Goodbye, Portland!

A Lighter of Fires is moving on, sadly. I hate to go but it's just time. Portland is a great place to live with a pretty cool little tight-knit community of writers and poets and kickass bookstores and I'm very sad to be leaving it all. I hope to return for more than a visit someday, but who the hell really ever knows about that.

The blog, however, marches on: in the utter abyss that is the local community of bookstores and readings, I'll be pretty dormant this summer. Let's hope Bethlehem, PA has got some great things to talk about and I'll do my best to feast on the juicy cactusmeat of the internet's poetry while i'm living in this desert for a while. You've been great, Portland.

Listen Up!

Words & Images, your neighborly neighborhood literary journal, is being let outta the cat's bag soon. Very soon. Thursday, to be precise. So yourblogs truly is going to the release party at One Longfellow Square on Thursday at 7:30 PM, because it's going to be a spectacular thingy. Importantly, Gibson Fay-Leblanc (my former poetry instructor and head of Portland's own The Telling Room) is going to read some poems as well as a whole bunch of the contributors including Mark Melnicove and Melissa Crowe. AND (unimportantly) i'm reading, too. Eeps. How did that one happen (cue old groucho marx joke about clubs willing to have me as a member)?

OH YEAH and there are going to be three bands playing too. So it's not some nerd-ass nerdparty. It's a nerd-ass realparty. So come and see yourblogstruly (who will write up the whole thing for you assholes who don't come) and buy Words & Images and see Marie Stella, Huak and The Scrapes. This Thursday. 7:30 PM (that's half an hour past the number under the ampersand on your keyb'd).

YEAH YEAH YEAH (UPDATE): no cover, you bums! & One Longfellow is right near the fucking statue of Longfellow at the corner of State & Congress, so if you're on your nightly walk from Video Expo to Treasure Chest & back to Video Expo and you DON'T stop in for this shits, you're a total asshole. But wash your hands first, eh? Nobody needs to catch Video-Booth-Peepshow-Semen Flu.

Time to put the nerd-pants on

I just found out about the launch of the World Digital Library, a free online library that has crap-tons of books, photographs, drawings, manuscripts, &c. It's not any sort of scam. They haven't even asked for my email address yet. It's just that sort of utopian free-information-for-everyone-for-the-betterment-of-humanity gig. Which is great. I've been poking around it for a while this morning and found The Book of Urizen, one of William Blake's gorgeous engraved books. This isn't just a bunch of jpegs. You get really high quality images that you can zoom in/out with, which is a real treat with the hand-colored plates that make up Urizen. The quality is good enough to read. This might be crazy nerdy, but i am insanely excited about this library. I also found a book of 100 Japanese poems by 100 poets dating from the late 17th century. For anyone who can read it, i'm sure it's fascinating. Anyway, it just launched today, so keep an eye out for expanding holdings. I'm sure they'll be putting stuff up constantly.

Finally, the last things about the WDL i want to mention is the interface. There are a lot of different ways to browse the collection, which lets you stumble upon things in a much more interesting way than having to guess what might be interesting based on title or abstract. It looks like this is going to be a really kickass resource.

AND: reading tomorrow night! Longfellow Books! be there! Betsy Scholl! Should be great! 7PM!

Reading in Portland! 4/23!

Today was a truly gorgeous day in Portland. Total bikeride weather. I was out on my sweet yellow bike today when i stopped in to Longfellow Books (recently re-named best bookstore in Portland!) to buy Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. So far, it's incredible. That's a story for another post, probably. Suffice it to say i'm amazed i've been around as long as i have without picking up any of his work.

What I'd like to relate to all Portlanders, however, is that Longfellow Books will be hosting a great poetry reading in 5 days! Betsy Scholl, Maine's Poet Laureate and esteemed faculty of the very English Department i've been learning from for the past four years, will be reading Thursday the 23rd at 7pm. I've got class right up until 7 and that won't stop me from going! So i don't want excuses. April is National Poetry month and Portland is lucky to have some good poets around. Seeing readings is good for you. like doctors and vegetables. You don't hate things that are good for you, do you? see you there, then.

Local Updatez!

Two quick bits of Portland news. I don't know anything about either of these authors but this sounds pretty good. Longfellow Books (in Monument Square) is having readings tomorrow (Thursday the 19th) and Friday the 20th. Tomorrow night is John Manderino, whose memoir Crying at the Movies tells his personal tale through the movies he grew up watching. It sounds like a pretty funny way of identifying, especially considering how important public consumption of film and music has become.

Friday night they host Patrick Tracey, the author of Stalking Irish Madness:
Searching for the Roots of My Family’s Schizophrenia. This one sounds like some really beautiful, poignant stuff. I'm going to be out of town this weekend, but hopefully I'll still be around Friday night to go see this. Support your bookstores and authors, Portland!