Caketrain. Myopicbooks. Lastnight. I got there late and so I missed the wine and the cheese and the chat and I missed, I hate to say, some or much or most of William Walsh's poem Question: Can You Say Something Nice? It's all right though because after buying a copy of Caketrain 04, a finely-wrought literary journal, I was able to read what he had read before I got there and to reread what I could barely hear of what he read after I got there. William Walsh has a flair for poetry and I think he should share it with everyone, even if they aren't within arms' reach. Brian Evenson read us Dread which was brief and brilliant and brief. (My repetitions are not accidental but accentuational.) I quote, here, from it's penultimate paragraph: And when I finally felt well enough to climb out of the bed by myself and make my way, swaying, toward a reflective surface, by then it was already far too late. What frightened me was not how the man thrown back so little resembled me, but how he so greatly did. Matthew Derby read aloud from a novel he promised he'd have ready by the year 2014. This was the second time I'd heard from it (He read a fragment at AS220 for The Encyclopedia Project last Fall.) and on this evidence, I think we all (I'm including you, stranger.) hope that he finishes and publishes this novel much earlier; say, sometime before the next presidential election. If you require a teaser to get you excited enough to buy a copy of Caketrain 04 (www.caketrain.org) in order to read Derby's An Excerpt then you'll want to know that it concerns an extravagant prisoners work program, oil derricks in Nigeria, a drug-addled basket ball game and a dismembered (and curiously stacked) corpse. And dried cassava.

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