Ah, me. After all that business yesterday about how we’re in for nights with hundreds of readings from now on, there’s only one reading tonight, at the University Book Store. The normally stalwart Elliott Bay Book Company is hosting a non-book event in which the Seattle Opera discusses their new opera I Puritani.

So I’m in a bind about the reading tonight. I used to work as a bookseller with the author, Matthew Stearns, for about a year or so. I think that we both have incriminating stories about each other—booksellers, as a rule, like to par-tay—and so I’m going to stick with the facts and leave reviewing out of it. He’s reading from his entry in the 33 1/3 series, in which each skinny book is about the creation and impact of an album. Stearns wrote about Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. Here, in lieu of comment, is an excerpt:

Sonic Youth’s manipulated-guitar fetishism, and by extension their avid affection for the modification of things generally, reaches its ultimate expression in the form of the lovingly destroyed (and tragically pilfered) Drifter. Ah, The Drifter. Now, this is the kind of guitar your mother warned you about. The mangiest, nastiest, rattiest piece of detuned refuse ever allowed out of the house after dark. Legendary for its Rasputin-like refusal to die, The Drifter was the kind of guitar-catastrophe that could make, one imagines, small or medium-sized children or the infirm recoil in horror at the sight of it; only to run for their lives once the magnificent, ungodly “wooooowruwrooooowruwrooooow” cry issued forth from its miserable bowels.

The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is awaiting your perusal.