"'We have wacky mode,” Powell remembers Barthelme saying to his class, a writing workshop Powell was taking. “What must wacky mode do?” The students, clueless, stayed quiet. Barthelme said, “Break their hearts."

In this, Wacky Mode serves a similar function to a strange object covered with fur.

(Incidentally, Powell's new book is The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?, 165 pages of which every sentence is a question ("Should it still be Constatinople?" "Why won't the aliens step forth to help us?" "Do you dance?"). We'll have a [glowing] review in an upcoming issue of the L, but in the meantime, he reads tonight at 192 Books. Will he point to a different a different audience member after every question?)

Enter Jonathan Lethem, who, god love him, has found a way to read fiction for the people while simultaneously indulging his ego. Starting on Friday (at the New Yorker Festival no less) Lethem will begin to read from his new novel, Chronic City, and will continue to read it, from start to finish, over eight nights and seven NYC venues, until he has read the whole damn thing. The little tour will culminate at BookCourt, in an evening offering "prizes and absurdities," for your trouble, whatever that means. Anyway, I'm just glad I won't have to buy the book now, 'cause I'm poor.

Anyway! Tonight, four marvy readers will duke it out for publication in the L's Summer Fiction Issue, a highly coveted Giant Novelty Check, a smaller, equally coveted Actual Check, and assorted other schwag, in front of a panel of discerning literati, drunken L Mag staffers powering through their Summerscreen hangovers, and you, presumably taking fullest advantage of, yes, the $1 cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Come join us at the Slipper Room at 7pm, won't you?

Literary Upstart, the L's short fiction competition, reaches its fevered conclusion on Thursday night, at the Slipper Room, when our three semifinal winners and one wild card read their stories for our witty, withering panel of judges, who will award one of them an enormous novelty check and publication in this month's Summer Fiction Issue. Listen while drinking dollar beers — what kind of beer will be on sale for a dollar is to be announced to be announced in a last-minute attention-getting shocker. Watch this space (or just show up)!

The lecture and signing with Lyle Rexer is free and begins tonight at 6:30pm (547 W 27th St, 4th Fl). The exhibition The Edge of Vision, which includes work by Bill Armstrong, Charles Lindsay, Edward Mapplethorpe and Manuel Geerinck (work pictured) among others, continues through July 16. Also, don't forget to get your tickets for Aperture's first Some Like it Hot Summer Party on Thursday night.

The "BPL" in its title stands for Brower Propulsion Laboratory (which consists solely of Brower), and the group's latest project involves tracking a major journey (literal and figurative) in American art history: painter Thomas Moran's 1871 expedition to the Yellowstone region of present-day Montana. Brower will be retracing that excursion using roboticized spacecraft, obviously, and with his launch date set for August he's hard at work with research and planning. He's taking a break from his intense pre-launch work schedule to explain some of the ideas behind the project today at 5pm at Parker's Box. Click here for more information about the exhibition, and click here for a full schedule of Art events at Northside.

On a similar and purely co-incidental note, the big new show at the Queens Museum of Art takes a similar stance on the artistic production of the region. Tarjama/Translation, which continues at the QMA through September 27, features nearly 30 artists working in all manner of media and offering different takes on their national and regional identities.

Sharon: yes! and heels. can i tell you two of my favorite things she said? i typed them up.
Mark: yes!
Sharon: On writing: "I write for myself. I write the story to make it exist in the world."
Sharon: On relationships: "I don't have an opinion on love. I just know that sometimes people throw away good, loving relationships. And sometimes they should have."
Mark: yeah, those're great
Sharon: i could NOT STOP STARING AT DEBORAH TREISMAN'S GLITTERING WEDDING RING. it blinded me, mark. but i thought she was an incredibly good interviewer and very sensitive about her follow-up q's... it flowed so well.
Mark: huh. she's hella married, apparently. i bet she has a flower behind the "taken" ear most times... treisman did a good job, i thought, starting with her biography, it informs a lot of stuff. especially the being a creative person in a practical place, which tends to be the case with a lot of artist/observers, it seems. (a phrase that shows up in both "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" and in one of the memoir-y bits in Castle Rock is a white-collar literary person thinking that a tacky, hardscrabble woman is intimidating because she must be "good in a crisis"... which seems a pretty fair way of thinking about how both the small-town people and the Girl Who Got Out can be both condescending and condescended to)
Sharon: it's nice to know that alice is juliet, basically
Mark: yes, it is. did you go up to her with your copy of Runaway, speaking of?
Sharon: no, i did not. i didn't see her afterwards...
Sharon: but after malcolm gladwell...well let's just say he was mobbed by girls my age attacking him with pens and their free copies of Blink
Mark: ha
Sharon: i hovered on the fringes and scurried away
Mark: i am so the opposite of surprised to hear that. what did you think of the questions put by the audience to our alice?
Sharon: i thought they were very thoughtful, and there was a point where i will presume to think deborah treisman and i were smiling over the same thing, which was that the lines to the mic were all girls in their 20s. we are alice's posse, yo
Mark: i know, it was fascinating.
Sharon: what did you think about what she said re not being able to build up a thick skin, even after all these years?
Mark: i was thinking i wish people would occasionally, just occasionally, ask writers if they pay much attention to good press. especially given as alice chalks so much of her process up to intuition, i wonder what she thinks of close readers of the meaning and implications of individual storytelling choices -- does she put much stock in that, et cetera. but i do think that makes sense, to take criticism too seriously, given that she's still in awe of those Serious Novel Writers
Sharon: definitely... there's just something about that, the fact that it still bothers her, and yet she attempted to give up writing and be "normal" but wasn't capable. that and the fact that she revises and revises -- the anecdote about how she'll somehow know herself what isn't working, and rework the page without being told and pages back to Treisman...
Mark: yeah, i was interested in the revision, and also in her statement that she doesn't go back and read old stuff very much -- the implication being that it'd occur to her how she could have done it better (I'm generally embarrassed by the apparent naivete and infelicitous style of anything i've written not within the last six months, so i can only imagine what somebody with her lifelong project of knowing people thinks of the silly young woman she must have been to write such and such a thing all those decades and experiences ago)
Sharon: i feel the same way about my writing
Mark: yeah. which is sort of the point of the whole thing, innit? (feeling the same way, i mean)
Sharon: yes.

Okkervil River
Everyone at The L HQ pretty much has notebooks covered in poetic frontman Will Sheff's name. With hearts drawn around it. Totes crushing. you know. They're just GOOD. Listen and cry and bop your head and frown and maybe play eye-hockey with someone you will never speak to. With Crooked Fingers and Black Joe Lewis & the Honey Bears.

7pm; $25. Webster Hall, 125 E 11th St, between Third and Fourth Aves; webster-hall.com

Gossip Girl
Just go home, make yourself something nice to eat, or just eat the CW for dinner. It's very satisfying. By the way: I do not forgive that man-hussy Dan Humphrey for being a judgmental douche in sensy-boy's clothing. TEAM SERENA, ya'll.

8 pm; Free. Your Awesome Living Room.

Hey, remember when Salman Rushdie was snubbed by the Booker Prize committee for his novel The Enchantress of Florence, which the judges hated as much as you maybe hate the Black Kids? Well, dude's on the rebound hawking his other project, The Best American Short Stories 2008, which he guest edited. During his talk, "Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story," he'll discuss his favorite picks from the collection and maybe have a conniption if you ask him what he thinks of the six short-list winners. Be nice!

7pm; $27. Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th St; symphonyspace.org