There’s a lot going on for a Sunday, and I’ve got some Mother’s Day love in my heart.

Emerald City Comicon is today at the Convention Center. Today’s convention should be much slower than yesterday’s, so it’s probably a better day to actually, you know, shop for comic books. Despite the fact that they have Suicide Girls in attendance, I would like to say that it’s good that we have the locally owned Emerald City Comicon, because it’s not owned by Wizard Entertainment, which is basically the Maxim of the comic book world. Wizard owns conventions around the country, but not here. So ECC: way to keep it local—good on you. Just leave the internet porn at home next year, please.

Kerry Reichs, whose mother is Kathy Reichs, who writes the books that are a basis for the Fox TV show Bones, will be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company from her debut novel, The Best Day of Someone Else’s Life. She deserves credit for not writing a mystery series like her mom for an easy paycheck.

And at Town Hall, it’s time for Short Stories Live, which is a reading of three short stories by authors like Eudora Welty and Deborah Eisenberg. Since I’m giving out compliments today, I think that it’s nice that they’re providing a literary option for Mother’s Day. Spread the mother love!

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, here.

Today we have an open mic and a number of readings. Dinaw Mengestu, author of the The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, will be finishing his run as the Seattle Reads author. Check the Library’s listing of events on their website. He’s done like ninety events a day for the last three days, though, so he might not be as fresh as when he started out.

Also, we have the Emerald City Comicon at the convention center. Many years ago now, when I was starting out at The Stranger, I wrote a piece about Comicon. It was too mean. I got many responses to the piece, and one of them said: “Why don’t you go back to jerking off over Suicide Girls” or something along those lines. I would just like to point out that, as entertainment at the Emerald City Comicon, the Suicide Girls will be in attendance. And so I say to the person who wrote me back then: I apologize for my meanness, sir, but now it is time for you to go jerk off over the Suicide Girls. And to the founders of the convention: this is not the way to get more women to take comics seriously, boys.

Up at the University Village Barnes and Noble, Annie Griffiths Belt will discuss being a photographer for National Geographic and being a mother. She is a good person to discuss this, since she is both a photographer for National Geographic and a mother.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, in the afternoon, Emily Transue, a local doctor who has read at virtually every bookstore in town, will be reading. In the later afternoon, Raj Patel, a man who has been “tear-gassed on four continents,” will be reading from Stuffed and Starved, which is kind of an anti-Michael Pollan book about the global food shortage from tiny, gorgeous publisher Melville House. This is the reading to attend, in my opinion.

And then, also at Elliott Bay in the evening, Sarah Katherine Lewis will read from her book Sex and Bacon. I assigned that book to a Stranger writer to review, but the reviewer declined to review it, because the book was bad, but not bad in any sort of an interesting way. I read Indecent, Lewis’s previous book, and it was horrible, and not in an interesting way. So at least she’s consistent.

Full readings calendar, including the next week or so, here.

So some time ago, Brad threw a copy of this book:

on my desk. He said that he and two other roommates tried…repeatedly…to read it, to no avail. He couldn’t express in words exactly what was so horrible about it, although his facial expression signified a very particular kind of distaste. It was like watching someone remember an atrocious shit smell. And then he bet me fifty dollars that I couldn’t read this book from cover to cover.

And so, welcome to Book Club of the Damned. For the rest of May, I will read I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein (“The Brilliantly Shocking Story of the Ultimate Transplant!”) in three segments. Starting next Wednesday, I will post a weekly book club update, complete with discussion questions, here on Slog. If any brave souls would like to read along at home, they are more than welcome to, although I’m not splitting the fifty bucks. It should be a singular reading experience.

Here’s what the Ace paperback edition’s back cover says about the book:

“As startling and provocative as his famous STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND, here is Heinlein’s awesome masterpiece about a man supremely talented, immensely old and obscenely wealthy who discovers that money can buy everything. Even a new life in the body of a beautiful young woman.”

One open mic and a whole lotta readings tonight, so let’s get into it.

Today there are three disgustingly popular authors reading at Borders downtown at noon. Terry Brooks, who wrote the novelization of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, and who I’ve commented on before, will be appearing with Susan Wigg, who is a popular romance author, and John Saul who writes Dean Koontz knock-offs, which is sad on many levels.

Up at Third Place, Ellie Matthews, who won the motherfucking Pillsbury Bake-Off, will be reading from her book, which is about climbing to the top of the competitive cooking chain. It also includes recipes. I recommend this reading. Seriously.

At the University Book Store, Chelsea Handler, who is the author of Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea, will be reading. Apparently, she’s a comedian, though you can’t tell from the title of her book.

At Elliott Bay Book Company, Andrew Foster Altschul reads from Lady Lazarus, which is a novel about rock and roll. This is one of those books that everyone thinks I’d like and then I start reading it and I really don’t like it. But Altschul hangs with the McSweeney’s crowd and despite this severely uninteresting first novel, I think that he’s a decent writer, so maybe there’s something there for you.

Also, from the 7th through the 10th, Dinaw Mengestu, author the The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, will be reading at various libraries throughout Seattle. Check the Library’s listing of events on their website. There will surely be a reading somewhere near you.

Here is the full readings calendar.

Many authors have felt this way, but this is the first modern age author to admit it: Sci-fi writer Thomas Disch has announced on his LiveJournal that he is God. He is taking questions.

Dear God,

What is your favorite species in the whole universe and why?

Your friend,

zack

Disch’s response:

The Xloti of Aldebaran 4. They’d be your favorite too, if they weren’t invible to the human eye.

Hopefully, this is just to promote Disch’s new book, The Word of God, but if he gets enough of a positive response, I suspect that he might just stick with it. I guess that Norman Mailer’s death has left a vacuum in authors who believe they’re deities.

Here is the MySpace page for Cassie Wright, the porn-star main character of Snuff, Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel. Palahniuk will be reading at Town Hall on May 20th. On the MySpace page, there’s a video trailer for a fake movie, called The Wizard of Ass, starring the fake porn star. It’s also a trailer for the book. I’m not going to embed the video here, because, well, gross.

Also on the MySpace page is a list of fictional movies that the fictional Cassie Wright has starred in, with titles that have already been used in actual porn movies like On Golden Blonde and The Da Vinci Load. There’s also a message from Chuck Palahniuk himself:

Hey all,

Just Top Friended you. Let’s get this page some hits. Cassie deserves it.

It’s authors like Palahniuk that make me proud to have devoted my life to literature. That is all.

I love waking up to grammar corrections. I just got an e-mail this morning referring to this article, and particularly this sentence from the article:

It’ll be sad when Amazon isn’t based out of the looming Pacific Medical Center building anymore.

Here is the e-mail in full, minus the link to the story:

Perhaps I’m being petty, but how can Amazon be “based out of the looming Pacific Medical Center” when it is located IN that building?

I have no idea where or how the phrase “based out of” originated, but in this usage it is clearly an oxymoron. Indeed, I have never seen or heard a case in which this overused phrase was not.

I’m sure you meant that Amazon is based IN the looming Pacific Medical Center. Why did you not write that? The phrase you used is an affectation. Please do not use it again.

Thank you.

dr

I took the question to our copy desk, and they said that it means “to serve as a base,” and that the phrase appears frequently in the New York Times and “If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us.” I agree. I just informed dr and am eagerly waiting a response. I’m thinking it’ll be a crisp “Good day, sir.”

Questions: Does this mysterious dr have a Google alert on “based out of?” Does s/he think of him/herself as a kind of grammar vigilante, swooping in to right wrongs? Does this Batman of usage ever sleep?

A ton of readings on a whole bunch of topics tonight, including a mystery book signing at noon and an open mic.

Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart read from Fixing Failed States, which seems to theorize a way to fix failed states, at Town Hall.

Up at Third Place Books, Charlie Ayers reads from his memoir, Food 2.0 : Secrets From the Chef Who Fed Google. Apparently, it’s a cookbook that suggests how to eat yourself into smartness.

At the University Book Store, book blogger Mark Sarvas reads from his debut novel, Harry, Revised. It’s a pretty good debut, with lots of good writing, but it’s a little too consciously literary. I look forward to his future work, and the Q & A for this reading should be a fun, name-dropping discussion about books, too.

At Parkplace Books out in Kirkland, we have Morgan Howell, reading from a fantasy trilogy. There may be elves in attendance.

And at Elliott Bay Book Company, Siri Hustvedt reads from her new novel, The Sorrows of an American. It’s always awkward to say this sort of thing, and many people will find it obnoxious and unnecessary, but Siri Hustvedt is married to Paul Auster. I find this sort of thing relevant not because of weird claims of nepotism, but rather because it means that Ms. Hustvedt’s book has an excellent first reader. She’s a very good writer in and of herself, and, having begun this book, I can say it’s probably one of her best.

Also, from the 7th through the 10th, Dinaw Mengestu, author the The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, will be reading at various libraries throughout Seattle. Check the Library’s listing of events on their website. There will surely be a reading somewhere near you.

There’s more going on in the full readings calendar.

In one corner: Michel Houellebecq, author of nihilistic and prurient French novels.

In the other corner: His mother, Lucie Ceccaldi.

He said:

In his international bestseller Les Particules élémentaires - translated as Atomised - he created one of modern French literature’s vilest mothers, a selfish, sex-obsessed hippy called “Ceccaldi” who leaves her young son in an attic in his own excrement then dumps him so she can enjoy free-love life in a bizarre cult. Elsewhere, he described the “fundamental psychic flaw” his mother caused in him. He hasn’t spoken to her for 17 years. He once told an interviewer she was dead.

She said:

She calls her son an “evil, stupid little bastard” adding that “this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all - above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame.”

She also said:

“[His] book is pure pornography, it’s repugnant, it’s crap… ” In her own book, she speculates that he writes about sex because he doesn’t get enough. “What’s this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who’s never done anything, who’s never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior … Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq’s a stupid little bastard, whether he’s my son or not.”

And one more, for good measure:

“If he is unfortunate enough to use my name in something again, I’ll cane him round the face, that’ll knock his teeth out, that’s for sure. And [his publishers] won’t stop me.”

Happy mother’s day, everyone.

Last night, I went down to Elliott Bay Book Company to buy Mother’s Day gifts to mail to my mom and to attend the Aleksandar Hemon reading (he was very charming, by the way, in an aloof, Eastern European way and, while he’s not the best reader of his own work, he did bring a Power Point presentation of the gorgeous photos in his most recent, very good book The Lazarus Project).

When I got there, customers and employees alike were abuzz with a recent happening: it seems that a furious customer had just shouted at an employee about the books lead that I wrote about Amazon.com’s lack of contributions to local arts organizations.

Now, I do quote an Elliott Bay employee’s blog—a blog not sponsored by Elliott Bay Book Company—in my article, but Elliott Bay had nothing to do with the story beyond that. The employee tried to tell the customer this, but the man was inconsolable. He said that, due to their involvement in that hack-work passing as journalism, he was never going to shop at Elliott Bay Book Company ever again. And then he threw his frequent buyer’s card at the employee and stormed out.

To which I have to say: You, anonymous angry consumer guy, are a total jackass. Way to protest my pointing out that a locally based global retailer doesn’t support local arts by boycotting a local retailer. You’re really making a case.