaimed NK JEMISIN, in honor of the release of the final book of her INHERITANCE TRILOGY, THE KINGDOM OF GODS, which is about deities as weapons of mass destruction, a city on a spire and one hundred thousand kingdoms.

AND ALSO! There will also be an exhilarating STAGE COMBAT DEMONSTRATION by stage combat instructor, stunt man and KUNG FU MASTER MIKE YAHN.

BE THERE OR BE SAD YOU ARE NOT THERE!

Videos are up from the Carol Emshwiller 90th birthday event! Included is a fascinating 30+ minute interview with everyone's favorite nonagenarian, and a hiliarious set from official Carol Emshwiller birthday magician, Magic Brian!

Another Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza this Sunday!

Join us for steampunk western magical realism in a novel thats garnered rave reviews from Ursula Le Guin, The Onion AV Club, Locus and more, Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World. Join us for New York Times Notable and multi-award-winning writer of the unsettling and sublime Jeffrey Ford. Join us for flarf poetry with Fullbright scholar and New York Foundation for the Arts fellow Sharon Mesmer, author of Annoying Diabetic Bitch. Join us for music once more by the miraculous John Pinamonti and the Atomic Nevada Two. Join us! Resistance is NOT AWESOME. Hosted by Eric Rosenfield (that's ME!)

The event is at 6:30pm this Sunday, January 30th at Word Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (Directions.) All FREE OF CHARGE, as always.

If you click over to the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza website you can get video of the reading that myself and Ed Champion hosted here in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, including Cat Valente reading from The Habitation of the Blessed which explores the myth of Prester John, Brian Francis Slattery and the West Constantinople Squeezebox Orchestra and sexy dancing!

There's also information about our next event in Januray, featuring Felix Gilman, Jeffrey Ford and Sharon Mesmer!

So the Wold Newton Reading Extravaganza recently inaugurated its new website which has video from the last reading by Brian Francis Slattery and Charles Yu as well as various bonus materials and awesomeness. This weekend will be another great event featuring Cat Valente reading from her book about Prester John, The Habitation of the Blessed, along with belly dancing and burlesque! All for free, at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint. See the website linked to above for more info.

Meanwhile, Wet Asphalt will probably continue to be light until the end of the month when I might have time to breath again. Stay tuned every body!

Justs a reminder that tonight is the WOLD NEWTON READING EXTRAVAGANZA at WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at 6:30.

Charles Yu, Brian Francis Slattery, Jonathan Berger, Ed Champion and Eric Rosenfield, on one stage. One of them may even make it out alive!

Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman points out that the GOP, once the party of ideas, has "become the party of Beavis and Butthead."

I couldn't agree more, but I think they're actually a little more Butthead than Beavis these days. See, apparently some C list pundit on CNBC went off on a tangent about the Boston Tea Party and how apparently he sees some link between The Stimulus Package and the Stamp Act or something, because he has called for Americans who agree with him to re-enact the Boston Tea Party in protest of it.

Apparently, the wealthiest 5% of americans are unhappy with the fact that under the Stimulus act with it's extension of the waiver for the AMT, they're going to save only somewhere in the vicinity of a few grand on their taxes this year vs current law, and really they think that they ought to be getting an even bigger tax break.

And somehow, and the way these scum do this never ceases to astound me, those wealthiest 5 percent have convinced a bunch of other idiots to go out protest with them that they didn't get enough of a tax break.

That's right folks, the conservatives are having themselves a good old fashioned patriotic street protest. Because apparently not happy with putting the economy in a tailspin with their disastrous dogmatic adherence to a bullshit economic theory that most of them don't even know the name of, they would now like to take this opportunity to whine about the fact that while the income by percentage of the population increases exponentially across the populations in the top ten percent of earners in the US, the tax brackets barely increase at all over that range. Meaning that a person who makes 300,000 grand a year pays roughly the same percentage of his income in taxes as somone making in excess of 2 million a year.

Of course, it's no secret that taxation is bordering on regressive in the USA. The Republicans have been trying to make that happen for decades now, and the result is the monstrous increase in deficits and debt that have been happening since Saint Ronnie Ray-Gun had the purse strings in the eighties. And, y'know, I've watched Fox News, so I know that these fucking scumbags are capable of getting their panties all twisted up at the drop of a hat.

But to actually stage a Nation Wide Protest because the aren't getting still MORE money? That's just ghoulish. They've turned into that douchebag who insists on splitting the check evenly at the end of the night even though he had three times as many drinks and the live Maine lobster while everyone else picked at appetizers. Seriously Republicans, we on the left, we know a little something about staging a protest. We've been at it a lot longer than you, and we picked up a few things over the years. One of the most important rules? Surprisingly enough, it's the rule that says you should never protest over an issue that makes you look like a greedy sack of shit. Funny how this one works out, but when you go out in public and make a lot of noise about what a greedy sack of shit you are, you don't win over a lot of new political allies super anxious to be your best friend so that everyone will think that they are greedy sacks of shit too.

But by all means, if you all insist on having your little jamboree, go nuts. But you really should be ashamed of yourselves.

UPDATE: I am sort of annoyed that more people aren't as annoyed by this as I am. Maybe it's just that word hasn't got out enough. Still, even if these things are a raucous success, it's not going to change anything. Obama is still president. Democrats still control the legislature. And conservatives are still too dense to realize how effete and privileged organizing a national day for a tea party makes them.

I went to the "Three Musketeers" event at the 92nd Street Y which was a reading and then interview with Umberto Eco, Salmon Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa. I wrote about the event on Filthy Habits, and now that post was quoted by the 92Y Blog itself. Also audio of the entire event has been posted on the PEN American website. It was a pretty amazing evening, and worth listening to.

Tonight I will be attending Straight out of Angoulême, Words without Borders' event with Charles Burberian and Philippe Dupuy, creators of the French Monsieur Jean comics (some of which have recently been collected in the book Get A Life which I highly recommend). These two guys have been kind of heroes of mine since I first read there work years ago in the anthology Drawn and Quarterly, and my one attempt at online comics (which shall go unnamed) openly aped their style.

Tomorrow, I'll be at the National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony, an award which really needs a nickname. The Crities? The Nats? The Natties?

Yesterday was day 2 of the New York Independent and Small Press Book Fair, much more sparsely attended than the first day, probably because of the snow. The first panel I attended was an agent talking about how to pitch agents, whose tone I found extremely condescending and when she said "Remember the golden rule: show don't tell" I realized I wasn't in 8th grade anymore and left the room. However, later I conferred with my friend Jon who was in attendance and he said "Did you hear the questions being asked at the end? Condescending might have been the right way to go with these people." The second panel that I attended was on self-publishing, which I think was about summed up by from Booksurge (one of only two panelists) who citing some frighting statistics about how 70% of all books published don't earn out their advance and then said "Self publishing is more about a passion about your book than about making money." Fair enough. Of course, you can make money self-publishing, and he cited some counter-examples, but that's not the expected result.

One thing I noticed on both days of the fair was that, judging by the questions being asked, a lot of would-be authors, especially older ones, find themselves increasingly bewildered by the Internet. I feel for these people; Lauren at the publicity panel yesterday talked about how the most effective form of publicity is done online, and that more and more of book coverage is going on online, and the self-publishing panelists talked about how self-publishing didn't really exist before the Internet (which is not strictly true, as James Joyce and Walt Whitman knew, but it's true that there has been an explosion in self-publishing because of the Internet and that the Internet is today the primary distribution method for self-published books). It must be very confusing to people who spent most of their lives without the Internet to try and cast their lot in a world (publishing) in which the Internet is increasingly important.

Then I saw an excellent reading by Aaron Petrovich, whose novel The Session I bought.

Lastly, there was the literary quiz smackdown between the New York Review of Books and A Public Space, which looked something like this:

Flickr link to image
In which the much more wizened (read: older) New York Review of Books team won a narrow victory over the spritely A Public Space folks. (A Public Space, if you're wondering, is a pretty excellent literary magazine.) Present at the gathering were some bloggers, who looked something like this:

Flickr link to image
That's (left to right) Sarah Weinman, Ed Champion and Levi Asher, conferring on how they know the answers the contestants don't. The bloggers (myself included) spent most of the time heckling the contestants and at the end Ed officially challenged the winners to a bloggers vs. NYROB match-up. A good time was had by me.