Upcoming Events

You know, I’ve been blogging for a long time and I would have thought that I’d done just about every type of post there is to do. But then I was like “Man, there’s a lot of cool shit going on in the next month that folks might be interested in.” And so now, I am going to just make a list of the cool shit I’m doing that you might also want to do. And by “doing” I mean, you know, knock on wood. This idea that you can plan to do things and it works out? I don’t know. It just goes against everything I know to be true. But still! What is fall if not a time of unbridled optimism? And free shit.

Here goes:
September 22–Tiny Cat Pants anniversary! It will be eight years old. Which is just crazy-talk! Um, also, there’s no place to go or thing to do involved with this. I invite everyone to go to the bathroom in your own home and think about poop and how glad you are that the new kitty doesn’t poop on your bathroom floor.

September 25–Chris Chamberlain is having his book dohicky at Parnassus Books.

September 30–the 220th anniversary of the Battle of Buchanan’s Station out at the Buchanan Station cemetery.

October 2–Michael Chabon at the library

October 5,6,7–Handmade and Bound at Watkins. That was one of the coolest things I went to last year and I am completely stoked for it again this year. If you love art and books, it is a wonderland.

October 12, 13. 14–Southern Festival of Books. Chesya Burke, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Catherynne Valente, and others. Great, great, great time every year.

October 27–Elizabeth McClellan and I are reading at East Side Story. Details to come.

October 28–I’m doing some panel thing at the Belcourt in conjunction with The Handmaid’s Tale.

October 31–This weird Remixing Arts thing at the Frist.

And among all that stuff I have to find time for my nine nights and a new den ceiling. But you don’t have to! Plus, starting October 1, it’s creepy story time here. Oh, I am so nerdily excited. Please don’t tell me if it’s stupid.

The Hole in History’s Heart

I’ve spent my morning emailing people and putting things on my calendar and I have many people I want to email this post to, just because I want to hear their thoughts, but I think all y’all read here. So, instead, I’m linking to it right here.

I am, obviously, not a professional historian, but it seems to me that this approach to history, in which we openly ask questions whose answers have been either lost or deliberately kept from us and acknowledge the spaces caused by lack of knowledge really appeals to me.

The glossing over, the closing off of avenues, as if we already know or as if we can’t know, that’s a lie to me. I would rather, a million times over, that, for instance, Henry Brown had no occasion to watch his wife being sold away from him. I wish that were not true. And yet, I truly believe that the debt the living owe the dead is not to create a sanitized place in which Brown’s story is never told, where it is as if it did never happen, but to hear it and know it is true.