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Getting the very last ticket to see Sherman Alexie, at 1:00 on the dot: awesomesauce. More later.

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If you read Sherman Alexie's semi-autobiographical Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, you laugh a lot, but you also emerge with a sense of how hard and painful a life it must have been, painful enough so that you have almost no choice except to wallpaper humor over the painful parts. There are three funerals over the course of a year in the book. In Alexie's real life, there were nine.
(He says that it once had a working title of "The Funeral-a-Month Club.")

Hearing him speak, it's the same thing; he's a very funny speaker. He's funny enough to wring a big laugh out of "I would have killed hundreds of people." (Before discovering his talent for writing, he attempted to major in pre-med.) And then he talks about having 22 relatives die of alcohol-related causes.

I nearly didn't manage to go -- the 96th street station was closed to uptown trains, and I didn't realize I could take a downtown train from 110th, so I ended up at 110th and Lenox trying to run the considerable distance crosstown and make it in time. But I'm very glad I slid in under the wire.

Yuki Kaori has a new series out

Yuki Kaori's new series, Orchestre Royale de Guignols, is about cannibalistic zombies referred to as Guignols for reasons that are not yet entirely clear; and also a quasi-string-trio (well -- a cello, a violin, and a singer who plays the accordion) who dress as over-the-top-gothed-out as any of Yuki Kaori's characters. I saw it on the new-releases table at Asahiya today and bought it out of no more impulse than, "I can read the latest Yuki Kaori weirdness before the rest of English-speaking fandom!" -- though there are scanlations around, I would assume. Perhaps I'll have more to say when I'm finished; I'm really starting to find Yuki's pages way too busy to follow what's going on.

(What has Kinokuniya done with their light novel section? And does Asahiya still get any light-novel magazines? I walked away much disappointed. What's the point of living in New York if I have to mail-order?)

One more thing about Sherman Alexie

Or, a couple closely-connected things:

(1) I can't ever imagine asking a writer, "So, you know that extremely sad thing that happened in your semi-autobiographical novel? How did that play out in real life?"

(2) I do not ever really want to answer a question about how much of Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad comes from real life. Colson Whitehead's answer is fabulous:

A: I tend not to act or feel or talk in a way that would add anything worthwhile to an extended work of fiction. I tend not to do things that lend themselves to dramatic unity, aesthetic harmony, and narrative discharge. My leitmotifs are crappy. I need an editor or someone of artistic bent to shape my useless existence into something that would interest other people. Also, I am a real person.

But it's like asking how much of the butter and flour and eggs are in the cake, isn't it? You can say, oh, it's four sticks of butter and three eggs and two cups of flour, but it tastes like cake all the way through. You're never going to hit the patch that's just a whole stick of butter.