February 20, Wednesday afternoon -- Reading Pat Gilbert

This is post # 711 (1023 with dogeared blog), which makes me think about being a kid and how, at 7:11, be it am or pm, if my siblings and I noticed the time, we'd want to run to 7-11 and get candy. My mom and dad were never keen on this, especially since it happened twice a day, and we missed out time and again. Well, I missed out again last night. The candy "happened" at a reading for the Six Word Memoir. Readers were awarded, as my friend Sasha put it, by having Nerds thrown at them. Not that I like Nerds, or even candy at all anymore, really, but I can appreciate the fun in it!

While candy confetti rained through the air, I was at another reading, which, while the readers, especially Elizabeth Bernstein, impressed the audience with their talent and sagacity, throwing candy would have been entirely out of place. Among the themes were death, abortion, cancer.

But, on to the current post:

Reading Passion is a Fashion: The Real Story of the Clash, by Pat Gilbert.

In addition to the details about the formation of the band, he has, so far, learned about the Notting Hill Race riots in London (1958 and 1976), about the London counterculture of the 70s, and about the emergence of Punk music in general.

It has also inspired him to play his guitar more, and with friends.

Recently he read Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke and The End of Faith, by Sam Harris. He likes to read a nonfiction and a fiction book at the same time.

If he were to write a book it would be about how little things relate to big things, and possibly about a dentist with ESP who can't help hearing patients' thoughts at work, and they are mostly suffering and cursing him silently.

I'll buy it.

A favorite book? He has trouble with favorites questions because everything has its time and place, but the book he's been most excited about recently was last year, reading Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. He liked it so much that he bought it for four or five people as a holiday gift.

As a child of a librarian he's been reading his whole life.

And, a point for the rain (which we're stuck with through the weekend)--when it's too wet to ride his bike to work, he takes the bus....and reads.

And, yet another point for the rain--at the reading I was at last night I was reminded by one of the readers, Instant City editor, Gravity Goldberg, that the rain is good for the fruit trees. This year the fruit will be really good....which, even when my feet got wet this morning, made me happy, even though I don't like fruit. It's too sweet. 7-11 doesn't impress me much either anymore. But raining Nerds does. And dentists with ESP. Maybe I'll steal his idea and write the book myself--about global warming and shifting weather patterns that cause a town to be engulfed with storms of, not rain and snow, but Nerds and how the residents, inflicted with serious tooth decay drive their dentist to insanity as he extracts tooth after tooth. Poor man.