Why is everything happening tonight? I just want to go see Frightened Rabbit. (Is anyone else absolutely having a relationship with The Midnight Organ Fight?)

But I can’t. Because:

1. Inspired by San Francisco’s Porchlight, the Back Fence PDX storytelling series commences tonight. Because Melissa Lion is hard to say no to, I will be participating. When I get nervous, I pee. It should be good.
Tour de Crepes, 2921 NE Alberta, 473-8657, $7

2. There’s a new “literary convergence” in town: The Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia (gulp) tonight presents readings from Bethany Ides and Emily Kendal Frey, with music from Old Time Relijun’s Arrington de Dionyso. It’s the second quarterly event for the series, with plans to eventually evolve into a full-fledged small press—and the name, UDLE founder Garrett Strickland explained to me, is a Borges reference. What, you didn’t get it?
Funky Church, 2456 SE Tamarack, 7 pm, $5-12 sliding scale (“includes a free chapbook of previously unpublished work by the writers featured the night of the event, as well as free wine, beer, and light snacks.”)

3. DIY, Portland Listening Party at the Waypost. Tonight’s topic: gender expression. “Can gender be a DIY project?” I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the answer is YES.
Waypost, 3120 N Williams, 7 pm, FREE

4/5. Saša Stanišić is reading at Powell’s Cedar Hills, 7 pm; John Price at Powell’s City of Books, 7:30 pm. These are both great-sounding readings: What I’ve read of John Price’s goofily titled memoir Man Killed by Pheasant and Other Kinship is surprisingly funny, while Stanišić’s How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone has gotten some good reviews. (Read an excerpt here.)

Seriously, literary types? Start a phone tree or something. This is too much for one night to handle.

Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada showed up at the NYSE yesterday. I’m really glad to see that while our economy’s in the shitter, this is what the people who track, follow, predict, and shape it are spending their valuable time and effort doing. “No, no—I don’t have time to discuss petroleum futures with you! Can’t you see I’m trying to awkwardly applaud something or other while wearing giant foam Hulk hands? HULK CLAP! CLAP CLAP CLAP!”

(Welcome to our new blog column Two Page Minimum, wherein I take a new book out to happy hour, and give it a few minutes to grab my attention. Two Page Minimum is my judgment on that speed-dating experience.)

Who’s your date today?

Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, by Kerry Cohen. (Seemed [in]appropriate, given that a blogger friend who will remain URL-less recently told me that whenever he sees a girl sitting alone at a bar with a book, he assumes she’s waiting to be hit on.)

Where’d you go?

Beulahland—happy hour is 3-7 pm daily, $3 wells, $3.25 micros, and $1 off the food menu.

What’d you drink?

Mt. Hood Brewing’s Cascadian Pale Ale.

What does your date say about itself?

From the dust jacket: “Loose Girl is Kerry Cohen’s captivating memoir about her descent into promiscuity and how she gradually found her way toward real intimacy. The story of addiction—not just to sex, but to male attention—Loose Girl is also the story of a young girl who came to believe that boys and men could give her life meaning.”

The cover image reminds me of this Bookslut post, and very much looks like the type of picture that would get deconstructed in a media literacy workshop at the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls.

Is there a representative quote?

“Boys are connected to this independence for me. I’ve seen the movies, read the books. I know the ways a boy can make a girl feel. I believe they have the capacity to pull me out of the muck of my life, to save me, and I will believe this for a long, long time.”

Will you two end up in bed together?

This question is in kind of poor taste, considering the book’s subject matter. But, speaking metaphorically and with some surprise: Yes, we will. My patience for memoirs is very, very limited—particularly those that involve struggles with sex/food/drugs. Been there, right? But unlike 80% of memoirists, Cohen can actually write. Not only that, but she’s incredibly self-aware. (The MA in counseling psychology from Pacific might have something to do with the insightful way she frames her promiscuous past.) This isn’t a sensationalist account of how many dudes she’s banged: Her underlying concern is with the non-sexual neediness that drives her into these situations, and she conveys this uncomfortably familiar impulse (at least, I’ll wager, to a lot of the ladies in the crowd) remarkably well.

Kerry Cohen reads tonight at Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W Burnside, 7:30 pm. Melissa Lion has a review in the O if you want more on the book—and just so you know, the “I bet I can get laid at that reading!” joke has already been made by my coworkers like, 6 times.

I promise this is the last Star Trek-related post I’m ever going to do on Blogtown, but Erik has been dropping hints (read: alternately throwing tantrums and trying to bribe me with Kit Kat bars) for weeks now that he wants to review William Shatner’s new autobiography. This great, great post on Papercuts kind of makes me regret yelling “Leave me alone, nerd!” then chucking the new Salman Rushdie at his head the last time he asked:

“The Shatman,” as he ill-advisedly nicknames himself, is clearly a tortured soul. “Being Kirk was an island of tranquillity in an ocean of anxiety,” he writes, and when he got to direct the fifth “Star Trek” movie, he was determined to be ambitious: “I wanted Kirk and Spock and Bones to go to hell. Filmically. I wanted to explore the whole philosophical question of God and the Devil and man’s relationship to their worship, a subject that had fascinated me for a long time.”

And while we’ve got the Books tab open, check out the LA Times’ recent list of recommended summer titles. If you’re still even marginally interested in the truth-in-nonfiction conversation, there’s a new David Sedaris collection on the list: Hit the Times for a recap of the New Republic’s priggish takedown of Sedaris’ factual flexibility last spring (and Michiko weighs in on the book itself here).

Alex Gibney’s eagerly anticipated doc on Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo, opens in Portland, appropriately enough, on July 4 at Cinema 21. YouTube trailer below; better quality here.

Thanks for all the help coming with names for the reading/drinking blog column. Here are my favorites—pick one!

PICK A TITLE FOR THE MERCURY’S NEWEST BLOG COLUMN

Paul Constant up at The Stranger has a blog column called “Lunch Date,” where, a few times a week, he takes a new book with him to lunch, spends half an hour or so with it, then reports on both the book and the food (here’s one). With his gracious permission, I’m going to rip off that idea—the Mercury twist being that I’ll take books to happy hour, rather than lunch. So it’ll be a happy hour guide-meets-book club. Sounds good, right? I need a name for it, though—the only thing I can come up with is a fairly depressing Billy Joel reference. Any suggestions?

Duuude.

William Gibson is at the Clackamas Town Center tonight, reading from his 2007 book Spook County, now out in paperback. Anybody read it? I haven’t read him since Neuromancer when I was 12, but that book sure is cool.

Barnes and Noble Clackamas Town Center, 12000 SE 82nd, 786-3464

After diligently blogging from Book Expo America on Friday, my weekend—and with it, my sense of obligation to this paper and by extension, you people—soon dissolved into a sea of Tecate. A sea of Tecate where taco boats sailed. God, I can’t stop thinking about tacos since I got back. Someone recommend me a taco truck?

Anyway, there is one highlight of my trip to BEA that I still want to share.

That, my friends, is a picture of me and Leonard Nimoy, taken after waiting in line for 45 minutes for an autographed copy of The Full Body Project, Leonard’s newest collection of photographs. (The Times has an informative writeup about Nimoy’s photography career here). Now, I’m no photo critic, so far be it from me to pass judgment—but an influential member of the local arts community (who will remain nameless because, well, I don’t want to get yelled at) recently called the book a “true national treasure.”* I will post some stills after the jump. They are a tad, how shall we say, NSFW.

While we’re on the subject of Spock, I get this song stuck in my head all the time. As for the contention that this song represents “perhaps the lowest moment in Leonard Nimoy’s life,” I’ll leave you to make up your own mind.

*OK, he was almost certainly being ironic. I chose to take the quote out of context because it is funnier that way. What.

The two main floors are jam-packed with publishers hawking their wares, handing out galleys of new releases and wooing booksellers with bulk discounts only available here. The big publishers—Simon & Schuster, Perseus, PGW, Houghton Mifflin, etc—have elaborate booths, while on the sidelines there’s a little ghetto of self-publishers desperately trying to attract any attention. Talk live with Hilda the Animated Goat! Come to a free screening about the “biggest UFO event of modern times”!

There’s a booth where, for $99, you can get your teeth whitened.

Hello from sunny Southern California! This weekend Los Angeles hosts Book Expo America, which brings together booksellers, authors, publishers, and hangers on who just wanted an excuse to get out of Portland media types for an industry-wide orgy of schmoozing, wheeling, dealing, networking, and maybe a little reading, too.

It’s proving very, very difficult to pry myself out of real live honest to god SUNSHINE to explore the vast halls of the convention center—I’m outside right now and can hardly see my laptop screen, so apologies in advance for any egregious typos.

Between drinking margaritas, adjusting my bra straps so I don’t get weird tanlines, and reapplying bubblegum-flavored lip gloss, I’ve barely dipped a toe in the big sloppy wading pool that is BEA, but some initial impressions are after the jump.