I'm packing my stack of Peavy amps and Stratocasters for a world tour that is now double the size previously projected, having grown to two events. The world-straddling motorcade will now make its way at breakneck speed from a late-March event in South Bend, Indiana to an early May event in Chicago. How the roadies, groupies, and hangers-on will handle the pace is beyond me.
Anyway: in addition to giving a reading March 29 at Notre Dame with Cornelius Easy and Joyelle McSweeney, I'm now set to read at Chicago's own Myopic Books on Sunday, May 9, at 7:00 pm. Myopic is one of my favorite bookstores in Chicago — and up until he made some terrible strategic error in booking me, Larry Sawyer had a great record of bringing interesting poets to read there.
Larry made a worse mistake when he scheduled me to read last fall with Linh Dinh. I didn't make it to the reading! (I *had* read there twice before, though. So maybe two out of three isn't bad.)
ReplyDeleteI'll try to be in the audience May 7th. If you're not there, Bob, I'll rush the stage and take over your spot.
If I'm there on the 7th, I'll be browsing, probably in sociology or poetry. The reading's on the 9th. Happy to see you there either day, though!
ReplyDeleteB.
Okay, I can totally hang with the Stratocasters, being a single-coil Fender-ish guy myself, but Peavey amps?!? Good god, man -- the Marshalls are the canonical stacks (tho I lean towards Vox myself).
ReplyDeleteMarshalls are great. But the guy who sold me these Peavys told me they go to eleven. That's one more, for when my reading needs that extra something during a sestina solo.
ReplyDeleteB.
Bob and Mark, since you both are among my favorite poetry critics, I feel the need to ask:
ReplyDeleteWhat the freaking hell are you talking about?
There's something about explaining a joke -- or explaining sophomoric banter -- that suddenly drains it of humor, y'know? I was playing off of Bob's figuration of his own reading schedule as a "world tour," and jesting at his invocation of Peavey brand guitar amplifiers -- in my own mind (& I own one) a rather second-string bit of gear. Jimi Hendrix, for instance always used Marshall brand amplification. (Vox is another brand name: most of the British Invasion bands used Vox amplifiers, for instance.)
ReplyDeleteBob replied with some über-witty repartee about his Peavey amp "going to 11," playing on the classic Spinal Tap scene in which dim-witted rock star Nigel Tufnell shows off the guitar amp whose volume control "goes up to eleven": Interviewer: "So it's louder?" Nigel: "Well, it's 11, innit? The others only go up to 10." Interviewer: "Why don't you just make 10 louder?" Nigel: [pause] "This one goes up to 11."
Er -- this is the equivalent of a couple of 40-somethings exchanging Monty Python lines, I guess.
I don't think either of us has know for quite some time, Kent.
ReplyDeleteNow I get it!
ReplyDeleteWhat other poet/critics now in forties, I wonder, used to be rock musicians in their twenties? There must be others. Maybe you guys could find a bass player and drummer from the Pound-Stein-Olson-Zukofsky line, or whatever they call it now, and practice live over the internet (there must be some kind of tehcnology by now for doing this?). It would be great to have a band of middle-aged poet rockers. You could call yourselves Metallica's Fugs, or something like that, or The Projectivists, say, and play at Orono in nine years, when they hold the next conference. Even though by then you'd be in your later fifties. But no question it would be a hit!
Sorry, sort of fun to think about.
One word: keytar.
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