I am the titular fuckhead of this post. I am leaving on a jet plane bound for New York City starting this evening to cover Book Expo America for Slog. In case you're wondering about what BEA is, here is a story I wrote about it for The Stranger years ago when I was still a freelancing bookseller:

Every year, over one weekend in May, publishers, bookstore owners, Amazon.com employees, and big-chain-bookstore buyers all converge on one major American city to reflect on the past year and prepare for the next one. There are several major players at BookExpo America: The New York publishing houses all have a commanding presence, as do Barnes & Noble and Borders and Amazon.com, and also ABA, the American Booksellers Association, a conglomeration of independent bookstores that use their combined weight as leverage against the aforementioned nationwide monsters.

And here is the story I wrote about last year's BEA, which was in Los Angeles. I was in Larry King's back yard:

A bookseller, noting that her heels don't sink into the grass the way that they do on the lawns of cheaper events, bends down to tug at it. The entire section of lawn rises, tentlike, when she pulls. The lawn is a convincing, vegetal toupee. King, as dry and shriveled as a gremlin, walks across the lawn and stands by the pool, next to his sixth wife and his two young sons, Chance and Cannon. He starts off, as all public speakers have been taught, with a joke. He mentions the age difference between him and his wife: King, who is 74, says that people ask him if the fact that his wife is only 48 worries him. Not at all, King says: "If she dies, she dies." The crowd ripples with the kind of laughter that you get when you make a joke about your wife dying. One of the little boys gets a frightened look on his face. King puts a comforting hand on his son's head and says, "I was just kidding. It was just a joke."

King segues to what we're all here celebrating, the publication of [Ted] Turner's new memoir, Call Me Ted. Then Turner comes up and talks about how excited he is to have a book coming out, and people applaud him. (Call Me Ted's cowriter isn't mentioned.) When everybody is paying attention to Turner, he seems to swell in stature; he cuts the sort of figure that Teddy Roosevelt must have, the figure of a man who issues sweeping statements and spends a good amount of time sating his large appetites.

Funny thing about that last feature that I wrote: It was hopeful. Then, of course, in fall of last year, the publishing industry virtually collapsed. This is going to be a weird BEA: I think the major publishers are going to be too busy pretending that everything is fine to actually address any of the problems they're facing. I'll be interviewing a lot of authors and editors and book folks about the publishing industry, which is currently in worse shape than it has ever been before. And I'm going to some parties, too, and telling you all about them on Slog and on Twitter. I'm also excited to be going to New York City again for the first time in ten years. I used to be familiar with the city, but if anybody has any tips on places to go for food or non-book-related entertainment, be sure and let me know.