Belated Final Thoughts on BookExpo '04

Yeah, I know these would've been more timely on Sunday--but Amtrak just hasn't gotten its act together on the WiFi access on the Chicago-New York run yet, so I've been offline for about 36 hours...Anyway, my last day on the floor went very well. I had promised myself I wasn't going to take any more books, because I was already bursting at the seams, but then Dalkey Archive Press was kind enough to offer me some books I'd been dying to read for a while now. Chief among them was Langrishe, Go Down, the 1966 debut novel by Aidan Higgins. I'd recently made my way through A Bestiary, a single-volume compendium of Higgins' three memoirs Dalkey's put together for American readers as part of their effort to bring his work back into print; Langrishe is the fictional component of that revival. Also in the stack I took from them: Nicholas Mosley's The Uses of Slime Mould, who I've been meaning to read ever since an essay about his fiction in the October 2003 Believer.

Cleis Press, meanwhile, was kind enough to give me a copy of their reissue of I Am My Own Wife, the memoir by Charlotte von Mahlsdorf that inspired Doug Wright's play, which would go on to win a Tony that evening (though I, cut off from the 'net somewhere in Indiana, would know none of that until tonight).

And though many people had already started heading home, there were still plenty of authors to run into on the floor, including Rachel Kramer Bussel and Kyle Baker, the latter sighting made for a total internal fanboy moment. (Henry Rollins and I were talking about that Saturday, how even today he'll be hanging out with, say, Iggy Pop, and be all cool up front, but inside, he's like, "YUH! I'm with IGGY!" That's what it was like to meet Kyle Baker...and, for that matter, Henry Rollins.)

One other big event: on Thursday, I was making my way to the lunch counter when somebody shouted out my name--and it turned out to be Ted, one of my high school classmates, who was at the show with his wife (another member of our graduating class) in the small press section to drum up some interest for a project he's working on called the Cookie Sutra. Exactly what it sounds like: the Kama Sutra, or excerpts at any rate, with the human figures in the illustrations replaced by gingerbread people. I swung by their booth Saturday and they said things were going pretty well; as soon as they've got a website up and running, I'll let you know!