- speaking of flarf, I gave a reading last night with major local flarfiste Mike Magee & 3 other poets, down at Tazza, courtesy of the gallant Mairead Byrne's monthly series. read some bits of Lanthanum. Mairead re-recited E. Alexander's inaugural poem, with blues quartet backup. Fun.

Emerged from my musty cave last night to attend reading downtown (at new spare restaurant-bar, Tazza) by visiting Nada Gordon & Gary Sullivan. Funny, exuberant, bawdy, silly. Politics, art, sex, religion - all the serious stuff - are fodder for satire. Enjoy life, be free. Great singing (a complex aria set to some industrial engineering magazine?) by the startlingly pale Nada. Poe would have approved. High points for me were their version of the Book of Revelation (set to an antique novelty-items catalog), Gordon's take-off on Whitman (Song of My OwnSelf), Sullivan's long Kerouacky epistolary piece. Their performance style reminded me, oddly, of the atmosphere at the coffeehouse sketched in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red.

The evening was hosted by two Mikes w/microphone (Gizzi & Magee). Mairead Byrne was there too. This is Providence, reporting.