January 3, Monday night -- Reading Dean Rader

At the literary event Quiet Lightning
Pictured above, one of my favorite readers of the evening -- Dean Rader, reading from his book Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize (I have to include this because I gave my dad the complete works of T.S. Eliot for Christmas) about how to buy a gun in Havana.

When buying a gun in Havana, you don't say the word gun, or pistol, or anything else gun-like, you ask for platanos. You offer payment in euros in a neatly glued together packet of powdered milk. You get platanos. You hang out around the store and....I won't ruin for you. The poem itself is, of course, more eloquent.

He also read a piece about confessions of a blizzard. Snow, apparently, actually wants to be rain and get all cozy inside when the temperature starts to drop instead of working the blizzard scene. Again, poem said it more eloquently.
On my walk home from the reading I found the literary equivalent of a turduken. In a sorry wet heap across the street from a zoot suit store was Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, by Jeffrey Toobin nested within Athens, America, by Larry Baker, nested within The Hot Zone, by Richard Preston. It was maybe a presbakbin. Whatever it was, it was more disgusting than a turdukin, but not nearly as disgusting as the turduken's dessert equivalent, something I just recently learned about -- the cherpumple.