The SPD open house yesterday was like a physical analogue of blogland. When I walked into the warehouse--a big cavernous room with rows of 20-foot-high metal shelving stacked high with books--I immediately saw Stephanie standing in the central aisle, arms full of books. As I stood there talking to her people kept materializing out of the stacks and Stephanie would introduce us, at which point another person would appear and the first person would fade away into the next row. I met James Meetze this way and also Catherine Meng, who was already halfway around a corner as Stephanie was frantically introducing us. Nobody knew anybody else but everybody knew Stephanie, so we'd all just get briefly caught in her orbit with a few other folks and then go flying off. It's just like when I said that all my links are a subset of Stephanie's. And I didn't run into Kasey until I was already in line to pay.

As Stephanie said, it was actually much less weird to meet bloggers I'd never met before than to see bloggers I already knew before I started reading their blogs. This was the first time I'd seen Stephanie or Kasey since I started blogging, and there was a slight awkwardness about it, as if we'd gotten so accustomed to talking in this mediated and indirect way that we felt we had to rush back to our computers to talk. Or perhaps it's because usually when you see someone after not having seen them for a while there's a whole "hey, what have you been up to" period that allows you to get readjusted to each other. Problem is, if someone blogs you to some degree *know* what they've been up to and there's a sense (I felt it, anyway) that you needed to have something to say about everything that had transpired via blog over the past several weeks.

Anyhow. Since everyone else seems to be cataloging their hauls, here's mine, all, since I'm cheap, pretty much from the "damaged" shelf:

Anselm Berrigan, Zero Star Hotel
One Score More: The Second 20 Years of Burning Deck
Cathy Park Hong, Translating Mo'um
Robert Creeley, Collected Prose
Jackson Mac Low, Representative Works (very excited--been looking for this one for years)
Steve McCaffery, North of Intention

Two books by the Davies twins:
Kevin Davies, Comp.
Alan Davies, Signage

and: a pristine and undamaged copy of David Hess's Cage Dances. Guess we all love you, David--we paid (almost) full price!