Plotting out next week’s arts section this morning, and I just can’t bring myself to read Bright Shiny Morning, the new novel from James Frey, even though Frey is reading at the Bagdad on May 21st. I thought A Million Little Pieces was bad BEFORE I knew it was fake, so suck it, Oprah.

I maintain that I don’t much care if books are “true” or not (though I get being creeped out by exploitation a la Margaret Jones); I care if I can read them without choking on the prose, and the bar for memoirs seems awfully low. I don’t have A Million Little Pieces handy, so let’s turn for an example to a memoir I tried to read last week: Rebecca Woolf’s Rockabye, an overwrought look at what happens when a party girl becomes pregnant at age 23. Woolf read at Powell’s on Monday, and perhaps the audience was treated to lines like these: “For two hours I hide under the sink, folded up like origami, watching the clock move its rusted hands around the face of time.” Or, no: “How can I be pregnant with anything but ideas? I’m angry. At myself for being so careless. At my body for being alive, unpredictable, female.” AAAGGGHHHH.

Hrmph. So anyway I can't bring myself to read Frey's book, so don't expect a Mercury review to coincide with the reading. Do, though, read this blowjobby Vanity Fair piece, it's pretty entertaining. ("Frey has fetishized breaking rules for as long as he’s been alive. On a casual level this makes him endearing. He routinely addresses women, even ones he barely knows, as “dude,” and he might break the ice with a stranger with 'Yo, what the fuck’s up?' At the age of 38, he still makes crank calls. Sometimes he’ll call from the street corner and put on a high-pitched, crazy-old-person voice, drawing out every syllable of your name." Sounds really, ah, "endearing," doesn't he?). Oh yeah, and if you see Matt Davis ask him to do his James Frey impression.

Frey reads with Josh Kilmer-Purcell, Wed May 21 at the Bagdad, 7 pm, $27 (includes copy of Bright Shiny Morning. Tickets are available at the Bagdad, Crystal, and through ticketmaster; I have no idea if this is going to sell out or not. Seems like it might?

[It occurs to me that the general meanness of this blog post might have something to do with the number of beers I consumed at last night's extremely fun Candidate Speed Date, at which Courtney and I learned that the only candidate even remotely familiar with Battlestar Galatica is Kyle Burris—but he'd only seen the first two seasons so we couldn't really get into if his leadership style was more Gaius or Rosalyn. Also, Randy Leonard doesn't like Battlestar because it's "too realistic," which, with all due respect, is one of the weirdest fucking things I've ever heard.]