Thomas Lynch, who I love, read at St. James Cathedral last night. Well, that’s not strictly true. He read in a cafeteria-like room in a building next to St. James Cathedral, which was a bit of a disappointment.

But Thomas Lynch was not a disappointment: He was just as Irish and lapsed-Catholic and funny and profound as one would expect. After greeting the crowd of sixty or seventy people—”It’s always nice to be outnumbered at these sorts of things,” he said—he read poems about sin-eaters (people who used to eat bread that symbolized the sins of the dead so that their spirits can get into heaven.) Lynch also read about a cow getting its head stuck in a fence, and the same poem ends with a beatific look on a woman’s face as she artificially inseminates the cow while staring at the rafters of a barn.

There was the kind of religious talk that I can get behind: The befuddled, mystified kind. Lynch read an essay, I believe from Bodies In Motion and At Rest, about a teenage girl who died in a freak accident. She was in the back seat of a van going down a highway at exactly the point when some bored teenagers threw a gravestone off the side of a bridge. The stone struck her in the chest and killed her. Lynch’s accusations and considerations of God from this event were sad and true but never maudlin.

The reading itself was marred by horrible sound. Bad sound equipment is almost a tradition at author readings, of course: there’s always an echo or a hum. But about ten minutes into the reading, this high-pitched whine erupted from the speakers. It wasn’t feedback, exactly, it was more of the kind of noise your ear makes inside itself after a particularly loud concert. After a few minutes, it kind of nauseated me, going down my nervous system from my head to my stomach. Lynch didn’t acknowledge the noise—maybe he couldn’t hear it from the podium—but someone from the church tried and failed to fix it. The piercing noise continued for the rest of the reading, which made the experience a lot less enjoyable.

After graciously thanking the crowd for listening to him babble—“It’s like seeing a shrink and not getting a bill afterwards”—he said—Lynch closed with a lovely story about whether it’s better to die from gonorrhea or diarrhea. After the reading, the church served coffee, tea, and cookies, which was very nice, and I approached someone who put on the reading. I introduced myself as the Books Editor for The Stranger. “You guys have a books section?” he asked in disbelief. I laughed a little bit, partly because it was funny and partly because I was so relieved that the sound system wasn’t icepicking my ear canal anymore.