The marvelous Tommy Pico is the man behind Birdsong, an actual printed zine of prose, poetry and interviews. We once got drunk and I called him an "Injun" and he yelled "ALL YR SCALPZ ARE BELONG TO US." (True story, he was born and raised on the rez and I'm a loud drunk.) Tommy will be hosting Birdsong's issue #6 party/reading this Saturday at Stain Bar, and you should go. Not only are the contributors (and hangers on) generally attractive and smart, but Jess Paps will be playing her songs, one of which ("Seen it All") is my favorite of the last three months. Also featured will be Hotel St. George mastermind (and Literary Upstart Judge) Aaron Petrovich. You would be an asshole to miss this.

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Other countries are great because a) they are not nations of hideous slobs, like ours, and b) they just love to try to boost their cultural profile in America by sponsoring cool events here, for their culture-makers. Support for artists, entertainment and edification for audiences, everybody wins.

Like this Festival of New French Writing thing, which the French Embassy and France's Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture are holding with NYU this evening, all day tomorrow, and Saturday afternoon. The basic idea, it seems, is to put an established or emerging French writer and an American writer onstage together, and shake the stage until they fight, or else have interesting and unreplicateable conversations about literature and culture and whatnot.

I never know on posts like this how much it helps to mention the names of the writers involved — it'd take up too much space and be too boring to explain who these people are if you don't know them already, and I never know if you know or not because who can say how big a star a writer is in someone else's cultural firmament? Can we really ever know each other? (No. No we cannot. Just check the schedule and bios.) Well, in any case, Bernard Henri-Levy gon be there; in his honor this post is accompanied by the unbuttoned-shirtiest BHL photo I could find. There were many.

*If we were an old couple, dated for years, this'd be where you say, "They have good beer there," and I say, "... now I know how bad American beer is."

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For obvious reasons The L is a great fan of literary events which encourage drinking, backtalk, and, on very special occasions, laser tag. So we quite like Opium Magazine ("the magazine that tells you how long it will take to read each story it publishes"), for running events like the Literary Upstart-like Literary Death Match. And, apparently, Opium Live, a new interview series featuring roundtable discussion and then an after-party in which writers are cruelly forced to DJ.

So tonight, there's that, for the first time, at Happy Ending — featuring, among others, the ubiquitous Ben Greenman, Literary Upstart's Distinguished Spokesjudge and, apparently, patron saint of small lit organizations trying to attract attention via quirky stuntlike events — plus an after- and after-after-party, for the sake of literacy.

There are two Happy Ending readings left at the actual Happy Ending, but before Amanda Stern's series packs off for bigger digs, the Book Bench has a nice little round-up of some literary stage risks Stern has taken in the last five years.

Catch the next event on December 10th, featuring Joan Wickersham, Marion Winik, Ammon Shea and, maybe, music from
Jeffrey Lewis. The final Happy Ending show is on December 17th and brings back the original line-up: Nelly Reifler, A.M. Homes, the Wingdale Community Singers , plus a big thank-you/good-bye party.

Then, it's off to Joe's Pub once a month.

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So, guys, 2666? Last week I was going to write about Jonathan Lethem's shit-flipping Times Book Review crowning of Roberto Bolaño's everything-in-it book, but then Mike Conklin forwarded the office a video of a puppy and I got distracted. But! Natasha Wimmer is the woman who has translated Bolaño's posthumous American reputation-making The Savage Detectives and now 2666, his five-part, 900-page say-it-all-before-you-drop-dead masterpiece. She'll be at the Strand tonight, talking with perhaps the world's leading translator, Edith Grossman — Gabbo Marquez's English voice and recently the translator of a major, controversially liberty-taking Don Quixote — about their difficult and perhaps quixotic art. And probably talking a lot about this book for which the literary canon has apparently waived its customary waiting period for admittance, like the Baseball Hall of Fame with Roberto Clemente.

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Literary man-about-town and friend of the L Ben Greenman reads, a little, at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum tonight, for what's mostly a release party for his new book? story collection? interactive epistolary project? Correspondences, which is a letterpress box-type book consisting of six stories-in-the-form-of-letters, and one story which requests readers to mail in a postcard to help complete the story — the Postcard Project. So I would obviously encourage you to send Ben Greenman many humorous postcards, for literature, and also to perhaps attend this party which is of course tonight and the very reason for this post.

Well, that and the opportunity to find and share amusing postcards.

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Comes late word that author, humorist and friend-of-the-L Ben Greenman is reading tonight at the National Arts Club, which we'll get to, from his dewy-fresh forthcoming book Correspondences, a letter-press project featuring epistolary, some of it interactive (it's complicated, check out the link, but the story from it that I've heard was good — funny in places but mostly glancingly specific). Also reading is the long-dead reporter and Communist John Reed, played by Warren Beatty in Reds, presenting his All The World's A Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare.

So, the National Arts Club is a fancy Gramercy institution with a dress code. Classy! The "suggested dress code" is here, you will note that the "code is strictly encouraged," which — strictly encouraged? — is pretty passive-aggressive, for a dress code, I think. Anyway, it's fun to dress up for literature, you should more often. Just last weekend I rented a tuxedo (vest, not cummerbund) to leaf through my trade paperback copy of Forward, Gunner Asch!*

(Since the reading info does not appear to be on the Nat'l A.C. website, I will add that the reading is at 7pm, plenty of time to go home and change, since I'm guessing your job does not understand this "business casual" business.)

* I know, right?