Reading in NYC Tonight

I'm reading tonight at the Village Zendo Reading Series, curated by Koshin Paley Ellis. Please come by if you can.

I expected to be more focused this morning, and I'm sure things would be different if I didn't have a couple of hours today to obsess about what I'm reading--and wearing. For the first time ever, I'm donning a sport coat to give a reading. I never give so much thought to appropriateness of dress anywhere else but in Manhattan. This time, I suspect I'm going to be too dressed--Koshin tells me it's a pretty casual affair--but better to be too dressed in NYC than not. The problem is that I have nothing in the middle--it's mostly polo shirts and a very few things at the other end of the spectrum, and I wonder if that says more about the last eight years than anything else. The state of our troubled country reflected in my closest!

As of this hour, I'm planning on a big old collage: some new work from Unbuilt Projects and at least a part of a chapter from The Burning House, the newly retitled, newly finished novel. Perhaps also the shortest bit from Lawnboy.

Here's something funny: it just occurred to me this morning that a lot of my newest work revolves around the loss of self, and the anxieties of all that. And here I am reading at a Zen center.

Time to get over it, I'd say.